Civilization And Savagery Quotes

It is a fine line, in all of us, between civilization and savagery. To any who think they would never cross it, I can only say, if you have never known what it is to be utterly betrayed and abandoned, you cannot know how close it is.

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.

There is no such thing as compromising between civilization and savagery. Civilization must always defend itself against savagery or else fall to it.

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis. Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.

There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

Murderous, mutual loathing between tribes was no more explicable, or complicated, then the genocidal urges of chimpanzees—a fact of nature that we humans, vainly and disingenuously, pretend our codes of civilization transcend.

Oftentimes it’s easier for lunatics to attract impassioned followers than it is for sensible people to get people to listen to reason. People are often more willing to believe lies than the truth. Lies can be made to sound pleasant. The truth, by its very nature, isn’t always so attractive. “That leaves peaceful people no choice but to fight for their lives or fall to the blades of madmen. In such a situation, there is no middle ground. There is no such thing as compromise between civilization and savagery. Civilization must always defend itself against savagery or else fall to it.

Richard straightened with a sigh. "People are often more willing to believe lies than truth. Lies can be made to sound pleasant. The truth, by it's very nature, isn't always so attractive." "That leaves peaceful people no choice but to fight for their lives or fall to the blades of madmen. In such a situation, there is no middle ground. There is no such thing as compromise between civilization and savagery. Civilization must always defend itself against savagery or else fall to it." "I guess that's our part in this?" Richard nodded. "I've never wanted to fight, to be in a war, to see good people die, to have to kill. I just wanted to live my life in peace. Others wouldn't allow me that life of peace. The battles I fight have always been to survive and live in peace, not to conquer.

A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery.

Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.

Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature.

We shall unleash the nihilists and the atheists and we shall provoke a great social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to all nations the effect of absolute atheism; the origins of savagery and of most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the people will be forced to defend themselves against the world minority of the world revolutionaries and will exterminate those destroyers of civilization and the multitudes disillusioned with Christianity whose spirits will be from that moment without direction and leadership and anxious for an ideal, but without knowledge where to send its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer brought finally out into public view. A manifestation which will result from a general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and Atheism; both conquered and exterminated at the same time.

They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities, and their audacities are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence, the emotion and principle, every great and every insignificant thought, belongs not to the individual, but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man brings sudden and profound trouble to the heart. To the sentiment of one's loneliness, to the loneliness of one's thoughts and one's sensations. To the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous. A suggestion of things vague uncontrollable and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.

Oh! To be beyond the pale once more, out of civilization into savagery? I abhor civilization!

There was a curious mixture in the boy, of uncompleted savagery, and uncompleted civilization.

Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

I performed the part of an odd, quiet woman, and performed it to everyone's satisfaction. When others slept, I was awake; when they woke, they found me quietly occupied. I took walks by myself. I read and sewed or sat in the garden with my own self for company. I was not missed. I have never been missed. I had all the manners and necessities of other women of my society, yet I was without society. ... I simply surrendered to that brute unhappiness which had always been close at hand. I no longer made the effort to appear civil, for by then I loathed civilisation from the bottom of my heart. Solitude, after a while, becomes the worst kind of savagery.

I'm not saying that the world will be reduced to expedient means and ridiculous disorder of the South American republics, - that we could maybe even return to savagery, and walk through the overgrown ruins of our civilization searching for food with a gun in our hand. No; - because such a destiny and such adventures would still presuppose a vital energy, an echo of primeval ages. As the new example and the new victims of inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by what we thought was our life-giver. Engineering will make us so Americanized, progress will create such great atrophy of everything spiritual in us, that the bloody, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the utopians could never compare with its positive results.

It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you.

I don't want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world--the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle--but on many days every week that's how it feels.

Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.

The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores.

By weaponizing the discourse of human rights to justify the use of force against governments that resisted the Washington consensus, this group of well-connected liberals was able to stir support where the neocons could not. Their brand of interventionism appealed directly to the sensibility of the Democratic Party's metropolitan base, large swaths of academia, the foundation-funded human rights NGO complex, and the New York Times editorial board. The xhibition of atrocities allegedly committed by adversarial governments, either by Western-funded civil society groups, major human rights organizations or the mainstream press, was the military humanists' stock in trade, enabling them to mask imperial designs behind a patina of "genocide prevention." With this neat tactic, they effectively neutralized progressive antiwar elements and tarred those who dared to protest their wars as dictator apologists.

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.

Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature. Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.

Humanity's savageness is what makes it civilized. Technology, trade, computers, space travel. All are products of competition and conflict.

In any war, except that for freedom from oppression, victory of any nation, is the defeat of all nations, because each war comes at the cost of lives, in the name of the same old tribal loyalty.

