Cruel Indifference

Does the notion that cruelty involves pleasure in another's suffering mean that the cruel lack empathy? And, does the idea of cruelty as a kind of enjoyment fall short when faced something like our common sense notion of cruel indifference? My initial inclination is that answering both questions 'no' gives a kind of clarity or precision to the concept of cruelty that might make it useful in thinking about present values.

Does cruelty manifest a certain lack? A lack, perhaps, of fellow feeling, of empathy or compassion? Is cruelty perhaps the result of a bestialization or brutalization or even alienation such that one cannot find a common grain of humanity connecting one to another? I think that cruelty manifests a lack, but not of empathy. The lack is one's own vulnerability and incompleteness, one's own fragility--or, the vulnerability, incompleteness, and fragility of the associations, practices, and beliefs from which one draws meaning and security. Cruelty, then, is in the first place a way to avoid confronting this lack, to avoid acknowledging vulnerability by locating it another or others and then eradicating it. The others are vulnerable, not me. They were fired because they failed; didn't work hard enough; they were too stupid; they deserved it.

In the second place, though, cruelty involves a kind of pleasure or enjoyment in the suffering of another. This pleasure is the benefit of cruelty, what it gives back. The enjoyment can be of one's own righteousness, a sense of justice and desert, a sense of righteousness so entitled, so exquisite that only the suffering of another can produce it. And here, I think, cruelty involves a kind of empathy, likely an imaginary empathy, and imagining of the other and its degradation, of what could hurt it, or even what it enjoys and why it so deserves to suffer.

And it seems that cruelty may well involve empathy in another sense--the fellow feeling of the cruel. There is more to cruelty than the specific pleasures of the sadist, but the sexual dimension here should alert us to the fact that cruelty is a matter of enjoyment. That is, I don't think that cruelty is well understood when it is pathologized, treated as an individual aberration, reduced to the activities of the criminal or the insane. On the contrary, cruelty is social, a skill, a way of interacting in groups, of reproducing the standards of the group by securing compliance, a pecking order, and, righteousness. High school--at least in the US--a theater of cruelty. The virulent strain of Evangelical-Fundamentalist-Christian Dominionism--a system for the production of the righteous through channeled expressions of cruelty. It should come as no surprise that the LaHaye-Jenkins Left Behind series celebrates a wrathful, violent, warrior Christ. One ready to smite, melt, annihilate. Most reality television? Doses of acceptable cruelty--ever pushing the bar of the acceptable--transfixing us with the expressions of cruelty, giving us our little kicks of enjoyment (good thing those pathetic money hungry yuppies on The Apprentice were fired, they deserved it, the bastards).

The cruel are always more interesting than their victims--and indeed, they don't need victims to testify to their cruelty. To say otherwise, to presume the victim, would somehow premise cruelty on the resilence of another, on what another could take, or was aware of, even. This, I think is a mistake. Cruelty is an attribute of a subject (individual or collective, like a system, group, or ideology). We can be transfixed (a sign of enjoyment) by images of the cruel, thinking their cruel thoughts, making their cruel plans, having their cruel ideas.

The expression 'cruel indifference' seems to capture an intuition involving cruelty, namely, that the cruel are unaffected by, indifferent to the suffering of another. We might think here of indifference to suffering in Dafur, to starvation and disease, to AIDS, to poverty, to the unbearably obvious realities of global capital. Indifference, it seems to me, is a product of cruelty, a by-product of the righteous entitlement cruelty secures. Indifference is a kind of shield, precisely that protection from vulnerability cruelty seeks. Cruelty holds it together. Indifference may be best understood as a kind of staged fiction concealing enjoyment. Perhaps the greater the indifference, the more successful the cruelty.

Comments

[Patrick J. Mullins]

These are all interesting and meaningful thoughts, but necessarily are too complex to be fully taken in--because of the different perceptions of what is cruelty or indifference in the 'smaller,' less obvious cases.

I'll just remark on reality TV, that I am definitely indifferent to the fate of anyone--producer, network, 'idea by' person, 'sadistic' decision-maker, and (when any) contestants--that takes part in such proceedings. People who have gone the route of reality TV have already reduced their sensibilities to total insincerity, that even when they win they're losers; more like a dishwater reduction than a meat glaze. Especially offensive is 'American Idol' where American popular song has been reduced to just another sport. Inevitable--since I remember people in the late 80's already talking about 'ice dancing' as if it were on a par with serious dance--but thoroughtly corrupt. So in reality TV, the 'sadists' don't even get their sadistic pleasure, because there really isn't any way to care in such a vacuum, making everyone involved equal (or less.) Real artists don't go there, and anyone who has at least some talent quickly loses it just by the environment of totalitarian crassness.

