Bullying, whether flagrant or discreet, is a very prominent strand in social interaction: the nasty end of the endless human endeavour to get other people to behave as we would wish. We may like to think that we ourselves bully only on behalf of higher values (sharpening the exercise of the mind, deepening the awareness of God in the spiritually resistant, winning an argument or a struggle in which we are confident that right is firmly on our side). But those who can bully with any proficiency (those who are not irretrievably feeble) are apt to bully largely out of habit. We may like to think that we, at any rate, are cruel mainly to avoid worse outcomes: that only the compulsively cruel – the genuinely depraved – are cruel for the sake of being so. But cruelty has a constant tendency to get out of hand. In the areas of human practice where the capacity for cruelty is most directly engaged – in policing, in imprisonment, above all in warfare – the control of cruelty (even the control of murderousness) is always pretty insecure. In such a milieu there will always be many who go too far, whose actions vastly exceed any possible justification, even when the practices themselves are relatively easy to justify. There cannot be armies or police forces or gaols without cruelty. (This is a matter better treated by Augustine a millennium and a half ago than by any subsequent author …) Least of all there cannot be wars without cruelty. But there are very good reasons (and more than sufficient causes) why armies and police forces and even gaols and wars are still with us today.[1]
John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason (2000)
[1]
John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London:
Basic Books, 2000), p. 60. John Dunn’s
extraordinary words here are not limited to this short excerpt. Please see his following paragraphs as they appear in his
book.
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