The Spire

October 31, 2023

The word many ancient Greek writers used to refer to non-Greeks was “barbaros,” which they understood to take its etymology from the (non-Greek) sound of other languages (“bar bar”). This distinction between Greek-speaking Greeks on the one hand and “barbarians” on the other was central to the rhetoric used to describe and classify violent conflict. In the fifth century BCE, the historian Herodotus presented the war between the allied city-states on the Greek peninsula and the Persian Empire (which stretched across what we now call the Middle East) as the latest in a centuries-old series of contests between Greeks and barbarians, Europe and Asia, West and East (Histories 1.1-5). In the following century the philosopher Aristotle, in Book 1 of his Politics, would classify barbarians as inherently inferior and subservient to the naturally superior Greeks (Politics 1252b). Barbarians were thus deemed the rightful and just victims of any Greek acts of war and enslavement, without any restrictions on Greek violence against them (Politics 1256b). 

The authoritative standing of Herodotus, Aristotle, and other Greek authors meant that these essentializing and dehumanizing dichotomies would go on to have enduring and destructive legacies over the coming millennia, as they were marshaled forth to justify conquest, colonization, and slavery. Coined some 2,500 years ago, this oppositional rhetoric continues today to corrupt discourse and decision-making about human lives.

On October 25 the Middle East Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies programs co-organized a panel of Holy Cross faculty on “Violence in Israel and Palestine.” In my role as director of the Peace and Conflict Studies program I moderated the panel. During the question-and-answer period a fellow faculty member critiqued what he perceived to be the pro-Palestinian bias of the panel and then expressed the position that the violence in Israel and Palestine amounts to a conflict between “civilization” and “barbarism.” This comment, which led to commotion and strong responses from many in attendance, was in keeping with a number of high-profile characterizations of the war, such as that by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who on October 30 rejected calls for a ceasefire by the United Nations and a number of international humanitarian organizations on the grounds that a cessation of attacks on Gaza would be a “surrender to barbarism.”

The massacre on October 7 of an estimated 1,400 Israelis by the militant group Hamas was a horrific act that has caused unspeakable pain in Israel and around the world. The ongoing massacre of an estimated 8,500 Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces, with the backing of the United States, is a horrific act that has caused unspeakable pain in Palestine and around the world. (These estimates of fatalities are from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs, dated October 31, 2023). An overwhelming number of those who have been killed were civilians. Per an October 29 release by the non-profit organization Save the Children, 3,257 of those killed in this conflict between October 7 and October 29 were children: 29 children killed in Israel, 33 children killed in the West Bank, and 3,195 children killed in Gaza.

These horrific acts – and there are many more, and more to come – must be named. How we do so matters. One might argue that we can distinguish between a “barbaric act” and the definition of a person or people as “barbaric.” I want to put forward that, given the deep and destructive history of this rhetoric, introducing the reductive language of “civilization” and “barbarism” into our discussions of these horrors runs the risk of desensitizing us to the plight of an entire ethnic group, and thus of unduly differentiating atrocities, of seeing the slaughter of some civilians as less horrific than the slaughter of others, of – as Aristotle did when deploying such classifications – deeming the lives of some innocents less valuable than the lives of others. Dehumanizing shorthands of this sort have long been put to use in the spread of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and indeed any number of expressions of hate. They bolster division and violence; they are barriers to understanding and peace.

The faculty member who brought the rhetoric of “civilization” and “barbarism” into the discussion on October 25 also expressed a concern that a liberal arts education should seek to expose students to multiple perspectives. I share that view. I also think it is imperative to keep in mind the Holy Cross Mission Statement’s encouragement of dialogue that “challenges us to seek that which might constitute our common humanity.” When considering multiple perspectives we must begin by refusing to employ rhetoric that dehumanizes and thus has the potential to obscure or erase those perspectives; we must begin with an acknowledgement of our shared humanity.