[pebird]

I agree with Patrick that this is a complex subject - we are all capable of cruelty - some/many of us are relatively successful at holding it back. Verbally, sarcasm can be a form of cruelty - the lashing back. Cruelty is some kind of release - a way to remake the world without concern for what that world ends up being.

I slightly disagree with Patrick on American Idol - this is media cruelty par excellence - the point isn't the winners, the show would not exist if it wasn't for the pathetic displays that would never be shown in a legitimate contest. You can feel the entire audience jouissance when this occurs. I saw the show once and had to take a shower after.

Jodi, you have a good theme here - I'm not so sure that the cruel don't need victims to testify to their cruelty, not exactly sure what that means.

I've always thought of cruelty as a disavowal of another's subjectivity. So, I need to redefine empathy to make this consistent with your discussion. Anyway, keep it going, very engrossing.

[chris robinson]

Wonderful reflection, Jodi. At the end of The Stranger, Camus has Meursault reflecting on the "benign" or "gentle" indifference of the universe from his prison cell. The sentence and the image are great, and I think Camus must have been very proud when he came up with this neat combination of words. But Camus was a great thinker who imposed his critical powers on his on works. He spent the rest of his life, in essays and novels, speeches and journal entries, showing that indifference is never benign. Cruel indifference is a redundancy. Indifference is at the core of cruelty.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

pebird--I'll confess I've never even seen the show, and only read specifics about it in Stephen Holden's article on 77-year-old Barbara Cook at the Carlyle, who I will hear in a few weeks. (Middle age is not literal-old, but I assure you I am an old-fogey already, even though I swore I would never be.)

Even so, the audience bloodthirstiness notwithstanding, the point I had in mind which may or may not still stand up (you can be the judge of that) is that I assumed the winners loved the audience automatically upon winning, and the losers, who now hate them, WOULD have automatically loved them had such audience not insisted upon such high standards...But it may also be true that, just because they are enclosed in a mechanized bubble does not make it less violent. Somehow, the fact that nobody involved with the proceedings is aware of the WORTHLESSNESS of all of it made the question of cruelty and indifference in this one example seem less relevant--so that I was able to identify a reaction of indifference in myself since they had somehow excluded their existences. Sorry to overdo this detail, but all the others will require a lot more thought on my part, insofar as on first reading I tend to automatically agree with all of them.

[Jodi]

Thanks, ya'll, for your comments. Not only are they encouraging, but they are enormously helpful in pushing me in directions to refine the ideas I'm just now sketching. The exchange on 'indifference' suggests to me that all indifference isn't cruel. So, Patrick's indifference to reality tv could mean that he is not taken in, part of, this aspect of the culture of cruelty. It doesn't interpellate him as one of the cruel. (Something similar might be a Roman aghast and disgusted by gladitorial spectacles.) So, maybe some kind of indifference is benign? Or maybe what Patrick is suggesting is disgust rather than something even remotely akin to cruelty? So, I guess I think that there are kinds of indifference that are not cruel--I'm indifferent about meals, for example, while my partner likes 3 squares a day (plus snacks).

On the presence of a victim: my effort to distance my account from one that focuses on victims might be a mistake. At this point, the worth of the approach, to me, is that it is not part of a therapeutic discourse or current emphases on victims rights (as in the discussion around the death penality that sees relatives of the deceived as themselves victims with rights to what I will now call revenge, blood, and a pound of flesh but which they call justice; perhaps in the culture of cruelty, these two things are the same...) Also, because I am interested in how cruelty enables a shoring up a subjectivity unable to address or respond to vulnerability in itself, it seems appropriate to focus on the subject, rather than victim.

Finally, and because I'm now really into this theme and will keep on it for a while, I did some research today and got some of the work by a major political theorist, the only who has said much about cruelty, Judith Shklar (Richard Rorty takes up some of her themes as well). Shklar holds that a repugnance for cruelty is at the heart of liberalism. Anchored as it is in a defense of liberalism, Shklar's view emphasizes individual rights as a kind of protection or defense against cruelty. My thought is that cruelty produces the liberal subject and thus that a rights approach, anchored in the victim, fails from the outset. But this is still an intuition that I hope to defend properly in a few days.

[John Reeve]

"Anchored as it is in a defense of liberalism, Shklar's view emphasizes individual rights as a kind of protection or defense against cruelty. My thought is that cruelty produces the liberal subject and thus that a rights approach, anchored in the victim, fails from the outset."

