Putting Callousness First
The Apparent Power of the Hardened Heart
Years ago, the political theorist Judith Shklar examined what it might mean to “put cruelty first” among humanity's vices. After contrasting Montaigne's revulsion from cruelty to Machiavelli's advocacy of it as a means of governing “efficiently,” she came to a bracing conclusion:
Nevertheless, the irrelevance of goodness in politics did impress [Montaigne] deeply. Let princes be just; if they tried to be magnanimous, they would only be arbitrary. Moreover, society did not depend on personal virtue for its survival. A society of complete villains would be glued together just as well as ours, and would be no worse in general. Not morality, but physical need and laws, even the most ferocious, keep us together. After years of religious strife, Montaigne’s mind was a miniature civil war, mirroring the perpetual confusion of the world. But his jumble of political perceptions reflected not intellectual failure, but a refusal to accept either the comforts of political passivity or of Machiavelli’s platitudes.
Our society is no longer “glued together” very well, and it may well be ruled by “complete villains,” but what impresses me about those villains’ approach to government is not so much their advocacy of cruelty as their indifference to its consequences.
Whether cruel government is effective or efficient government is of no moment to such people.
Mass deportations are certainly cruel, but they are also inefficient, doing damage to the collective economy as well as to the private well-being of the afflicted individuals and families.
The closing of US borders to students of designated “undesirable” nationalities is certainly cruel, but it, too, is likely doing great damage to the collective intelligence on which future prosperity depends; it is hard to comprehend as effective governance. Even Machiavelli would have recoiled.
The wanton disruption of venerable alliances forces spurned allies to turn elsewhere for support; it is the opposite of an efficient means of promoting national security.
The recourse (reported by Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker) to unprecedented and likely illegal “third-country removals” of political refugees who cannot be deported to their home countries because of threatened persecution or execution “fits this Administration’s general pattern—draconian, cruel processes that create a spectacle and coerce people into leaving of their own accord.” But its “efficiency” as a means of controlling US borders is nil. Montaigne would have gasped, but Machiavelli would have mocked the pointlessness of such depravity.
What emerges time and again in this regime's pronunciamentos is thus not so much cruelty as blithe indifference to its consequences. The ruler's harshest words are treated as if they have only momentary rather than enduring effect. Even before Trump took office, his éminence grise Stephen Miller announced that “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” Here the essential word is “spectacular”: it is the show that matters, not the aftermath. Efficiency is not the goal of cruelty, as it was for Machiavelli; what counts is to be seen as powerful, not to use power to achieve a well-defined (and possibly evil) result, to articulate and then implement a (possibly cruel) policy. This is a regime for which the end of politics is not policy but police.
The other day, President Trump was asked what would happen if Ukraine's President Zelensky failed to embrace the so-called “US peace plan.”1 In that case, Trump replied, Zelensky can just “continue to fight his little heart out.”
Can one imagine a more callous way of phrasing the intention to abandon Ukraine to its fate at the hands of the Russians? As usual, the inimitable Trump style manages to condense in just a handful of words a world's worth of contempt. On hearing these words in isolation, would anyone guess that this was not a hard-hearted father indifferent to his child's bawling but rather the President of the United States condemning an ostensible ally to defeat at the hands of an implacable enemy?
Here we have political callousness in its purest form: words—he can “continue to fight his little heart out”—are aligned not to achieve a result or to state a goal but to mask the actual consequences of their enactment, namely, condemning a grievously wounded nation to continue a fight likely rendered futile by the withdrawal of US support. Callousness is cruelty compounded; it is insensitivity to the pain caused by cruelty, disregard for the suffering of others. It is possible to be cruel without being callous; there are tyrants who have reveled in the cruelty they inflict or who have excused it as necessary to some essential end. But the cruelty we witness now on a daily basis is a shamefaced cruelty, a cruelty that dares not speak its name. It masquerades instead behind some expediently erected principle such as America First and everyone else last. Empathy is derided as weakness, selfishness exalted as virtue.
Among political evils under contemporary conditions I therefore put callousness first, because in the society of the spectacle it is the condition of all other political evils. The callous leader pretends that the evil he does, the cruelty he inflicts, has no consequence other than to confirm his own centrality. Image alone matters. Truth, in the sense of the correspondence of that image to something outside itself, is bludgeoned beyond all recognition.2
And note, as Heather Cox Richardson has done, that the “complete villains” who comprise our current government cannot agree among themselves whether the supposed “peace plan” is a US plan, a joint US-Russian plan, or a Putin-dictated wish list to be passed on to Ukraine.
See today’s column by my friend Michael Tomasky.