Humanizing the world

The historical process of constructing a humane secular society, it is said, has aimed at eliminating cruelties. Thus it has often been claimed that European rule in colonial countries, although not itself democratic, brought about moral improvements in behavior—that is, the abandon­ment of practices that offend against the human.

Major instruments in this transformation were modern legal, admin­istrative, and educational practices. And a central category deployed in them was the modern category of customary law. “Of all the restrictions upon the application of customary laws during the colonial period,” writes James Read, “the test of repugnancy ‘to justice or morality’ was potentially the most sweeping: for customary laws could hardly be repugnant to the traditional sense of justice or morality of the community which still ac-

cepted them, and it is therefore clear that the justice or morality of the colonial power was to provide the standard to be applied.” Read points out that the phrase ’‘repugnant to justice and morality” does not have a precise legal meaning, and that early legislation in the colonies sometimes em­ployed other expressions, such as “not opposed to natural morality and hu­manity,” to perform the same revolutionary work.¹¹

But moral and social progress in those countries has been uneven. Although Europeans tried to suppress cruel practices and forms of suffer­ing that were previously taken for granted in the non-European world by making the practitioners legally culpable, the suppression was not always completely successful. Today the struggle to eliminate social suffering is taken up by the United Nations. Or so the story goes.

I want to propose, however, that in their attempt to outlaw customs the European rulers considered cruel it was not the concern with indige­nous suffering that dominated their thinking, but the desire to impose what they considered civilized standards of justice and humanity on a subject population—that is, the desire to create new human subjects.¹² The an­guish of subjects compelled under threat of punishment to abandon tradi­tional practices—now legally branded as “repugnant to justice and moral-

11.

12. Lord Milner, undersecretary for finance during the British occupation of Egypt that began in 1882, described Britain’s imperial task in that country as fol­lows: “This then, and no less than this, was meant by ‘restoring order.’ It meant reforming the Egyptian administration root and branch. Nay, it meant more. For what was the good of recasting the system, if it were left to be worked by officials of the old type, animated by the old spirit? ‘Men, not measures,’ is a good watch­word anywhere, but to no country is it more profoundly applicable than to Egypt. Qur task, therefore, included something more than new principles and new meth­ods. It ultimately involved new men. It involved ‘the education of the people to know, and therefore to expect, orderly and honest government—the education of a body of rulers capable of supplying it’” {England in Egypt, London: Edward Arnold, 1899, p. 23). Here Milner enunciates the government’s need to create sub­jects (in both senses) as well as rulers informed by new standards of human be­havior and political justice. That this would involve the application of some force

« and suffering was a secondary consideration. I stress that my point is not that colo­nial administrators like Milner lacked “humanitarian” motives, but that they were guided by a particular concept of “humanness.”

Reflections on Cruelty and Torture in ity” or as “opposed to natural morality and humanity,” or even sometimes as “backward and childish”—could not therefore play a decisive part in the discourse of colonial reformers. On the contrary, as Lord Cromer put it with reference to the misery created among the Egyptian peasantry by le­gal reforms under British rule: “Civilisation must, unfortunately, have its victims.”¹³ In the process of learning to be “folly human” only some kinds of suffering were seen as an affront to humanity, and their elimination sought.

Inhuman suffering, typically associated with barbaric behavior, was a morally insufferable condition for which someone was therefore respon­sible; those requiring it (themselves inhuman enough to cause it to be in­flicted) must be made to desist, and if necessary punished. That, at any rate, is the discourse of colonial reform. What individual administrators actually felt, thought, or did is another (though not entirely unrelated) matter. Most experienced administrators were prepared locally to tolerate various “uncivilized” practices for reasons of expediency, but all were no doubt aware of the dominant progressivist discourse rooted in “civilized” societies.

In an unpublished paper by Nicholas Dirks there is a nice example of just this discourse in late nineteenth-century British India. His account of the inquiry conducted by the colonial authorities into the ritual of hook­swinging¹⁴ contains this sober judgment by the presiding British official: “It is, in my opinion, unnecessary at the end of the nineteenth century and, having regard to the level to which civilisation in India has attained, to consider the motives by which the performers themselves are actuated when taking part in hook swinging, walking through fire, and other bar­barities. From their own moral standpoint, their motives may be good or they may be bad; they may indulge in self-torture in satisfaction of pious vows fervently made in all sincerity and for the most disinterested reasons; or they may indulge in it from the lowest motives of personal aggrandise-

13. “The Government of Subject Races,” Political and Literary Essays, 190S- 1913, London: Macmillan, 1913, p. 44.

14. Hookswinging involves a ceremony in which the celebrant swings from a crossbeam built for the purpose on a cart, suspended by two steel hooks thrust into the small of his back.

ment, whether for the alms they might receive or for the personal distinc­tion and local eclat that it may bring them; but the question is whether public opinion in this country is not Opposed to the external acts of the per­formers, as being in fact repugnant to the dictates of humanity and de­moralizing to themselves and to all who may witness their performances. I am of the opinion that the voice of India most entitled to be listened to with respect, that is to say, not only the voice of the advanced school that has received some of the advantages of western education and has been permeated with non-Oriental ideas, but also the voice of those whose views of life and propriety of conduct have been mainly derived from Asi­atic philosophy, would gladly proclaim that the time had arrived for the Government in the interests of its people to effectively put down all de­grading exhibitions of self-torture.”¹⁵

The fact that the performers themselves declared that they felt no pain was irrelevant. So, too, was the plea that this was a religious rite. Such justifications were not acceptable. It was the offense given by the perform­ance to a particular concept of being human that reduced qualitatively dif­ferent kinds of behavior to a single standard. And it was the governments task to realize that standard here and now, not that of divinity to apply it in the afterlife.

Confirmation of the moral offensiveness of this behavior was ob­tained by listening to some colonized voices only. The latter included west­ernized Indians. But, more significantly, confirmation was provided also by those who accepted a westernized exegesis of their Asiatic philosophy.¹⁶

15. N. Dirks, “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India,” unpublished manuscript, pp. 9-10.

16. In relation to the more celebrated British prohibition of sati (the self- immolation of the Hindu widow on the funeral pyre of her husband) in 1829, Lata Mani notes that “Rather than arguing for die outlawing of sati as a cruel and bar­barous act, as one might expect of a true ‘moderniser’, officials in favour of aboli­tion were at pains to illustrate that such a move was entirely consonant with the principle of upgrading indigenous tradition.

From the point of view of moral progress, the voices of those who took up a “reactionary” position could not, of course, be attended to.

Clearly, then, in the cause of secular progress there was suffering and suffering. What is interesting, I think, is not merely that some forms of suf­fering were to be taken more seriously than others, but that “inhuman” suf­fering as opposed to “necessary” or "inevitable” suffering was regarded as be­ing essentially gratuitous, and therefore legally punishable. Pain endured in the movement toward becoming “fully human,” on the other hand, was necessary, in the sense that there were social or moral reasons why it had to be suffered. This view is of a piece with the post-Enlightenment concern to construct through judicial punishment the most efficient means of reform­ing offenders and of guarding society’s interests.¹⁷

As the idea of progress became increasingly dominant in the affairs of Europe and the world, the need for measuring suffering was felt and re­sponded to with greater sophistication.