Savagery

 I have been thinking about the meaning of this word and how we use it. The whole bundle of collocations and undertones has a lot going on. 

If you think of where people use it and how it is used, it feels like unbridled and cruel violence against other people is the context, whether by an individual, a group or a state's forces. There is cruel intent and the will to cause pain, death or loss, but there is also a taste of 'loss of control, loss of humanity, inhumanness' which is also there.

It apparently derives from the Latin 'silvaticus' which means 'from the woods' and you can see how that shift from 'beyond the civilised world' to 'beyond civilised limits' would come about. 

AI tells me that it was used a lot in the 18th and 19th centuries in descriptions by colonisers of the places they had colonised. That figures. And worth remembering that when the Romans colonised our isles they likely thought of us in the same way. Everyone is always scared of the things that live in the woods.

But anyone can do savagery, it's not just for the uncivilised. In the Saigon war museum this summer there was enough savagery to last me a lifetime, whether it was low-tech poisoned bamboo stakes or high tech 7.5 ton 'Daisy-cutter' bombs. 

There is always some shock or surprise implicit when you use the word. As if you didn't know humans could stoop this low. Or as if you really had a desire to not believe it was possible. I've just been listening to a song from the Proclaimers new album and its very straightforwardly called "(We say that's not who we are) But it is". And it lists the savageries that we hypocritically impose on others, unable to see  ourselves clearly. 

But the ground zero, the Ur-savagery seems to reside in communal violence, when neighbour turns against neighbour, perhaps for the very fact that this is someone you had a civilised relationship with, for years. I am reading 'Shattered Lands', Sam Dalrymple's excellent but often shocking account of the breakup of British India in the middle of the 20th century. The most horrific communal violence, when modern India and Pakistan were created from the old Raj, seems to baffle even those who took part in it. The phrase 'red mist' is very apt for the way that something seems to overwhelm the actions and instincts of the humane people that we imagine ourselves to be (and that we may well really be, if circumstances do not conspire against us).

Fear can be involved in much ordinary violence, but when it descends into savagery, it's as if a 'blood lust' has poisoned people's minds to make them act as they do.  And when they stop and try to retrieve the common humanity that they shared before, it remains always out of reach. 

And if I can take anything at all positive from these thoughts, it is to shun the demagogue amongst our politics . I have heard from more than one person recently the opinion that we are headed for problems because our cultures do not have any fearful memories of real wars, so we do not appreciate the dangerous ground we tread when we follow demagogues. Those who would lead you into savagery, whatever their politics, and whether with knives or cruise missiles, should be left nowhere near the levers of power.