Today, two stories. The first is impersonal, and is about the difficulty of handling immediacy and specificity in the context of State violence. The second is personal, and is about the difficulty of handling abstraction and generality in the context of personal agency. Two angles on the same cultural phenomenon.

One: No Theatre for Achilles

Writes Graeber,

We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not abstract. I am not speaking of conceptual violence. I am speaking of violence in the literal sense: the kind that involves, say, one person hitting another over the head with a wooden stick. All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force. “Force” in turn is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence: that is, the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten to hit others over the head with wooden sticks.

It is curious how rarely citizens in industrial democracies actually think about this fact, or how instinctively we try to discount its importance. This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required. It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm. (58)

A subterranean question that I’m interested in surfacing: by what means—psychological, cultural, political, economic—are the “armed men” in this story rendered willing and able to cause physical harm to total strangers in libraries? Or, in another context: what is the process by which The State convinces its pilots to fly reaper drones?

A simple, too-cute answer: it’s the uniforms.

Well, it’s not the uniforms per se. Instead, more precisely, it’s a network of relations that makes uniforms seem possible as natural kinds. It’s a web of symbols and signification—a worldview, an ontology—that reorients those who exist within it around extremely stylised notions of identity and ethical behaviour.

You write that

To motivate yourself into certain acts—to be an actor (in the sense of someone who does things)—sometimes relies on the transformation of self into an actor (someone who pretends to be a certain kind of character who would do those acts).

I disagree. To be an agent is to be someone who does things in the environment in response to desires and expectations; to be an actor is to be someone who does things in the course of fulfilling a role. The distinction is subtle, but important. In many harsh (or ‘immediate’, or ‘concrete’) environments, the ‘motivation’ to act is immanent in one’s relation to the environment. Think of the way you are when you’re hiking. Or the way a dingo acts. Or an albatross. Think, also, of how you feel about the suffering of farmed animals. I don’t mean how you feel about it ‘as an abstraction’, or as that kind of something which most people flinch away from receiving any information about. How do you feel about the suffering of factory farmed animals when you consider that suffering as the visible consequence of real events in the real world?

The thing I’m claiming is that a certain kind of theatricality is a sufficient (though not necessary) pre-condition for motivating some kinds of anonymous, Us-vs-Them, Group-on-Group violence. Individual violence is plainly possible. Even ‘small group’ violence arising from the control of territorially-bound resources seems ‘natural’ enough. But the kinds of things that modern soldiers (predominantly) do are importantly unlike the kinds of things Achilles does. And the murders perpetrated by modern soldiers are (even in fiction) characterised in ways that are, as you rightly point out, importantly unlike the death of Alcathous.

The threatricality isn’t something that happens ‘in parallel’ with this ‘Group As Moral Patient’ phenomenon. Rather, theatricality is a means of traumatisation, of moral injury, of destroying and reconstructing the ‘individual’ so that they are more reliably ‘actor, not agent’.

While I’m not the first to say this, it’s relevant here: to a first approximation, The Iliad is a story of a powerful aristocratic figure (Agamemnon) trying to translate more personal forms of warfare (which focused on ‘raiding for glory and stolen resources’) into a modern, transpersonal, impersonal form. And it’s a story of that project basically failing. Agamemnon tries to turn early agrarian warfare (identifiable individuals fighting over territory) into the kind of thing that the American army as an institution does today. But, well, it doesn’t work.

In some of the post-Homeric stories, Achilles—hidden on Skyros—makes one of the only truly free choices in Greek mythology. If Achilles stays away, he knows that the Greeks will lose the war, but he also knows that he’ll die as a happy old farmer. That he’ll be loved by his sons, remembered by his grandchildren, and then (in a few generations’ time) forgotten. If he instead takes up the spear, he’ll die in the war. Young and bloody. But with his help, the Greeks will sack Troy, and his name—Achilles’ name—will last for millennia, synonymous with ‘hero’ and ‘warrior’. Only by dying at Troy can Achilles burn away the last mortal parts of himself. Only there can he finish what Thetis started.

