Maggie Schein

Talking frankly and bravely about cruelty and about our claim that we can be inhuman when we are cruel invites scenes, scenarios, and rationales that can challenge our individual sanity and collective rationality. This chapter makes mercenary use of examples of banal cruelty (such as playground bullying), extreme cruelty (such as Edmond Kemper), and the confounding combination of ordinary and extraordinary cruelties (such as Himmler or the Menendez brothers). It also acknowledges the possibility of cruelty driven neither by intent to harm, nor that results in extreme suffering: benevolent cruelty. For one instance of well- intentioned cruelty, Col. Pratt of the Carlisle School, in his passion for humanity and civility, ripped children from their indigenous ways of being “for their own sakes”. According to him and the Friends of the Indian: “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.” How do we make sense of ourselves in light of examples such as that?

Is it yes? Or is it no? Does a sheep on a tiny planet eat the love of the life of the Little Prince of Asteroid B-612?Various elements of this book suggest practical courses of both thought and action in response to the topic of cruelty, and as importantly, to what we might think of as “humanity,” as something that matters. “Practical,” here, translates neither to “linear” nor to “easy.” To add another variability, this chapter revisits the “formula” that illuminates the cruelty of any given action and continues to test it against commonly baffling scenarios, challenging its use, its effectiveness as a real practice. I’ve offered a mental tool, inviting the reader to engage and see if the understanding of cruelty that has been proposed and developed over the course of this book delivers clarity, depth, or, at bare minimum, confirmation that we still have much to learn about cruelty---and about ourselves.To hammer it home: before we engage our rationality—the often-supposed king of morality, that which separates beast from man, and other such well-accompanied misinformed fantasies—before we can even act irrationally, before rationality comes into play at all, we are separate from anything that is in front of us, and may not know if it is good, bad, with us, against us, or none of the above. Let’s assume it is harmful. Right before we see harm or are harmed we:Feel or PerceiveReactRespondAnd then, hopefully, we AdaptPerhaps you must believe we (you, me, him, her, they) don’t naturally mean harm. I am sorry to disappoint by saying what we already know and pretend we don’t: the truth is that human beings, we, as a species, are not apex predators. Siberian tigers and alligators, when attacked, don’t usually run from an attack, and they rarely freeze, unless it is strategic. The same can’t be said of us in the aggregate. Our vulnerabilities, or weaknesses—from the psychological, intellectual, to the physical—are important to understand so that we might not get trapped in self-deception, and might learn how we might do better at moral development, at beginning to develop what we are.This chapter concludes by attempting honesty. The propositions offered are both difficult and simple at the same time. And much of the emphasis here is on our perceptual capacities, the means through which we learn, and also our adaptive capacities, and how these three need to work together.We often restrict ourselves to, as Pierre Hadot says, “fencing in front of a mirror,” by relying on reason and a reflection that is deceptively-reflective, as the judge and jury. This has an impact on how we behave, how we practice being human, as well as an impact on our understanding of the virtue of humanity—when there can be virtue in that.My suggestion is that we take what senses we have, that we do not confuse certainty or objectivity with full knowledge, and that we learn to learn better, and that, most importantly, we learn that our moral value, the virtue of humanity, is that we are always learning.We are learning creatures. And we value humanity. And so, we have to value that the base of that humanity is instability about knowing quite how or when or where or to whom we belong, and those are things we are privileged to be able to learn. A sparrow cannot come to my aid if I have fallen. I, however, can learn to come to its aid. Or, I can get that attempted act of compassion wrong. That’s the price of being a learning creature, and one with a moral valence.END CAVEAT: I am often criticized for not having an answer, for provoking questions and not providing enough explanation. I have tried to justify that as best I can throughout this work, for those who are dissatisfied. At the end of editing the final draft of the full MS I asked one of my dearest friends and mentors, Professor Arnold Davidson, and he said, “There is a big payoff—this should help people learn how to ask new questions. And the value of philosophy lies more in its questions than in its answers. That is one of the things I like about Talmudists; they always say that a new question is more important than an answer.”“Cruelty: A Book About Us” provides a platform for further questions, discussion, and interaction. This last section is a primer and trigger for continued curiosity, dissatisfaction, and persistent learning—and, in that way, honors the most morally valuable aspects of being part of those aspiring towards humanity.

