190. Cruelty vs. savagery
190. CRUELTY VS. SAVAGERY
Primitive people, including our remote ancestors, seem shockingly cruel to us. (And we probably would seem shockingly weak, soft, and self—indulgent to them.) Is this because they are closer to the animals, since “brutality” means “like brute animals”? Do we become less cruel as we evolve farther from animals (if we do)? But then a pure spirit would be least cruel of all; yet Satan is the most cruel. Are “savagery”, “brutality”, and “cruelty” the same?
Savagery and brutality take their names from a likeness to wild beasts (“brutes”) which are also described as savage. For animals of this kind attack man that they may feed on his body, and not for some motive of justice, the consideration of which belongs to reason alone. Wherefore properly speaking, brutality or savagery applies to those who in inflicting punishment have not in view a fault of the person punished but merely the pleasure they derive from a man’s torture. Consequently it is evident that it is comprised under bestiality, for such pleasure is not human but bestial. It results either from evil custom or from a corrupt nature. . . . On the other hand, cruelty not only regards the fault of the person punished, but exceeds in the mode of punishing; wherefore cruelty differs from savagery or brutality as human wickedness differs from bestiality. . . (II-II,159,2).
There is a significant difference between the violence of a wild man who has lost his reason and the cold, calculating cruelty of a tyrant. To derive pleasure simply from another’s pain, whether that pain is deserved or not, is “not human but bestial”, for the beasts know nothing of justice or injustice. On the other hand, cruelty is a form of human injustice, an excess of vengeance. Cruelty wants to exceed the amount of punishment deserved. But punishment is deserved, so there is an almost-redeeming feature in cruelty: justice, though it is justice perverted.
In one sense savagery or bestiality is worse, for it does not even participate in the good of justice in a perverted way, but sacrifices human reason entirely to animality. In another way it is cruelty that is worse, since that proceeds from deliberate reason and free choice. This does not exonerate the sin of bestiality, of course, in a human being, since a human being is not a beast and therefore must have become bestial through some fault, without or within, social or individual (“either from evil custom or from a corrupt nature”).
As our civilization becomes more sophisticated and rationalistic and less “animal”, it probably tends more to cruelty than to bestiality, which is why the bestiality of our early ancestors seems more shocking to us than it did to them.
Or perhaps our civilization is not becoming less “animal” but more. It would only be practicing what it preaches. For materialists now proliferate in academic and scientific buildings like cockroaches.