68. On Cruelty

This is really more of an essay about virtue than it is about cruelty, although we’ll get around to that subject a bit later in the essay. I wanted to start out, though, by noting an interesting synchronicity I came across this week between Montaigne and something by Carl Jung that I read:

Virtue rejects ease as a companion, and that the gentle easy slope up which are guided the measured steps of a good natural disposition is not the path of real virtue. Virtue demands a rough and thorny road: she wants either external difficulties to struggle against (which was the way of Metellus) by means of which Fortune is pleased to break up the directness of her course for her, or else inward difficulties furnished by the disordered passions and imperfections of our condition.

Hold that thought as I move on to Jung’s quote:

The pious Drummond once lamented that “bad temper is the vice of the virtuous.” Whoever builds up too good a persona for himself naturally has to pay for it with irritability.

I should probably back up slightly here and describe exactly what Jung means by persona. He does it best himself:

The persona is a complicated system of relations between the individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.

So if you take those two Jung quotes together, he is saying that some people adopt this persona of virtue and do everything possible to present themselves as good, supportive, and protective people.

A few years ago, I took part in a Group Relations Conference at Northwestern University, which was really like attending a massive focus group on your personality. I started off the conference being aggressively inquisitive about people and asked a lot of leading questions. The other participants hated it and projected their strongest feelings about middle-aged white men onto me. Knowing that this could be three days of hell if I kept on this course, I adjusted.

I adopted a new persona as the supportive, mentoring, peacemaking male character–and the perception of me dramatically shifted. By the end of the conference, several young women came up to me and apologized for what they said about me early in the conference—which was completely unnecessary, but appreciated.

Over the past few years, I have cultivated this persona to mostly positive effect. But returning to the thought of Jung, there’s no doubt that I feel irritability as an internal rebellion. How could I not? Who wants to be everyone’s TV dad?

Now going full circle to Montaigne, he’s arguing that expecting ease in this persona is an error, because virtue demands difficulties, and would argue that it’s even an error to adopt this persona too often, because it’s making me too attached to a certain response from certain people that brings a level of admiration, but might make it more difficult to form deeper relationships.

I’ll let go of Jung now and return to Montaigne’s argument. He seems to advocate something close to Taoism here, with an embrace of both the light and the dark:

If Virtue can only be resplendent when fighting opposing desires, are we therefore to say that she cannot manage without help from vice, to whom she at least owes the fact that she is held in esteem and honour?

And here he makes an interesting turn—what happens when the virtuous stoic endures pain for so long that he turns it into a pleasant fetish?

If I postulate that perfect Virtue makes herself known by fighting pain and bearing it patiently, by sustaining attacks from the gout without being shaken in her seat; if I make her necessarily subject to hardship and difficulty, what becomes of that Virtue who has reached such a pinnacle that she not only despises pain but delights in it, taking the stabbings of a strong colic paroxysm as tickling pleasures?

Montaigne then argues that in Cato the Younger and Socrates, we have the perfect examples of Virtuous human beings, who have so internalized their responses to hardship that it’s no longer a persona they are adopting, it has become the definition of their true authentic self:

[Cato and Socrates performed such] a perfect acquisition of the habit of virtue that it became a matter of their complexion. It was no longer a painful virtue nor a virtue ordained by reason, virtues which they had to stiffen their souls to maintain: it was the very being of their souls, their natural ordinate manner. They rendered them thus by a long practice of the precepts of philosophy encountering beautiful and richly endowed natures. Those vicious passions which are born in us can find no entry into them; the force and rectitude of their souls stifle and snuff out concupiscence as soon as it begins to stir.

This thought brings to mind to me some stories that I shared this week that recount some childhood trauma. Perhaps merely remembering and sharing these stories could be re-traumatization, and I should do my best to avoid this practice. I see it differently—I think the stories have become so ingrained in my personal narrative at this point that I can share them to make points about myself and better explain my emotions. And perhaps this is a part of what Montaigne is getting at … we need to become so comfortable with ourselves at all times and in all forms that the past loses its hold over us.

Or maybe he has something much simpler in mind. This long and strangely constructed sentence (almost Proust-like) seems to make the case that this Virtue is mostly about sidestepping libidinal temptations:

That it is more beautiful to prevent the birth of temptations by a sublime and god-like resolve and to be so fashioned to virtue that even the seeds of vices have been uprooted rather than to prevent their growing by active force and, once having been surprised by the first stirrings of the passions, to arm and tense oneself to halt their progress and to vanquish them; or that this second action is nevertheless more beautiful than to be simply furnished with an easy affable nature which of itself finds indulgence and vice distasteful: cannot I think be doubted.

Montaigne then says that he doesn’t really hold this kind of virtue—if he comes across as a wise soul, it’s mostly been because of good fortune in life:

Assays of myself have not revealed the presence in my soul of any firmness in resisting the passions whenever they have been even to the slightest degree ecstatic. I do not know how to sustain inner conflicts and debates. So I cannot congratulate myself much if I do find that I am exempt from many of the vices: “if, in my nature, which is otherwise straight, there are a few trivial vices, just as you might criticize an otherwise beautiful body for having a few moles.” (Horace) I owe that more to my Fortune than to my reason.

He also points out that sometimes people who advocate the most libertine philosophies live more scrupulous personal lives, for example, the Greek philosopher Aristippus:

Aristippus laid down opinions about pleasure and riches which were so bold that the whole of philosophy rose and stormed against him. Yet where his morals were concerned, when Dionysius the Tyrant presented him with three beautiful young women to choose from, he said he would choose all three, since things had gone badly for Paris when he preferred one woman to her two companions: but having escorted them to his home he sent them away without laying a finger on them. And when his manservant found the load of coins he was carrying too heavy to manage, he told him to pour out as many of them as he found too heavy.

Montaigne finally gets to the point of cruelty and notes his visceral dislike of it:

Among the vices, both by nature and judgement I have a cruel hatred of cruelty, as the ultimate vice of them all. But I am so soft that I cannot even see anyone lop the head off a chicken without displeasure, and cannot bear to hear a hare squealing when my hounds get their teeth into it, even though I enjoy the hunt enormously.

War always brings out the greatest cruelty, and Montaigne notes it was rampant during his country’s religious civil wars:

I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice of cruelty flourish because of the licence of our civil wars; you can find nothing in ancient history more extreme than what we witness every day. But that has by no means broken me in. If I had not seen it I could hardly have made myself believe that you could find souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sheer fun of it; would hack at another man’s limbs and lop them off and would cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures and new forms of murder, not from hatred or for gain but for the one sole purpose of enjoying the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitchings of a man dying in agony, while hearing his screams and groans.

He then compares this to watching hunted animals writhe in pain—and I’m in total agreement on that point. And I’ll close with this beautiful thought, which I also embrace:

Even if all of that remained unsaid, there is a kind of respect and a duty in man as a genus which link us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feelings, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men: and to the other creatures who are able to receive them we owe gentleness and kindness. Between them and us there is some sort of intercourse and a degree of mutual obligation. I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so childishly affectionate that I cannot easily refuse an untimely gambol to my dog wherever it begs one.

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