We don’t always get it right. Our timing, for example, the “tense” in the world that often governs our responsiveness to others, is often out of sync. In fact, we most often do not get it exactly right, and at best only get a partial picture or understanding of how we belong in the world with everything else--from our children, to trees, to the weather, to our gods, to ourselves. In practice, if we are to own our lack of certainty as our especially humane virtue, then we have to concede that the search for A Singular truth, being right, being certain, inhibits our capacity to inhabit the world as we are, and thus distracts us from how we might learn to belong: that is, from the practices of being that belong to belonging, and how we are different from many other creatures. Not only is it non-sensical to say a cat can be an “in or “un” cat, or have “in” or “un” “cat-ness,” it is also strange to think of a cat learning how to be in the world in the same way we must. Ours is a constant, perpetual, state of learning, of even, practicing to learn. That means we are constantly making mistakes.

Paulo Coelho said, “Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind.” The usual way we go about talking about ourselves in relationship to the rest of nature—everything on the spectrum of the living that populates what counts as our world—tends to front with something to disguise our anxiety about whether and how we belong. I suggest that this anxiety is an organic, innate, constitutional part of having humanity, and though we may initially be a bit repulsed by that or react defensively, it is justified; we have the reason and the possibility of the unraveling of reason and sense-making for it. We drape ourselves with prescriptions, declarations, suspicions, or conspiracies: we are rational or flout that we have reason, whereas the rest of what makes up this world is not or does not. We are divine, whereas the others are not. We are creators ourselves (free-will, autonomy, self-determination), or we are cursed, whereas the others—the rest of nature—are not. We can go to heaven or hell, or so some of us tell ourselves. And the others? Who is to judge? Who are we to judge? And to judge who is to judge? How? With What? Talk of what cruelty is turns quickly to talk about who or what can be accused of it: Us. What are we such that we, unlike a groundhog, can be so bad at our own nature that we can be said to be inhuman? There is no “in-groundhog” or “un-groundhog” groundhog. That brings up anxiety about how we belong in the world, how we explain how we humans belong in the world. This chapter illuminates our (often deeply hidden) anxiety and suggests that nearly all moral commitments and orientations, from religions to reason-worship are attempts to answer that calling or solve that anxiety. Works by philosophers, thinkers, writers, and theorists, such as Kierkegaard, Paulo Coelho, Cora Diamond, Christine Korsgaard, Raimond Gaita, Jean Amery, Pierre Hadot, Judith Shklar, St. Exupéry, along with very candid email exchanges with J.M Coetzee, and a few conversations with a self-described local “town drunk”’ guide us through from the acknowledgement of our anxiety to preparations for what to do about it.

After recognizing we are on unstable ground in the previous chapter, we want to try to gain balance, naturally. In trying to gain our balance it is easy to take for granted what we think of as ourselves in the world, as human beings, to orient or vison ourselves and ground our feet in the traditional ways outlined in lectures, sermons, books we read that rely on reason, religion, “truth”, argument, rhetoric, and so on. In each case, clarity, or certainty, or stability are kinds of promised life-lines. This chapter reinforces and clarifies a theme that runs throughout this book, which is that those may be misleading pathways and false promises. How we belong in the world, how we understand ourselves as belonging in the world around us, is dependent on fundamental aspects of being that are primary—that is prior to-- any particular moral, religious, cultural, or legal convention. This chapter continues the discussion and the hope that out of our “ignorance,” as I have called it, or our distance from knowledge, there can come a development of a more attuned attention to how to be in and with the world. This, I suggest, is critical not just to our understanding of ourselves as having moral relevance, but also to how we train ourselves and each other to make our being, as human, relevant, morally valanced. We are not born morally relevant, but we can make ourselves so.We often talk about the moral importance of responsiveness, but we don’t always talk about how important timing and the other senses with which we are equipped are for responsiveness—and that the dance among those is morally fundamental. Unfortunately, that dance is taught far more explicitly in teaching how to torture, how to be cruel, or inhumane, than it is in how to be less cruel, and more humane.Responsiveness, critical to not only our belonging, but also to our ideas of being “moral” or “human,’ is far more subtly complex, more nuanced, than many traditions acknowledge or cultivate. How to investigate this earnestly is a question this chapter tries to bring to the forefront.