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery.

My own eyes were wide open, waiting to see all the ways the world would change now that we had crossed through, past the limit of civilization and into the dark land, where whites keep their rule by savagery and fear. I waited for the sky to darken, for the crows that would wheel across the clouds. But it was the same winding road, the same spreading green countryside, the same taffy-blue sky. Same on either side of the Fence.

In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both others and themselves. Things are no longer what they seem. The combat veteran Tim O'Brien describes this pervasive sense of doubt: '... There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.' ...

But in creating a hierarchy of acceptable bodies versus unacceptable ones, fat stigma also pulled considerably from racist, classist, and sexist ideologies. Not-thin bodies were interpreted as not as controlled, not as “civilized,” and therefore indicative of savagery. Dr. Farrell observes of this history, “Fatness, then, served as yet another attribute demarcating the divide between civilization and primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, good and bad.

Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default.

Serious, critical history tends to be hard on the living. It challenges us to see distortions embedded in the heroic national origin myths we have been taught since childhood. It takes enemies demonized by previous generations and treats them as worthy of understanding in their particular contexts. Ideological absolutes—civility and savagery, liberty and tyranny, and especially us and them—begin to blur. People from our own society who are not supposed to matter, and whose historical experiences show how the injustices of the past have shaped the injustices of the present, move from the shadows into the light. Because critical history challenges assumptions and authority, it often leaves us feeling uncomfortable. Yet it also has the capacity to help us become more humble and humane.

Islamism has become the “go-to” haven for those seeking order amid such chaos. Sharia courts have been established in these countries, filling the void of social control. After the savagery of dictatorship and civil war, the promise of divine law is understandably welcomed by a population hungry for order and stability. When the Islamists come to town, they therefore reestablish order again with their own savagery. For example, the immodest woman is no longer considered simply immodest; she is an adulterous sinner who must be flogged and stoned.

In a word, commercial competition, under the paternal aegis of the law, allows the great majority of merchants-— and this fact is attested to in countless medical inquests-— adulterate provisions and drink, sell pernicious substances as wholesome food, and kill by slow poisoning… Let people say what they will, slavery, which abolitionists strove so gallantly to extirpate in America, prevails in another form in every civilized country; for entire populations, placed between the alternatives of death by starvation and toils which they detest, are constrained to choose the latter. And if we would deal frankly with the barbarous society to which we belong, we must acknowledge that murder, albeit disguised under a thousand insidious and scientific forms, still, as in the times of primitive savagery, terminates the majority of lives.

To one outraged commentator, the mad “scramble of 15,000 people” to the site of such “appalling and atrocious” crimes was a sad commentary on the moral state of supposedly civilized man—“galling, incontrovertible proof that the race is still but a little removed from a stage of actual savagery.”[

[..] the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since the creature that conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. we are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.

Surely many courageous Christians spoke out against the savagery of their so-called civilized fellow Christians? And surely many compassionate Christians spoke out for the humanity of the so-called savages? Sadly, very, very few actually did, notable among them a Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas. His

We’re too weak as a nation. If we were hardened, like Afghanis or Kurds―or even our grandparents who made it through the Great Depression―a failure of the stock market wouldn’t be such a game changer. We would go back to growing food in our yards and raising goats in city parks. But we’re the weakest society the world has ever seen. If the system fails, people will go ape shit. Any cop will tell you: there is a fine line between civility and savagery. When Costco closes in the middle of the day, that’ll be our cue that the credit card machines aren’t running and we’re screwed.” “I hope you’re wrong.” Jason shook his head.

The day’s most vivid exchanges were about a delicate but serious matter: the extreme foreignness of native Hawaiians. Both sides used racial arguments. Annexationists said the islanders’ evident savagery made it urgent for a civilizing force to take their country and uplift them. Opponents countered that it would be madness to bring such savages into union with the United States, where they could corrupt white people.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS TENDED TO INTERPRET history as a progression from savagery to civilization. Key hallmarks of this transition included the development of agriculture, metallurgy, complex technology, centralized government, and writing. Of these, writing was traditionally the one most restricted geographically: until the expansions of Islam and of colonial Europeans, it was absent from Australia, Pacific islands, subequatorial Africa, and the whole New World except for a small part of Mesoamerica. As

Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set upon the Moon instead of on the Earth. Its builders were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive -by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet, sooner or later. It is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy and the last choice between life and death." (do conto The Sentinel)

in American history. Those who think this fact has no place in our schools would—intentionally or not—hasten a return to unquestioned white dominance. We should never forget that it took National Guard soldiers to get Black and white kids seated together in American schools, that abstract notions of a colorblind Constitution weren’t a shield against slavery’s horrors or the savagery of lynching, that Jim Crow was a legal regime codifying racial subordination, and that civil rights wrested from white supremacy’s stingy fingers could be snatched back.

