The Present Age of Savagery

Thomas Friedman’s “flat earth” description and his discourse on globalization describe the enormous power the internet and computers have given individuals. Fareed Zakaria’s piece in Newsweek of January 14th, 2008, ‘What People Will Die For,” describes the enormous killing power individuals have acquired in recent times.

The unifying element of this awareness and thinking is that people with little education, low or even non-existent levels of humaneness and “civilized” socialization, with smarts and large desires for power are learning to use religion, primitive ethnic and tribal affiliation as a substitute for patriotism, and the weapons of destruction so easily obtained from merchants of death to “forward” their goal of power acquisition.

Through the centuries, power elites fought each other or joined each other to gain or protect their power, often advancing mankind’s march to higher standards of living and well-being. Now we see low-level charismatic power-hungry individuals deconstructing that mode of relating. This fragmented control of power bodes ill for peace anywhere in the world for the foreseeable future. Examine the explosions of death in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. We see this control-fragmentation among the non-governmental wielders of enormous destructive power in Iraq and we see its support and encouragement by religious leaders of all stripes. Madrassas are used as religious schools of weaponry, and death to the “other,” the “non-believer.” We see the arsonists of power in multi-cultural and multi-religious societies lighting their fires between “others” with easily obtained small weaponry and with fire power unimaginable even twenty years ago. What is happening in India and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Indonesia and Sri Lanka and Darfur and other places in Africa clarifies how the transfer of power by machete and machine gun to non-elites is taking place.

How do the traditional power elites of “civilized” society in nation-states stop this exploding phenomenon? How long will the deconstruction, the return to pre-civilization, go on? How many innocents must die before we revert to civilized killing by nations going to war with nations?

Mankind’s savagery through the ages has had many faces. Webster’s dictionary definitions of “savagery” and “savage” serve to identify the core elements of this claim. “1 a: the quality of being savage b: an act of cruelty or violence c: an uncivilized state,” and “savage” means lacking the restraints normal to civilized man; also, to attack or treat brutally. Did the power elites bring this on themselves and those of us with little or no power by amassing wealth and denying its benefits to the masses from whose womb savagery was reborn?