Showing papers on "Cruelty published in 1983"

For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

Abstract: Alice Miller explores the sources of violence within ourselves and the way these are encouraged by orthodox childrearing practices. Challenging the way in which we rationalise punishment and coercion as being for the child's 'own good', she illuminates the cost in compassion and humanity in later life, both in the private and public domain. Her message is clear: 'people whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood; will feel no need to harm another person or themselves.

War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience

Abstract: T At HE character of all these [Iroquois] Nations is warlike and cruel," wrote Jesuit missionary Paul LeJeune in i657. "The chief virtue of these poor Pagans being cruelty, just as mildness is that of Christians, they teach it to their children from their very cradles, and accustom them to the most atrocious carnage and the most barbarous spectacles."1 Like most Europeans of his day, Le Jeune ignored his own countrymen's capacity for bloodlust and attributed the supposedly unique bellicosity of the Iroquois to their irreligion and uncivilized condition. Still, his observations contain a kernel of truth often overlooked by our more sympathetic eyes: in ways quite unfamiliar and largely unfathomable to Europeans, warfare was vitally important in the cultures of the seventeenth-century Iroquois and their neighbors. For generations of Euro-Americans, the significance that Indians attached to warfare seemed to substantiate images of bloodthirsty savages who waged war for mere sport. Only in recent decades have ethnohistorians discarded such shibboleths and begun to study Indian wars in the same economic and diplomatic frameworks long used by students of European conflicts. Almost necessarily, given the weight of past prejudice, their work has stressed similarities between Indian and European warfare.2 Thus neither commonplace stereotypes nor scholarly efforts to combat them have left much room for serious consideration of the possibility that the non-state societies of aboriginal North America may have waged war for different-but no less

The Society for the Suppression of Vice and its Early Critics, 1802–1812

Abstract: The Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in I802. It held its inaugural meeting at Gray's-Inn coffee house on 22 March of that year' after several months of preliminary negotiation.2 The particular forms of vice which the founders of the society selected for suppression they eventually listed as follows: profanation of the Lord's Day and profane swearing; publication of blasphemous, licentious and obscene books and prints; selling by false weights and measures; keeping of disorderly public houses, brothels and gaming houses; procuring; illegal lotteries; cruelty to animals.3 In their early years of activity members of the society had to face a considerable amount of hostility and ridicule. This much of the society's history is reasonably well known, partly as a result of research into 'the origins of Victorian morality',4 partly as a result of research into the urban and labour history of 'the age of the industrial revolution'.5 Yet existing accounts of the Vice Society's early activities remain vague, incomplete and sometimes contradictory, even on basic issues. Who, for example, founded the society? (Historians have commonly, though not unanimously, assumed the founders to be evangelicals acting under guidance, or at least inspiration, from William Wilberforce and the 'Clapham Sect'.)6 More generally, what were the motives of the founders? Why did they choose to define vice in the way that they

For Your Own Good. Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. London (Faber and Faber) 1983.

Abstract: Alice Miller explores the sources of violence within ourselves and the way these are encouraged by orthodox childrearing practices. Challenging the way in which we rationalise punishment and coercion as being for the child's 'own good', she illuminates the cost in compassion and humanity in later life, both in the private and public domain. Her message is clear: 'people whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood; will feel no need to harm another person or themselves.

Spencer and the Liberal Idea of Community

Abstract: As the originator of the term, "survival of the fittest," Herbert Spencer has come to symbolize the harsh excesses of the liberal state. This unflattering portrait emanates from two sources. First, Spencer's political ideas read like a handbook for doctrinaire libertarians: maximum liberty for the individual, unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, and minimum governmental interference. Second, Spencer's theory of social evolution in his eyes grants his political ideas scientific validity, but it also presents those ideas in a most inhumane and anticommunitarian light. And yet, in an obscure editorial in the Times, this apologist for only the "most fit" of evolutionary forms writes of the "horribly cruel practice of boiling lobsters alive." Suggesting a more humane method of killing these primitive creatures, Spencer concludes true to form that "legislative coercion is not needful to enforce adoption of this method." Rather, consumers of lobster should form a voluntary organization aimed at boycotting lobsters not treated according to his humanitarian proposal.' This is more than an amusing and perhaps surprising anecdote, for within it are contained many of the central ideas of Spencer's social and political thought. His concern with "inhumanity" to lobsters is not unexpected given the basis of his social and political ideas. All of Spencer's thought draws from two essential premises: first, that all biological organisms are subject to the laws of natural evolution. This evolutionary process is progressive in a qualitative and moral sense, and runs through individual members of a species as the units of selection. Included in the list of biological organisms participating in the evolutionary process is society. Second, callous or gratuitous interference with the natural workings of evolution is both dangerous and immoral, and this holds true regardless of whether the context is of coercive governmental social programs or capricious cruelty to lower evolutionary forms such as lobsters.

Do Animals Have a Right to Life

Abstract: The question of whether nonhuman animals have a right to life has less practical importance than one might think, for even if they have no such right, the slaughter of nonhumans can still be condemned on other grounds. The principal human activities that involve killing animals—hunting, trapping, meat production, and scientific research—all involve such cruelty that they should be rejected for that reason alone.2 If, in addition, the animals have a right to life that is violated, the already conclusive case against those practices is simply made stronger. Nevertheless, the question in my title does have some practical importance, for there are some cases of painless killing not covered by the moral prohibition on cruelty. And of course it has considerable theoretical interest, not only for those concerned with animal welfare, but for all those interested more generally in the concept of the right to life.