With this savagery, the civil war progressed, and it seemed all the more savage because it was the first, while later the rest of Hellas, almost without exception, was also in turmoil, with rival efforts everywhere by the popular leaders to bring in the Athenians and the oligarchs, the Lacedaemonians. In peacetime they had neither the pretext nor the willingness to call them in, but during war, with alliances available to both factions for damaging their opponents and at the same time strengthening themselves, occasions for bringing in outsiders were readily found by those wishing

To pause there would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world. To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation.

For the house of Dunraven, the ravens represented a spiritual claim to the Tower for the Celtic, especially the Welsh, people. For the English, the ravens represented the colorful savagery of their ancestors, which, however, testified to the exalted state of civilization they had since achieved. The national sagas of the Welsh and English gradually blended in tall tales told to tourists by Yeoman Warders, to eventually create a national myth. The romanticized past of Wales, predicated on survival, was fused with that of England, predicated on progress and conquest, to create a legend of Britain.

The savage knows nothing of 'the law of Christ.' He will bear no other's burden. The sick must die; the wounded must perish; the feeble must go to the wall. Only the mightiest and most muscular survive and produce another generation. 'The law of Christ' ends all that. The luggage of life must be distributed. The sick must be nursed; the wounded must be tended; the frail must be cherished. These, too, must be permitted to play their part in the shaping of human destiny. They also may love and wed, and become fathers and mothers. The weaknesses of each are taken back into the blood of the race. The frailty of each becomes part of the common heritage. And, in the last result, if our men are not all Apollos, and if our women do not all resemble Venus de Medici, it is largely because we have millions with us who, but for 'the law of Christ/ operating on rational ideals, would have had no existence at all. In a Christian land, under Christian laws, we bear each other's burdens, we carry each other's luggage. It is the law of Christ, the law of the cross, a sacrificial law. The difference between savagery and civilization is simply this, that we have learned, in our very flesh and blood, to bear each other's burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.

People love to say, everybody is entitled to their opinions. It is one of the greatest fallacies of human habit. Everybody is not entitled to their opinion, not when their opinion advocates for segregation and discrimination. Freedom of speech doesn't mean saying whatever one wants, it means saying what's non-discriminatory, non-prejudicial and nonbarbarian. Bigots may have the right to say that all Mexicans are drug smugglers, all black and brown people are inferior humans, or all nonmuslims are infidels, inside the narrow bounds of their own house, but they are not entitled to express such opinion, when amidst people, amidst a civilized society. Remember, acceptance of bigotry and discrimination is the same as advocating for bigotry and discrimination.

If we consider this official or elite multiculturalism as an ideological state apparatus we can see it as a device for constructing and ascribing political subjectivities and agencies for those who are seen as legitimate and full citizens and others who are peripheral to this in many senses. There is in this process an element of racialized ethnicization, which whitens North Americans of European origins and blackens or darkens their 'others' by the same stroke. This is integral to Canadian class and cultural formation and distribution of political entitlement. The old and established colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery, are the conceptual devices of the construction and ascription of these racialized ethnicities. It is through these 'conceptual practices of power' (Smith, 1990) that South Asians living in Canada, for example, can be reified as hindu or muslim, in short as religious identities.....We need to repeat that there is nothing natural or primordial about cultural identities - religious or otherwise - and their projection as political agencies. In this multiculturalism serves as a collection of cultural categories for ruling or administering, claiming their representational status as direct emanations of social ontologies. This allows multiculturalism to serve as an ideology, both in the sense of a body of content, claiming that 'we' or 'they' are this or that kind of cultural identities, as well as an epistemological device for occluding the organization of the social....an interpellating device which segments the nation's cultural and political space as well as its labour market into ethnic communities....Defined thus, third world or non-white peoples living in Canada become organized into competitive entities with respect to each other. They are perceived to have no commonality, except that they are seen as, or self-appellate as, being essentially religious, traditional or pre-modern, and thus civilizationally backward. This type of conceptualization of political and social subjectivity or agency allows for no cross-border affiliation or formation, as for example does the concept of class.

