See also Anonymous: beowuLF; Austen, Jane:
eMMa; Baldwin, James: Go teLL it on the
Mountain; Black Elk: bLack eLk speaks; Brad-
ford, William: oF pLyMouth pLantation; Coet-
zee, J. M.: waitinG For the barbarians; Conrad,
Joseph: heart oF darkness; Crane, Stephen:
open boat, the; Forster, E. M.: passaGe to
india, a; Gaines, Ernest J.: autobioGraphy oF
Miss Jane pittMan, the, and Lesson beFore
dyinG, a; García Márquez, Gabriel: one hun-
dred years oF soLitude; Hardy, Thomas: tess
oF the d’urberviLLes; Harte, Bret: “Luck of
Roaring Camp, The”; Hawthorne, Nathaniel:
house oF the seven GabLes, the; McCullers,
Carson: MeMber oF the weddinG, the; Miller,
Arthur: crucibLe, the; Mistry, Rohinton:
Fine baLance, a; Naylor, Gloria: woMen oF
brewster pLace, the; Orwell, George: aniMaL
FarM; Paine, Thomas: “Age of Reason, The,” and
coMMon sense; Shakespeare, William: tweLFth
niGht; Silko, Leslie Marmon: aLManac oF the
dead; Steinbeck, John: pearL, the; Synge, John
Millington: pLayboy oF the western worLd,
the; Twain, Mark: adventures oF toM sawyer,
the; Wharton, Edith: aGe oF innocence, and
ethan FroMe.
FURTHER READING
Bauman, Zygmunt. Community: Seeking Safety in an
Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
Hilde, Thomas C. “The Cosmopolitan Project: Does
the Internet Have a Global Public Face?” In The
Internet in Public Life, edited by Verna V. Gehring,
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
121–130.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
New York: Penguin, 1987.
Tonnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Rajender Kaur
cruelty
The idea of cruelty, for most readers, calls to mind
actions or behaviors that inflict suffering in ways
that are especially coldhearted, depraved, or indif-
ferent. Acts or words considered cruel seem to go
beyond what is merely unkind or simply violent
in a way that harms the victim irreparably. Cruelty
can be physical or mental; it can be inflicted upon
human beings or upon animals; it can take the form
of large-scale horrors such as the Holocaust or the
September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade
Center; or it can involve only two people, as in cases
of domestic abuse. The binding factor in all of these
cases is the intent of the perpetrator. To willfully
hurt others and to feel indifferent at the suffering
of one’s fellow human beings, to enjoy or delight in
the infliction of pain—these are acts of cruelty. Acts
of cruelty such as torture, domestic abuse, terrorism,
and genocide profoundly alter the victims’ sense of
the world, how it works, and their place in it. Perpe-
trators attempt to take away the victims’ humanity,
to reduce them to an object in a way that simple
violence does not.
At first glance, the definition of cruelty might
seem straightforward, but upon further consider-
ation, determining what is cruel and what is not is
not so easy. Seneca, a Roman philosopher from the
first century, wrote that the factor that determines
cruelty rests in the mind of the perpetrator in exact-
ing punishment. Excessive punishment or torture
was, for Seneca, the opposite of clemency, or mercy,
and leaders should avoid it. Seneca wrote his treatise
De Clementia to the Roman emperor Nero, to whom
he was an adviser. He encouraged the cultivation
of mercy in the emperor, in what was probably an
attempt to move him away from the brutality of his
predecessors.
St. Augustine (354–430), one of the most impor-
tant figures in the development of Western Chris-
tianity, went beyond Seneca’s theories and wrote of
cruelty as a reflexive evil that destroys its inflicter
and should be judged by its effect on him or her.
What is important here is that Augustine explored
the connection between the body and the soul,
understanding that cruelty goes beyond the physical
pain it causes and alters the way both victim and
victimizer see the world. In Summa Theologica, St.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) relied heavily on Sen-
eca’s work when he discussed cruelty, believing that
“harshness of mind” in the inflicter of cruelty was
the determining factor. For Thomas Aquinas, inten-
tion was all-important; in other words, an excessive
punishment was certainly unjust, but not necessarilycruelty 21