III
We appear to be neither fundamentally good nor bad. I see no evidence for either as the dominant virtue or vice, but I have seen and continue to see plenty of evidence of our fundamental malleability when we gather in groups, especially when peer pressure, dogmatic beliefs, fear, a lust for vengeance and propaganda come into play.
Stanley Milgram’s experiment illustrated how authority alone, even without using threats or physical coercion, had an inherent power to motivate ordinary, decent people to take actions that they believed caused intense pain to someone sitting before them. They ‘performed’ torture because they were told to do so. Their desire to obey, either through fear or a need to please the person giving the orders, broke down whatever principles of right and wrong they had been certain they believed in: “Milgram found that more than seventy percent of the subjects administered what they thought might be fatal shocks to an innocent stranger.”
What about the performance of cruelty when there is an absence of orders, when no one person or group is saying ‘you must do this’, but instead a general agreement takes hold within a given community that the cruelty occurring is just? For example, at the lynching of Zachariah Walker in Coatesville in 1911, men in the crowd politely stepped aside so that women and children would be better able to witness his torture, mutilation and burning. How to explain the complicity of those women, some of whom left Churches to follow the mob?
IV
Cruelty is an action that creates suffering. It is designed to create pain. The action may be verbal or physical, performed in person or over distance, brought about by a yes muttered over a telephone, by a signature, by a nodding of a head, or by a club or knife or gun wielded by a willing hand.
Cruelty requires a power arrangement of stronger to weaker. It requires a victim. It cannot operate in isolation. For example, sarcasm is a low-level form of cruelty. It has an object of derision. It means to hurt. It also often unites a group through shared mockery and laughter at another.
Those who torture others in service to a political regime are bonded by their very abuse of another. Humor is a part of their arsenal by which they dehumanize their victims and build connections with each other. For example, torture by electricity had names coined by the torturers: In Brazil, “it was called ‘the telephone’, in Vietnam, ‘the plane rode’, ‘the Motorola’ in Greece, ‘the dance’ in Argentina’, ‘the birthday party’ in the Philippines.” Torturers described mocking their charges by telling them the name of what was coming, of what they were about to inflict upon them.@
V
By its definition, if one is cruel, one must be cruel to another. That other must be alive. It makes no sense to speak of cruelty to a chair or a table, but cruelty to an animal, a child, an elderly person; cruelty that is religiously or racially motivated and directed – those examples are true to life.
Cruelty has purpose. First, it requires malice aforethought because it is meant to humiliate, and second, through that humiliation, it is meant to subjugate. In these ways, it is always an exercise in power and thus is the ultimate tool of autocrats and of any authorities who will not be held accountable.
If unopposed, cruelty can build in force and the breadth of its attractiveness. Think of a group amassing power, building alliances with like-minded groups. Think of them entering politics, electing representatives, passing laws that institutionalize cruelty.
When we gather together and certain pressures are applied, certain lessons taught, certain lies told again and again – that’s when cruelty takes hold. Begin with the pinpointing of outcasts, lead on to mockery and thence to brief, pleasurable moments of physical assault – the trip in the cafeteria, the shoulder bump in the hallway, the push to the ground on a sidewalk; add the lash of ugly names delivered by a group united against someone weaker – kike, n****r, alien, illegal, fag, bitch, c**t; now move to damaging property with spray-painted names and broken windows. Now gather to purposely hunt whoever has become the target. If permission to kill them comes from above, to burn their homes, to drive them from the land, do so. Such permission gives a kind of moral blessing to assault and murder and arson and rape. The authorities, the leader, have told us that this is righteous.
For example, the Rwandan Genocide began with a call to kill over radio on channels controlled by the government. Ordinary men and women and militias, using mostly machetes, began murdering their neighbors: “During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, also known as 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbors. …. Officials rewarded killers with food, drink, drugs and money.”#
@from The Body In Pain by Elaine Scarry, p. 58
