Civilized Cruelty

 Civilized Cruelty

“People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.”  

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, *The Brothers Karamazov*

We like to call ourselves the only civilized beings on this planet, as if the word itself were a moral shield. Yet Dostoyevsky’s claim that humans are “so artistically cruel” keeps troubling me: what if civilization has refined our cruelty instead of curing it. The more I think about it, the less I can equate being civilized with being humane.

When I look back at ancient history, a pattern appears. As humans learned to make better tools, store food, and shape their surroundings, they also learned to hoard and display. Objects no longer needed for survival—jewelry, rare garments, eventually whole palaces—began to mark distance between people. With that distance came a new coldness: others became scenery for someone’s comfort, or raw material for someone else’s splendor.

Violence itself is older than any city, of course; bones long before palaces already show wounds and fractures. But something changes when power controls walls, armies, treasuries, and myths to justify them. Cruelty becomes organized and even aesthetic: the staged punishment, the public execution, the carefully choreographed humiliation that tells a whole population where it stands. This is cruelty with architects, scribes, and bookkeepers.

What unsettles me is that we still use “civilized” as praise for these arrangements, as though writing, monuments, and good manners guaranteed inner kindness. Often the polished surface simply hides layers of fear and coercion, sometimes internalized as self‑control, sometimes externalized as law, prison, or war. The tiger, as Dostoyevsky notes, “only tears and gnaws”; it does not invent ceremonies of torment.

And yet I love culture. I love music, poetry, painting—those fragile attempts to say something honest and beautiful across time. If that is civilization, I want to defend it. If civilization is instead the machinery that turns surplus into hierarchy and hierarchy into “artistic” cruelty, I want no part of it. Maybe our task is to separate our love of culture from our reverence for civilization, to admit that libraries and palaces do not belong in the same moral category. To be truly civilized, if the word is to mean anything, might not be to rise above the beasts in power, but to refuse our very human talent for refined, imaginative harm.

Corinne Wesley