The government has a great need to restore its credibility, to make people forget its history and rewrite it. The intelligentsia have to a remarkable degree undertaken this task. It is also necessary to establish the "lessons" that have to be drawn from the war, to ensure that these are conceived on the narrowest grounds, in terms of such socially neutral categories as "stupidity" or "error" or "ignorance" or perhaps "cost." Why? Because soon it will be necessary to justify other confrontations, perhaps other U.S. interventions in the world, other Vietnams. But this time, these will have to be successful intervention, which don't slip out of control. Chile, for example. It is even possible for the press to criticize successful interventions - the Dominican Republic, Chile, etc. - as long as these criticisms don't exceed "civilized limits," that is to say, as long as they don't serve to arouse popular movements capable of hindering these enterprises, and are not accompanied by any rational analysis of the motives of U.S. imperialism, something which is complete anathema, intolerable to liberal ideology. How is the liberal press proceeding with regard to Vietnam, that sector which supported the "doves"? By stressing the "stupidity" of the U.S. intervention; that's a politically neutral term. It would have been sufficient to find an "intelligent" policy. The war was thus a tragic error in which good intentions were transmuted into bad policies, because of a generation of incompetent and arrogant officials. The war's savagery is also denounced, but that too, is used as a neutral category...Presumably the goals were legitimate - it would have been all right to do the same thing, but more humanely... The "responsible" doves were opposed to the war - on a pragmatic basis. Now it is necessary to reconstruct the system of beliefs according to which the United States is the benefactor of humanity, historically committed to freedom, self-determination, and human rights. With regard to this doctrine, the "responsible" doves share the same presuppositions as the hawks. They do not question the right of the United States to intervene in other countries. Their criticism is actually very convenient for the state, which is quite willing to be chided for its errors, as long as the fundamental right of forceful intervention is not brought into question. ... The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates - indeed, encourages - a variety of forms of opposition, such as those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially neutral category not linked in any way to concrete social and economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for domination" to the employment of force by the United States government in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible to exploitation by U.S.-based corporations - that is extremely impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way.

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

I am not surprised. Lizzy, you have grown up without brothers, so you are perhaps unaware that, although we may manage to force a veneer of civility on young boys, they are in truth young savages, and I can attest to that as a former young boy myself." He smiled at her. "Then we send those young savages away to school with other young savages, and we pretend that what occurs at those schools is something other that uncontrolled savagery. Unfortunately, it is precisely that.

Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt. A vainglory is it, and like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark.

Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man thought bitterly about primitive simplicity and decadence, and how he had been ruined by civilization and forced by circumstances to drink and smoke and sit up all night inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and could no longer afford a savagery whether noble or not;

The savagery of our distant ancestors survives just beneath the surface of our civility,

Without question, violence and brutality—and bloodlust—were intrinsic to human nature. Scratch any century throughout recorded history and staggering displays of cruelty came gushing out: the slaughter of helpless innocents on a massive scale, brutal wars, enslavements, tortures, mass rapes and murders, and other atrocities far too numerous to ignore. Hitler was just one example in a seemingly endless parade. Humanity could wrap itself in the cloak of civilization and pretend this side of its nature didn’t exist, but the hostility and savagery that drove the most dangerous predator on the planet to the top of the food chain was always seething, just below the surface.

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation. Could anyone wish his name to be coupled by history with such human degradation and destruction? Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “great destroyers,” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s never-ending quest for peace and mankind’s God-given capacity to build.

[..] I learned there [in Mostar] that the distance between civilization and savagery is exceedingly small and this has scared me ever since.

[..] I learned there [in Mostar] that the distance between civilization and savagery is exceedingly small and this has scared me ever since.

There is no greater contentment than the feeling of victory over your own savagery.

And as for the contention that unbelievers who behave morally are implicitly adhering to Judeo-Christian standards of morality, Lewy has the matter exactly reversed. It is precisely because Christian ethics have, in the last two centuries, been shorn of their numerous elements of savagery, bigotry, and exclusivity that they are now in approximate conformity with the secular morals that the advance of civilization has engendered; and I repeat that this entire process has only come about because Christians have tacitly or explicitly rejected a multitude of moral axioms and adjurations plainly found in their scripture and plainly attributed to God or the son of God. Punishment of unbelievers, forced conversions, hostility to learning, subjugation of women, condoning of slavery - these and other moral principles found in the New Testament have been quietly jettisoned by mainline Christian churches, and only through relentless criticism from secular thinkers.

In real life, there is no such thing as a gradual descent from civilization to savagery. There is a crash—and no recovery, only the long, drawn-out agony of chaos, helplessness and random death, on a mass scale. There is no such thing as retrogressing “a little.

White people caused genocide after genocide, Yet you still boast about white superiority. You proclaim that people of color are inferior, While white society is the epitome of savagery. After all the heartaches inflicted by white people, A 100 generations worth apology won't be sufficient. Yet I am human enough to declare, we are all equal; All I ask is that, humans finally behave human.

