Cruelty or Humanity. Rees, Stuart
appear as a corollary of assumptions about superiority. Unequal opportunities are bolstered by state powers and by beliefs nourished by ethnic traditions and by carefully maintained religious customs. Machiavelli taught that inequality helped to sustain order, that cruelty to someone regarded as an equal never happened. Victims of cruelty are the unequals, Dalits victimized by upper castes, Afro-Americans by white superiors, Roma people by powerful states, people living with disabilities by those considered ‘normal’, refugees of every colour and creed by operatives who do not want them. Such inequalities are sustained by a top-down exercise of power which is often violent and from the perspectives of victims, almost always cruel.
Inequalities may continue without evidence of cruelty. Experience of inequality is not a cruelty in itself. It is the persistent experience of social, economic and other status-bound inequalities which creates vulnerability to cruelty, directly and indirectly.
In policy circles, efforts to maintain inequalities are clouded in claims about efficiency. It is inefficient to reward people who do not work hard, even if job opportunities do not exist. It hardly matters if the victims of such policies are hungry, poor or homeless. An efficient system has to be maintained and cruelty never acknowledged.
The economist J.K. Galbraith argued that free-market economic policies could be explained more by morality than economy. Efforts to achieve efficient productivity and vigorous economic growth were state priorities and should be pursued irrespective of cruel consequences. As part of their ideology, ‘you deserve what you get and get what you deserve’, political elites, such as members of the Republican Party in the US, punish the poor by denying them resources yet also claim that such polices would save people by motivating them to work harder. Inequality begets further inequality. Conspicuously wealthy people urge the character-building value of abolishing public services and instead claim that policies of deregulation and privatization will help the poor. Galbraith judged that one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy was the search for superior moral justification for selfishness.
Governments’ and state institutions’ concern to be efficient derives partly from ‘economic’ concerns, as in charges about cost-effectiveness, about not wasting taxpayers’ money, protecting individual and corporate interests. Advocacy of efficiency is also evident in moralizing by religious powers which want vicious punishments for alleged abnormal sexual behaviour. In personal relations and in international affairs a status quo is protected, and to defeat supposed enemies, efficient yet horrendous military goals are permitted, as in the obliteration of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and, more recently, the Iraqi city of Fallujah.6 Efficiency becomes taken for granted, uses violence whatever the human cost and not just in military operations.
Geological strata of cruelties reveal prominent layers, superiority, inequality and efficiency. Fear also appears. A commander takes the Machiavelli cues that engendering fear, not seeking love, is the way to rule, a lesson followed by African and South American dictators, President Duterte in the Philippines, Hun Sen in Cambodia and by Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Fear is also experienced by inferiors who expect admonishment or punishment if they do not comply with the orders of a perceived superior, a theme explored so significantly by Stanley Milgram.7 In both instances, concern with morality has been jettisoned and the fear inherent in experiences of authoritarianism usually ensures compliance.
Another layer appears to be present in each of the others. It is difficult to see. Called concealment, it refers to lying and denial that a cruel act occurred, or if it did it was someone else’s responsibility. Bureaucratic formalities, supposedly conducted for public interest, are invisible, the decision makers unknown and the rationale for their decisions seldom tested.
From victims’ perspectives, the concealment of cruelties may be exposed only when a Truth Commission investigates or when state leaders offer official apologies, albeit decades after the hurtful actions had occurred.
Somewhat ironically, an understanding of humanity derives from observing cruelty, and provides the rationale for ‘humanitarian alternatives’, the second half of this book. The philosopher of the French Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne, said ‘The horror of cruelty impels me more to clemency than any model of clemency could draw me on’, and when opposing state and religious justification of cruelty he insisted there were no naturally inferior or superior people.8 He might have said that goals of justice and humanity derive from the realization of the interdependence of peoples and of all living things. That thesis ranges from a 16th-century English poet who envisioned that no man is an island to current environmentalists advocating the importance of preserving a unique and precious planet.
That brief theorizing is introduced to help navigate the evidence in the following chapters.
Outline and themes
Chapter 1, ‘Perpetrators and victims’, lists individual cases of cruelty which illustrate the character of perpetrators, whether governments, state institutions or individuals, and the awfulness experienced by the victims. Speculation whether one form of cruelty is worse than another, whether state-sanctioned brutalities should be taken more seriously than violence perpetrated by the representatives of institutions or by extremist religious and political groups, is avoided.
Chapter 2, ‘Values, attitudes and behaviour’, identifies the social, religious, political, economic and cultural forces which facilitate cruelties. In those accounts, the platitude ‘it’s part of human nature’ is not helpful. Even where notorious killers and torturers could be identified, the moral and cultural contexts of their acts require an examination, which includes cruelty to animals and violence to the environment. The evils of violent cultures, such as the security politics of Israel, Iran’s authoritarian theocracy, America’s love of imprisonment and entrenched discrimination in the Indian caste system, will also be discussed.
Chapter 3, ‘Explaining cruelty’, addresses causes. It covers a continuum of explanations from the banality of evil to automaton-like behaviour in bureaucracies, from pleasures derived from sadism to the cruelties fostered by selfishness. There’s also a postscript about cruelty driven by managerial demands for efficiency, a powerfully addictive notion which is not value neutral.
Chapter 4, ‘Cruelty as policy’, moves from cruelty as a deliberate motive to situations where it looks as though the architects of policies enabled cruelties to take place but did not direct them. Then come the denials and deception: who could possibly think that countries such as the US, Russia, Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iran or Myanmar would indulge in human rights abuses such as collective punishments, ethnic cleansing, floggings, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, targeted killings and executions? Finally, there’s collusion. Alliances are made with countries which commit cruelties but their allies behave as though this is nothing to do with them. When the US ignores Israeli cruelty to Palestinian children, that’s collusion. The European Union (EU) and the UN may also collude by silence which encourages perpetrators.
An impression may have been given that the story of cruelty concerns only direct violence, as in torture, bombings, executions and other acts of war. That would be a wrong conclusion. Cruelty is also promoted by policies which promote inequality and maintain poverty.
Chapter 5, ‘Humanitarian alternatives’, explores the opposite to cruelties, as in diverse forms of advocacy for a common humanity through literacy about non-violence and for the health-promoting values of creative, non-destructive uses of power. In commentary about the vision required to build an economy not based on inequalities and injustices, the place of technology, whether it is help or hindrance, is also assessed.
Chapter 6, ‘Cruel or compassionate world?’ highlights the responsibilities of corporations and the cruelty involved in the threat and possible use of nuclear weapons. A final drumroll for humanity returns to the need to recover respect for human rights, for humanitarian law and for the ideals written into the UN Charter.
Chapter 7, ‘Humanity on a bonfire’, argues that in analyses of cruelty, if the rules and niceties of social commentary and academic rigour