Cruelty, Not Quite a Deadly Sin
Some acts of violence are perpetrated by individuals who seemed, up to that point, ordinary; however, many perpetrators advertise their aptitude through danger signs and continue from one act to the next unimpeded.
Many of the latter individuals may have been socially or environmentally at risk from a very early age, and/or may have exhibited their malaise through childhood acts of cruelty. One of the easiest signs to detect is alloanimal abuse (Arkow and Ascione 1999, Lockwood and Ascione 1998). One can go further and suggest that abuse for abuse's sake of other living things, such as of plants, and destructive behavior generally, even of inert “things,” all signal a system overdue for feedback, but by that time the situation can have become very complex. Self-abuse indexes other pathological behaviors as well, as seen in phenomena from eating disorders and selfmutilation to neuroses.There are many medical practices that are at odds with sympathetic logics and environmental sensibilities, however culturally ingrained the procedures may be. Circumcision comes to mind. Most of the critical discussion focuses on female circumcision, but closer at hand is the example of pervasive male circumcision in cultures without any religious or ritual reasons to practice it. Many other medical trends and procedures turn out to be misguided or even dangerous, and in any event divert resources from situations of more straightforward needs. In medicine and much of culture we have not internalized any responsible, and consensual, guidelines for triage. The medical profession in the West reveals its macho stance in the military metaphors it adopts, conquering cancer, for example (Hardin and Baden 1977). The pharmaceutical industry joins forces with advertising to brainwash consumers to think they can buy beauty and eternal life (Lasn 1999), illustrating other examples of violence in language.
Doctors overlook their natural ability to deal with, even heal, whole persons, and, complying with patients, sometimes administer serial, lucrative “cures” for merely spurious symptoms. The pharmaceutical industry profits through its influence on all sides of the doctor-patient relationship.While the global inventory of individual cultures and languages is steadily declining, human population increases. Our only substrate, the earth, continues to sustain a burgeoning human population, but barely (Hardin 1968, 1993, 1999), and this is not just a recent phenomenon. At the same time, many other species have been lost at a rate which would not be “natural” were humans not so dominant in the equation (Murray 2003). Regardless of societal scale, the human impact on the environment is massive, because each culture tends to expand, to extract, and to waste unsustainably. Of course, the percapita footprint on the earth by the contemporary industrial and post-industrial first and second worlds in particular dwarfs each and all other and previous insults to our blue marble. Discussion of this matter tends toward self-flagellation-unto-bragging by wellmeaning observers, who may go on to romanticize fourth-world peoples (Edgerton 1992, Knauft 1987). No one is innocent, sadly, but some cultural practices are more violent than others. Regardless of the society, since it is we humans who most damage the earth, overpopulation could be our most egregiously violent practice, even and especially when matched by affluence.
The greater the number of people, the greater the consumption and waste. The more affluent and immune to limits the society appears in the short term, the more it is afflicted by the seven deadly sins of lust, greed, gluttony, envy, anger, pride, and sloth; the first four are related through their consumption of objects and essences, and the final three are related through their consumption/erosion of self. These sins are luxuries; perhaps the poor can muster some envy and anger, but not to the degree of the affluent.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1998: 118) remarks on the strange absence of cruelty in this litany of seven deadly sins (cf Rosset 1993). Perhaps cruelty comes more cheaply. The infliction of pain may not be mortal but it is universal, and the types of pain many. With or without implicating each other in every instance, cruelty and violence share deep cultural roots. Indeed, a perception of the universality of bodily pain may lend violence a cloak of transparency affording a communication which transcends ordinary language—language only to be cracked through translation, and at the risk of doing violence to the original (Ruch 2002, Zizek 1989).Everyday language reveals some of our assumptions about aggression and power. Nor has public discourse been passive in the face of changing cultural habits. For instance, our concern for other animals used to index “cruelty” as an issue, while now “abuse” can cover human as well as alloanimal maltreatment; indeed, these happen to be correlated behaviors. Cruelty remains an interesting term, though, as it only applies to action by a human being against the presumed most sensate of living things, while violence can be stretched at both ends, allowing for more categories of perpetrators and of their targets. While we credit other animals with a capacity for compassion, they cannot be cruel, and, as discussed with respect to infanticide, only in exceptional circumstances can they be violent. Built into the ontologies of these concepts is an assumption that cruel or violent transgressors are endowed with other and preferable behavioral pathways.
Also, the adjectival forms, “cruel” and “violent,” focus more narrowly than the substantives, “cruelty” and “violence.” The distinctions are more emphatic when considering who or what can be on the receiving end of cruelty and violence. If in our culture we cannot empathize with the victim, it will not classify as cruelty, whereas violent behavior need not claim only sentient victims, nor even be limited to living ones. Ratcheted up from the interpersonal to the cultural, cruelty readily morphs to torture and terror (cf. Baumeister 1999/1997, Daniel 1984). Thus, violent behavior can damage inert objects, and institutionalized violence can damage nature and culture alike, all hiding behind habit.