Cruelty is an interesting subject to me, because there’s a duality to it that is often not fully examined. There is both sadism and masochism, the yin and yang of pleasure and pain. People willingly submit to cruelty at times just to feel something. The pain of disappointment is found superior to the empty space of nothing. Abusers and victims stay connected over long periods because victims fear the empty space and nothingness that will take the place of pain. Abusers can feel, with some justification, that the infliction is on some level desired.
Having said this, there’s no question that cruelty is a human impulse that we should act to eliminate as best possible. Richard Rorty, that American philosopher I quote nearly as often as Montaigne, once wrote about the types of books intended to educate us about cruelty. In fact, I wrote a companion piece to this essay on my site examining Rorty. You can read it here.
Rorty says that books about cruelty come in two forms:
The books which help us become less cruel can be roughly divided into (1) books which help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others and (2) those which help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others.
We are accustomed to thinking of institutional cruelty, of ways that authorities do horrific things to punish people as a way of retaining power and keeping some kind of social order. But the more private form of cruelty is more pervasive, and it’s the subject of this Montaigne essay.
People cannot always recognize this type of cruelty objectively. Rather, it’s an emotion elicited in the victim, a feeling of being piled on, singled out and purposefully punished disproportionately. Very often, the perpetrator of such abuse is shocked when the victim accuses them of cruelty. Not seeing oneself capable of direct abuse, the elicitors of emotional cruelty cannot fathom how his or her actions could lead to such feelings.
Montaigne starts out this essay with a highly sexist interpretation of such emotional cruelty:
I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty. And I have learned from experience that that harsh rage of wicked inhuman minds is usually accompanied by womanish weakness.
There’s a lot of stupidity in this quote, including the assumption that women are weak. The Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate should put that idiotic thought to rest forever. But if you remove the word ‘womanish,’ the quote has some value. The actions he details in the essay are often a sign of weakness and an inability to confront the genuine issues at hand.
Montaigne’s thought is better understood at the extreme example. It is often much less cruel to kill than to torture. And the true sign of bravery is to know when to walk away entirely:
Everyone knows that there is more bravery in beating an enemy than in finishing him off; more contempt in making him bow his head than in making him die; that, moreover, the thirst for vengeance is better slaked and satisfied by doing so, since the only intention is to make it felt. That is why we do not attack a stone or an animal if it hurts us, since they are incapable of feeling our revenge. To kill a man is to shield him from our attack.
From here, Montaigne makes a very interesting psychological connection between chains of lies and chains of cruelty. Just as a liar has to keep inventing new lies to cover up the original untruth, so too must the cruel punisher continue a series of cruel acts to prevent the abused from seeking revenge:
The first acts of cruelty are done for their sake; from them there is born fear of a just revenge; that produces a succession of fresh cruelties, each intended to smother each other.
This bloodlust then gets out of hand — the inflictor of pain no longer wishes to punish an act, but to remain in control:
What is it that makes tyrants so lust for blood? It is their worries about their own safety and the fact that when they fear a scratch their cowardly minds can furnish them with no other means of security save exterminating all those who simply have the means of hurting them, women included.
By staying on offense, the inflictor turns every counterattack into an act of defiance and retribution—he or she deserved the punishment for an evil act. I am only being retaliated against because he or she didn’t like the punishment. I have the power to punish, therefore I am in the right.
If someone suffers abuse long enough, he or she eventually becomes steeled to it and loses the ability to react to the punishment as something cruel and unusual. Montaigne finds punishment inflicted in this stage especially heinous:
Vengeance is at its most wretched when it is wreaked upon someone who has lost the means of feeling it; for, as the one who seeks revenge wishes to see it if he is to enjoy it, the one who receives it must see it too if he is to suffer the pain and be taught a lesson.
The worst thing that can happen to anyone who inflicts cruelty is for the punished to escape: in a marriage, to divorce; in a job, to quit; in life, to die:
If we had thought that we had for ever overcome our enemy by valour and could dominate him as we pleased, we would be sorry indeed if he were to escape: he does that when he dies. We do want to beat him, but with more security than honour, and we seek not so much glory through our quarrel but the end of that quarrel.
The end goal of cruelty isn’t the end of a relationship, but the transformation of that relationship into pure submission. The inflictor of punishment wants the punished to bow down in defeat. When in a situation like this—other than appeal to a higher authority with the ability to stop it — the only solution is to sever the relationship and walk away.
Some people do not do this—and by submitting, that person entrusts his or her future to the submitted. Montaigne finds such submission enslavement for both parties:
I find it derogatory to anyone who does fully trust in himself to go and confound his fortune with that of another. Each of us runs risks enough for himself without doing so for another: each has enough to do to defend his life on behalf of his own valour without entrusting so dear a possession into the hands of third parties. For unless it be not expressly agreed to the contrary, the four of them form one party under bond. If your second is downed you are faced, by the rules, with two to contend with; you may say that that is unfair. And indeed it is – like charging well-armed against a man who has only the stump of his sword, or when you are still sound against a man who is already grievously wounded.
I’m making an effort in my latest edits of essays to take some of the Nietzsche out, but I feel obliged here to add him … because I believe this essay must have inspired Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Just notice how well this passage from Nietzsche’s work fits with Montaigne’s thoughts in this essay:
One should remember that, even supposing that the affect of contempt, of looking down from a superior height, falsifies the image of that which it despises, it will at any rate still be a much less serious falsification that that perpetuated on its opponent—in effigie of course—by the submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent. There is indeed too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking away and impatience involved in contempt, even too much joyfulness, for it to be able to transform its object into a real caricature and monster.
Leave a Reply