Violent Competition and Modernity

The clergy in many European countries was fueled by “surplus sons”. The land would go to the first son, education to the second and there would usually be no money left over to really give the third son so he’d have to become a nonprofit worker. As European countries ballooned in population, all that extra life force floating around meant that armies had fourth and fifth sons to recuit. This eventually led to the wars that devastated Europe for much of its history and left it a divided, embittered place.But out of that maelstrom came something useful: the Leviathan. The monopoly on violence.

Eventually this monopoly on violence led to the rise of the nation-state framework - set in motion by the treaties of Westphalia. Colonialism, industrialization, scientific progress are all downstream of a set of treaties made to prevent people from wasting resources over violent competition. Professional militaries turned aggression into an industrial affair, expressing the anger of a national consciousness, serving as the arms shielding the body of the country.

The development of professional militaries are themselves dependent on practices that came before - codes of warfare, understood norms of engagement and safe channels of communication between warring parties. In India, this took on the form of warrior-caste ethos and arranged marriages, Japan had its samurai codes - these feudal constructs were themselves trying to tame forces basic to the survival of humans in a community and communities among larger communities. The stateless societies of the world substitute collective norms of blaming and judging for the power of punitive violence from a large professional actor. This often means that stateless societies, and even spaces where the state cannot intervene quickly become places where people establish an honor code - a usually unwritten set of rules which dictate how to escalate a conflict into and out of violence.

I posit that the real difference between modern societies and non-modern ones is not smartphones, but a state with a strong monopoly on violence. If you come from a place that was violent, either because the state itself was violent or because there was no state, you might have similar traumatic profiles, but people who come from a place with no state also carry with them elements of a pre-modern sense of interpersonal relationships which presumes the possibility of violence at any time due to the transgression of unwritten rules.

To make this more concrete - someone who suffers at the hands of the police in America experiences something traumatic - they assumed that their society will be safe. They assumed that the dispensers of violence in their society will do dispense fairly and clearly - that’s the contract of America. There is still the assumption that the normal way of working is that the state will dispense it normally and that this experience was an abnormal one in some way.

Someone like my mom, who grew up in the Telangana Agitation with shoot-on-sight orders for anyone who stepped outside, will have a similar profile - but her life was not dominated by this one event! Rather, her way of being is centered around being non-offensive since you never know how someone might explode in violence. This, I would argue is what differentiates pre-modern attitudes of honor and chivalry with modern lackadaisical attitudes about pissing people off. In the modern world, pissing someone off isn’t likely to hurt you irreparably - the state has clamped down on violence to the point that such a thing isn’t supposed to happen.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen! People are violent all the time! That’s where the clash happens - I came in with all these pre-modern attitudes - that if I was self-effacing and compromising enough, avoided pissing people off, I would avoid violence and could find a nice group of people to be with. Instead, I found I was not protected from violence! This deep contradiction is what I had to sort out in my mind - that neither my attitude nor the authorities in my life were able to protect me. In order to become truly an adult in a state-ful society, I had to understand the ladder of escalation to violence, the ways in which authorities and appeals to rationality will fail.

Becoming modern, becoming an adult and becoming myself were all happening at the same time. It’ll always be hard for me to tease apart my experience and attribute events in my life to one particular process. Never had that kind of stability. I was always wrestling in shifting sands - with the fact that the words people said to me meant nothing, while I came from a place where the words you said could get you smacked. Today, a word means something, tomorrow another. If I close my eyes I can hear the hum of that constant creative destruction, the violence that reverberates like bass through everything. Always present.