Humans are a unique species in many ways but one unpleasant aspect of that uniqueness is our tendency—one might say addiction—to cruelty. A cat can seem cruel when it toys with a mouse and a lion when it claws down a gazelle and proceeds to eat it alive. The lion, however, is obeying an evolutionary imperative, it must kill to eat and it does so using the means at its disposal, its claws and teeth. You cannot say a lion is ‘pitiless’, its actions are a product of instinct. The cat may seem more problematical as it plays with a mouse, tossing it up in the air, letting it run a while before pouncing again. We cannot see very well into the mind of a cat, but since all cats hunt and act in the same way, it is fair to assume their behaviour is instinctual, too. To say that cats ‘play’ with their prey, therefore, is a resort to metaphor.
In humans it is otherwise. Our species is the only one having a brain and a mind capable of articulating moral categories of right and wrong, of behaviour that is acceptable to society and behaviour that is not. It assumes we are responsible for our actions, which is why we have laws, and why individuals can be arraigned before a court of law when they transgress them. To put a cat on trial for torture would be absurd. The concept of cruelty implies free will and intention. The cat’s lawyer would plead ‘instinct’ and the case would be dismissed.
The one possible exception here is the chimpanzee, with whom we share 96 percent of our genetic make-up. In The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Jane Goodall describes behaviour, including assault and battery, killing, and proto-war between different bands, which is remarkably similar to human behaviour and which seems, from external observation, to have a strong element of intentionality. Even though taxonomists have assigned us to different genera, Pan and Homo, the affinity of our respective genomes suggests at least that that aspects of human and chimpanzee behaviour evolved from the same root stock.
However, when we speak of cruelty it is humans we mean, and it has existed as a trait in our species as far back as there is a record of our history. It can take a myriad forms, from emotional and physical cruelty between individuals, to the indiscriminate mass cruelty of dictatorships like those of Stalin and Hitler.
Always there is the question of intentionality. Humans can be cruel out of anger or malice, or simply because they enjoy hurting others. That is why state actors never have a problem recruiting torturers. Cruelty reaches intolerable peaks in mobs, and on a larger scale in armies, when the individual abandons personal responsibility, absorbed into the anger and violence of the crowd.
Shakespeare understood this very well. In Julius Caesar, the poet Cinna is on his way to Caesar’s funeral when he is overtaken by a mob looking to take revenge on Caesar’s assassins. They question him aggressively: ‘What is your name?’ ‘Whither are you going’, ‘Where do you dwell?’ ‘Answer every man directly’, ‘Ay, and briefly’, ‘Ay and wisely’. Cinna tells them he is on his way to the funeral. Then one of the mob again asks his name. ‘Truly, my name is Cinna.’ The admission is fatal. ‘Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.’ ‘I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.’ The mob is out for blood, anyone’s blood, and this is where it becomes cruel. One says ‘Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.’ Cinna tries to defend himself, tries to explain. ‘I am not Cinna the conspirator.’ ‘It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck his name out of his heart, and turn him going.’ The mob’s righteous fury reaches a crescendo, only blood, only violence will do: ‘Tear him, tear him! Come, brands, ho! Firebrands! To Brutus’, to Cassius’; burn all! Some to Decius’ house, and some to Casca’s; some to Ligarius’. Away! go!’ The scene ends: ‘Exeunt, all the Plebians, dragging off Cinna’. We are left to guess at Cinna’s fate, though that is not difficult.
Individuals in armies are often cruel in other ways and on a far larger scale. When you have been fighting an enemy who has been trying to kill you, the gates of mercy are easily closed. Unarmed prisoners of war are supposed to be treated humanely, but often they are not. Often they are simply shot. If they are taken to a prisoner-of-war camp they are frequently maltreated, even starved to death, especially when the victorious regime is a brutal dictatorship like Nazi Germany. Yet ‘civilised’ nations (among whom we naturally include ourselves) can also be guilty of cruelty on a grand scale. Torture was widespread in the British Empire. It was widespread, too, during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in prisons like Bagram and Guantánamo, and in so-called ‘black’ sites in Poland, Egypt, Myanmar, and no doubt other locations we have never learned about.
When the Wehrmacht invaded Russia, it murdered, raped and burned its way across vast swathes of the country. When the tide of war turned, German women in the path of the Red Army advance knew what was in store—rape and revenge on a horrific scale, human suffering begetting more suffering in its wake.
There must have been Russian soldiers who had pity on these defenceless women, who tried to shield and protect them, even though they were enemies; and there are instances of soldiers giving aid to wounded enemy, as if they were their own comrades. Such pity and compassion are among the noblest aspects of our nature.
Yet pity and compassion are unstable attributes which can at times lead by degrees to their opposites. Ian Garner gives an instructive example in his book Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth. Russian state media assert again and again that Ukrainian forces are using women, children, and babies as human shields, that they hunt down and kill Russian-speaking children. This is not true, but very many people in Putin’s Russia believe it because few have access to other sources of information. Ian Garner gives an example of a primary school teacher in Moscow who tells her class what she (presumably) saw on state television:
[The Ukrainians] ran toward the Russians. Then what do you think happened? One of the nationalists shot the mom from inside the building. The little boy stood up next to his mom—he was about four years old [the teacher starts to cry]. They shot him right in the head. I’ll never understand it.
The teacher believes this story and it touches her humanity. Social media are flooded with responses to similar propaganda lies, because they are believed: ‘What a tragedy [prayer emoji] God save you!’, ‘God protect you now, my children!’ But as Ian Garner shows, expressions of sympathy and compassion quickly segue into desire for vengeance, to do to the ‘child-killers’ what they are supposed to have done to innocent Russian children: ‘Nazi bastards’, ‘We don’t need to beat an enemy like this. We have to KILL them! Guys, don’t spare the prisoners.’ As Ian Garner notes: ‘Calls to save children descend into rhetoric of extreme violence and aggression that justifies—at least in the posters’ minds—a war with no limits.’ It feeds as well into the many atrocities committed by Russian soldiers, from unlimited looting to massacres like the one at Bucha.
This leads to consideration of a deep paradox in human nature. If you ask most people, what they think of cruelty, they will say it is awful. They may well say it is inhuman. This is interesting. It assumes that negative aspects of human behaviour are an aberration, we say they are in–human. To be human is to be humane, to do right by others to the best of one’s ability, and indeed most decent people try to live a right-minded life. It is, however, a falsification to suggest that the inhuman is somehow alien to our species, a breaking-in of something other, a ‘not human’ element into our psyche that distorts our behaviour. It is not. It is twinned with our better selves like a double helix that can suddenly unwind, releasing cruelties small and great. The trait is so deep in the fabric of our nature that we must accept its reality as part of us. Not to do so, is to blind ourselves to what we are. Two-faced Janus is the profoundest symbol of human nature and we can never tear one face from its opposite and partner. We must live with them both, for good and, as often, ill.