Eliot's Cats: Serious Play behind the Playful Seriousness

Abstract: Hodge treats the cats as object lessons. The Old Gumbie Cat, for example, is "damned . . . because she does not realize the depth of man's depravity." Practical Cats testifies, then, to Eliot's "conviction that catkind/mankind is prone to crudity, cruelty, and violence, and is beyond reformation"; secondarily, it is a "quest for order."31 wish to defend Practical Cats against such overseriousness, and yet suggest that it is one of Eliot's serious undertakings, a book that makes sense in terms of his career as a poet. Very few students of Prufrock and TL· Waste Land would argue that those poems moralize; in any case, the charge cannot be successfully prosecuted against Practical Cats with the lines that Hodge quotes, as the subsequent lines make clear: "some are better, some are worse—I But all may be described in verse" (CPP, p. 169; my italics). Old Possum here clearly disavows any intention to praise or

The Clouded Mirror

Abstract: Misdeeds and moral illusions keep close company. Acts of cruelty may pass for something better where the victims can be seen as either undeserving or of no moral account. In turn, low estimations of another’s moral worth do little to discourage hostile conduct. The long history of injustice to women and the sordid traditions of racial and ethnic discrimination amply illustrate this pattern. In each case a system of degrading stereotypes has served both to legitimate and to stimulate immoral conduct. Somewhat less recognized, but no less potent are the stereotypes that shape and are shaped by the traditions of human cruelty to animals.

Editorial: Child Protection: A Journey Into History 1

Abstract: This essay traces the historical development of child protection from the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 to the passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and ...

The Use of the Grotesque in the Plays of Edward Bond.

Abstract: A contemporary English dramatist, Edward Bond writes plays that have often been controversial because of their use of cruelty, violence, and other forms of bizarre behavior which can be considered grotesque. The grotesque is a concept originating in the fifteenth century as a term referring to primitive artwork combining various forms to create a fanciful design. The term broadened in the eighteenth century to include literature and drama. Possessing a negative connotation, it referred to elements which were ridiculous, incongruous, absurd, or deformed. The Romanticists of the nineteenth century favored the grotesque as a valid aesthetic element which acted as a foil to the sublime and which created variety and contrast. In the twentieth century the grotesque becomes a prevalent force in drama. Theorists recognize that it elicits a dual response of fear and humor by juxtaposing incongruous and incompatible components. Its major purpose is to challenge existent norms and standards by shocking an audience into an awareness of the arbitrary nature of reality. Bond uses the grotesque to make the audience recognize weaknesses in the social structure. People turn into gro­ tesques when victimized by a harsh and unjust political and

Terror in Russian Culture and Literary Imagination

Abstract: From the seventeenth through the twentieth century, torture, cruelty, and violence have prospered in the Russian state. Terror has been applied both by the authorities and their opponents and has become a naturalized, domesticated fact of Russian life. In the twentieth century, terrorism has grown into one of the major functions of the state, beginning with the "Red Terror" in 1918 and continuing under Stalin. It has manifested itself in the imprisonment in labor camps of entire classes and nationalities of people and has taken the form of arrests, executions, mass deportations, creations of artificial famines and, ultimately, of random, arbitrary violence. It would not be an exaggeration to state that since 1918 tens of millions of people have died as a direct result of terrorism by the Russian state. The subject of terror in Russian literature can be approached in many ways. I shall leave out of the account some important aspects of the theme1 in order to concentrate, first, on Russian culture's traditional reactions to terror, and, second, on salient literary depictions of terror in the last three hundred years. I conclude by noting that the insights to be gleaned from this cultural/literary tradition may be useful in resolving the problem of terror in Russia. To say this does not mean that one is anti-Russian. Russian culture has supplied us with treasures of literature and music and many other positive contributions to our understanding of man. Our topic is terror, however, not poetry or warmth of human contact, and we must face the facts as we see them.

Things Do Go Wrong (and Right)

Abstract: We do our theological thinking as concrete, historical human beings in medias res. We cannot start von oben, from God's perspective, looking down upon the world and history as from a weather satellite. We begin, instead, von unten, in history and as historical beings. We are not watchers on the hill, observing the human beings struggling through the valley below. Nor do we begin "once upon a time," in illo tempore, but in these days, with the perplexities and exigencies by which our tasks are set. The conditions of our thinking are well stated by Whitehead: "The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience."' We should add the qualification that for Whitehead there is more to immediate experience than meets the eye of presentational immediacy. The depths of the past are present in it to such an extent that immediate experience is virtually inexhaustible. Also, it is pregnant with anticipation. Immediate experience is historical, internally related to every item in its past actual world. Theology, hence, should both start as reflection on lived experience and test all theological concepts for adequacy to that experience. If it does so, it will not have a "problem" of evil and will, at most, encounter that problem only as a formal problem, that is, a problem in deductive reasoning that started with the wrong premises. Theologies that begin with lived experience recognize the reality of evil as a given, as something concretely encountered in history, and as something from which escape or deliverance is sought. Jewish theology begins with the reality of slavery in Egypt and subsequent deliverance in the Exodus. Christian theology begins by facing the cruelty of crucifixion and oppression at the hands of a Roman procurator and declares that such evil powers do not have the last word in history. Latin American theologies start with an analysis of poverty and dependence and articulate a theology for liberation. Black theology gets off the ground by describing a heritage of slavery and racism and seeks within