Barbarism: Know Your Enemy

What the West stands for, what the West stands against

What is the greatest enemy of modern Western society?

That is a complicated question, if not too abstract to be a question at all. Perhaps we might ask a slightly different question: who is the greatest enemy of modern Western society? That yields some very concrete, real answers: Russia, China and to some extent Iran, who threaten the integrity and very existence of modern Western society with military action, cyber attacks, disinformation and propaganda, proxy networks, nuclear weapons… We spend immense effort preparing ourselves for attacks, if not already defending ourselves against attacks from these actors, whether on visible battlefields or invisible corners of our internet, social infrastructure and our minds.

But the most dangerous countries threatening modern Western society are not at all that un-modern, or un-Western themselves: they too value education, science, technological advancement, some degree of meritocracy, a somewhat functioning legal system and some sense of individual rights. As an average Westerner, you would probably much rather live in either of these countries than, say, sub-Saharan Africa — where one may be subjected to FGM, child marriage, honour killings or being accused of witchcraft; even though fighting the latter in a war would not devastate you nearly as much as fighting the priors. The “Second World” may be a greater physical threat to the West; but bar its atrocities, it too values life to a degree of not bounding itself to archaic ways that make it impossible. There is some sense of civilisation in the Second World that is lacking in the undeveloped world.

We should be clear about our terminology: we use modern to mean adopting state-of-the-art technology — not just in state and military affairs but in the daily life of the average man, where it is associated with the longevity and quality of man’s life. Meanwhile, the West is a set of ideas. Being Western means adopting the political institutions and beliefs — individualism, capitalism, rule of law, scientific method, constitutional governments, modern universities… that originated from the European Renaissance and survived centuries of refinement. Modernity as we know it is impossible without Western ideas. But it is not its origin that makes these ideas special — the West has something deeper in its essence: its strife for, and specifically for civilisation.

Civilisation is the best of humanity’s effort in organising its surroundings, creating and advancing systems for the purpose of a better life. The world by default is cruel and chaotic, where the only way to survive is taking on physical combat against all odds it offers. Humans escaped that fate with its capability of being civil — humans use their intellect to create systems for interacting with the world and one another, pass these systems onto their descendants, and improve upon them from generation to generation. Great ideas emerged during this process just as terrible ones did, but the civilised know to keep the good and rid themselves of the bad.

The opposite of civilisation is barbarism — the greatest enemy of modern Western society. Barbarism is different from so-called conservatism: conservatism means little on its own as it does not specify what it wishes to conserve, whether the object of conservation is superior or inferior to the alternative. Barbarism is the specific refusal to move on from an outdated, inferior way of life — one which, by comparison to its own time, creates not life and prosperity but poverty and death — when a proven better alternative is available and known. There was a time when religion and theology (not pure faith, but a mix of faith and rationality) was the epitome of civilisation — it was a way of thinking about the natural world and human society, as opposed to no way of doing so.

So-called “progressives” (the opposite of “conservative”, a term just as meaningless as it refuses to specify where the progress is towards) can also be barbarists. The only difference between progressive barbarists and conservative barbarists is that, whereas the latters reject civilisation when it is available, progressive barbarists try to destroy civilisation that already exists. Socialism, whether that of Marx’s or Rousseau’s, is the archetype of progressive barbarism: it worships, and aspires to throw the world from industrial society back to agricultural society, if not further back — Rousseau praises the pre-society Barbarian as “stronger” and “freer” than the civilised man in his Second Discourse. Aside from the fact that the concept of freedom was not available to the barbarian who struggles for mere survival, Rousseau’s sentiment is not entirely false: the average barbarian, physically, would have been stronger; as those who suffered from fragility and chronic illness, like Rousseau himself, would have succumbed to nature without modern medicine. Even then, one could argue most of the earlier socialists and communists were but misinformed, rather than intentionally barbaric — but today, in the presence of these ideologies’ disastrous concretisations compared to capitalist societies, it is clear that upholding them is barbarism.

The hippie counterculture is the epitomic manifestation of barbarism. Not only does it reject the political aspect of civilisation and seek return of religious faith in the most primal form, it seeks to abandon and erode society from the means of civilisation — rationality — once and for all through its embrace of whims (what they call “vibes”) and psychoactive substances as a lifestyle and “means of knowledge”. Hippies, by their nature, cannot be militarised to take down modern Western society — but they need not to be. The point is that they exist within Western society as a people infected with barbarism; and when the ideological contagion spreads across Western society, it incapacitates Western society from defending itself when it is under attack from a militarised adversary. The hippie culture of the 60-70s has dissipated in organisation; yet its ideas not only survived but disseminated into popular culture — into the making of “useful idiots” for our adversaries.

This is especially important in the modern strategic context. Wars are fought not just on battlefields, but in minds. When it comes to battlefield technology, no country in the world — not Russia, not China — can force out the sort of innovation and productivity that exists naturally in America as a feature of capitalist entrepreneurship. But all that physical capabilities are in vain if minds — wills, principles and morale are eroded. And in eroding the mind is easier now than ever: spend 10 minutes scrolling on X, and you would encounter a dozen of Russian and Chinese bots. They do not have their own ideology to promote — the best their propaganda can do when speaking of their own countries is bending facts as to convince the West that they are civil. And bending facts can only get one so far before one becomes a North Korea-styled hermit kingdom. But what they are free to do is bending minds — promoting barbarism in hope that Western society forgets what it stands for. When they convince Western society that it too stands for, or at least does not stand against barbarism, they corrodes its reason and will to defend itself. Russian propaganda tries to convince Americans that the essence of America is not liberty, but traditional religious values. Chinese propaganda tries to convince Americans that its robust institutions are not just worthless but a hassle, and that one should prefer a Leviathan-esque, totalitarian efficiency. They break our alliances by making us sympathetic towards barbarian states, corrode our society by making us skeptical of technology and finance, and undermine our defences by flaring up conspiracy theories and installing hipster sentiment like anti-nuclear pacifism.

Barbarism is also the West’s greatest enemy in a post-war context. We live in a pre-war age, and many fail to think about what happens after — but wars don’t end when bombs stop being dropped, they end when the proper institutions and culture are in place to keep them from happening again. There is a reason why Germany and Japan reformed at an almost miraculous rate after WWII, while Iraq and Afghanistan remained in chaos. There is (as some would even argue) a reason why we wouldn’t take out the Islamic regime of Iran despite our clear ability of doing so. As historian Stephen Kotkin puts it, there is winning the war, and then there is winning the peace. It is easy to win a war against barbarians — even ones armed with modern weapons, as they have neither the innovative prowess to catch up with cutting-edge technology nor the proper culture to understand and handle them. But winning the peace involves having the other side on the same page — and you cannot just give civilisation to those who don’t want it. You cannot give Western ideas and institutions to those who do not understand its point. You cannot give the opportunity for a better life to those who value religion, tradition and ethnic “culture” above it — they have to come to want a better life themselves. There are arguments going around that we should never have given China the chance to modernise — but an unmodernised China would not want war any less than it currently does, nor would it be any less dangerous as it already obtained nuclear weapons in the 60s. Modernisation made it more difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to wage war, now that the people had a taste of living in freedom and prosperity, even if temporary and ersatz. And in the unimaginable post-war, post-CCP scenario, it has a better chance evolving into a free society rather than another round of violent totalitarianism.

It is always easy to name concrete, immediate enemies. But concrete enemies — hostile powers, rogue states, terrorist groups — grow like weeds, endlessly when we thought we had chopped them off. It is only by tackling the abstract enemy — their unifying quality, barbarism — that we can preserve the integrity of modern Western society.