Cruelty has a human heart
And jealousy a human face,
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress. William Blake
I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression. Albert Camus
If God is keeping out of sight, it’s because he’s ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they’re responsible for promoting in his name. Philip Pullman
We can never be gods, after all–but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. N.K. Jemisin
You cannot use cruelty against yourself to justify cruelty to others. Marie Lu
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams
Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant. Brene Brown
It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first, intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. Judith Shklar
Those of you who have endured many years of these annual messages know of my personal fondness for the image of the Jewish man or woman sitting on the end of a remote cliff, staring into the vastness of space, wondering if there is any relief for the suffering borne of an enveloping cruelty part personal and part embedded in the institutions of the day, sadly including that embedded in religious institutions.
It is hard for some of us to imagine that moment of being seemingly rebuffed by such a vastness and then having to return to domiciles and communities under oppressive occupation complete with religious leaders who have turned their backs on the needy and dispossessed, people longing for relief who will accept even its faintest hope, a veritable whiff of a world that is kinder and more just than the one which defines most all of their daily business.
We moderns who like to imagine the superior manner in which we conduct our earthly affairs are more than occasionally guilty of scoffing at the cruelty of those earlier times and the misery they inflicted, scoffing as though we have somehow graduated from the lusts of degrading and subjugating other human beings, graduated from muck to which too many of our ancestors were consigned and about which they felt they could do little. Look at how far we’ve come. Look at our “mixed blessing” achievements and successes. Look at our evermore fancy gadgets and the clever economic predations they enable. Look at our decision making which consistently magnifies current interest to the detriment of future interest. Look at the overly confident, divisive, self-satisfied proclamations that our modernity privileges some of us to spout.
Maybe this isn’t the Advent to look too closely at ourselves. Or maybe it is precisely the moment to do so.
For the sojourn at the edge of the cliff is not only about the longing for a redeemer. It is also about the discomfort – at times severe – during those all-too-rare moments when there is nothing but vastness and quiet to distract us from ourselves, to remind us of our relative impotence, the many things we have done and especially left undone, the potential once identified and then summarily squandered, the love and care we failed to provide in sufficient measure or rebuffed as others tried to provide for us.
And the cruelty. Always the cruelty, perhaps the most shocking feature of our current, collective incarnation, cruelty disturbingly linked to those long-ago days of occupation and crucifixion, those days which relegated sickness to the demonic and branded as unclean anyone who broke any of the complex regulations brandished by religious elites, regulations which such elites often felt entitled to ignore themselves, regulations sold as revelations of a God who ostensibly prioritized honor and deference over compassion and reconciliation.
As many of “God’s people” try to sell in our own time. Psychologists such as Erich Fromm had long identified the “death wish” that can consume people defined by grievance, some of whom are people of faith, a wish that manifests itself in decisions which are short-sighted and anger-fueled, decisions neither in our best interest nor in the interest of generations to come who may well face formidable trouble coping with the massive damage we now eagerly inflict with full impunity.
Let’s be honest with ourselves. Cruelty has always been our species companion, the demon that literally consumes much of our life energy and conspires to make a mockery of our values once we stop identifying and wrestling with its threats and allures. There are certainly many moments when kindness, compassion, fairness and other, deeper and more “horizontal” virtues seem to have pride of place, when we seem to “have it in us” to rise to a higher, more attentive and more responsive standard.
But then we too often allow ourselves to get complacent, or self-satisfied, or we give in to multiple impulses which should have been thoroughly examined and then placed under wraps. In all of this we tend to neglect the uncomfortable spaces which remind us of uncomfortable truths. And at such times, cruelty is poised to make a comeback, returning to a stage complete with autonomous weapons and violent rhetoric, with ethnic cleansing and partisan hatred, with all of the self-serving justifications one could possibly invoke including willful, decontextualized misinterpretations of religious texts which are at times astounding in their arrogance.
It is a truism of sorts to insist that we are responsible both for what we do and what we enable, that which our own actions inadvertently grant permission for others to do. A bit like children in a kindergarten class, we defend our own behavior by pointing fingers at those who not only behave contrary to our own interests but who we might feel get away with it, serving personal preferences petty and more profound with what appears to be full impunity. In a similar vein, we trend towards laser focus on behavior we find offensive in others and then too often try to attribute the offense to an entire class of human beings defined by race or ethnicity or gender or religion, all while doing what we can to ensure that the laser never turns back on us.
