Cruelty A Book About Us – Maggie Schein

He responded by acknowledging my situation but saying he couldn’t rescue me from it. He did exhort me, though, to try to make plainly clear that my hopelessness/helplessness is a necessary consequence of staring at the facts fully. I hope by now it is clear that I think our understanding of what kind of being we are, of our “kind,” does begin with us acknowledg- ing our anxiety at being and our uncertainty at belonging; acknowledg- ing that there is a tension between the pressure to understand more (driven by a sense that that will alleviate our anxiety and uncertainty) and the utter fatigue and helpless that such an endeavor entails.

What I am still after is what cruelty is itself. What the facets of it are and how they reflect us. Those are, basically, our initial queries. What about us, basically or essentially, are we looking at when we look our- selves through the lens of cruelty and us as the only creatures who can legitimately be guilty of it? And, though I hate to make this explicit because of all the demons it can unleash: if cruelty is specifically and inti- mately human, and to each of us our own, neither divine, nor fully ster- ilizable or isolatable through reason or objectivity, that is, it belongs to us, who is to judge and against what?

These are the foci of questions I try to hold central. Coetzee’s response comforted me and reminded me that it really is important that we look together, that we don’t shield ourselves with abstractions, and that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. So, play this game with me a bit longer, taking cruelty as a whole lens compressing our vision of our kind. I am not sure we can understand what cruelty is, what the ingredients of cruel acts are, unless we also and in tandem look at what we are through the lens of the fact that we have a concept of cruelty at all, which do we through looking at acts that we call “cruel.”

It does seem that a sober take on cruelty pocks the smoothness of the territory we want “humanity” to possess as a morally valenced descrip- tor of a category or kind. What we think of the kind of beings we are both individually and as part of a species called “human” are precursors to our actions.

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Maggie Schein Independent Scholar Beaufort, SC, USA This book is dedicated to the guardians of stories and communications that transform us: parents, teachers, witnesses, seekers, doers, tellers, those who see, who show, who mesmerize, who walk with us, who talk with us, those who exist in awe, and to “the little prince” in each of us. —and to the Pilot who drew a Sheep for the Little Prince. —and to the Little Prince’s Rose and to the endless question: “Is it yes, or is it no?”

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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