This chapter explores more intimate engagements with scholars and non-scholars in conversations about cruelty. It aims to demonstrate how we can so easily blind ourselves—and each other-- and what we may be missing during these conversations about cruelty, what we mean by “humanity,” and how we, as humans belong in the world.For one instance, my father is an optimist of the most beautiful and dangerous kind. So are most American kids—even teenagers, despite online displays of pessimism, text-assisted kills and suicides, mass shootings, and random knifings. Most readers of this will also hold such optimism, despite ourselves. We have to be. The idea of having “faith in humanity,” or in human benevolence—that we, and others, will, in the end, do the “right” thing, is a common one—and one that is to some fortunate or unfortunate degree a necessary thing. This chapter explores stories of that faith from teachers, from my life, and includes direct conversations with J.M. Coetzee, along with sources mined from those such as Nietzsche, Stanley Cavell, Simone Weil, Primo Levi, Dorothy Allison and Langston Hughes. It also explores the consequences of the absence of that faith.This chapter exposes the sometimes-tragic contrasts between our assumptions, fears, and convictions about the sort of creatures human beings are when we become more aware of and transparent about what we do and are capable of, while also being with each other and in the world as such. It explores where and how any light forces its way through the cracks.

Incidences of cruelty may make us cringe in fear, empathy, or shame. They may make us turn away in horror because what is happening is unbearable to witness or to undergo, is beyond our capacities to imagine, or is confirmation of our fundamental helplessness and vulnerability. They may also incite curiosity—perversely or genuinely—or annihilate or cripple our bodies or psyches in cases of physical or psychological abuse. If we look with open eyes, we can see that they also can motivate us, spurring us to learn to prevent, rectify, or heal from acts of cruelty, or even learn how to execute cruelty better by pushing the limits of what we can know about another and what we do with that knowledge. Sometimes, cruelty slides between our judgment of either good or bad and, therefore, matures us in necessary ways, like a stern guardian. Cruelty is all at once confounding, provocative, horrible, and ubiquitous. It is also, no matter the particular act or experience in question, uncomfortably intimate. This chapter surveys types of cruelty and offers the preliminary formulation we will use throughout this work.

The relationship between humans and non-humans is a widely explored, fraught and wrought cattle train--but not, however, specifically through the prism of the definition of cruelty suggested in this book. This chapter begins with how my own interest in cruelty started. It forces us back to the question, “Why is being a human being morally important,” which may seem naïve, since by this point in the book we’ve reviewed many answers that could count as acceptable ones. This chapter aims to push further: it asks who counts not just as an agent of cruelty, but also what we count as a victim, a subject or object, of acts of cruelty. Approaching these questions becomes more transparent through the lens of understanding what cruelty is, as opposed to the traditional focus on why it happens.This chapter sprints through offerings from the continuing and candid email conversations with J.M. Coetzee, mining thinkers such as Plutarch and Montaigne to those such as Nietzsche, Jean Amery, Rosalind Hursthouse, Charlotte Delbo, and Phillipa Foot, to literature on non-human behaviourism and psychology, and how non-humans inevitable appearance in these conversations reflects not just them, but also us in striking ways. Taking cruelty seriously as its own subject brings out our interests, concerns, capabilities, and weaknesses in blinding brightness and forces us back to questions about what we think it means to be good—back to questions about morality itself, stripped of any one moral belief system. It returns us to the radically humanistic question: how can we be better at being human if neither divinity nor reason might be our salvation or stable answer?

Following from Chapter 3, this chapter dives deeper into what we can learn from both our habits in approaching and avoiding cruelty. It analyses the eight characteristic, or most common responses, to cruelty that I have encountered—in philosophy, psychology, my own life, conversations with others, in order to try to understand what possibly drives each of them. The eight common responses are reiterated and then supplemented, through real-life journalistic accounts, as well as personal examples. The eight most obvious, or commonly encountered explanations for how or why a behavior is experienced or labelled as “cruel” are:Ill intentExcess, Extremity, Unreasonable Causing of SufferingIndifference to anotherIndividually personalized or intimate psychological attackLegal/rule definitionPathological/psychologically aberrant given cultural conventionsHeresy (Religious)Naturalistic NihilismAs in chapter 3’s stage-run through Ordinary, Extraordinary, and Benevolentappearances of cruelty, this chapter offers us an opportunity to peek around our blind spots, to face our reactions and to acknowledge the deficiencies in the tools we us. We often rely on false gods in this area because the subjects make us insecure; this is a theme that runs throughout this book: we often seek definitive proofs, a clean answer, a truth, a tradition, something to lean on. That is what we want, but also something we have to overcome in order to get what we need. This chapter suggests that we learn to lean in, and to do so, we must not just accept that we may be wrong (and often are), but also that being wrong, the capacity to be wrong, is foundational to our moral relevance in the way we have invested in it.

