Note on political moralism: How should we read our civilization's documents of barbarism?

The left believes, as Walter Benjamin put it, that "every document of civilization is a document of barbarism."

The pseudo-left believes the very different proposition that every document of civilization is nothing more than a document of barbarism. Culture then is a mere mask of power.

Reading the documents of yesterday's societies may give us what we need to effectively criticize our civilization and bring closer the general happiness that has been so greatly promised and obstructed. Cancelling them will most likely have the opposite effect. There is something redemptive in the recognition in documents of the culture of our civilization of something other than power. If only we could read better, and moralize less.

The moralist and the discoverer of scandalous injustice are always asking us to stop reading and implement their judgment. They do this out of inability or lack of intellectual courage to ask of claims of barbarism not if they are true (for we know they are) but what other possibilities might the civilization's documents reveal to us. And that we might want to know because they well show us the way to a greater happiness, which moralists have foreclosed, and so must desperately deny that their are enigmas and try to shame people out of their curiosity and wonderment.