Cruelty

RIchard Rorty’s discussion of cruelty focused on the works of Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell. I admire both writers, but I find Rorty’s juxtaposition awkward. So I’m going to focus on Michel de Montaigne instead, because cruelty was a central issue for him. He wrote two essays on the topic, but brought up the subject for the first time in his 23rd essay, On Habit:

Some fathers are so stupid as to think that it augurs well for a martial spirit if they see their son outrageously striking a peasant or a lackey who cannot defend himself, or for cleverness when they see him cheat a playmate by some cunning deceit or a trick. Yet those are the true seeds by which cruelty, tyranny and treachery take root; they germinate there and then shoot up and flourish, thriving in the grip of habit.

For Montaigne, people become capable of cruelty when such bad habits take root, to the point that they cannot see how their routine behavior affect others. He returned to this thought a few essays later in On The Education of Children:

This education is to be conducted, moreover, with a severe gentleness, not as it usually is. Instead of children being invited to letters as guests, all they are shown in truth are cruelty and horror. Get rid of violence and force: as I see it, nothing so fundamentally stultifies and bastardizes a well-born nature.

Montaigne believes that parents are largely responsible for creating monsters by exposing their children to thoughtlessness, violence and a lack of concern for those who need protection and care. Montaigne had special contempt for people with superior power who act barbarously, as he noted in On the Cannibals:

Yet no opinion has ever been so unruly as to justify treachery, disloyalty, tyranny and cruelty, which are everyday vices in us. So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism.

In his second collection of essays, Montaigne devotes a chapter to the topic, entitled On Cruelty. He notes that, while cruelty is not considered one of the seven deadly sins, it is the most loathsome human vice to him:

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.

And then Montaigne pulls it all together in one more essay on the subject: Cowardice is the Mother of all Cruelty. By this he means that people who inflict the worst acts on humanity do so out of weakness, not strength:

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. Cuncta ferit, dum cuncta timet. [Fearing all, he strikes at all, Claudianus.] The first acts of cruelty are done for their own sake; from them there is born fear of a just revenge; that produces a succession of fresh cruelties, each intended to smother each other.

Taken together, Montaigne constructs a full theory of cruelty, one that begins at childhood and the wrong habits being adopted, ending up in the brutal rule of tyrants lashing out in weakness, leading to a growing chain of cruelties to keep them from catching up with him.

Rorty doesn’t want to make such a synthesis, he wants to separate writers who delve into the personality of individuals who inflict cruel acts, such as Nabokov in “Lolita,” or social-minded writers who see cruelty enacted writ large, as did Orwell in “1984.”

This is disappointing, because it creates a false dichotomy and I believe it gives cover to leaders who act with cruelty, because it separates them from the values discussion that Montaigne thought was so essential.