The only way America could be considered a civilized nation, is if we embrace and celebrate our identity as an integrated society - otherwise, everything about America screams savagery.

When Calls A Promise: I made a promise to someone that I would protect humankind with my life - that I would let no savagery, no prejudice, no sectarianism tear my people apart - that I would spend every breath of my life in uniting my people - the people of earth. And my very existence is the living manifestation of that promise. Don't make promises that you know not whether you will be able to keep, but once you do make a promise, keep it at all cost, even at the cost of your life, which is exactly the kind of promise I made - to give my life in the unification of humankind. Initially I thought I would achieve that by erasing the religious barriers amongst people. Hence, in the beginning I wrote ceaselessly on religion, but as I kept studying the tenets of the society, I came to realize that the barriers amongst people have invaded every aspect of life and society, much beyond the mere traditional bounds of religion - they have invaded the very lifeblood of society and have been tearing the society apart from inside out. I came to realize that the religion of the future is not going to be christianity, islam, judaism or any such traditional system, rather, the religion of the future is going to be social justice. And the best way to shape the future is to envision it early on and start manufacturing it today. Thus, though initially the primary premise of my work was religion, eventually it acquired much wider and diverse societal roots. My purpose remains the same, that is, to unite you all, to unite my seven billion sisters and brothers of earth, but I had to make a few changes to my approach based on the need of the time as I kept evolving with my work. I started off as a scientist, but the needs of the society turned me into a reformer. Society needed not yet another scientist, it needed a reformer scientist, so I became one. All my life my need has been to serve the need of the society - need mark you, not desire. There is a difference between what the society desires and what it really needs. Society may desire for more bigotry, more segregation, more rigidity, more separatism, but that's not what the society needs - a civilized society needs humility, not bigotry - it needs inclusion, not segregation - it needs reason, not rigidity - it needs assimilation, not separatism.

The state, the official religion, the bureaucracy, the army, these resurgent institutions of civilization were capable indeed of effecting great constructive transformations of the environment, but the human price of their success was heavy: the class structure, the lifetime fixation of function, the monopoly of land and economic and educational opportunity, the inequalities of property and privilege, the chronic savagery of slavery and war, the fears and obsessions and paranoid ambitions of the ruling classes, culminating in mass destructions and exterminations. In short, a nightmare. Such constant miscarriages of power and organization offset the genuine claims that could be made for this system, and raised serious questions, at least in the minds of the oppressed and the enslaved, about the value of civilization itself. These doubts encouraged the notion that if only the past institutions and structures of civilization were destroyed, men would be happy, virtuous, and free. Rousseau expressed this idea in its most extreme form in his prize essay for the Academy at Dijon, in which he castigated the demoralizing effects of the arts and sciences, those features of civilization about which people had the fewest doubts.

Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind of unique, self-generated monster and his “killing fields” as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced from civilization. But without the United States government’s Vietnam-era savagery, he could never have come to power in a culture like Cambodia’s,

[D]espite the patina of civility coating most of modern society, underneath it is a thick layer of savagery.

It is as I say, War was the fire beneath the boiling pot, unleashing those atavistic fumes, pulling back that slight and insecure lid called civilization. Rousseau was right: Savagery is not to be found in far off exotic places but in our own recondite depths. At the slightest excuse the savage in us will come storming out to the fore, bowling down the civilized part like a cannonball. - Not that Voltaire ever understood, that insufferable dandy" Victus - Book 3

We have, then, three main forms of the family, corresponding in general to the three main stages of human development. For savagery group marriage, for barbarism the pairing family, for civilization monogamy supplemented by adultery and prostitution. Between the pairing family and monogamy, in the higher stage of barbarism, the rule of men over female slaves and polygamy is inserted. As

Shalom Civilization (The Sonnet) Without accountability there's no civilization, For it is the line between human and animal. Without integrity there's no civilization, For it is the line between human and vegetable. Without sanctity there's no civilization, For it is the line between sanity and savagery. Without amity there's no civilization, For it is the line between humanity and machinery. Without conscience there's no civilization, For it is the line between order and upheaval. Without character there's no civilization, For it is the line between life and survival. Civilization is a small word with a universe inside. To unfold it requires a species without divide.

Lines drawn by savages are bound to be crossed by thinking humans. If we don't, out of fear of persecution, then we shall never see the light of civilization.

