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RANDALL COLLINS
many. Then you have kissed all of Provence,have you? There would be
no satisfaction in kissing all of Brittany, unless one likes to smell of
wine. . .Do you wish to hear the news from Rennes? A tax of a hundred
thousand crowns has been imposed upon the citizens; and if this sum is
not produced within four-and-twentyhours, it is to-be doubled and col-
lected by the soldiers. They have cleared the houses and sent away the
occupants of the great streets and forbidden anybody to receive them on
pain of death; so that the poor wretches (old men, women near their
confinement, and children included) may be seen wanderingaround and
crying on their departurefrom this city, without knowing where to go,
and without food or a place to lie in. Day before yesterday a fiddlerwas
broken on the wheel for getting up a dance and stealing some stamped
paper. He was quarteredafter death, and his limbs exposed at the four
corners of the city. Sixty citizens have been thrown in prison, and the
business of punishingthem is to begin tomorrow.This provincesets a fine
example to the others, teaching them above all that of respecting the
governorsand their wives, and of never throwingstones into their gardens.
Mutilation: punishment not by death, but by life at its lowest level. The
amputation of feet or hands, or ears-so common in ancient Rome, China,
Mesopotamia,Palestine and in the Arab societies; the gougingout of eyes.
The intent is not merely punishment,but prolongedmisery and humiliation.
This is especially evident in sexual mutilation, prominent in extremely male-
oriented societies: the great Han historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, castratedfor an
honest but unfavorahlememorandumto the. Emperor;the Turkishsultanof
Egypt punishing a rebellion in the Sudan by castrating the men and
amputatingthe breastsof the women.6 Mutilationmight be combined with
execution, always in a public form (as in the 17th century Europeancase
describedby Tocqueville);clearly, public humiliationis at the essence of the
phenomenon.
This is also true to a degree of funeral sacrifices; the Shang rulers, the
post-kill "celebration" in the form of eating their victim together has its
humanparallelsas well.13
The torturer or the mutilator, however, could not even attempt his arts
without a capacity for taking the role of the other. The torturerdoes not kill
and eat; he concentratesinsteadon inflictingpain, and above all, in conveying
to his victim his intentions and powers for inflictingthis pain. For the animal,
terror is only an incident in the combat; for the torturer, it is the prime
target. Torture and mutilation, then, are distinctivelyhuman acts; they are
indeed advancedhuman acts. The boundariesbetween groups are involved,
making possible the detachment that allows (and motivates) a free use of
cruelty; but there is a skill at empathizingacrossthe boundary,enough to be
able to gauge the effects of cruelty on its victim. This distinctivelyhuman
violence becomes symbolic; torture and mutilation are above all forms of
communication usable as threats and supports for claims of complete
domination.'4 "I can get inside your mind," the torturerboasts: "don't even
think of resistance."Mutilation and other public punishmentsare above all
violence to one's social image, and hence are pre-eminentlyusable for up-
holding inter-groupstratification.
groups are very strong, but the external relations are so episodic as to con-
stitute (when they are violent relations) only brief fights, animal-likein their
intensity and directness. Human sacrifice is found primarily in advanced
horticulturalsocieties, especially around the institution of the divineking or
reigning priests, and reflects the gulf between dominant and dominated
groups. But such stratificationis neverthelessvery local in scope; the ruler's
power is still very circumscribedby surroundingcouncils and by the weakness
of military technology and administrativeorganization.Cruelty is now used
to uphold the awesomeness of the ruler, but only on limited, highly
ceremonialoccasions, and without any personalelement: a victim is offered
to the gods in the name of the society. The extremes of refined cruelty are
found in advanced iron age societies, with their great military powers and
their high degree of warfare. Patrimonial administrationmaintains moral
boundariesamong groups, but the great territorialextension of such states
and the prevailingtone of military conflict brings a great many warrior-
contenders into the contest. Domination, unstableas it is under such circum-
stances, is sought with the refinementsthat come with a literate mentality;a
sharp (if unstable) order of internal stratification appears-indeed, the
sharpestin all of history-and ferocious and humiliatingextremes of violence
are used to maintainit.
