The Relics We Leave Behind

I have spent much of the past year writing about the decline of civilization. About empires that mistake power for wisdom, political movements that mistake resentment for virtue, algorithms that turn human contempt into revenue, and the peculiar animal that learned to speak, worship God, constructed magnificent institutions, and somehow remained perfectly capable of enjoying another person’s humiliation. I have written about the enemy becoming the last god. About attention becoming the new sovereign. About the institutions we create to protect ourselves eventually demanding protection from us. About the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between authority and legitimacy, between being right and being good. And lately, I have been forced to confront an embarrassing possibility. I may have confused writing about these things with doing something about them. They are not the same. A diagnosis does not cure a disease. A warning does not prevent a catastrophe. A beautifully constructed sentence about cruelty does not make a cruel person reconsider his conduct. Sometimes it merely leaves the writer feeling that he has fulfilled an obligation, while the machinery he describes continues operating, entirely indifferent to his existence. This week, the American defense secretary proposed broadcasting a military execution. The secretary of state escalated his government’s confrontation with the International Criminal Court, an institution established to prosecute some of humanity’s gravest crimes. I could not escape their juxtaposition. One concerned the public exhibition of punishment. The other concerned the limits of external accountability for power. And then came the spectators. When someone objected to broadcasting an execution, I ran into an online commenter defend the idea by explaining that the intended audience was not Americans, but America’s enemies. Consider what has happened to the moral imagination in that sentence. A human death, administered by the state, becomes a message to people who may never see it. The condemned man is no longer merely being punished for his crime. His death becomes an instrument in a theatrical conversation between a nation and its imagined adversaries. I recognized it immediately. It seemed almost absurdly faithful to the mechanisms I have spent so much time describing. And I felt no satisfaction. I felt furious. The machinery of American decline seems to have produced figures who regard restraint as weakness, humiliation as leadership, and cruelty as evidence of national strength. I find myself thinking increasingly about France. Americans sometimes speak as though their political crises are unprecedented, as though no civilization has ever struggled with the contradiction between republican ideals and the appetites of those governing in their name. But France has lived through these contradictions repeatedly. It had monarchs who confused themselves with the nation, revolutionaries who promised liberty and delivered terror, an emperor who conquered much of Europe, another empire that eventually collapsed, and generations of citizens struggling to determine what justice should mean after the barricades had been dismantled. And it had Victor Hugo. In 1829, Hugo published The Last Day of a Condemned Man, an extraordinary denunciation of capital punishment. In 1848, he stood before the French Constituent Assembly and argued against the death penalty. Later, during his exile under Napoleon III, he published Les Misérables, a novel in which poverty, punishment, mercy, political revolt, and the dignity of the despised become inseparable questions. Its famous barricades belong to the failed Parisian uprising of 1832, not the Revolution of 1789. But that distinction only makes the history more revealing. France passed through successive revolutions, restorations, and empires, repeatedly confronting the same unanswered questions about who possessed power and what gave them the right to exercise it. Hugo understood something that our contemporary custodians of order might profit from remembering. A government cannot manufacture legitimacy merely by displaying its capacity to punish. Nor can a society expect its citizens to respect institutions indefinitely when those institutions appear incapable of recognizing their suffering. The law may possess the machinery of coercion, but coercion alone cannot make the law worthy of respect. I wonder whether the people governing America understand how old these problems are. This country sometimes appears to imagine that because its republic is relatively young, history itself began with its founding. Yet the historical record is full of ruling classes that mistook their temporary command of institutions for evidence of permanent moral superiority. It is full of governments that dismissed public anger as irrational until that anger became impossible to ignore. And it is full of revolutionaries who discovered, too late, that destroying an unjust order did not automatically make them capable of constructing a just one. I do not want another French Revolution. I know enough French history to understand what that romantic phrase can conceal. But I increasingly understand the feeling from which revolutions grow: the terrible suspicion that those entrusted with correcting injustice have become its administrators. And I wish the people holding power would recognize that suspicion before it hardens into something far more dangerous. Because beneath my own attachment to constitutional order, beneath the essays and the history and the careful distinctions, I can feel something less civilized stirring. Not the elegant indignation of an essayist composing a sentence about the moral failures of his age. I mean ugly, physical anger. The sort that imagines dragging powerful men into the street, stripping them of their dignity, and making them experience the humiliation they seem so comfortable imposing on others. There is something I must confess about that fantasy. It is not justice. It is revenge wearing justice’s clothes. I have written extensively about the animal beneath civilization, the creature that desires dominance, recognition, retaliation, and relief from its own helplessness. Yet I am apparently quite capable of imagining that same animal wearing my face, provided I believe its intended victims sufficiently deserving. This is an uncomfortable discovery for someone who has written so confidently about the moral dangers of contempt. I am not outside the disease I describe. None of us is. Perhaps that is what frightens me most. We have become accustomed to describing the present as an unprecedented descent into barbarism. But Western civilization has never been an uninterrupted ascent toward enlightenment. Europe spent generations slaughtering its people for worshipping the same God incorrectly. Catholics and Protestants burned, tortured, expelled, and massacred one another while composing intricate theological defenses of their righteousness. The Crusades joined sacred language to conquest and violence. The twentieth century produced industrialized slaughter on a scale that earlier centuries could scarcely have imagined. The same civilization that gave us constitutional government, scientific inquiry, universalist moral philosophies, and extraordinary works of art also gave us the trenches, the camps, colonial brutality, and cities reduced to ash. Civilization has always contained its own contradiction. The question is whether we are becoming less capable of restraining it. I fear that we are. Not because people today are uniquely wicked. I have no evidence that the human animal has become worse than its ancestors. But we have built systems capable of amplifying its worst instincts with extraordinary efficiency. Resentment now travels instantly. Humiliation becomes entertainment. Political leaders perform strength for audiences trained to mistake cruelty for courage. Technology studies our weaknesses more carefully than man… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com