I
I was about 10 when I pushed a lightning bug into an ants’ nest and watched them carry it to its death. I remember no pleasure coming from this. I remember being curious. What would happen? I felt no emotion.
At the time the Baltimore Catechism presented age 7 as the age of reason, the age at which we left our innocence behind and became accountable for our actions – in other words, the age at which we should know right from wrong, the age of first Confession, the age when we became sinners and should therefore do penance, the age when our conscience emerged as an instrument for governing our choices.
I consciously took a living creature and gave it up to pain and death. I did not think of it as a cruel action. I thought nothing, really, my head was simply empty.
The action itself was cruel. My intent did not matter.
Was I acting out of a fixed human nature? Are we a cruel species? What makes an action cruel as opposed to merely negligent or inadvertent? Are we more or less cruel individually or in a group? Under what circumstances does cruelty assert itself?
II
How am I to make sense of the scene in King Lear when Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s eyes. Goaded by his wife, one of Lear’s daughters, who calls on him to “pluck out his eyes,” Cornwall digs one out. Before he can go after the remaining eye, a nameless servant of Cornwall, a man utterly repelled by what is occurring, tells him to stop. The servant draws his sword. In doing so, he makes it clear that he is willing to fight to protect Gloucester, willing to kill his master and to die himself if necessary. He is killed by Cornwall but not before delivering a mortal wound to him. Cornwall then takes Gloucester’s other eye.
What separates Cornwall and Regan from this nameless man?
What separates those who say yes to cruelty from those who say no?
Over 36 years and among thousands of students I taught and those I came to know outside of my classroom, less than 10 come to mind that I could name as cruel by nature – less than 10 as conscience-less, as human beings who took individual, lonely pleasure in cruelty.
Individual malevolence exists of course. Evil individuals exist. My father was a police officer for 35 years. He saw such people close up. Other officers I have interviewed have described criminals who had committed acts of deep, abiding horror.
I taught high school and thus my cross section of humanity was not arrayed along a line from victim to criminal. My experience with human beings occupied a line that stretched from the brilliant to those who struggled to learn. Although, by necessity, I was tasked with controlling 30 adolescents at a time so that they could learn. I was responsible for order, not for arrests. I was charged with teaching and not as an arbiter of law. Keeping order was a required task but a comparatively light one to manage. I was never exposed to the concentrated malevolence of some of those with whom the police are often called upon to deal.
My life and my reading have led me to conclude that we are not cruel as a species. As a species, we do not evidence a delight in the pain of others as part of a genetic code. A few individuals may be damaged, born as a bad seed, capable of acting out of real malice and of enjoying doing so, but of humanity as a whole, I do not believe this to be true. Otherwise, we would be killers from the moment our consciousness separated the world into weaker and stronger.
As a teacher, a student of history and an ordinary observer of others, I have been interested in the nature of cruelty for a long time. This short essay is my attempt to think about cruelty in a methodical fashion.
