"The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism"
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Progress isn’t a staircase in David Hare’s world; it’s a moving walkway pointed at the cliff. “The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism” lands with the cold, theatrical clarity of a playwright who’s spent decades watching institutions perform virtue while quietly rehearsing collapse. Hare isn’t pining for a lost golden age. He’s warning that “civilization” can be a costume: polished language, cultured habits, procedural niceties. Under pressure, that costume tears fast.
The line works because it flips the usual story we tell ourselves - that time plus education plus liberal norms equals moral ascent. Hare suggests the opposite vector: complexity breeds fragility; comfort breeds complacency; bureaucracy breeds moral outsourcing. When systems get dense enough, individual responsibility evaporates into process. At that point barbarism doesn’t arrive as an invading army; it arrives as “just doing my job,” as managerial language smoothing over cruelty.
As a British playwright formed in the long afterglow of World War II and the later disappointments of late-capitalist politics, Hare’s context is a nation and a class that prizes civility as identity. The barb is that civility can coexist with harshness - in policy, in media scapegoating, in the easy dehumanization of outsiders. “Ultimate tendency” is doing heavy lifting: not an everyday inevitability, but a gravitational pull when fear, resentment, or opportunism take over.
It’s a bleak sentence, but not a nihilistic one. Its real intent is diagnostic: if barbarism is a tendency, it can be resisted - but only if we stop confusing refinement with ethics.
The line works because it flips the usual story we tell ourselves - that time plus education plus liberal norms equals moral ascent. Hare suggests the opposite vector: complexity breeds fragility; comfort breeds complacency; bureaucracy breeds moral outsourcing. When systems get dense enough, individual responsibility evaporates into process. At that point barbarism doesn’t arrive as an invading army; it arrives as “just doing my job,” as managerial language smoothing over cruelty.
As a British playwright formed in the long afterglow of World War II and the later disappointments of late-capitalist politics, Hare’s context is a nation and a class that prizes civility as identity. The barb is that civility can coexist with harshness - in policy, in media scapegoating, in the easy dehumanization of outsiders. “Ultimate tendency” is doing heavy lifting: not an everyday inevitability, but a gravitational pull when fear, resentment, or opportunism take over.
It’s a bleak sentence, but not a nihilistic one. Its real intent is diagnostic: if barbarism is a tendency, it can be resisted - but only if we stop confusing refinement with ethics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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