The Strange Case of the Disenfranchised Barbarian

All roads lead to savagery

The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

-Claude Lévi-Strauss

Readers who live under rocks or on Mars will be interested to learn that 2024 is shaping up to be a big Transatlantic political year. It was always going to be a biggie, of course, but the announcement of May 22nd by Rishi Sunak that the next general election in the UK will be held on July 4th has suddenly brought everything into sharper focus.

The result of this is that the British political scene stands suddenly exposed as being in very bad health. On election day people will be faced with a smorgasbord of options that in most respects are largely the same. One is tempted to call this a set of variations on a theme of technocracy - the claims that each of the major parties seems to be making basically boil down to the same essential premise: we will manage things better than the other guys. But I will instead here suggest that the real tragedy facing the electorate is that the paths before them all basically lead in the same direction - to what I will call, following Michel Foucault, a form of savagery. This is a big problem, because an awful lot of us would much prefer to be barbarians - but will have no realistic barbaric representation in Parliament. The lesson here is clear: one of the two major parties, which is to say the likely loser, needs to seize that mantle in the medium-long term, if only it has the guts to do so.

Let us start then with Foucault. A lot of thinkers are given the label ‘dangerous’, either by colleagues who want to give them a leg-up or publishers promoting a book, but Foucault was a man who genuinely merited the term. He was a dangerous thinker, because he was prepared to go close to the live rails and raw nerves, and there are passages of his work that are as a consequence genuinely explosive in their implications.

One of these passages, which stunned me when I first read it, appears in the public lecture series delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1975-76, collected and translated into English as Society Must Be Defended. To give a little background, in these lectures (which I have touched on before), Foucault decided he wanted to explore the reverse of Clausewitz’s old maxim, ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’. What if, Foucault asks us, we considered the converse: that over the centuries war has been domesticated and integrated into the political sphere, such that we could speak instead of ‘politics being the continuation of war by other means’?

This is the cue for a description of modern society as being characterised by an implacable but surreptitious conflict perpetrated by those at the centre against the periphery; by the insider against the outsider; by the legitimate against the illegitimate; by the high against the low. And Foucault describes that conflict as being fought chiefly through the mechanism of status, whereby those who lack it are systematically described and imagined to be corrupt, dangerous, ignorant, immoral, deviant and therefore deserving of effective political exile.

This, of course, has the effect of making the reader in 2024 sit up to attention, since it sounds so very like our current predicament - in which those who have ‘low status opinions’ not only occupy low status economically, but are everywhere cast by those with high status as being stupid, ‘low information’, uneducated ‘gammons’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’, not to mention racists, fascists, bigots, anti-vaxxers, ‘extremists’ and so on and so forth. One does not merely have low status opinions nowadays because one is of low status - one has low status opinions because one possesses some awful character flaw, some inherent immorality or lack of decency, and one is therefore not considered to be merely wrong but held up as wicked and deviant. And it will not have escaped the reader’s attention that the pattern in this discourse always seems to flow in the direction which Foucault indicated - toward a kind of political death for those of low status: their right to vote is tolerated so long as they vote the right way and shut up and be grateful for what they get, but if they dare to vote the wrong way or air their odious views in public they must be cast into the political pit of Carkoon and never be heard from again.

In a classically Foucauldian leap of faith, which may very well have little hard evidence to support it but which nonetheless somehow gives rise to very important insights, he suggests that this feature has been part of human society since antiquity, and that modern politics in fact has a way of replicating ancient patterns of thought concerning two symbolic figures who loomed large in the imagination of the ‘civilised’ world for centuries - the ‘barbarian’ and the ‘savage’. In the particular passage to which I’m referring, which bears some elaboration, he describes the former as follows:

The barbarian…is somebody who can be understood, characterised and defined only in relation to a civilization, and to the fact that he exists outside of it. There can be no barbarian unless an island of civilization exists somewhere, unless he lives outside it, and unless he fights it. And the barbarian’s relationship with that speck of civilization  - which the barbarian despises, and which he wants - is one of hostility and permanent warfare.  

The barbarian cannot exist without the civilization he is trying to destroy and appropriate. The barbarian is always the man who stalks the frontiers of States, the man who stumbles into the city walls. Unlike the savage, the barbarian does not emerge from some natural backdrop to which he belongs. He appears only when civilization already exists, and only when he is in conflict with it. He does not make his entrance into history by founding a society, but by penetrating a civilization, setting it ablaze and destroying it…. And when he does acquire a power, acquire a king or elect a chief, he certainly does not do so in order to diminish his own share of right but, on the contrary, to increase his strength…

The barbarian, in other words, is a figure who always symbolically opposes civilisation - one who ‘takes possession and seizes’; whose sole aim is ‘plunder’. He is a threatening outsider who coverts the property, the money, the slaves, the horses and so on which are owned by the ‘civilised’. And the civilised as a consequence hate and fear him: ‘the barbarian…has to be bad and wicked’.