originalIslamic expansion, and its most powerful later converts (in terms of
military prowess) came from pastoral cultures;and these are the most male-
dominated, vi9lent, and warlike of any societies. The practice of
cliteridectomy among the Bedouin, for example, is a ceremonial form of
cruelty designedto enhancemale control over female sexual property.'8 The
pre-universalistreligionsof such pastoralistsare also centeredaroundkilling:
the act of the sacrifice,which is actually a ceremonialpreparationfor a group
feast. Indeed, it appearsthat the habituallife of herding,prodding,and killing
animals fosters a similar attitude towards people. The introduction of a
literate, philosophical, universalist religion only expands the scope of the
possible State that can be built around such a culture; internally and
externally,it is sharplystratifiedand violent.' 9
(and hence the church organization)could extend beyond the ethnic group.
This form of altruismrepresentsthe effort to expand Churchmembershipto
a potentially universalbasis.
The persecution of the Christiansat the hands of the Roman state illustrates
the underlyingviolence of the situation. For Christianitywas persecutedonly
(with a minor and local exception under Nero) when it had become a major
political faction; the persecutionsof Diocletian were part of a final struggle
for dominance within the empire, and preceded by only 10 years the fimal
ascension of the pro-Christianfaction with Constantinein 313.2 1 The Chris-
tians in power acted exactly like their former persecutors.Indeed, existing
forms of torture, slavery,and mutilation(e.g., eunuchry)were not abolished,
but widely used by the Christianemperors.22 Nor did Christianferocity come
only from the political officials among its sympathizers.From the begin-
ning, there were violent conflicts within the Churchover questions of heresy
and leadership.The election of the Bishop of Rome in 366 was settled by the
murder of severalhundredsof one Christianfaction by another;23 struggles
over the Bishopricsof Constantinopleand Alexandriawere fought out by
mobs hurlingstones. Whenthe Churchfelt its strength,its pagan opponents
were subject to ferocious violence, as in the case of the philosopherHypatia:
... in the holy season of Lent, Hypatiawas torn from her chariot, stripped
naked, draggedto the church, and inhumanlybutchered by the hands of
Peter the readerand a troop of savageand mercilessfanatics;her flesh was
scraped from her bones with sharp oystershells, and her quiveringlimbs
were deliveredto the flames.24
the benevolent community: the sick, the poor, the lepers, are necessarysuf-
ferers in the scheme of things, wretched and blessed at the same time.26
Above all, alms are for the deservingpoor, the repenting,obedient, subser-
vient; acts of charity are ceremonialreaffirmationsof dominationand subor-
dination, in which the extremes of suffering are preservedand affirmedas
emblemsof the social orderthat is being upheld.
The example of India lends weight to this analysis, and also amplifies the
Durkheimiantheme with which we began. For Indiansociety, althoughnever
approaching the ideal of non-violence preached in the highest form of
Brahminismand in many of the salvationcults, has neverthelessshown much
less ferocious violence than the West.28 OrthodoxHinduism,in fact, makes a
special place for the warrior,the (Kshatriya)caste;the famous Bhagavadgita's
central concern is to justify a battle, even against kinsmen, as part of the
ordained karma of that particularstation. But this same device also encap-
sulated and limited the use of violence, above all since the caste system
maintained privilege through the mechanism of group inclusion and
exclusion, establishingpervasiveritual barriersin every activity of life. The
Kshatriyacaste, although fighting within itself for political domination(over
rathersmallkingdoms,at that) was not itself the bulwarkof the caste system.
Ferociousnessis most institutionalizedwhere ritualboundariesare structured
within an autonomousstate;Indiahad the formerwithout the latter.Hence,the
relativelack of mutilationand exemplarypunishmentin India(at least of the
classical period, before the Moslem conquest, and after the rise of the caste
Indian Society has its own form of cruelty. The caste system can be described
as a special form of the cruelty of callousness. The inferior position of
women, also supportedby the reincarnationdoctrine, involvedother forms of
callousness,includingthe extreme form of the immolationof widows. Yet all
of this is far from the ferocious violence characteristicof other iron-age
societies. India, the negative case, supports both the Weberianand the
Durkheimian theories. India, the land of the limited, weak state, had a
religion emphasizing ritual barriers,not forcible subjugation,passivity and
inner experience, not externaldomination.In terms of groupboundaries,one
may say that the caste system makes for psychologically impenetrable
barriers;29the degree of empathy necessaryto motivate torture,mutilation,
terrorist punishments does not exist; nor does stratification within a
ceremonial community, which is the structure upheld by symbolic and
ferocioususes of violence.
