Cruelty

1

Our most vivid and long-lasting memories tend to be those which induce a strong emotional reaction. In childhood, books and movies with dark and traumatic episodes are frequently the source of deep impressions that are as unwelcome as they are indelible. How many of us still shudder at the thought of the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, of Dorothy's close encounters with the Wicked Witch, or of the sinking of the Titanic? Today, parents may very well deem such fare unsuitable for small children, but few such qualms were voiced in generations past about exposing kids to the nastier realities of life. Indeed, not long ago we all lived by the ethos of the Brothers Grimm, which dictated that a healthy dose of fear, torment, and death would inoculate the young against the shock of encountering these realities later on (not to mention implanting in our immature minds the moral imperatives of reward and punishment). Protecting one's children from cruelty and misfortune was an entirely different matter from sheltering them from an awareness of what the world was really like.

One of the most terrifying and disturbing stories of my childhood was The Count of Monte Christo — not the original novel written by Alexandre Dumas, which I only read some years later, but a made-for-TV adaptation from the early 1970s starring Richard Chamberlain. The part of that story that still haunts me after more than half a century is the imprisonment of the title character, Edmond Dantès, in the island fortress of the Chateau d'If. Thrown into a dark stone cell as the result of a false accusation made by a nobleman (as I recall it, anyway — my memory of the story is no doubt faulty), the hero is one of literature's prime exemplars of the powerless suffering at the hands of the powerful. In addition to having to endure dismal conditions within the massive prison, from which virtually no one ever got out except in a death shroud, Dantès has to live with the seething anger of being wronged and unable do anything about it. Only an unlikely happenstance gives him a chance to escape, when his friend in the neighboring cell dies. Dantès sews himself into the sack intended for the disposal of the other man's body, and when the sack is tossed into the waters of the surrounding sea, he cuts himself out, swims to safety, assumes a new identity, retrieves a hidden treasure — and begins his all-consuming quest for revenge.

One would have thought that a child who had been fed a steady diet of World War II movies, unsparing accounts of the Holocaust, predictions of nuclear conflict, the civil rights struggle, and daily news reports about the war in Vietnam as well as the frequently violent domestic opposition to it, would have no shortage of unspeakable human behavior upon which to fixate his stunned attention. But somehow a story of one unjustly accused man seemed to distill all of the fears of a cruel and indifferent world into an easily digestible lesson about the dangers lurking out there. There is wisdom in the heartless observation (attributed to Stalin) that while a single death is a tragedy, 10,000 deaths is merely a statistic. The horrors of the 20th century were perhaps too enormous to be appreciated by the individual mind, too far outside the realm of ordinary experience to be grasped as a personal, rather than an abstract or historical, reality. The idea of being snatched from one's everyday existence by irresistible forces of evil, whether fascist, communist or any other flavor of authoritarianism, was prominent in our collective consciousness and a source of not inconsiderable anxiety.

On the other hand, this was America: the self-declared exceptional nation, the beacon of democracy and safe haven for the persecuted. While a Communist takeover was a subject of numerous popular books and movies, and the likelihood of a Soviet attack on the homeland was not zero, an imminent invasion still seemed a remote prospect. We quietly scoffed at the air raid drills in school and lived as though a nuclear exchange was simply unimaginable. Of course we did imagine it, a lot, but perhaps expressing our fears through fiction enabled us to put them away somewhere they could not overwhelm us. The misery of being forced to live in chains, of being held captive by the state without recourse to justice, was frequently depicted in drama, satire, science fiction, and almost every other conceivable genre. And these horrors were set not only in other less exceptional countries but also right here, most notably in depictions of our own agonizing history of slavery and racism.