This is contrasted with the figure of the savage:

[T]he savage is basically a savage who lives in a state of savagery together with other savages [sic]…The savage is a man who has in his hands, so to speak, a plethora of freedom which he surrenders in order to protect his life, his security, his property, and his goods…

The savage then is fundamentally benign - one who lives in a state of contentment in his savagery, but who when he comes into contact with the civilised world is content to trade away his savage freedom in order to have a secure, protected life. This, to the civilised person, is much more preferable to the approach adopted by the barbarian: the savage, rather than engaging in plunder, arson, rapine, etc., is carrying out ‘a form of reciprocity in which we can, if you like, recognize the acceptable…form of goodness’ - he is giving up his savage way of life and becoming domesticated. Hence, far from being ‘bad and wicked’ like the barbarian, ‘the savage is, despite it all and even though it has to be admitted that he has done a few bad things and has a few faults, always the noble savage.’ This is because in the end he can be reconciled with the civilised world into a position of comfortable inferiority - willing to accept a kind of client status in return for not being treated too harshly.

All this of course is metaphorical rather than literal. For those who think of themselves as civilised, there are basically two ways of conceptualising those who one thinks of as lacking in the necessary characteristics to qualify as being civilised as well. The barbarian is one who possesses too much arrogance, too much treachery, too much greed and too much depravity to be allowed to be anything other than an outsider - ‘stalking the frontiers’ of the State. And the savage, on the other hand, is one who is pliable and domesticable - one who is happy to be pastoralised, who lacks pride, and who is content with giving up freedom and ambition in the name of a peaceful life.

It is clear that these two discourses, as Foucault was implying, continue to infect our politics to this day. Those who possess high status, who consider themselves to be at the centre, and to occupy the higher rungs of the ladder - those who, to mix my metaphors, know themselves to be well and truly ensconsed behind the city walls - look out on the world and see hordes of low-status people wandering in what they consider to be the wilderness. And they differentiate keenly between those low-status people who they consider to be bolshie, uppity, bumptious, vulgar, and crass - and those who they consider to be servile, grateful, unambitious and content.

The former, the barbarians, are the prosperous tradesmen and small business owners, the grubby lower-middle classes, the barbers and van drivers, the ‘new money’ types, the ‘gammons’ and bigots who dare to have political opinions of their own and to demand a form of politics which respects their freedom and increases their strength and prosperity. And the latter, the savages, are those who the ‘civilised’ think they can deal with: those who will give up political claims entirely in return for being fobbed off with welfare (or, some day, presumably UBI), and ideally will retreat into ‘a state of savagery together with other savages’ and never bother the civilised world again.

The problem that we have long had is that the political and chattering-class establishment in the UK has, in a unified way across the spectrum, largely come to the conclusion that it prefers ordinary people to exist on the model of the savage, and that it intensely dislikes ordinary people to exist on the model of the barbarian. People who don’t have money or degrees from ‘good’ universities are not supposed to really have any politics at all except insofar as they will vote for the party which gives the most handouts and best ‘manages’ the economy. And if they do develop any sort of political awareness which suggests that they might like to elect governments which increase their freedom and strength, and provide them with greater economic opportunity and prosperity, then this must immediately be stamped out, squashed, or else made to seem beyond the ideological pale. What the modern establishment likes is poor people who are content to have their needs met, and who don’t care which government meets them, or really which set of politicians happens to be in charge. What the establishment doesn’t like is poor people who want to live in a political economy in which they can increase their wealth, come to own land and other assets, expand their sense of pride, and save for the future and gain autonomy - rather than relying on the benevolence of the State alone in perpetuity.

The great problem facing UK citizens as we contemplate casting our votes in July 2024 is that over time the political parties have each come to embrace the discourse of the savage: what they all seem to desire above anything else is to create a more attractive basis for exchange wherein the ordinary voter can trade away more freedom in the interests of being made more secure against some real or imagined risk. Each party then simply sets out an elaboration on that theme. No political party genuinely presents the priorities and interests of the barbarian, and barbarians as a result are fast being driven further and further off into the wilderness to lick their wounds and mutter in the darkness.

This is a depressing picture. But it suggests that there will be a way forward - likely in the aftermath of the election. There are a lot of barbarians out there: ordinary people outside of the middle-middle and upper-middle classes who would like not to merely survive on the State’s largesse and to rely on its morality, but to make their own way, and to achieve in the long run autonomy and personal wealth. They may at the moment be politically homeless. But sooner or later the Tory Party is going to have to reckon with the fact that they are its natural allies - and that only it can realistically bring them within the city walls and integrate them politically. When this happens it will I think be explosive for the ‘civilised’ establishment: if there is one thing metaphorical barbarians are good at, it is causing metaphorical damage. The only questions are how long it will take for the realisation to dawn that savagery is not the route to electoral success - and how big the confrontation with the ranks of the civilised ‘new elite’ is going to have to be.