Plutarch describes how this system worked in reality: ‘But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law, that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighborhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor… were thus deprived of their farms.’ Flushed with righteous zeal, Tiberius Gracchus ran for the office of tribune on a platform of redistributing land to the poor so they could fee themselves. The idea, though riotously popular with the plebs, horrified the plantation owners and their moneyed allies. Gracchus won the election, but… the patricians cried that Gracchus was exploiting those same masses to seize power and declare himself king. ... On the day that Gracchus’s reforms were due for debate in the Curia Julia, the honorable gentlemen of the Senate arrived in a state of eagerness bordering on cannibal savagery… Again, Plutarch describes the scene: ‘Tiberius [Gracchus] tried to save himself by flight. As he was running, he was stopped by one who caught hold of him by the gown; but he threw it off, and fled in his under-garments only. And stumbling over those who before had been knocked down, as he was endeavoring to get up again, Publius Satureius, a tribune, one of his colleagues, was observed to give him the first fatal stroke, by hitting him upon the head with the foot of a stool. The second blow was claimed, as though it had been a deed to be proud of, by Lucius Rufus. And of the rest there fell above three hundred, killed by clubs and staves only, none by an iron weapon.

If you want to be civilized, ma’am, you’re going to have to fight to protect it, or all the civilized will be dead, and we will be back in the darkness of savagery.

This opened up the possibility that physical and mental traits that had allowed man to adapt to a savage environment, whether in the remote past (of the Neanderthal hunter) or in the present (of the Watusi warrior), could inadvertently be passed on to his modern civilized descendants. The Darwinian zoologist Henry Maudsley explained this with the chilling observation that there is “truly a brute brain within the man’s,” making it possible to “trace savagery in civilization, as we can trace animalism in savagery.”10 Nineteenth-century biologists called this brutish survival “atavism,” after the Latin word atavus , or remote ancestor. Atavism taught that every organism had certain “lost” characteristics that were ready to reappear under certain conditions and would then be passed on to offspring. Atavistic theory had existed before Darwin, but his theory of evolution only seemed to confirm it, as did Mendelian genetics later on.

A view of the Amazon as an “uncivilized” and “savage” place—indeed as the very epitome of savagery—has been deeply ingrained in the European psyche for centuries. It is therefore not surprising the Carvajal was disbelieved when his journal finally surfaced in 1895.

We hear so much about the sanitary qualities of laughter, we have been taught so seriously the gospel of amusement, that any writer, preacher, or lecturer, whose smile is broad enough to be infectious, finds himself a prophet in the market-place. Laughter, we are told, freshens our exhausted spirits and disposes us to good-will–which is true. It is also true that laughter quiets our uneasy scruples and disposes us to simple savagery. Whatever we laugh at, we condone, and the echo of man’s malicious merriment rings pitilessly through the centuries. Humour which has no scorn, wit which has no sting, jests which have no victim, these are not the pleasantries which have provoked mirth, or fed the comic sense of a conventionalized rather than a civilized world.

Observers of the Fair had remarked how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and . . . well, frankly, white exhibits located closer to the center of the “White City” seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery. To the boys it seemed that they were making their way through a separate, lampless world, out beyond some obscure threshold, with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair. . . . As if the half-light ruling this perhaps even unmapped periphery were not a simple scarcity of streetlamps but deliberately provided in the interests of mercy, as a necessary veiling for the faces here, which held an urgency somehow too intense for the full light of day and those innocent American visitors with their Kodaks and parasols who might somehow happen across this place.

Origen was the first Christian thinker to make the conscience, Socrates’s daimon, or inner voice, the focus of moral life. For Origen, the conscience is all that separates the human being from the savage beasts who lynched his father. His teacher Clement had praised the ancient Stoic virtue of apatheia, emotional detachment. Origen never does.28 If Christianity was to have any larger meaning in the lives of the faithful, Origen believed, it had to cultivate that inner conscience, to make it the guide all our dealings with the world and others. By combining Plato’s thymos, that sense of moral outrage, with the teachings of Jesus, Christianity could scour away the cruelty and savagery of the age.

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

First, we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated," all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

People are kept unaware of the reality, with the sweet and illusive candy of nationalism. They are made to believe in their bones that killing people in the name of sovereignty is the most glorious act of all - they are made to believe that the citizens of the neighboring country are their arch-enemies - they are made to believe that nationality is far greater than humanity. They are made to believe that surgical strikes against the nation across the border is a great patriotic deed - they are made to believe that raising wall and separating children from their parents are deeds of great glory. In short, politicians (not all) in the government keep doing whatever they desire, and the citizens choose to keep their mouth silent in obedience because that to them is the greatest act of patriotism. In short, to these spineless citizens, their country is always right and the neighboring country is always wrong - their country is always good and the neighboring country is always evil - their country is always on the side of ethics and morality, and the neighboring country is always on the side of moral degradation. And this has been going on since the rise of human civilization across the world. When will this change, one wonders! And the answer is now. You change - just you - you the individual - you the one human - and slowly but surely, little by little, the entire society will change.