But hadn't we put all that behind us? Hadn't we defeated fascism, decisively? Hadn't all of those dreadful Nazis leering at us from our TV and movie screens been relegated to the past? And hadn't we built the most formidable arsenal in the history of humankind to prevent the loss of our freedoms to the likes of those godless Commies? Didn't we have two vast oceans between us and the foreign progenitors of such misery, with two friendly allies on our northern and southern borders? Hadn't we passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, giant steps on a steady if sometimes halting march toward racial equality? Didn't these military and political victories reflect the inherent power and beneficence of our system of government, and therefore represent a kind irreversible of progress? Aren't constitutional rights, foremost among them the right to be free of state tyranny and arbitrary punishment, woven into our national DNA? Wasn't it simply impossible that someone living within these peaceful shores could be thrown into a prison cell without even the pretense of justice?

If only.

2

If one believes that there is both good and evil in the world, then one is obligated to acknowledge, at the very least to oneself, that this is a distinctly religious point of view. In the secular conception of human affairs that has pertained at least since the middle of the last century, good and evil are not forces wielded by God and the Devil, not a grand moral battle for the soul of mankind, but ethical fluctuations to which we are all subject under particular circumstances. People may commit harmful acts but they cannot themselves be inherently evil. Hence, even an unrepentant murderer is a product of his environment and therefore worthy of redemption. (There is a reason why prisons were once called "reformatories" or "penitentiaries".) Moreover, we could all be induced to behave monstrously if conditions allowed, as purportedly demonstrated in the famed (or infamous) Milgram experiment of the 1960s in which subjects were prodded into administering painful electric shocks to other participants. This did not make them evil, but merely prone to commit evil deeds if manipulated in just the right way.

Traditional (i.e., religious) ideas of good and evil had one characteristic that the liberal perspective simply could not abide: agency. This modern, enlightened paradigm insisted that we are all subject to forces over which we have no control — genetic, psychological, societal, political — and therefore we cannot assume ultimate responsibility for the decisions to which they lead us, however deviant and malign they may be. The punishment of criminals is therefore not a condemnation of evil but an unfortunate exigency demanded by the proper functioning of society. Just because we can't have violent people running around the streets causing mayhem and death, we don't have to lock the perpetrators in jail and throw away the key. One thing we must never, ever do is label them as psychopaths or monsters. They are just people who, through no fault of their own, strayed from the path of peaceful coexistence with their fellow creatures.

Of course, even as this view held sway for decades in many governmental and academic circles, and criminal justice policies were fashioned accordingly, a great many in the general public, and more than a few in government and law enforcement, always thought this to be so much wrongheaded nonsense. Or worse: seriously harmful nonsense. We are tempted to attribute this retrograde moral undertow to the ongoing religious indoctrination of much of the citizenry, and there is certainly an element of truth in this explanation. However, many avowed secularists were also genuinely troubled by excessive leniency and worried — with good reason, it turned out — where it might lead us as a society. At the very least, liberal excess could lead to a loss of political power and the ascendancy of conservative, even reactionary, ideologues who would tip the balance of society decisively in the opposite direction and result in even more abhorrent excesses of their own devising.

The demonization of political opponents in present-day America may strike reasonable people as dangerous and ultimately pointless, but it continues because it is politically effective. Each side's excesses are widely reviled by the majority, as each party defends a bottomless well of ridiculous and contradictory promises and policies with which they can be derided by the other side. The reason the American government has been able to veer so dizzyingly from one extreme to the other is because a large enough segment of the public remains vulnerable to the argument that the other side poses an existential threat to the very survival of the nation, a zero-sum argument which pushes both sides ever farther beyond the edges of rational public discourse. In politics, it is a dead certainty that if you hand your opponents a stick, they are going to bludgeon you with it. In every election cycle, candidates on both sides are exhorted to return to the middle ground where most of the voters are, and in every election cycle most of the clear-eyed, middle-of-the-road candidates get trampled under the feet of more radical office-seekers racing to the outside lanes.

Can we ever extricate ourselves from this dance of death?

