Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence

Evidence

All in all, the overall non-violent character of modern civilization is an illusion. More exactly, it is an integral part of its self-apology and self-apotheosis; in short, of its legitimizing myth. It is not true that our civilization exterminates violence due to the inhuman, degrading or immoral character of the latter. If modernity is indeed antithetical to the wild passions of barbarism, it is not at all antithetical to efficient, dispassionate destruction, slaughter, and torture … As the quality of thinking grows more rational, the quantity of destruction increases. In our time, for example, terrorism and torture are no longer instruments of passions; they have become instruments of political rationality. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that rational, dispassionate destruction is modern civilization’s signature — not the absence but the redeployment of violence — is dense and paradigm-shifting material central to the whole theoretical apparatus of bureaucratic evil.
• XREF: This ‘rationality of destruction’ claim connects to Foucault on biopolitics and to the course module’s future biopolitics/necropolitics readings, and to Arendt’s banality of evil. — connects to: Meiji state-building bundled mass literacy, conscription, and centralized violence — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 370; Modern Caesarism is police-run rather than military-run — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 859; Colonization is fundamentally violence and plunder, not a civilizing mission — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 12 (+15 more)

Related

• Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity (similarity 0.89)
• Modern civilization idealizes itself while being constitutively built on incorporated violence (similarity 0.85)
• Centralized coercion concentrates and magnifies its destructive capacity (similarity 0.84)
• The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it (similarity 0.84)
• Political institutions perpetuate the violence that founded them (similarity 0.83)
• The civilizing state embodies the very violence it claims to purge. (similarity 0.82)
• Civilization cannot be separated from the terror that sustains it (similarity 0.82)
• Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. (similarity 0.81)
• Modern rational society enabled systematic genocide and discredited impulsive mass violence (similarity 0.81)
• Modern Caesarism is police-run rather than military-run (similarity 0.80)
• Modernity’s institutional safeguards against violence all failed during the Holocaust (similarity 0.80)
• Civility veils socially sanctioned violence rather than ending it. (similarity 0.80)
• Modern societies are constitutively founded on violence, not purged of it (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.79)
• Civilization and savage cruelty are inseparable, not antithetical, aspects of the same order. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285
• Political institutions perpetuate the violence that founded them #expands (0.80)
• Monopoly of violence within precise borders is distinctive to the modern state #qualifies (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 155
• Violence becomes purely technical and instrumental when bureaucratized #complicates (0.70) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 287