Disproportion

In church a few days ago, the preacher bemoaned the “increasing violence” of modern Western society. I sat flabbergasted. Today’s Western civilization is indisputably the least violent culture in history. The ideas of police and street lights and safely walking around after dark are less than 200 years old.

Compare the current enemies of that civilization: beheading innocents on television, shooting women in the head in front of packed stadium crowds for the crime of walking in the street without a male escort…

Even one hundred years ago the level of violence in Western society would make today’s poncy liberals faint right away. Did you ever read the Little House on the Prarie books? In one of them, Laura’s Pa and his friend fight to keep their place in a land claims lineup. Admittedly, this was on the frontier. But in another, set in upstate New York, I believe, the senior boys of a one-room school boast of “breaking” the school: trashing the building and hospitalizing the teacher. So the most respectable man in the neighborhood teaches the new teacher how to use a bullwhip, and he whips the students bloody when they try to take over. This is all seen as admirable.

On the S. M. Stirling mailing list a few days ago, Mr. Stirling related the following:

In the 1880’s, there was a saloon near what’s now Yellowstone, named the “Bucket of Blood”, and the proprietor was a woman known as “Madame Bulldog”. (I’m not making this up, honest.) A cowboy and a sheepherder got into an argument, and it got lively. Madame Bulldog pulled a shotgun from under the bar and said: “This is a friendly place, boys, so if you can’t keep it friendly, take it outside.” They did. Shortly thereafter, the cowboy came back in, dripping bowie knife in one hand, the other guy’s head (also dripping) in the other. He put the head down on the bar, and said to Madame Bulldog: “I’d like to buy a drink for my friend here.” Evidently everyone considered this to be a hoot and a half. The frontier was, indeed, a rough place.

Many have observed that much of the difficulty the US is having in Iraq stems from its restraint — the occupation has been insufficiently harsh to keep down the troublemakers. It has been clear from ancient times how to deal with terrorists and insurgents. If one of our soldiers is killed, we destroy a random village and slaughter its population. Oderint, dum metuant.

But when Israel ups the notch just a smidgen, after thousands of missiles rain down on it from territory it gave back, the Western world erupts in protest. Note the response of Arab leaders: basically, Hezbollah had it coming.

The supreme irony is that the whole saga of the state of Israel is ultimately caused by the fact that the Romans knew what to do about “insurgents”. In AD 70 and 132, the Jews revolted against Roman rule. The Roman response: fire and slaughter and 2 millennia of exile for the few who survived.

Note that I think that our modern sensibilities are a good thing. I applaud the restraint of the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the noble attempt to bring democracy to their people, who’ve suffered under tyrrany for decades. But if the enemies of modernity continue to whittle away at our patience, as Victor Davis Hanson says in his latest essay, they might not like what they get when it wears thin.