3

It would no doubt come as a shock to most young progressives — many of whom see themselves as saviors of politics, the nation and the world — to realize that they have reverted to a proto-religious conception of good and evil. They have cast aside the universalism that was a hallmark of traditional liberal belief in favor of a rigidly moralistic categorization of human beings. Today's self-proclaimed justice warriors would presumably bristle at the suggestion that the religion of their ancestors informs their world view in any way, but how else can they explain their unyielding conviction that all human beings are either "oppressors" or "oppressed"? Like all committed revolutionaries, they have divided the world into black and white, leaving no room for nuance or even explanation. (Ironically, in their enlightened view "black" is now good and "white" is bad, but it is of no consequence because these divisions are arbitrary anyway.) In branding some people as self-evidently good and others irredeemably evil, their world view bears a strong resemblance to the uncompromising belief system of their forefathers, who merely drew the dividing line elsewhere. On the "wrong" side of the newly inscribed ledger of good vs. evil are racists, misogynists, fascists, settler-colonialists, and people who use the wrong pronouns. On the "right" side are, well, themselves.

The smug sanctimony of the young has been unwavering through the ages, and is rather too easy to mock. Let us allow a master to undertake the assignment: George Bernard Shaw. In Major Barbara, the arms merchant Undershaft, getting reacquainted with his family after a long period of estrangement, asks his son what he plans to do with his life, only to discover that the young man's education has left him with neither knowledge, skills nor ambition. When the son declares that the one thing he knows is the difference between right and wrong, Undershaft erupts with merriment:

"You don't say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you're a genius, master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!"

Undershaft dismisses his children's disapproval of the arms business that has financed their very comfortable lives, and is unsparing in his opinion of their narrow-minded moralism. He goes on: "You are all alike, you respectable people...you daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game."

Mockery aside, we are left to contemplate whether standing up for the oppressed is making the world a better place or, in devouring even those who are avowedly anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ, is actually increasing the stock of callousness and cruelty. To zealous youth, rule number one is, "The revolution is never wrong." (Rule number two is, "If the revolution is wrong, refer to rule number one.") This cuts a wide swath of indiscriminate persecution, and leads adherents to believe in all manner of indefensible absurdities, for example: that Native Americans were peace-loving naturalists who never made war against one another or hunted most of the hemisphere's large mammals to extinction; or that slavery as practiced by white Southerners in America was more horrific by orders of magnitude than the variety practiced in every part of the world throughout the history of mankind. Subtleties such as the basic human predilection for violence, the internecine strife that afflicts the roving tribe no less than the nation-state, and the ubiquitous mistreatment of women, minorities and all manner of "others", are, according to the new morality, mere distractions from the revelation that white Europeans are distinctly barbaric and that brown and black people, when uncorrupted by contact with their white oppressors, are distinctly peaceful and compassionate.

Let us be not merely clear, but explicit: Colonialism is alway bad. Slavery is always bad. War is always bad. The subjugation of one people by another is indefensible in every instance, whether the poor by the rich, the powerless by the powerful, the ignorant by the educated, blacks by whites, women by men, gays by straights. But let us not be so foolish as to suppose that cruelty is the unique characteristic of any particular group or groups. The crimes of the conquerors do not magically expiate the sins of the conquered. Both governments and "freedom fighters" are equally capable, and equally likely, to commit crimes against humanity. Victims do not come in pre-selected colors, creeds or genders. Once we fall into the trap of condemning some outrages while forgiving others, we are shedding the very premise of civil society. Pinning a label of "evil" on a particular group in the name of justice for some other group is antithetical to the very notion of equality.

What could be more ironic and cruel than people losing their livelihoods, their property, their freedom, or their lives in the name of someone's arbitrary idea of justice? All of these forms of persecution and violence are to be condemned not because perpetrators are instrinsically evil and victims instrinsically good, but because each of us has the basic human right to be left in peace and is entitled to whatever protections the law provides when this right is violated. Rights that belong only to a select few, by definition, are not rights at all, but the division of spoils.

One of the distinguishing features of the democratic experiment was that, for the first time in human history, individuals did not have to depend for their freedom and prosperity on the patronage of aristocrats and the annihilation of enemies. If we continue our descent into the pre-Enlightenment struggle of all against all, then the experiment will have been deemed a failure, and subjugation will once again be the predominant relationship among the world's peoples. Generations to come will then experience more cruelty and fear than we could have ever imagined.