Put Cruelty First

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To oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the patriotic motive is foolish, because the same motive may heed the drumbeat of our invasion of others. To oppose the death penalty out of pity for the victim is insufficient, because the soft person is unstable and easily becomes a bully in a mob of bullies. War and legal execution of criminals are acts of violence on different orders, but they share the same element of cruelty, and so must be hated by the genuine liberal.

This is just one lesson I took away from reading Judith N. Shklar's 1984 book Ordinary Vices, recommended to me by a dear friend. Born in Riga, Latvia, of Jewish parents, she fled persecution during World War II with her family to Canada. Later, she became the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Government Department. Ordinary Vices is written with an eye not on fellow academics but on the ordinary reader. To our current preoccupation with the oppressiveness of political structures and social norms, Shklar counterposes, it seems to me, a private ethics that must have public consequences. 

In defense of liberalism as the fear of cruelty, she writes in the introduction of Ordinary Vices:

"Since the eighteenth century, clerical and military critics of liberalism have pictured it as a doctrine that achieves its public goods, peace, prosperity, and security by encouraging private vice. Selfishness in all its possible forms is said to be its essence, purpose, and outcome. This, it is said now as then, is inevitable once martial virtue and the discipline imposed by God are discarded. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. The very refusal to use public coercion to impose credal unanimity and uniform standards of behavior demands an enormous degree of self-control. Tolerance consistently applied is more difficult and morally more demanding than repression. Moreover, the liberalism of fear, which makes cruelty the first vice, quite rightly recognize that fear reduces us to mere reactive units of sensation and that this does impose a public ethos on us. One begins with what is to be avoided, as Montaigne feared being afraid most of all. Courage is to be prized, since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats, both physical and moral. This is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining, far too much so for those who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom. The habits of freedom are developed, moreover, both in private and in public, and a liberal character can readily be imagined. It is, however, by definition not to be forced or even promoted by the use of political authority. That does not render the tasks of liberalism any easier, but it does not undermine its ethical structure."

Jee Leong Koh
April 21, 2022