Like many of you, I suppose, I woke today to news of terrorist bombings in London and have spent the morning reading the news from there. As the day progresses the death toll rises and the attacks look even worse now than they did in the shock of the first news.
Earlier, Tony Blair made a statement before leaving the G8 summit for London. He said:
All of our countries have suffered from the impact of terrorism. Those responsible have no respect for human life. We are united in our resolve to confront and defeat this terrorism that is not an attack on one nation, but all nations and on civilized people everywhere.
We will not allow violence to change our societies or our values, nor will we allow it to stop the work of this summit. We will continue our deliberations in the interest of a better world.
The term “barbaric” must resonate. More than any of the other words in Blair’s statement it has been pulled by news organizations for headlines: “Blair Condemns ‘Barbaric’ Attack,” “Blair Calls Terror Attacks ‘Barbaric,’” “Blair: Attacks ‘Particularly Barbaric,’” and so on.
It resonates also, at least for me this morning, not for the irony in this instance that it was the early British who were among any of a number of northern tribes who sacked Rome and were called Barbarians, but for the damage done in more recent centuries by the kind of thinking that divides the world into barbaric and civilized cultures.
Blair, I assume, is using barbaric in what is perhaps its most common usage, the one that denotes terrifying acts of brutality, those of a “wild, rude, uncivilized person” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The earliest use the OED provides suggests another meaning, however, and one that may be useful to keep in mind if we hope to reach a time possibly after terrorism or a time after this time when terrorism is met with other violent acts in retaliation. And if such progress is impossible, then maybe a time when we simply understand better. A line from John Wycliffe’s 1388 translation of The Bible, found in 1 Corinthians xiv, reads:
In this usage, one and the other are equally barbaric. Barbaric is any language one doesn’t speak, any language one doesn’t understand.
I do not mean to suggest that we (and by “we” I mean most every person in the world) learn to speak the language of terrorism, or that Tony Blair isn’t accurate in calling today’s attacks in London barbaric in the sense that they are brutal and terrifying. Rather, the memory of barbaric as shared non-understanding may be more useful than the idea of barbaric as savage, that is, if what we want is a less brutal time.
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