Cruelty or Humanity. Rees, Stuart
such reality with eyes wide open is a challenge that few acknowledge, and even fewer have the stamina, insight, compassion, wisdom and imagination needed to discern a brighter alternative future for humanity.
Stuart Rees is such an exception. His Cruelty or Humanity has the courage to portray reality in all its degrading ugliness without taking refuge in some specious bromide. His book addresses the range of cruelties that befall those most vulnerable among us in myriad specific circumstances. With an astonishing command over the global and historical landscapes of cruelty, Rees leads us through the wilderness of the most evil happenings, which have been enacted individually and collectively. And yet, through it all he manages to guide us toward the light of hope without indulging sentimentality or embracing false optimism.
What gives this perilous journey its defining originality is the degree to which Rees brings to bear the knowledge and timeless wisdom of poets both to depict the intensities of the darkness but also to instruct readers that the disciplined and lyrical insight of a poet can better than the rest of us find shafts of light that illuminate paths leading to empowerment, transcendence and liberation. Rees has actually written two parallel interacting texts, brought together in a single, fully coherent book: on one side, a fearless and comprehensive reportage of the facts and figures of human cruelty in many distinct settings of place and circumstance, stressing the plight of those most victimized, ranging from asylum seekers to Indigenous peoples tortured in their homelands and extending to the horrifying torments endured by animals and a variety of thoughtless encroachments on our natural surroundings; on the other side, this depressing litany of cruelties inflicted on masses of people is simultaneously refracted through prisms of light offered by a multitude of poets who share the agony while intoning the most vital truth of all, that hope is not futile, that human society has dreams, aspirations and untested anthropological potentialities. Rees shares with readers extracts from dozens of world-famous and relatively unknown poets, in this parallel form of narrative that interacts with the gory reportage of cruelty to offer a creative tension between entrenched evil and its transcendence.
Rees’s undisguised autobiographical engagement with this inquiry gives Cruelty or Humanity a quality of urgency and sincerity that it would not possess if confined to the scholarly canons of ethical and political detachment. The fact that Rees cares so deeply about choosing humanity over cruelty is evident on almost every page. He conveys his concerns without ever diluting the profound difficulties of overcoming the evil being done by humans, mainly men, to others stigmatized and rendered inferior, punitively instrumentalized to serve ambitions, manipulate fears and satisfy sadistic urges of those in power.
In personalizing his immersion in this difficult subject matter Rees’s residence in Australia becomes evident in the manner that he treats the severe cruelties over centuries inflicted on the original natives of the land, and currently reproduced in the manner that Australian asylum-seekers have been sequestered in an isolated island and often driven to suicidal desperation, a horror show that is mostly hidden from the world, but shocking when disclosed in all its ferocity. It casts doubt on the ritualized apologies that some liberal Australian politicians offer to the aboriginal people and their forebears for past wrongdoing. The cruelties of Israel toward the Palestinian people receive deserved attention from Rees, as a leader of Palestinian solidarity efforts in Australia, in depicting the cartography of cruelty.
Rees advances a strong case for the positive side of the human condition, resting on the rock of shared humanity. He quotes these arresting lines from Maya Angelou, which really captures the essence of his ethical message:
In minor ways we differ
In major ways we’re the same.
The political implication of this affirmation is a strong embrace of the spirit and substance of equality, which implies a rejection of hierarchy, as well as making positive use of the interplay between the unity of humanity and the many differences evident in the way individuals and communities choose to live. Another poet, William Stafford, is quoted approvingly in words intended to repudiate hierarchy and its companion, stigmatization of ‘the other’ deemed inferior:
I can’t eat that bread.
In the end, Rees manages to nurture hope, which he rests on what might be best identified as ‘the transformation-to-come’. This radical departure from the present will be recognizable only when political leaders begin to articulate their programmes and policies in what Rees calls ‘the language of common humanity’. Of course, a humanistic worldview naturally follows such a linguistic trope. It draws its normative direction from existing traditions of international human rights, international law and a rising respect for nature. Whether such an axial moment, if and when it comes, can be operationalized in the form of humane patterns of governance will be the ultimate test of whether equality can become a way of life for the human species as well as an uplifting slogan.
In the end, we should be thankful to Stuart Rees for providing us with such an inspiring reading experience, which contains within it a roadmap that could help humanity escape from the species’ eco-ethical slide toward extinction. This will happen only if enough of us are sufficiently responsive to Rees’s damning diagnosis of the present and then heed his liberating prescriptions for the future.
Richard Falk
Santa Barbara, California
Introduction: towards a theory
The people need poetry that will be their own secret
To keep then awake forever
And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing. 1
Osip Mandelshtam
Mankind cannot live by logic alone but also needs poetry. 2
Mahatma Gandhi
In commentators’ evaluations of social and foreign policies, cruelty as an intended, or as an unanticipated consequence of policies, has received little attention. In policy appraisals, the notion ‘cruelty’ seldom appears, not even in an index, and has not been acknowledged to be a purpose of policies even if the cruel consequences have been obvious. It was as though an alleged rational process should be cleansed of any consideration of irrational actions such as causing serious harm to citizens or to animals.
The absence of regular commentary on the business of inflicting cruelty prompts this book’s aim, to show cruelty in the play of politics, in the design and implementation of state policies and in non-state responses. If truths about worldwide cruelties become evident, the elimination of such practices should become a key consideration in any future crafting of policies and in the advocacy of values which influence political cultures. Advocacy of humanitarian alternatives to cruelty would depend on the spirit of universal human rights, challenges to oppressive uses of power and the promotion of policies to address social and economic inequalities.
The behaviour of nation-states, their governments, institutions and the cohorts of politicians, public servants and media acolytes who contribute to cruelty needs to be exposed. Identifying the cruelties of citizens who act as individuals, or as loyal members of well-organized groups, prompts questions: do they look in a mirror, do they pretend all is well, nothing unusual has happened?
Cruelty refers to a wanton and unnecessary infliction of suffering on body and mind. The adjective ‘wanton’ describes conduct without regard to what is right, just or humane. That could include discrimination, torture or murder by individuals or by a state, as in the mass famine in China from 1956 to 1976 (the Great Leap Forward) which killed tens of millions of people.
In Western parlance, cruelty also warrants definitions according to specific contexts. In marriage relationships, cruelty includes mental and physical harm occurring over a period of time. Cruelty to children encompasses physical and mental battering and abuse. Regarding responsibilities for animals, it includes the infliction of physical and mental pain or death.
Distinctions need to be made. One cruelty should be distinguished from another.