Achilles, of course, goes to war. He’s a young man, trained by Chiron, and he’s the human embodiment of the phrase ‘too much testosterone’. Picking glory over longevity is what young men do. And it’s the thing that old men make use of. And because Agamemnon fails in his project, Achilles is—from the perspective of maximising the interests of The Group—allowed to remain too much of an individual agent, and not enough of an actor. Achilles is a great warrior, but a terrible soldier. Theatricality, moral injury, trauma … these are the means by which modern soldiers are produced. And the means by which anonymous armed men can be motivated to “use force” against strangers in libraries (or sleeping in doorways), as manifestations of institutions that are necessarily patriarchal and racist at their root.

Modern states such as America and Australia rely heavily on small teams of highly-trained, ‘special’ forces to enact the most personal violence. And it’s a fraught affair. First, as far as I can tell, modern States find themselves in need of extremely specialised, personalised, high-precision forms of personal violence. The occasional Achilles, in addition to a cop. First, the State tries to (re)construct low-fidelity simulacra of Men Like Achilles from a subset the already-usefully-traumatised-and-reliable mass of ordinary soldiers. This doesn’t work, or rarely does, and so the system instead resigns itself to selecting people who can’t or won’t submit to ordinary military structures and—at a kind of strange “arm’s length” remove—allows the older and more experienced of these to recruit, train, instruct, and direct the younger and less experienced ones. Provided these small teams are sufficiently violent in useful-to-the-State ways, they’re given the resources and freedom to develop a kind of parallel culture. It barely interfaces with the normal military, because it barely can. Inside a given team, one sees largely structureless, formal-hierarchy-disrespecting, positive-sum interactions; members of these communities believe, fundamentally, that every person and thing ‘outside’ their is mere environment or terrain (and so not morally relevant). Including their ostensible commanders.

The State tries to narrativise these groups of Extremely Personal Violence Executors in ways that are more palatable or comprehensible to ordinary citizens (eg. heavily-funded fiction such as the ‘Seal Team’). The system finds excuses for their beards and lack of uniform. The system does its best to titrate Achilles-like glory. The system does its best to tame the monsters it needs. It mostly fails. The reality breaks through. These people look like us, and talk like us, but they’re from a culture that’s alien even to the larger military that produced it.

(Compare the fiction to the reality.)

The theatricality to which I am referring is not a precursor or precondition of Achilles. It’s a thing that someone like Agamemnon is using (or, at least, the cultural system which generates Agamemnon is using) in an attempt to create the useful-to-the-State attitude of the blank-faced bureaucracy, or the Nazi Guard.

Two: As Christian Patriarch

I was talking to my mother about her father—let’s call him D—a while ago. D’s got Late Stage Parkinson’s Disease, and he’s been in a nursing home for a few years now. It’s a good nursing home, as they go, and a necessary situation. My grandmother couldn’t care for him at home and, really, nobody could. But he’s miserable. He wants to die, but can’t. He’s felt this way for years. It’s not a great scene.

The other day, I wrote:

While at first nobody believes the masks they’re holding up are ‘real’, the moral injury inflicted by the things they’ve been complicit in has made removing masks impossible. All they can do is switch from role to role. What seemed at first to be a temporary ‘play’ becomes embodied as The Real for its players. One is motivated, now, to redefine identity and being for oneself. One redefines belief. One naturalises masks. And, as a matter of psychological survival, one is motivated to continue that re-definition until everything is theatre. It’s a one-way street.

I found myself trying to explain this to my mother, in the way that adult children sometimes do in tense relationships with parents. I failed. Maybe it’s generational. I don’t know. I’ll try again here.

My mother is confused, I think, in her distress. Or maybe she’s flinching away from what she doesn’t want to see.

By her account, for years—since before D went into full-time care—my mother would have these interactions with her dad. The three of them would sit together—my mother, my grandmother, and D—and he’d be chipper and cheerful. Then, my grandmother would leave the room to make tea, answer the phone, whatever. And D would suddenly switch.

“I can’t keep this up,” he’d say, in a moment of grim honestly, “And neither can she. I’m not going to get better. You’ve got to help me.”

Then my grandmother would return, and he’d be chipper again.

If my mother tried to bring up D’s stated ‘privately’-stated feelings in larger conversations with him and others (my grandmother, a doctor, whoever), he’d play it off and minimise it, or deny it outright. His suffering was real—is real—but it was like he’d reached a negotiated settlement within himself, where he’d admit it to his daughter but not his wife.

He still does this. In the nursing home, to just my mother, he’ll say openly that he wants to die. But when she sits with him and his GP, as she does—as he asks her to do—he can’t seem to bring himself to make a plan.

