It is, of course, politically incorrect  to ever call a group of people “barbaric,” which most certainly means there are groups of people in the world that just are barbaric. We are told that “barbarian” was originally ascribed by Greeks to all non-Greeks around the time of Aristotle, and given in the present another culture being different from our own doesn’t entail it is worse, it commits the fallacy of assuming that whoever is not “we” is “worse.” This, of course, assumes that the Greeks, who in the latter centuries before Christ maintained some of the most advanced cultures and forms of governance, were completely unjustified to ever think that their way of life was never comparably better to those other cultures that surrounded them. Yet it seems almost certainly accurate that the Greeks were, if not the, one of the most advanced cultures around the Mediterranean basin. After all, the Egyptians hadn’t progressed past the polytheistic cults of Ra the sun god, the Persian empire was a mishmash of conquered (and ergo less advanced) cultures and peoples, the Roman people were yet to come into their own, and the Greek city-states had established colonies as far West as Iberia and as far East as the Caucasus. It was the Greeks who first attempted to produce accounts of the world that relied on what could be inferred by reason, a task that even the Romans who later conquered them largely failed to engage with. In short, the esteem of the Greeks for themselves at the time of Alcibiades and Aristotle was well-deserved, and the surrounding cultures were, if not necessarily outright barbaric, not so civilized.

The idea of civilization, in a nutshell, would appear to be that you can trust your belongings will remain where you left them, that you will not be violently accosted on the street, and that you would be allowed to form associations with others according to your own preferences. At no time in human history has this been possible without certain social norms which separate the decent from the indecent; the mark of civilization is a gate that can be closed on barbarians. If there is no gate or, even worse, we are not allowed to close that gate, then inevitably the barbarians shall let themselves in, fail to assimilate, and thus the decent lives decent people had established for themselves through the collective problem solving of choosing to associate with other civic-minded people fall by the wayside. If decent people are not allowed to avoid associating with indecent people, then decent people shall just have to avoid associating with anyone, preventing nice people from having nice things. The indecent, i.e. the more barbaric, will not care, for in almost every way whatever they have is in some way looted or given to them by certain “decent” people from the actually decent.

It would be an insult to civilized people to suggest that cannibal warlords in Africa are not barbaric. If we are not allowed to suggest that cannibalism, female genital mutilation, incessant tribal warfare, disposing of human waste on the street, the stoning of adulterers, and the beheading of reporters is behavior indicative of a less civilized people, then we are necessarily unable to suggest that small things like resolving disputes peaceably, enforcing the law equally, respecting contractual agreements, and using your blinker to indicate lane changes are not more civilized. The logic of refusing to call certain behaviors, and the people who practice them, barbaric entails we cannot mean anything by saying a behavior is civilized. All behaviors are equally civilized if no behaviors are less civilized.

This is absurd, so we needn’t pretend to accept this insane logic for a moment. Yes, there are certain cultures that are better than others, and this due to certain conditions such as the development of pro-social norms, historical institutions, and, yes, populations that are just more innately civilized. If there wasn’t the implicit recognition that certain cultures are just more civilized, then by what logic does the objection to anarcho-capitalists “What about Somalia?” approximate a rebuttal? Civilization is precious, a blessing beyond measure worth preserving even at the cost of human life. Barbarism is the norm of human history, and those few rare instances of civility ought be prized more precious than any material bounty or imposition of social justice; if defending and supporting civilization requires inequality, sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination against lower class populations less apt to it, then so be it. Those capable of civility and decency ought to be allowed to close the door against those who will not or cannot respect the expectations of polite society, for it is impossible to hold a polite conversation or adjudicate a disagreement when one group insists on resorting to zero-sum games of brute strength or wanting to determine who’s right merely by who can shout the loudest. You would have to be truly delusional to suggest that Chicago’s South Side is as civilized as Central Park in New York City (…for now).

The West has been emasculated; it no longer has the balls to insist that this is our land, our culture, our civilization. And if civilization shall not be defended, if no one shall shut the gates on the barbarians, they shall overrun us, and that will be the end of civilization and the return of barbarism.