Apparently, We Are Headed for Civil War
David Betz, a KCL academic, argues that we will soon be at each other’s throats.
In conversation with Paul Kingsnorth on her podcast, Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, the writer and thinker Louise Perry wondered aloud if she might have a predisposition towards doom and gloom. Kingsnorth called himself a ‘collapsarian’, certain that the West has begun to slide towards oblivion. I notice that this seems to be a more and more fashionable view. But as David Betz, a professor at King’s College London, points out, not everyone in the West is so downbeat:
‘Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build — the three things together … Most of the rest of the world is a jungle…’
Not that Betz thinks this optimism and cultural lordliness is a good thing. He writes that future dictionaries will use the snippet above, offered by the EU Foreign Affairs chief Josep Borrell, as an example of ‘the definition of hubris’. The reason Betz thinks this is because for him, civil war is coming to the West. In a two-part essay published in Military Strategy Magazine, he mounts the case that — well, we are in a very sticky situation indeed.
Betz writes that future dictionaries will use the snippet offered up by the EU Foreign Affairs chief Josep Borrell as an example of ‘the definition of hubris’.
His case rests on publicly available data and widely accepted principles of civil-war theory. Stable, wealthy, trusting democracies do not implode; fractured, poor, mistrustful cultures do. And we Westerners are now in the latter category. In 2022, the Edelman Trust Barometer said ‘distrust is now society’s default emotion.’ Pew Research from three years before showed something similar: 68 per cent of Americans thought it urgently necessary to restore confidence in government; half said the distrust reflected ‘cultural sickness’. According to Robert Putnam, father of modern sociology (and author of Bowling Alone), trust is the ‘glue’ and ‘lubricant’ of society. No one in the field disputes this. I risk mixing metaphors, but the fabric of society is, on this data, starting to tear.
For Betz, multiculturalism is at least partly to blame. Back in about 2010, both Angela Merkel and David Cameron called it a failure. Cast your mind back to that time (and how young he looks, by the way) and you will remember his rhetoric:
‘Do they believe in universal human rights — including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separatism?’
Cameron’s worry was that some groups did not agree with what he saw as liberal British values. Betz suggests this speech was prescient. He writes that we now see ourselves more as members of our ethnic, religious, or cultural groups than members of the nation. Identity politics has not helped. Social media lets us choose what information we get. We live in (a hackneyed term) echo chambers. Within these online bubbles, we firm up our tribal identities and loyalties and come to distrust those different to ourselves. Betz writes that in 2022, Hindus and Muslims fought in the streets over conflicts linked to South Asia. For him, this shows they saw themselves first as belonging to their cultural groups and not to Britain.
He writes that we now see themselves more as members of our ethnic, religious, or cultural groups than members of a shared nation.
Betz goes on to say, citing the sociologist James Chowning Davies, that a widening ‘expectation gap’ – that is, a divide between what we think we will get and what we actually get – is a common cause of revolution. Economic stagnation, de-dollarisation, inflation – all of these are widening that gap, says Betz. Young people do not think that they will ever own a home; from home ownership flows starting a family, among other things. To quote Fight Club’s Tyler Durden: these young people are very, very pissed off.
It would be difficult for me to argue in good faith that things are as they were. Still, I do not get the sense that society is in free fall. But one must remember, as Hubert tells us in the iconic opening of La Haine, ‘Mais l’important, c’est pas la chute. C’est l’atterrissage.’ ‘It isn’t the fall that’s important. It’s the landing.’ And it has to be said: Betz is persuasive. He is plain-speaking, sober, and wide-ranging in his sources: we encounter Collier, Hoeffler, Krause, Walter, Suzuzi, Dalio, Turchin. Betz invokes Renaud Camus’s highly contentious Grand Remplacement, the theory that ethnic white Europeans are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples. I hasten to add that Betz does not endorse the theory, but sees it as a kind of mobilising story that fuels the feeling among some white working-class people that they have been ‘downgraded’. This felt downgrading is a classic cause of civil war. When a group thinks it is losing power, being culturally displaced, and is morally justified in resisting, sparks tend to fly.
It would be difficult for me to argue in good faith that things are as they were. Still, I do not get the sense that society is in free fall.
In the second part of Betz’s essay, he stops analysing the causes of war and begins to chart how one might play out. He sketches what looks an awful lot like a Hobbesian state of nature, with neighbour-on-neighbour fighting along class, racial and religious lines. This bellum omnium contra omnes will be worst in the cities, he writes. Infrastructure, already frail, will be sabotaged. (Betz notes the ‘blade-runners’, a group of vigilantes in London, have sabotaged thousands of cameras used to enforce the Ultra Low Emission Zone.) Once the infrastructure breaks down and we lose power, food and connectivity, mayhem will follow. He also expects constant low-level crime, negotiated policing, no-go zones, private security, and more.