I'm glad that you are suspicious of the relationship between cruelty and indifference; wrote a big ol' lot of words on this, but decided not to post it.

Anyhow,

the gist of what I had written was that indifferece is a kind of protection against cruelty: it allows the cruel to justify their cruel actions because they conform to a shared and social picture of necessity.

Literally, the cruel are in-deferral of their moral judegement to a social understandig of necessity for which no person could take responsibility.

Intuitively, I feel that the connection between indifference and cruelty is that "indifference" is the indifference to an objectively less cruel option, justified by an appeal to necessity based in the social.

The "objectively less cruel option" is a necessary feature of cruelty, at least insofar as part of cruelty is the cruel actor's recognition of the cruel act.

This indicates that there could be different types of cruelty, each analyzed in terms of how people jusitfy the "objectively less cruel option."

{additional blah,blah,blah cut out}

[Alphonsevanworden]

"Anchored as it is in a defense of liberalism, Shklar's view emphasizes individual rights as a kind of protection or defense against cruelty. My thought is that cruelty produces the liberal subject and thus that a rights approach, anchored in the victim, fails from the outset."

You may find interesting the guillotine literature of the late 18th c. also, which support your pov very neatly in showing that the individual anecdotal perspective - let's not make the condemned suffer on the rope, that's uncivilized and archaic - is always accompanied by a parallel perspective championing social/state cruelty as necessary terror; the appeal of the latter is assumed and present even in the stanches liberal humanists seeking the reform of penal practises and the abolition of the death penalty.

Dr. Cabanis:

"If my notes have given consolation to those persons who are troubled in their imaginations and their hearts, with regard to the final moments of their executed relatives and friends, I will have achieved my principal goal. If the physiologists against whom I battle come to substitute for the guillotine a manner of death as mild ["doux"] but more imposing, better capable of making a strikng impression on the spectators ["plus capable de frapper les spectateurs"], and which better observes the respect owing to man, in the condemned man, I will bless their efforts. Although, in every other circumstance, I regard them as proceeding wrongly. But I will bless, above all, our legislators, when they find the power to abolish a punishment which I have always considered a great social crime, and which, to my mind, never averted any [crime]." [Notes on executions by guillotine]

[chris robinson]

Don't forget Stephen White on cruelty and postmodernism.

[kevin]

don't let the bastards grind you down

http://tinyurl.com/a7zkp

[Jodi]

Chris, thanks--I had forgotten (if I ever knew!). Is there something in the book he has with postmodernism in the title? Do you recall what he does with cruelty?

[kevin]

john -
i'm taken in by what you said, that there's still a remnant difference between 'indifference' and 'cruelty'. but do you mean indifference itself is justified in the social, or objectivity ('the objectively less cruel') is? i'd like to know what you mean to qualify, but to me, this 'indeterminacy' (or indifference to determination) is central to the issue of cruelty, indifference and objectivity. i would go further and say cruelty necessarily shields and 'protects' itself from itself, is indifferent to itself, that cruelty as a pathos (or pathology) banalizes cruelty itself, a gesture that is still necessarily cruel; it still *subjects* cruelty (indifference, apathy, avolition etc) to mythical humors and metastasizing differences when it is an objective (pre-discursive, pre-subjective) passion. (ie it's not as in the condescendingly optimistic view that the cruel 'deep down' feel bad and need to defer their conscience in the name of a necessary social contingency, and indifference is merely a face (well, it is), but that in cruelty, the 'face' (opposed to the fold) is all there is, which is the very feature of the cruel.) so yeah, i disagree w/ deleuze - and to invert one of his own analogies, difference *is* like lightning emerging from yet still connected to the high cloud of indifference. i'd like to read what you wrote originally.

[kevin]

also, pebird said cruelty is disavowal of another's subjectivity; i would say cruelty is the form of the other's objectivity.

ps this is not the kevin who posted the link.

[Brad]

Re: Alphonse's comment about the guillotine literature of the 18th century, I would also encourage you to watch (if you've not already) the documentary about the rise and fall of the Fred Leuchter, Jr., Mister Death. Leuchter is more famous now for being actively (albeit naively) complicit with Holocaust deniers; prior to that, however, he was the innovator of a more 'humane' electric chair, and other various devices of capital punishment. The documentary is very much in line with your current enquiry.

[Brad]

A good review of the documentary here:

http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2000/01/14/mrdeath/index.html

[Jodi]

Brad, thanks for the heads up--will look for the documentary.