Modern states treat abstract humanity as sacred but subject actual persons to institutional violence

Evidence

John Keane suggests that the eighteenth-century assumption at work here, that violence is antithetical to civil(ized) society (because normatively reflective of (leftover) antique barbarisms), remains the silent assumption marking almost all theories of civil society. Violence, Keane insists, chronically persists within all extant civil societies. This is surely right, though he fails to comprehend what so many other commentators deny, not that violence persists, which is still to assume that civilization is the purging from society of violence, if only we could get it right. Rather, the more difficult recognition is that modern societies aren’t just marked by violence but constitutively founded upon and committed to incorporating and (not quite) covering over the various expressions of violence, civil and state(d). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 236 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Whether all the transformations in Iran in the period covered by Rejali’s book truly represent modernization in the sense of moral improvement is—these readers will say—an open question, but shocking evidence of blatant torture in that country does not prove that torture is integral to modernity; what it shows is that torture might occur in it, as Scott concedes. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 511 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State-sponsored violence channels a resentful hatred of living bodies; Administrative mass death requires a humanity already dead to itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 255; Civility veils rather than ends sanctioned state violence — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 250 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern societies are constitutively founded on violence, not purged of it #corroborates (0.93) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 236
• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence #corroborates (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284
• Torture occurring in a modern society does not prove it is integral to modernity #complicates (0.78) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 511