Amidst all of these manifestations of self-deception is a pervasive cruelty. While recognizing the degree to which social media skews judgments on this matter – providing compelling visuals on incidents individual and collective which would have remained hidden in previous times – it is nevertheless the case that our human compassion has taken a serious hit. At levels both official and community, a generic indifference serves to endorse and justify the most obvious instances of cruelty, those which have dented our rational and moral capacities – rapes in El-Fasher and Goma, target practice and food insecurity against Palestinian children in Gaza, brown-skinned people brutalized by aggrieved and poorly trained ICE agents in US cities, religious bias, domestic violence, racial discrimination and killing largely without remorse, without accountability, without any sense of the implications of such brutality for a world which must sooner or later be passed on to children in whatever shape we leave it. And beyond active cruelty, we move with lightning speed from individual instances of abuse to more categorical denunciations of “other” humans which ultimately encourage more abuse than they identify.
I certainly do not believe that cruelty constitutions our entire genetic and social footprint, not by any means, but from my UN policy vantage point it seems to occupy more of our current frame than most of us would have deemed possible, certainly more than our civilizations can likely survive over the long term.
Returning to the lonely figure at the edge of a cliff, it is also important to acknowledge the degree to which making time and space for self-reflection is also to make time and space which can be filled by anxiety, by self-doubt, by disappointment. The space of Advent is a moment for reminding me of how far I’ve come but how very much is left undone, the self-honesty and amendment of life which remains an insufficient portion of my seasonal preparation, the vestiges my own “sweet dreams of oppression” which have led over the years to trespasses which are to be forgiven only in the same measure that I forgive the trespasses of others.
Collectively, our demons are now well out of the places where they had been at least partially confined, tricking us into renewing cycles of distrust and outright violence that compromise our politics, our faith and possibly our future. It remains alarming at how quickly we can sacrifice our compassion and dignity at the altar of anger and grievance. It is equally discouraging (if numerous films are any indication) how easily we can become addicted to dystopian worldviews that, beyond entertainment, reinforce the belief that the world is in its essence a harsh, violent, deceitful and fearful place in which values such as cooperation, discernment, kindness and compassion are naïve if not outright dangerous.
It may be, as Judith Shklar maintains, that cruelty is the behavior which represents the very worst of ourselves. But what we fail to recognize as often is how this “worst thing we do” lurks just below the surface of civility, just out of sight and reach until it bursts forth like a plague of long-dormant insects which we then choose to feed and otherwise encourage until the outburst has run its course, leaving in its wake a veritable wasteland of disinformation, intolerance and cynicism. This cycle is compounded by the widespread and insufficiently countered belief that cruelty is an inevitable manifestation of our genetic makeup. Cruelty may represent a pervasive factor in human history, but “inevitable” it is not.
The reason I particularly honor Advent, year after year, is that it represents yet another opportunity for people of much faith and little faith to confront and overcome what Dostoyevsky termed the “artful” cruelty which dominates far too much of our current human landscape. In our words, in our actions and reactions, we very much have it in us to set a tone that can serve to counter the worst of current influences and thereby ensure places where children can live and thrive when we have finally left this world to their loving care. But this “tone” requires more of us, replacing grievance with thanksgiving, swapping out indifference with caring, renouncing in words and deeds what Fromm worried was “our craving for evil,” pledging to take more risks and give in less to cynicism and fearfulness.
If the opportunities of Advent seem more dauting this year it is because the “syndrome of decay” which we have over-indulged like Thanksgiving leftovers has been allowed to consume larger and larger swaths of our human condition. But we can roll it back. We can recover our shattered faith, our lagging courage, our indifferent stewardship of a world which will eventually no longer be ours to pillage. For me, Advent represents the latest, best opportunity to restore our collective dignity, prepare to better incarnate my understanding of the divine promise, and “save what’s left” of our ailing planet. This year, let’s agree to honor that potential.
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