Betz writes that up to a point we are already seeing this. But things have not kicked off properly just yet. He tells us there is a 4 per cent chance of civil war breaking out in any given year in a state with known conditions. Over five years, it climbs to 18.5 per cent. If ten to 15 European countries are in such a situation, there is an 87 to 95 per cent chance that one will erupt in civil war in the next five years. If a civil war does break out in one, then the chance of its spreading to others is between 60 per cent to 72 per cent. So we are in a jam. Given this, our aim should be damage limitation, not prevention. After all, writes Betz, prevention might be impossible. Civil wars also tend to be very long and very bloody. The median length is six years. The total number of deaths from civil wars between 1945 and 1999 was 16.2 million.
There is an 87 to 95 per cent chance that one European country will erupt in civil war in the next five years.
If Britain were to face violence at the level seen in Northern Ireland’s worst year, (which was 1971), we could expect 23,300 people to die annually. If we used Bosnia or Syria as our standard, then we could expect up to 4 per cent of the population to be killed, and many more displaced. ‘Culture’ would be targeted first: civil wars tend to begin with the destruction of religious or national symbols by those who wish to do away with the old order, as in Spain in ’36. So we ought to guard our museums and monuments, says Betz, and set up safe zones, protected by the military, so that at least some of us can get on with our lives while the others are fighting. We should also secure our nuclear arsenal, lest some foreign actor slip into the country while we are at each other’s throats and take control of them.
More than anything, we should get real. Hemingway writes somewhere that bankruptcy happens ‘gradually, then suddenly’, which points to what the logicians call normalcy bias, our habit of thinking things will stay more or less as they are. I refer you to the introduction to La Haine cited above. Betz does not invoke this directly, but he does suggest that we are not prepared for what he clearly believes is about to hit us. The ‘tools of revolt in the form of various appurtenances of modern life are just lying around’, he writes, and the coming civil war, as we have seen, will be decentralised, feral, tribal, bloody, and long. So it seems we may soon need to retreat to the bunker with the wine and olives. As if to hammer home the point, Betz cites Yeats:
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…’
A little familiar, I grant you. But you see what he is getting at.
The ‘tools of revolt in the form of various appurtenances of modern life are just lying around’, he writes.
It is surely a given that in the absence of a common picture of reality it will be difficult for us to live together. Of course, each of us has a slightly different picture of reality; but so long as my picture looks in large part like yours, we can rub along well. Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, noted with great clarity and insight that when this is not the case, our moral conversations cease to be fruitful. For we no longer hold the same basic and unproven assumptions on which all rational argument rests. If your highest value is personal freedom, then my claim that legalising euthanasia will pressure the old, sick and disabled to die, give too much power to the state, and devalue human life, is unlikely to sway you. Our arguments, in the end, rest on irreconcilable beliefs.
Perhaps this picture does not need to be detailed. It could be more Robert Ryman than Leonardo, as it were. But one would hope we can still agree on some basic facts, such as the dignity of the individual, the legitimacy of trial by jury. This is necessary. Whether it is sufficient is less clear. Liberal societies tolerate rival moral visions, but some disputes—see my point on euthanasia—that cannot be settled by mere toleration. At that point, the state’s pose of neutrality is unmasked as a fiction. It takes a side. And if the people sense that the ruling political order is now handing them a picture of reality they do not like, faith begins to melt away. Hence falling trust in institutions. It seems to me that the trouble starts when moral visions are bound up with group identities. Then, we move away from what Oakeshott called ‘conversation', and culture and politics become a question of which group wins, rules and gets to impose its version of reality.
if the people sense that the ruling political order is now handing them a picture of reality they do not like, trust begins to melt away.
The retreat into group identity, is, in the circumstances, not particularly mysterious. One can see how, in liberal societies like my own in which we are cut off from that shared organising horizon and can, as Betz says, choose what information to get, we might reach a point where we cannot agree even on those things thought to be settled: the importance of democracy, the rule of law, free speech. Indeed, these too are now contested. More basic questions, around the nature of truth and what personhood is lately been the subject of loud and not always illuminating debate. And what grows out of this metaphysical mess is frustration, and a thinning of that instinctive sympathy on which civil life depends. I am no longer me, but a member of a group: liberal élite or ‘silent majority’, ‘native’ or immigrant. I am thus assumed to hold a whole raft of beliefs bound up with whatever group I am thought to be a part of.
Yet, as I have said, civil war seems unlikely to me. The rather ugly scenes that followed the stabbing of three little girls last summer seemed to me to owe as much to the fact there wasn’t any football on as anything else. I do not mean to sound glib. People need circuses as well as bread, as it were. And should anyone try to organise in future, the state is more equipped than ever to stop them (not that I hail what Gray calls ‘the new leviathans’). One does not need tanks when one has search histories and payment data. Still, these two compelling if rather gloomy essays throw light on the general sense of fragmentation and unease in the West and its possibly violent outcome should it continue.
