Civilization and Barbarism

December 15, 2024 by Lars Meller

Image: The Triumph of Civilization, Jacques Réattu.

As the true scale of German war crimes committed during the 1940s eventually became known, the public response across the West was one of outrage and disbelief.

That the native country of such master spirits as Immanuel Kant, Johann W. von Goethe, and Ludwig van Beethoven could also have bred the vile Nazi mob looked like a mystery. It was such a long way from the creation of philosophy, poetry, and symphonic music, respectively, to the implementation of fake-scientific, inhumane eugenics after the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler. And the distance between good and evil became infinitely long as soon as the Nazis indulged wholesale in their emblem atrocities of the Holocaust, industrializing the sadistic orgy of genocide in the vast territories occupied by their troops.

Of course, there is no real contradiction, unless you insist on an unduly innocent (misguided) view of human nature. Since the foundation of civilization, scientific and literary masters, whose brilliant works continue to amaze and inspire us, have trodden the same places as the worst scum under the sun. The rendition of life in antiquity by artists has, as a rule, omitted the boringly prosaic in favor of romantic idealization. And as long as we are busy perfecting the institutions of civilized society, we are likely to be blinded by our own ideals and forget that perfection is impossible in this world. The truth is that barbarism — our base instinct as humans — always survives in the shadows.

Neither the common self-understanding (i.e. the total body of institutions, rites, and habits) nor the philosophical conscience of a nation is seriously compromised until the scum assumes absolute power. Thus, a tyrant commanding a guard of loyal followers, a conceited brute presiding over life and death, may destroy everything in his path, burning the defining thoughtworks of the past and killing the intrepid truth seekers dedicated to freedom of thought. — British author George Orwell put it like this in his novel 1984:

“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”

However, there was much more to Nazi atrocities than the sadistic, depraved excesses of socially maladapted individuals acting in concert, say, as members of the so-called “Einsatzgruppen” or security guards in concentration/extermination camps.

Obviously, it carried the risk of a violent death to oppose the Nazi regime, whatever your standing in society. That is a trivial implication of political gangsterism. However, it seemed as if many academics (e.g. doctors, lawyers, and scientists), supposed to be “cultural carriers”, as it were, actively approved of the Nazi ideology and helped it penetrate every corner of society. If anything, that treachery should be an occasion for deeper reflection. The very people, who should have withstood barbarism, those with cultural literacy, insisting on human decency and the rule of law, failed completely.

The painful experiences of the twentieth century make you wonder how thick the veneer of civilization actually is. In particular, how fragile is it to the perversities of totalitarianism? And what does it take to preserve it from decay? How should we prepare our institutions for the active preservation of civilization?

In the intellectual mists of the affluent society, where history drowns in social media nonsense, some might ask if the evil that ravaged Europe during World War II could ever return? Well, have a look around; it has been there all along. It ravaged the Balkans in the 1990s when Yugoslavia disintegrated. And since 2022, it has ravaged Ukraine after the Russian invasion. The atrocities continue on a varying scale.

Unlike Trofim D. Lysenko, Joseph Stalin’s favorite scientist, appointed director of the Moscow Institute of Genetics in 1941, genuine scientists have failed to find any evidence for “the inheritance of acquired characteristics”. Accordingly, every child born into this world is, in other words, a Stone Age child. It falls to us as parents (and caregivers) to introduce it to the modern world and help it adapt socially and integrate culturally.

What separates modern man from Stone Age man as a fellow human being is not his DNA, but the contingent layout of institutions determined by the cultural history of his society. From cradle to grave, they help shape his state of mind and behavior. Most of us manage to find a meaningful place in the world, wherever we are born, intent on entering into binding relationships with others. That some — instead of conforming to the norms of society — turn out to be bestial deviants is not so much due to the failure of “the overarching patterns of culture” as the random occurrence of developmental, personality, and psychotic disorders.

On the occasion of the trial against the American cannibal Jeffrey L. Dahmer in 1992, a judge said something to the effect that he was appalled that such heinous crimes could take place in the middle of a civilized society. That was silly of him. He clearly did not recognize the difference between the “brute force” of neural hardwiring as implied in autistic spectrum disorders and the dynamics of neurotypical efforts at socialization, if you like, as determinants of human behavior.

(Judged on both his actions and statements, revolting as they truly are, the so-called “Milwaukee Cannibal” was an autistic freak — working like a piece of machinery from outer space, behaviorally speaking. His various — and conflicting — diagnoses of “schizotypal”, “borderline”, and “antisocial” personality disorder, as made by psychiatrists recruited by the district attorney, simply do not stand up to closer scrutiny, the particular psychopathological pattern taken into account.)

In search of credible traces of civilization outside the West, you look in vain throughout the Muslim world. Not a single country with a Muslim majority can claim to be a liberal democracy under the rule of law. Not that professed Muslims are necessarily savages. By nature, they are like all other people who populate the world. However, the culture to which they belong — their ideology — is inherently barbaric, expressly advocating oppression (and enslavement), if not extermination, of those of different faiths.

Dating back to its origins in the Arabian Peninsula, Islam has been an intolerant, aggressive warrior religion constantly striving for expansion and dominance. As a result of holy war, it has succeeded in wiping out (a) Christianity from the Middle East, Anatolia, and North Africa, (b) Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism from Persia, and (c) Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

With the emergence of the Western welfare society, which denies its own traditions, including Christian spirituality, and has opened itself to the peoples of the world, the Islamic war of conquest has moved westward for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Where Lebanon and half of Cyprus have fallen in battle, the conquest of the European heartland is insidious, yet an inevitable consequence of unbroken migrations.

The Nuremberg Trials allowed those in the free world with an urge to understand evil to view barbarism at close range. Unfortunately, we never had the opportunity to indict and judge the guilty after the fall of Bolshevism. However, researchers had short-lived access to the gigantic Soviet archives in the 1990s, piecing together the evidence of nationwide oppression and suffering. As it turned out, freedom of the press and free elections also became a fleeting phenomenon. Since then, wars on the fringes of the old empire have consolidated the impression of civilizational regression.

In the West, the progressive elite has forbidden citizens to problematize the barbaric practices of Islam (e.g. blunt violence, mutilation, and homicide as variably legitimized by Sharia in the context of petty crime, perceived blasphemy, and gender discrimination). Any criticism of the invasive ideology, whose dogmas conflict openly with the traditions of freedom in the West, is met with the implacable accusation of “Islamophobia” (i.e. a politically charged term on a par with “racism”).

Utterly corrupted by secular relativism — yet, a seeming paradox, full of awe of the moral absolutists from outside — champions of the chattering class refuse to distinguish between good and evil, thereby denying the sacrifices of previous generations for “liberty, equality, and fraternity”.

Without a doubt, the survival of Western civilization is in the balance.