The closest he came to it was when he first moved into the nursing home; to his doctor, I’m told, he said he wanted to go off most of his medications, so that a chronic infection in his hip would take hold and speed things along. But he couldn’t seem to articulate it forcefully enough, to anyone, and so the doctor’s line was “it’s a distressing time, a lot of change; let’s put you on an antidepressent and revisit the issue once you’re settled.” (True and reasonable.)

Now it’s three years later and everything is worse.

Here’s the thing about my grandfather. He was a methodist missionary, in Africa, before the family was deported from the country because of his support of a union movement and the end of white colonial rule. Later, he was a leader in the church. Deeply sympathetic to what I think he and I would both call ‘Quaker values’. Then, as my grandmother puts it, “feminism happened”. They left the church and, with some others, formed an ‘intentional community’ that remains stable to this day. He was a teacher, and a community leader, in a deeply Christian mold.

My mother seems confused because she thinks that, when he articulates his preferences to her, that means he wants to act on them. When he can’t articulate those same preferences to his wife or doctor, she thinks he just needs help or encouragement to do so.

The sad fact is: I think he’s switching between artificial roles that are so deeply ingrained he’s naturalised them as ‘self’.

I asked my mother to look back on her own memories of childhood.

“How many separate memories do you have of him,” I asked, “where he came home late—visibly exhausted, angry, or depressed—because he was putting first the preferences of some other group of people you hardly knew?”

“Those are the only memories I have of him,” she said.

This is the ugly heart of so-called Christian Values, and the role of the Christian Patriarch that a man like him had internalised as “moral action”.

On a deep level, he thinks that it’s his duty to sacrifice himself: to subjugate his needs, and suffer in order to lessen (or somehow ‘bear’) the suffering of others. At home, as the patriarch, he’s the Provider of his house. And in the world—in every community he was part of—his Polaris was something like “Is this self-sacrifice? If so, it must be good for the group. It must be moral.”

No amount of ‘progressive values’, or ‘feminism happened in the church’, or ‘leaving the church’, or ‘intentional community’, actually replaced this decision framework. It’s too ingrained. And it’s too widespread. It’s not just Christian, now, it’s Western and it’s modern.

There is uncertainty about whether ‘good’ means ‘good for the individual’ or ‘good for the group’ or ‘both’. In Christianity, with Original Sin, the only good is ‘good for the group’. And so the individual Christian is taught to utilise an imperfect proxy measure for ‘good’: bad for me. And then Goodheart’s Law does its work. For two thousand years.

The earlier account I gave was framed in terms of an entangled violence/theatre/spectacle object in the cultural superstructure. While I think I probably owe more precise definitions of ‘violence’, ‘theatre’, and ‘spectacle’, in the meantime I’ll try to clarify the edges of that account.

To my knowledge, my grandfather was never engaged in any spectacle violence. However, the explanation of his behavior that best fits the facts is that he’s doing the exact same thing—psychologically—that you say participants in spectacle violence necessarily do: he’s generating his behavior from an understanding of generic ‘parts’ he knows how to play.

He’s not a coherent agent who looks for things that are at least good for him and mostly good for both him and others. He’s assuming a zero-sum dynamic, everywhere, and then behaving as if ‘losing in the zero-sum dynamic’ is what A Moral Person does.

For years, he’s had a coherent preference to die. He won’t act on it. He can’t act on it. He will, however, articulate it to his daughter. Why?

I think it’s because the role he plays with his daughter—the drama they play out—is one of ‘ailing father’ and ‘doting daughter’. She gets to feel like she’s a caring ‘good daughter’ and he gets to feel pride at having raised (having socialised) a daughter who plays this legible part so well. When both were younger, he was the disciplinarian, the distant father, and she was the rebellious teen. Now the arc of the narrative finds purchase: he softens, opens up to her, and she fulfills the role as feminine carer.

When he’s with his wife, however, he’s playing the part of ‘Christian husband’. He sacrifices for her and hides, as best he can, the very fact and extent of his sacrifice. He falsifies his preferences to himself so that hers—or rather, his model of hers—can be better satisfied. For this, he is emotionally rewarded. Externally, I’m sure, there are social rewards: he’s brave in the face of a degenerative illness, as is expected of A Man Like Him. There are also internal rewards. A ‘society’ within him, acting as the generating function.

And he does this so naturally, so instinctively, that he doesn’t even see it.