Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity

Evidence

The ‘civilizing process’, as Norbert Elias famously suggested, has made us all (or most of us at least) dislike and shun violence. But modern civilization has also invented the means to make this aversion and loathing of violence irrelevant when it comes to complicity in the commitment of violent acts – particularly when the acts are to be committed in the name of civilized values. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 694

Categorization

• XREF: Elias’s civilizing process and the disenchantment of violence directly undergird how modern bureaucratic states can execute genocidal policies in the name of civilized values — a mechanism the Islamophobia readings will build on. — connects to: Colonization is fundamentally violence and plunder, not a civilizing mission — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 12; Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284; The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285 (+12 more)

Related

• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence (similarity 0.89)
• Modern civilization idealizes itself while being constitutively built on incorporated violence (similarity 0.83)
• The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it (similarity 0.83)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.83)
• Civility veils socially sanctioned violence rather than ending it. (similarity 0.82)
• Political institutions perpetuate the violence that founded them (similarity 0.81)
• The civilizing state embodies the very violence it claims to purge. (similarity 0.81)
• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends (similarity 0.80)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.80)
• Violence becomes purely technical and instrumental when bureaucratized (similarity 0.80)
• Centralized coercion concentrates and magnifies its destructive capacity (similarity 0.80)
• Civilization cannot be separated from the terror that sustains it (similarity 0.80)
• Genocide required replacing collective rage with bureaucratic obedience (similarity 0.80)
• Individual sadism is functionally inferior to disciplined bureaucracy for mass killing (similarity 0.79)
• Civilization and savage cruelty are inseparable, not antithetical, aspects of the same order. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284
• The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285
• Violence becomes purely technical and instrumental when bureaucratized #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 287
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613
• Modern artillery made killing morally irrelevant by severing aim from effect #exemplifies (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 93
• Bureaucratic killing efficiency requires emotional neutrality, not enthusiasm #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 698
• Group-based discipline can coerce as powerfully as individual violence #corroborates (0.72) — , The Rod and the Child, 5601