I have friends, from all walks of life from around the world, some of them are believers, some non-believers, some nondualists, and so on. Their belief or disbelief in a supernatural higher force or entity doesn't bother me the least, as long as they do not look down on people holding different belief systems. In a civilized, humane and inclusive world, a person's behavior with others is most important, not belief.

Who is I, who is the other, it's all I. The other is I, and I is the other, it's all one. One is not one, but a reflection of all, and all is not all, but a reflection of one. So, what one does, can make an impact on all, and what all do, can make an impact on the one. One must be responsible for all, and all must be responsible for the one. Because without responsibility, no one is civilized, no all is civilized and as such, no one can have a humane world and no all can have a humane world.

If all ministers said: Bear the evils of this life; your Father in heaven counts your tears; the time will come when pain and death and grief will be forgotten words; I should have listened with the rest. What else does the minister say to the poor people who have answered the chimes of your bell? He says: "The smallest sin deserves eternal pain." "A vast majority of men are doomed to suffer the wrath of God forever." He fills the present with fear and the future with fire. He has heaven for the few, hell for the many. He describes a little grass-grown path that leads to heaven, where travelers are "few and far between," and a great highway worn with countless feet that leads to everlasting death. Such Sabbaths are immoral. Such ministers are the real savages. Gladly would I abolish such a Sabbath. Gladly would I turn it into a holiday, a day of rest and peace, a day to get acquainted with your wife and children, a day to exchange civilities with your neighbors; and gladly would I see the church in which such sermons are preached changed to a place of entertainment. Gladly would I have the echoes of orthodox sermons—the owls and bats among the rafters, the snakes in crevices and corners—driven out by the glorious music of Wagner and Beethoven. Gladly would I see the Sunday school where the doctrine of eternal fire is taught, changed to a happy dance upon the village green. Music refines. The doctrine of eternal punishment degrades. Science civilizes. Superstition looks longingly back to savagery.

At the Big Hole: Savagery of the Whites: Two small children crossed the creek alone and hid in the brush. Some women and the old medicine man, Kahpots, were there. One woman requested of him, "Why not do something against soldiers' killing? You must have some strong Power?" Kapots replied, "I can do nothing. I have tried, but my Power is not effective. I feel helpless. So, my niece, you better look out for yourself, how you can save your life. Go farther down the creek!" The woman did as directed and was saved. Kahpots, unable to travel farther, had to be left on the trail a few days later, and was killed and scalped by General Howard's Bannacks, and maybe white scouts. . . .when I think of those terrible scenes, wrongs waged against human beings, I say shame! shame! This great Christian government had power to do differently by those truly patriotic people. It is such rememberances [sic] which touch my emotions, and I am led to marvel at the term 'civilization.

What good came of all this exploration? It was a question philosophes found irresistable. Progress was their almost irresistable answer. But Diderot, the secular pontiff of the Enlightenment, the editor of the Encyclopédie, did not agree. In 1773 he wrote a denunciation of explorers as agents of a new kind of barbarism. Base motives drove them: 'tyranny, crime, ambition, misery, curiousity, I know not what restlessness of spirit, the desire to know and the desire to see, boredom, the dislike of familiar pleasures' - all the baggage of the restless temperament. Lust for discovery was a new form of fanaticism on the part of men seeking 'islands to ravage, people to despoil, subjugate and massacre.' The explorers discovered people morally superior to themselves, because more natural or more civilized, while they, on their side, grew in savagery, far from the polite restraints that reined them in at home. 'All the long-range expeditions,' Diderot insisted, 'have reared a new generation of nomadic savages ... men who visit so many countries that they end by belonging to none ... amphibians who live on the surface of the waters,' deracinated, and, in the strictest sense of the word, demoralized. Certainly, the excesses explorers committed - of arrogance, of egotism, of exploitation - showed the folly of supposing that travel necessarily broadens the mind or improves the character. But Diderot exaggerated. Even as he wrote, the cases of disinterested exploration - for scientific or altruistic purposes - were multiplying. If the eighteenth century rediscovered the beauties of nature and the wonders of the picturesque, it was in part because explorers alerted domestic publics to the grandeurs of the world they discovered. If the conservation of species and landscape became, for the first time in Western history, an objective of imperial policy, it was because of what the historian Richard Grove has called 'green imperialism' - the awakened sense of stewardship inspired by the discovery of new Edens in remote oceans. If philosophers enlarged their view of human nature, and grappled earnestly and, on the whole, inclusively with questions about the admissability of formerly excluded humans - blacks, 'Hottentots,' Australian Aboriginals, and all other people estranged by their appearance or culture - to full membership of the moral community, it was because exploration made these brethren increasingly familiar. If critics of Western institutions were fortified in their strictures and encouraged in their advocacy of popular sovreignty, 'enlightened despotism,' 'free thinking,' civil liberties, and human 'rights,' it was, in part, because exploration acquainted them with challenging models from around the world of how society could be organized and life lived.

