When I was thinking about what my next blog post should be, there was no lack of ideas. Should it be about the student protests, which, however sincere, lack historical perspective, or dog-, goat- and horse-shooting Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota or the Republicans’ “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” at former President Donald J. Trump’s trial in New York or the continuing wars in Ukraine and Gaza? Or how about Speaker-vacating Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene going after Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s eyelashes verbally, which led to Crockett’s sly rebuke “about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body”?
Then I had an unsettling personal experience that made me realize that what all these events and people have in common is further proof that despite the upward arc of civilization, we live in cruel world.
The world, of course, has always been a cruel place. Nature appears to be cruel. I remember an episode of PBS’ “Nature” in which a dominant zebra stallion thrashed a poor foal to death, because it sensed it was not its offspring. The mother tried to save it, but there was nothing she could do.
History has shown humanity to be no less brutal — from the philosopher-mathematician Hypatia being eviscerated and torn limb from limb, her eyes gouged out , by Christians, no less, in fifth-century Alexandria; to the drawing, quartering and beheading of traitors in Renaissance England; to the 20th century’s Holocaust.
After the horrors of World War II, it was assumed that humanity would pull itself back from the brink, rising from the ashes of Auschwitz, Dresden and Hiroshima. But despite the nuclear specter or maybe because of it, warfare has only gotten more inventive and impersonal, thanks in part to technology.
The remove and anonymity of technology has also exacerbated a culture in which savagery and brutality — verbal, physical and psychological — are not merely present and tolerated but actually celebrated and encouraged. Students don’t merely exercise their right to free speech. Some are calling for the annihilation of those who don’t agree with them. The Republicans aren’t merely supporting Trump. They’re attempting to intimidate witnesses and the jury in the Manhattan hush-money trial— while also doing an end-run around Trump’s gag order — by their presence in the courtroom and their grandstanding outside it. (I’m sure expensive Manhattan lunches and maybe a little shopping, a Broadway show, are also involved.) Former Trump employee Johnny McEntee joked that he likes to hand out fake money to the homeless so that they’re arrested when they try to use it. (He’d better be joking. Passing counterfeit money is a felony under federal law.)
But why would you say or do something so callous to people who are just poor souls? There but for the grace of God go we. And don’t get me started on Noem, who on shooting the goat realized she didn’t have enough bullets and had to get some more. In the meantime, the animal tried to get up. Even in its agony, it struggled to live. Think about that.
What’s amazing in her tone-deaf account is that she mistakes toughness for strength in a zero-sum game. But isn’t that the way of the world these days? There are leaders who are cruel out of fear and self-protection (Benjamin Netanyahu) and leaders who are cruel out of anger, hatred, spite and lust for power (Hamas, Vladimir Putin). Perhaps these categories overlap.
The question is not why people are cruel, but what should be our response to cruelty? Recently, I’ve been studying ancient Roman Stoic philosophy, whose core beliefs revolve around controlling what you can in life, namely your own character. Most of what the world pursues — wealth, fame, success, possessions — the Stoics would call “preferred indifferents.” You may want them, but they’re not essential for doing the one thing that matters, and that is leading a virtuous life.
For the Stoics, anger, hatred and violence were all types of madness, because they took reason out of the equation. But the Stoics weren’t pushovers either, training their bodies as well as their minds. Still, they took what we might consider a Christlike approach to the haters. They turned the other cheek, so to speak. And when you do that, you literally and figuratively force your opponent to play to his weakness. (Think of it this way: If someone slaps you across the face, he probably does so with the palm of his dominant hand. If you turn the other check, he now has to hit you with the back of that hand or the palm of the nondominant hand, thus displaying his weakness.)
Cruel people, the Stoics would say, are weak people. There are times when for the sake of justice and self-defense, we must engage with cruelty. But we don’t have to engage in it.