The stories we tell ourselves about our nature, about the moral importance of being human that conversations about cruelty provoke, reveal us to be inconsistent, our thoughts and emotions often immature, and our calls to action against cruelties grip-less, resulting in frustration, anger, and helplessness—that is, if the news, policy making, and attempts to respond to bullying, for example, are any indication. This chapter encourages us to collectively acknowledge and to make ourselves vulnerable to our fundamental ignorance in order to carve a new path. This very ignorance, if tended to with proper care, is not our downfall: on the contrary, it can be the tincture of our creativity, which helps us be better at humanity. This chapter concludes by proposing that the shadow of humanity we have been chasing and courting in this exploration into cruelty and inhumanity is a fundamental capacity to see another creature, and acknowledge another creature as a limit to one’s will, to one’s agency, and insight, and that that capacity is propelled by our natural need to understand what makes each kind of creature flourish as itself, or as one of its kind: whether it is a child, a cat, a fly, a friend, a student, or a master—or, as in The Little Prince, a “perfect” sheep that is perfect because the Little Prince can’t see it. He can only imagine it. This activity of perpetual learning --necessarily rooted in uncertainty, in ignorance and getting it wrong-- is often an indication that we are working, not that we are broken. It might be our ignorance that is the well-spring of our moral significance after all, but only if nurtured. Concentrating on our reflections in the shattered mirror of cruelty helps us understand how we can be better at being human. This chapter outlines how being aware that we often don’t know what we don’t know can help us cultivate ourselves, our children, and each other more deliberately, with more awareness and more consciousness. We can capitalize on what makes being human morally relevant, which, as we’ve seen, is not always the usual suspects (reason and religion). This chapter extracts from validated studies in moral psychology, educational theories, social psychology experiments, and speculative arts to explore a variety of habits and practices that encourage the development of the perceptions of others and our own self-knowledge. It proposes that awareness, perception, reaction, responsiveness, adaptability, and action are key developmental issues for understanding both how we can be cruel and how we can do so less often.

While working out the previous chapter, I again sought out help from my fellow “Professor of Cruelty.” Honesty, terror, confusion, nihilism, depression, and, as we know, anxiety and helplessness are natural in this conversation. I was finding myself having a hard time, at that point, thinking through things I’d thought through for decades. Literally, I seemed unable to drag my eyes through even Primo Levi or Jean Améry. I could not watch silly videos of people pointing and laughing while making their pets do unnatural and distressing things. This was a departure for me. I used to sit and read piles of Amnesty International reports of torture; transcripts and court documents from those like Kemper and Dahmer, reports of genocides, war crimes, reports from slaughterhouse engineers and forepersons, animal-use laboratories, serial and taboo rapists and killers, sexual offenders, ritualistic torturers, and so on. But I found myself having become what felt to be less brave, or perhaps less willing, is more accurate. I became concerned about the implications of such indifference, avoidance, or, god forbid, defensive callousness. And so I wrote to Coetzee, yet again.

Cruelty is such a ubiquitous and at the same time disturbing phenomenon that we take for granted that we understand what it is, and how it impacts the ways in which we think about our humanity as a moral condition—how we understand our moral significance. Cruelty: A Book About Us offers an accessible interrogation of cruelty and humanity, and, most critically, it provides a groundwork for us to raise questions collectively; it is an invitation for us all to join in the dialogue. Through academic studies, literary works, and’ personal stories and observations, this book provokes deeper insights into why cruel acts trouble our usual ways of articulating and addressing wrongness. Mining interdisciplinary sources, it excavates what we may not know we don't know and guides us in conversations about this profoundly evocative and often uneasy subject.