Glimpses of Reprimitivisation

William Rubinstein, Professor of History at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth, and author of Genocide: A History (2004), wrote recently:

Apart from the modern West—or, more precisely, the English-speaking democracies of the West—most of human history and most of non-Western societies have been hallmarked by nightmarish, murderous barbarism on a scale so pervasive and so hellish that its extent can hardly be grasped …

It may be objected that I have changed the meanings of the terms I am using: that scientific and technological “primitivism” is not the same as “primitivism” in terms of cruel and barbaric behaviour—the production-line murders at Auschwitz and the destructive use of nuclear energy were the products of science and technology, for example, and today technologically-educated people have been prominent among extreme Islamic fanatics. Nonetheless, I maintain that that the various types of primitivism go together. A modern society which rejects humane civilisation, such…