In the complex landscape of human history, the
barbarian, the uncivilized man or the brute, possesses a disproportionate
advantage over the civilized man because, in the first
place, he has nothing to
protect behind him, nothing cultural to cherish: his space is that of the
immediate, of everything that can be used, touched, exploited, cannibalized,
grabbed, bitten. The barbarian has no other prospect than that of his own expansion,
nothing in mind beyond the maximization of his will to power or his desire to
devour all that is to be found in his path: if civilization creates and builds,
barbarism consumes and destroys.
The law of club and fang
is the only rule recognized by the barbarian and so, even in this respect, he
or she has an enormous advantage, immense, almost inconceivable, over the
civilized being because, to stop the brute, even civilization would be forced
to descend into the same arena as the barbarian, that is, the arena of
brutality. The options of civilization in the face of barbarism are therefore
limited: either using the force that depresses and consumes civilization
itself, or surrendering to the advance of barbarism, letting itself be devoured
slowly, sacrificing itself because it is the only way that civilization has to
endure longer in life. As long as barbarism exists, the destiny of
civilization, of every civilization, will be to let itself be devoured. The
civilized person may be a master of intellect and dialogue, but these are of no
use among the slums of the spirit in which one recognizes only shrewdness and
the instinct of survival. The brute is, in many ways, similar to a ballast
which, when of considerable weight, is capable of sinking any sailing ship, no
matter how big, beautiful or robust. Culture or civilization are not really
able to withstand the ballast of barbarism.
The barbarian, thanks to
the curious and amazing laws of nature, also has numbers on his side and this,
in the end, tends to make him a role model for the future. When a civilization
becomes weak, because it is being assailed by barbarism, it begins to forget
its essential forms, and fewer and fewer people will be able to understand
culture and the basis for real knowledge while, on the other hand, those in
whose lives civilization and culture do not have a place, not even a meaning,
increase dramatically, and in the end, the large number of them causes real
knowledge to be forgotten, turning it into a distant ruin that they, however,
do not fail to occupy, making ancient and noble places of learning mere
classrooms of ghosts.1
In a society where
barbarism proliferates rapidly, because proliferating is also the strength of
the barbarian, in the end only the way of life and models of barbarism remain
because, thanks to the strength of their numbers, those ways manage to become
dominant, if only because, by increasing exponentially, they turn culture into
a mere rarefaction. The barbarian will never be replaced by the civilized man,
just as the weed will never be replaced by flowers, and this is, perhaps, one
of the most curious and ambiguous laws in the world!
The Greeks, who wanted
to stop barbarism, had proposed a society of excellence, but they too have
fallen and barbarism has overwhelmed them in its relentless journey. The fate
of the world and of the human beings in it, then, seems to be only to end in
barbarism.
© Sergio Caldarella, 2019.
1 See also: S. Caldarella, The Empty Campus. Education and Miseducation in the New Global Age, Dark Age Publishing, Princeton, N.J., 2016.
