What Happens When Violence Takes Over The Culture

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — Cancel culture may have given way to something worse, a culture of aggression. We might, in this time of extremes, recall Hitler’s rumbustious air-force chief Hermann Goering, who said, reputedly, that he reached for his gun every time he heard the word culture.

The writer and academic Victor Klemperer, who lived through Nazi Germany, tasked himself with studying the Nazis’ perverse use of language, which he compared to “minuscule doses of poison” that felt harmless enough before revealing their full toxicity. The Bolsheviks and their successor Stalin arguably trumped the Nazis in the dastardly art of verbal manipulation.

Today, some historians are calling our time a prelude to war, while others claim the big war has already begun but is barely discernible, appearing as a proliferation of “minuscule” crises poisoning our minds a little at a time.

The ties between war and culture, between a new order and violence, and conflicts and production modes, considerably predate even the earliest Biblical texts, going back to the proverbial time of the brothers Cain and Abel. Studies would show that war is as old as our species. It is, as the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus stated, “the mother of all things.”

Party of God

The word culture refers in the broadest sense to the manner in which men have ordained and cultivated the land and thereby, cultivated themselves. It too is ancient if not as ancient as our species, and linked to the phenomenon of violence.

Today the threat of a nuclear war has returned to the fore as never before even if many politicians have chosen to ignore the Russian president’s repeated warnings on its imminence or likelihood.

A particular danger of our time is in the resurgence of a strong, Manichean tendency or love of the good and bad dichotomy, reminiscent of another eschatological period when the Hellenistic world was approaching its end. Social media, which are now central to politics, are the perfect setting for its projection and its socio-political results can be seen, almost as a caricature, in countries like ours, or in Brazil.

Nothing is in its place anymore.

Here and there, black-and-white fundamentalism is supplanting religion’s many-splendored manifestations. There is a party — Hezbollah, the chief suspect in our country’s worst terror bombing — that cheekily calls itself the Party of God. China, in its immense diversity, is ruled top-down by a single, unquestioning and unchallenged party, the Communists. The most orthodox Jews want to turn Israel into their own version of an Iranian Islamic Republic, with no room for anyone who will not live by the Torah.

India’s prime minister, Modi, has similar plans for a Hindu India as he gnaws away at the rights of Indian Muslims. Still, he is not so Manichean as to reject doing business with both the West and Russia, China, Israel and even the Arab world!

Where is the reverence?

Even the usually peaceable Buddhists of Burma and Sri Lanka have succumbed to the divisive worldview as they persecute Muslims around them.

In the United States Protestant Christians, rather like the presumptuously named Party of God, have dragged their Maker into politics, thanking Him for “giving them Trump!” Where is the reverence at the heart of religion in all this?

Not that humanity ever needed subtle or nuanced arguments to resort to violence against “undesirables.” Yet a love of simplicity may turn events and their causes incomprehensible. How, for example, could Putin, an avowed admirer of the Soviet Union, have forged an alliance with the Orthodox Church that barely survived 70 years of Communist persecution?

Political labels are outdated

You might have expected Putin to back the Left or the successors of communism in Europe, instead of the extreme right-wing parties with which his regime is regularly associated.

That seems to have happened elsewhere. In the global South, the Left, seething still with anti-Western resentments, has barely concealed its sympathies for a warmongering Russia, ditching its own anti-imperialism in the process.

In fairness, it is the clear labels of Left and Right that no longer make sense in the present arena. It is ironic that our time’s love of over-simplification should produce, not clarification, but confusion.

Nothing is in its place anymore, and it may be naive to assume people are even looking for the right path to the mythical land of peace!