was compatible with manual work), and even created its distinctivemartial
art (Kempo, the predessorof karate and kung fu, originatingin the Shao-
lin-su monastery of the lower Yangtzearound500 A.D.). Literatecivilization
spread to Korea and Japan through the vehicle of Buddhism;in medieval
Japan, Buddhism had become militarized to the extent that armed
monasteriesheld the balance of power for severalcenturies.After the defeat
of this extreme form of militarism,the influence of Buddhismon the military
culture of Japan continued through the trainingof warriorsin Zen Buddhist
techniquesof fighting.31
Chinese society after the Han dynasty lacked this military aristocratic
emphasis;its culturalideal, instead,has been the rule of an internallypacified
empire by literate, cultivatedadministrators.3 2 The macho ethic was lacking
here; the military forces were concentratedon the borders,and the heartland
of the civilization adhered to another ethic. That ethic, expressed most
strongly in Confucianism,emphasized traditional loyalities and subordina-
tions within the family and within the structuresof government.The power
of emperor, mandarin,family head, were indeed upheld by force-above all
by beating (even to the point of death), with bamboo sticks. The mutilations
and public ferocity of the warringstates period seem to have been reduced;
torture in judicialproceedingsand punishmentsappearto have had less of the
public ceremonial significance of more militarized and conflictful societies,
and the Mandarins were given special exemption. Here again one
may invoke the Durkheimiandimension:the stratificationof Chinesesociety,
built around the centralized state, encompassedand reinforced traditional
psychologicalbarriersamong groups-in this case, especiallykinshipgroups-
that institutionalizedferocity even in the milderConfucianethos.3 3
At what point does the transitioncome about? Wehave seen that it does not
depend on the universalreligions per se, least of all historical Christianity.
The movement aginst ferocity, rather,is a secularizingmovement, originating
perhaps with Erasmus and the tolerant rationalists who oppposed the
fanaticisms of the Reformation period; it gained ground with the anti-
religiousphilosophes of the FrenchEnlightenmentand their Britishutilitarian
counterparts;and began to have a practicaleffect with the judicial reforms,
the anti-slaverycampaigns, and other benevolent movements of the 19th
century.3 It is true that a numberof liberal(non-ritualist,non-traditionalist)
Christian reformers were involved in these movements; but in general, it
indicates a break with the ritual boundariesof stratificationupheld by tradi-
tional religion. This is clearest in the case of the most vehement enemies of
religion, the socialists and the communist radicals,who perhapsfor the first
time extended altruism into a positive concern for universal human
happiness, rather than merely a token concern for suffering as an ungoing
part of an orderof privilegeand deference.
The major atrocities of the 20th century are of this sort. The Nazi exter-
mination camps were the epitome of bureaucraticorganization.37Whatwe
find so horrifying about them, above all, is their dramatizationof the
ultimate Kafka-esque possibilities we have always feared lurked in this
organizational form. The very methodical, impersonal, and ritually
unthreateningcharacterof most stagesof the Nazi exterminationprocedures,
are features which no doubt were most responsible for the relative lack of
resistanceand even the degreeof active complianceamongthe Jewish victims.
The secrecy of the camps and gas chambers,the night-timeround-ups-all of
these stand in sharp contrast to the public, ritual nature of violence in
patrimonialsocieties. For the Nazi participants,the well-known "Eichmann
syndrome,"the routinized following of orders,eliminatedany personalsense
of moral responsibility.And it is this, the turningup of the darkside of the
bureaucracy that surrounds us, which makes the Nazis an emblem of the
specificallymodern horror, a horror that dwarfsthe personalizedcrueltiesof
the MiddleAges.38
One prophetic element of the Nazi extermination camps was their use of
technology, not only to enhance the bureaucraticefficiency of their callous
violence, but to depersonalize and distance it from human contact. The
development of high-altitudebombing in the Second WorldWarrepresents
the same sort of atrocity, perhaps extended to even more de-personalized
limits. The atomic bombings of Japan are only the most dramatic(because
both technically novel and highly publicized) of the atrocities of the fire-
bombings of major cities in Japan, Germany, and Britain,with their heavy
Conclusion
The demons can be exorcised, but only by seeing them for what they are.