In hollywood white man saves the world, in the real world white man has wrecked the world more times than he could make amends for in a thousand years. So, to get straight to the point - the only way America could be considered a civilized nation, is if we embrace and celebrate our identity as an integrated society - otherwise, everything about America screams savagery. The same holds true for England, as well as France, Spain and Portugal. Every society born of colonial roots, must abandon the garbage geopolitical dream of becoming a superpower, and place all their attention on making amends for the past - at least until prejudice and discrimination are no longer a dominant force in these societies. It's not about feeling guilty, it's about feeling human, and doing everything it takes to correct the mistakes that keep you from becoming human. And for that, it is imperative, you abandon your make believe glories of the past and look at the world with human eyes. Or to put it plainer still - it's not your fault that your ancestors were jerks, but if you fail to right their wrongs as civilized human, then you are just as jerk as them.

But the whole point of the novel is that if we resort to savagery society falls apart. Maybe it should. It's all fake, anyway. That's what the book's really saying. We're all just pretending to be civilized, when, deep down, we're not.

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

Mustapha Mond shook hands with all three of them; but it was to the Savage that he addressed himself. "So you don't much like civilization, Mr. Savage," he said.

The final symptom of herd-intoxication is a maniacal violence. Instances of crowd-delirium culminating in gratuitous destructiveness, in ferocious self-mutilation, in fratricidal savagery without purpose and against the elementary interests of all concerned, are to be met with on almost every page of the anthropologists’ textbooks and—a little less frequently, but still with dismal regularity—in the histories of even the most highly civilized peoples. Except when they wish to liquidate an unpopular minority the official representatives of state and church are chary of evoking a frenzy which they cannot be sure of controlling. No such scruples restrain the revolutionary leader, who hates the status quo and has only one wish—to create a chaos on which, when he comes to power, he may impose a new kind of order. When the revolutionary exploits men’s urge to downward self-transcendence, he exploits it to the frantic and demoniac limit. To men and women sick of being their insulated selves and weary of the responsibilities which go with membership in a purposive human group, he offers exciting opportunities for “getting away from it all” in parades and demonstrations and public meetings. The organs of the body politic are purposive groups. A crowd is the social equivalent of a cancer. The poison it secretes depersonalizes its constituent members to the point where they start to behave with a savage violence, of which, in their normal state, they would be completely

Most of the propaganda the Allies and Japanese engaged in concerning the enemy's atrocious behavior was rooted in actual occurrences, and the horror, rage, and hatred this provoked on all sides was natural. Of greater interest now, however, is the way such behavior was offered as confirmation of the innately inferior and immoral nature of the enemy-- a reflection of national character-- when, in fact, the pages of history everywhere are stained with cruelty and unbridled savagery. The "civilization" which both the Allies and the Japanese claimed to be defending had failed to stem these impulses, and World War Two simply witnessed new as well as old ways of carrying out mass destruction and individual violence. Allied propagandists were not distorting the history of Japan when they pointed to much that was cruel in the Japan's past. They had to romanticize or simply forget their own history, however, to turn such behavior into something uniquely Japanese-- to ignore, for example, the long history of torture and casual capital punishment in the West, the genocide of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere by the sixteenth-century conquistadores, the "hell ships" of the Western slave trade, the death march of American Indians forcibly removed from the eastern United States in the 1930s, the ten thousand or more Union prisoners of war who died at Andersonville during the U.S Civil War, the introduction of "modern" strategies of annihilation and terrorization of civilians by Napoleon and Lee and Grant and Sherman, and the death marches and massacres of native peoples by the European colonialists in Africa and Asia, right up to 1941. In their genuine shock at the death rituals which the Japanese military engaged in, moreover, the Westerners tended to forget not only their own "epics of defeat" (immortalized in names such as Roland, Thermopylae, the Alamo, and Custer), but also the self-sacrifice against hopeless odds of thousands of Allied fighting men. To give but one example, the number of United Kingdom airmen who gave their lives in World War Two was ten times greater than the number of Japanese who died as kamikaze pilots. The acceptance of certain death by the latter did indeed set them apart, but the difference can be exaggerated