Rachel Forman
Response: Violence and Civilization Keynote Presentation
What he said:
In his Friday presentation, Bruce Lincoln discussed the different ways that violence became sanctified in the Mediterranean empires of Late Antiquity. Lincoln introduced five scenariosas a framework for understanding how violence interacted with people’s religious and cosmological world views to determine and alter different group’s worth relative to one another. In the case of conquest, Lincoln pointed out that conquerors generally saw the people being conquered as morally corrupt or uncivilized, and therefore it was the conqueror’s religious duty to raise the lesser people’s status through the conquest process. On the flipside of this equation is the second scenario—the defeat as humiliation framework. In this situation, conquered people come to see their defeat as a result of moral/religious corruption and believe that improvement in these areas is necessary on order for the group to belifted out of this humiliated position. The third scenario, millenarian revolt, is a variation on the defeat as humiliation scenario, the difference being that the defeated people regain their moral capital and revolt against the conquerors under the leadership of a messiah-like figure.
The last two scenarios, mortification of the flesh and martyrdom, are different from the first three because they occur on an individual level. Mortification of the flesh involves undertaking ascetic behavior in order to separate the soul/spirit from the physical body, thus allowing the soul/spirit to achieve a higher moral status. Martyrdom on the other hand, flips the dynamics of power by “disarticulating might and right,” since martyrdom essentially removes the power of the conqueror’s threat and use of lethal force.
Why this is useful:
By graphing these scenarios on a set of worth-time axes, Lincoln was able to show the complexity that exists within violence-empire-religion relationships. Violence is not simply a tool for the strong to use against the weak. It can be manipulated by the weak against the strong, like in the case of martyrs, or it can be used by a person against himself, like in the case of mortification of the flesh. Beyond simply having religion-based justifications, violence in the context of empire also has the power to alter a group’s understanding of its own moral worth, essentially admitting that they deserved to be defeated. And while Lincoln’s observations were based in the circumstances of the Mediterranean empires of Late Antiquity, they also provide an interesting jumping-off point for thinking about violence and empire today. Religious and morality-laden rhetoric is certainly alive and well today, from the United States’ proclaimed goal of spreading democracy to Al Qaeda’s goal of restoring their version of Islam. The question of who is “righteous” in their use of force is thrown back and forth in discussion of terrorism and non-state violence. These subjects are often thought of as novel, but Lincoln’s presentation showed that ancient history can be a useful tool when studying violence, religion and empire in the modern world.
My thoughts and questions:
Although I recognize that Lincoln’s time was limited, I would have liked more detailed examples of the frameworks that he talked about. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell whether he was talking about late antiquity in particular or all of history in general. Also, I was disappointed that all of Lincoln’s frameworks held violence as a means to a political or economic goal, making it seem that violence would have been discarded in favor of a more peaceful method if that had been possible. There were no examples where violence was inextricable from the vision of empire, the way we saw with the Aztecs and in ancient China. I don’t know if there were, in fact, cases in that time and place where violence itself was the means of serving the Gods or enforcing a particular cosmological order. Nonetheless, acknowledging that such a possibility existed would have made for a richer understanding of how, exactly, the different religions in the Mediterranean incorporated violence in to their empire building processes.