Those who claim that the demons can be exorcised only by action in the
world, not by theorizing about them, seem to be possessed by demons of
their own, especially the demon of asceticism;one senseshere the communal
hostility of the ascetic to the individualluxury of intellectualcontemplation.
And here is the danger.Those who deny everythingfor the self deny it as well
for others; our altruism,taken too exclusively,is an infinite regress,passinga
bucket from hand to hand that never reaches the fire. Whenwe act, we call
out the demons to meet us. Be careful:they are ourselves.
Notes
1 Han Fei Tzu, Basic Writings, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964, p. 80.
Original ca. 235 B.C.
2 Han Fei Tzu, of course, is the arch-Legalist and anti-Confucian of his day. This
passage nevertheless illustrates both the borrowing of the Legalists from the Con-
fucians, and foreshadows the synthesis of a bureaucratic ideology in the unified state
after 221 B.C.
3 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume 2, New York: Vintage books,
1960, pp. 174-175; originally published 1840.
4 Talcott Parsons, "Evolutionary Universals in Society," in Sociological Theory and
Modern Society, New York: Free Press, 1967; Societies, Evolutionary and Com-
parative Perspectives, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966; The System of Modern
Societies, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
5 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, New York: Free Press, 1970. Originally
published 1908.
6 Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile, New York: Harper and Row, 1963, p. 192.
7 1 Samuel 17: 51-54; 2 Samuel 4: 7-12.
8 Gerhard Lenski, Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification, New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966, pp. 155-159.
9 Gerhard Lenksi, Human Societies, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, pp. 225-227.
10 Lenski, HumanSocieties, p. 139; Powerand Privilege, pp. 122-123. The five main
categories of social organization presented here are based on the predominant
technology: hunting-and-gathering (stone implements), simple horticultural
(primitive agriculture, digging sticks), advanced horticultural (soft metal tools,
possibly irrigation agriculture), agrarian (iron tools, plows, and weapons, animal
power), industrial (inanimate energy technology).
11 Lenski, Power and Privilege, p. 437.
12 Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966, pp. 133-158.
13 There is another element of emotional contagion: not only between hunter and
hunter, but between hunter and hunted. The dog is set in motion by the frightened
running of the rabbit. This kind of aggressor-victim interaction seems to go on in
human animals in all of the more refined forms of human cruelty; human symbolic
capacities only add to the ways in which these phenomena may become consciously
sought after.
14 Animals do not torture or mutilate one another; they either fight, or quickly arrive at
a situation of token deference.
15 Lenski, HumanSocieties,pp. 138-139, 474-475.
16 Tor Andrae, Mohammed, the Man and his Faith, New York: Harper and Row, 1960,
pp. 73-79.
17 William McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963,
pp. 469-471.
18 William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, New York: Free Press,
1963, pp. 147, 211.
19 By contrast, as Weber noted, it is among city people, especially those in crafts and
commerce who never come in contact with animals, that pacificist moralities have
arisen. Marx Weber, The Religion of India, New York: Free Press, 1958, pp.
199-200; originally published 1916-1917.
20 See the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, St. John, and The Acts of the
Apostles.
21 Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967, pp. 116-124.
22 A characteristic utterance of the Empress Theodora: "If you fail in the execution of
my commands, I swear by him who lives forever that your skin shall be flayed from
your body." Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, New
York: Washington Square Press, 1963, p. 305. Originally published 1776-1787.
23 Chadwick, The Early Church, pp. 160-161. The origins of the doctrine of papal
infallibility date from this incident; the individual who won the Bishopric of Rome in
this fashion was so badly discredited personally that he strictly emphasized the
sanctity of the office as separate from that of its occupant.
24 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall, pp. 256-257.
