Coming to Grips With Cruelty in the World

My first memory of kindergarten is when I’d made an airplane by crossing two thin cylinders of modeling clay. As I “flew” my plane around the room, a bigger boy with a much sturdier airplane rushed up and slammed his into mine, smashing mine into a blob. He then raced away, laughing as I wailed. If he’d enjoyed smashing my plane, he enjoyed my distress more.

“Why was he so mean?” I asked my mother when I got home. As I recall, she sighed and told me, “Honey, I don’t know.”

Webster’s Dictionary defines cruelty as “deliberately seeking to inflict pain and suffering; enjoying others’ suffering; without mercy or pity.”

Animals steal without compunction, bully without shame, and seize every advantage they can, with no concern for others’ suffering. Simply by eating, predators inflict horrific pain. If you’ve watched a cat dismember a rat, or an osprey eat, bite by sharp-beaked bite, a flipping fish, you will know the poet Tennyson was right: Nature is “red in tooth and claw.”

But nature isn’t cruel; it’s amoral. Animals don’t relish others’ suffering—not in the way humans can. Our brains, which carry nature’s red-in-tooth-and-claw directives, also allow us to foresee how our actions will hurt others and even to exult over what we’ve done.

Students of history might well posit a human drive toward cruelty. It occurs so frequently. Certainly, anyone wishing to understand cruelty in the world should start by looking inward. Those who find no impulse toward cruelty, whether enacted or not, should look again.

Two main forces work against cruelty: custom/law and empathy.

Custom/law—externalized through fear of punishment and internalized as “conscience”—opposes cruelty at times but may support it when meting out punishment.

Empathy always opposes cruelty, allowing (or forcing) us to feel what others do. We have inherited fierce predatory instincts, but we can place ourselves “in someone else’s shoes.” Empathy is present even in small children and grows with experience and good parenting, joining forces with the conscience.

I remember my mother asking, when I kicked down my sister’s sand-castle, “How would you feel if she did that to you?” I also remember, when I got a new baseball glove at age six or seven, how I made sure to play with my old glove too so that it wouldn’t feel left out and sad.

If humans have a "good angel," its name is empathy. Yet many things can drive out empathy or lock it away. When this happens, even normally kind people can be cruel.

Anger at mistreatment can override empathy, priming the mistreated person for revenge—against one person or all of humankind. Shylock, a life-long victim of anti-Semitism, declared in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.” “The Misfit” in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, having been punished so often and for so long that he can’t remember why declares, “No pleasure but meanness.”

Groups of people, or sometimes all people outside of one’s group, may be dehumanized—viewed as “not like us” and out-of-bounds for empathy. To encourage soldiers to kill without mercy, the enemy is portrayed as vile and subhuman. The same process can move normal people down the road to genocide. The group slated for extinction must be seen as degraded, dangerous, subversive, disgusting, unclean, and deserving of extermination.

To turn off empathy toward animals, people may accept false “facts,” including that animals don’t feel pain. Hearing a caught fish flip in my uncle’s cooler, I was relieved to be told it was “just nerves.” Some who lack empathy towards animals may also be encouraged by the word of Genesis that God gave humankind unlimited “dominion” over animals.

Empathy can fade with desensitization. A friend whose first job was in an Omaha slaughterhouse threw up for the first week, then “got used to it.”

Yet, despite these exceptions, empathy—embodied in and aided by custom and law—allows people, for the most part, to live together more or less peaceably. We may still sometimes be cruel, but much less than we might otherwise be. And we will be much kinder, too.

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One kind of person, though, does not feel empathy. Research indicates that abnormalities in the brains of so-called psychopaths may deprive them of this ability and make them unable to learn from punishment as others do. These abnormalities may derive from nature, nurture, or both. However derived, they do seem to exist. Lacking empathy and more or less oblivious to the threat of punishment, psychopaths are like wild animals set loose among throngs of tame ones.

A story, perhaps apocryphal, tells how, as the hapless Anne Boleyn waited for death, her executioner barked, “Hand me my sword!” just as he began the stroke that took her head. By making his death-strike unexpected, the man showed mercy derived from empathy.

By contrast, I read recently about a man and woman who, having robbed a stranger and bound him with duct tape, placed a gun to his eye and shot him there. It can be hard for people with normal powers of empathy to understand that psychopaths are not nice folks who’ve gone astray, but rather people incapable of imagining and/or caring how others feel.

To understand cruelty in the world, we must understand our capacity to be cruel and what inhibits it. We must factor in psychopathy, too.