Postcards from Hell ...[1]
Oh, those Greeks! They regarded violence as an indispensable necessity [ἀνάγκη]: "tolerated like fate or a law of nature" [2] and cheerfully sanctioned acts of physical aggression as a legitimate means of conflict resolution.
I say cheerfully, because affectively discharging destructive energies is a good way of preventing neurotic conditions like depression and anxiety (even if it does have tragic consequences). As Byung-Chul Han notes: "External violence unburdens the psyche because it externalizes suffering." [3]
The Greeks delighted in acts of appalling cruelty - including rape, torture, and arson - but they didn't internally agonise over them afterwards; indeed, their poets celebrated these acts and "Greek mythology is drenched in blood and strewn with dismembered bodies" [4].
Of course, the Romans were just as cruel - if not worse - with giant public displays of staged violence designed to demonstrate the might and magnificence of Rome, free from all bad conscience. As Han writes, in the ancient world, violence was not only ubiquitous, it was "a significant component of social practice and communication" [5]. Power was spectacular, sensational, and bloody.
But in the modern world, "brute violence was delegitimized [...] It has lost virtually every show-place" [6]. Auschwitz, with its gas chambers, is a million miles away from the Colosseum; unlike the latter, the former is located at the edge of town and what goes on there is kept hidden from the public.
Power continues to express itself, but does so without any sense of pride or glory: "It does not expressly draw attention to itself. It lacks all language and symbolism. It heralds nothing. It takes place as a mute annihilation." [7]
This isn't to say being torn apart by wild animals in the Colosseum in front of a large crowd is preferable to being murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
But it is fundamentally different and it illustrates how violence itself has undergone a radical transformation, but without ever disappearing: "Violence is simply protean. It varies its outward form according to the social constellation at hand." [8]
Notes
[1] As these two picture-postcard images indicate, dark tourism is today a thriving industry. Whilst there are some who genuinely wish to get a better understanding of how violent power manifested itself in other times, places, and cultures, one can't help suspecting that, for most visitors, a day trip to Auschwitz, for example, is what Johnny Rotten would describe as a cheap holiday in other people's misery.
[2] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 3.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
Han is surely recalling Nietzsche here, who famously describes how noble peoples - be they Greek, Roman, Arabian, Germanic, or Japanese - remain at heart magnificent blond beasts, avidly prowling round for spoil and victory and able to commit terrible deeds in a spirit of innocence and gay bravado. See On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay 1, §11.
[5] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, p. 4.
[6] Ibid., p. 5.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., p. vii.
Byung-Chul Han is an interesting cultural theorist (and I thank Stephen for the reference), but his observation about how 'externalising' violence 'unburdens' the psyche betrays a naive dualism and seductive stupidity about the operation of the objective psyche - which is, as James Hillman's work consistently makes clear, both 'under the skin' and 'out in the world'. In other words, Putin obliterating the cities of Ukraine with his inhuman war machine - gripped as he is by the negative Mother (Russia) archetype - may, briefly, make him feel 'better' (read, 'superhuman', in the manner of any classroom bully), but in the short or long run, is going to make all those he/it touches (and hopefully even his own people), assuming they have any capacity for compassion or shame, feel a hell of a lot worse. 'Externalising' violence doesn't so much liberate as displace or project it; if anything, it embeds it in a sociocultural field that promotes it, both inwardly and outwardly, through a process of contagion. The tragedy of Macbeth is instructive here to all those who are contemplating Putin, presenting as it does a picture of a man who corrupts himself irreclaimably through his own proto-Hanian naivete about 'externalising' his murderous ambition. (Lady Macbeth's own hand-washing tragedy eloquently and pathetically symptomatises his futile self-deception, as Mya Hindley did for Ian Brady in our own time.) I suspect, however, the Russian President wouldn't understand Shakespeare's profoundly psychological play if Birnam Wood came to Moscow!
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