25 R.W. Southern, WesternSociety and the Churchin the MiddleAges, Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 1970, pp. 36-41 and passim.
26 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, New York: Random House, 1965, pp.
17-18.
27 Max Weber, The Religion of China, New York: Free Press, 1951, pp. 20-29.
Originally published 1915.
28 D.D. Kosambi, The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India, Delhi: Vikas Publica-
tions, 1970, pp. 133, 151, 157, 173, 197, and passim; Louis Dumont, Homo
Hierarchicus;The Caste System and Its Implications, Delhi: Vikas Publications;
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 160-192. P.T. Borale, Segregation
and Desegregation in India, Bombay: Manaktalas, 1968, pp. 83-94 shows that the
ancient laws of Manu prescibe mutilation as the punishment for various small
offenses by Sudras against the dignity of the higher castes: Spitting on a Brahmin
called for cutting off the lips, listening to the Vedas called for filling the ears with
molten tin. These were the laws of the early period of expanding military states,
struck down in the Buddhist regime of the Maurya dynasty, and later replaced by a
primarily exclusionary structure of the later caste system. I am indebted to Gail
Omvedt for pointing out these sources, and for discussion on these points; the inter-
pretation however is my own.
29 The very word for "caste" is "jati," which also denotes distinctive animal species.
30 McNeill, The Rise of the West, pp. 587-590; Melford E. Spiro, Buddhism and
Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1970; D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture,
New York: Pantheon, 1959; Matsutatsu Oyama, This is Karate, Tokyo: Japan
Publishing and Trading Company, 1965, pp. 307-317; William Theodore de Bary,
The Buddhist Tradition, New York: Random House, 1969.
31 Japanese Buddhism is noted for other extreme versions of secularization, including
the practice of priestly marriage-in a religion in which celebacy was the sine qua
non-and a distinctively nationalistic doctrine of salvation, Nichiren Buddhism.
32 Weber, The Religion of China.
33 There are other aspects of violence in Chinese society that strike one today as unjust,
especially the punishment of family members for the transgressions of a kinsman. But
this is a general aspect of patrimonial social structure, and should not be confused
with ferocity per se.
34 A great deal of popular support for the death penalty, however, seems to come from
advocates of a traditionalist group structure (and probably members of such pockets
of traditional groups as exist in modern society); although they may argue in the
language of deterrence, the tone bespeaks ritual revenge of a strictly Durkheimian
sort. The rationalist opponents of the death penalty have failed to grasp this.
35 The classic advocate of cruelty, the Marquis de Sade, emerges in the transitional
period, and his writings capture all the major structural elements of the system then
passing out of existence: the hermetically sealed status-group of the aristocracy, the
awesome terror of traditional Christianity, and the deliberate use of violence for
psychological effect. De Sade shared enough of the Enlightenment's clarity to
express, far better than the philosophes, the nature of the society that was passing
away.
36 Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, New York: Random House, 1962, pp.
365-404; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1967, pp. 96-134.
37 Of course the individual face-to-face relationships between guards and prisoners
provided scope for personal sadism as well. Political and military torture do not
disappear entirely in the modern world; the transition to bureaucratic organization is
hardly uniform at all places and all levels. In this sense, we may use the instances in
which it occurs as further variations against which to test the model of ferocity
proposed above. For modern ferocity seems to occur in precisely those instances
where strong ritual barriers may still be found among stratified groups: above all,
sadistic torture seems to occur across ethnic lines, both in prisons and in warfare, as
in the pervasive atrocities of the French-Algerian war.
38 Cf. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New
York: Viking Press, 1963. Stanley Milgram, "Behavior Study of Obedience," Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 371-378, shows experimentally the
degree of impersonal cruelty that benign middle class persons will inflict when given
instructions in a bureaucratic setting.
39 Frank Harvey, Air War: Vietnam, New York: Bantam Books, 1967.
40 Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier, New York: Free Press, 1960.
41 The manifestations of such asceticism have varied during the history of Christianity,
especially as the more patrimonial structure of medieval European society came to
the fore. It was above all during periods when the purer Christian ideal has been
emphasized (and along with it, the power of the church and its leaders) that
asceticism has been most clearly enforced.