Both William Paca of Maryland and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia signed the United States Declaration of Independence; both owned slaves; and both died believing that the musculature of American liberty—sinewed over self-evident truths and sound laws—was preferable to the arbitrary if not tyrannical governance of a foreign despot. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence focuses not only on the idea of American liberty but also on the despotic George III, leveling offenses at him for his feckless actions toward the colonies and their inhabitants.

Read the document this holiday week; you can hear the voices ebbing and boots scuttling across the public houses of early America. The king had sent foreign mercenaries to the colonies, crossing a line into “Cruelty & Perfidity” and breaching the bonds of political allegiance. This precedent about excessive cruelty is enshrined in the Declaration. Such unremitting cruelty would require states to rise where colonies died, shuffling off their former king. 

The early post-colonialists drank deep at the well of Roman moral philosophy. For them, the idea of American liberty would always be imperiled by the cruelties of leaders or the led. Inscribed in the U.S. Constitution is a legal and ethical warning against “cruel and unusual punishments,” a moral tripwire to defend us from excesses of cruelty that might otherwise emerge in the nation.

Is waterboarding cruel? And is it cruel to separate child asylum seekers from their mothers? If deemed so, then we have already tripped the wire laid down by the Founders. Where they admonished a foreign despot, we must turn that critical gaze upon ourselves and the current state of American liberty.

But what is cruelty? 

Western civilization has danced around this question for millennia. The Roman philosopher Seneca called cruelty a particular “insanity.” Medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that cruelty is “raw, like uncooked meat.” Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza noted that “[c]ruelty … is the desire, whereby a man is impelled to injure one whom we love or pity.” The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights condemns “cruel treatment,” while psychologist Sue Grand observes that “[g]eneration after generation, mankind has turned against itself in cruelty.” Still, we never say what cruelty really is.

Though the problem of cruelty is not America’s alone, it is nested right alongside self-evident truths in our guiding national documents. We must therefore face the cruelty not just in others but also in ourselves. 

Cruelty is like a velociraptor on your flank. You’ll notice it on the periphery of moral assault, next to hate speech and incitement to violence. When, for instance, we humiliate Haiti and African nations, or denigrate Mexicans as murderers and rapists, or demean women’s bodies for male gratification, or claim a moral equivalence between aberrant racists and their legitimate detractors—then we see excesses of cruelty. (There are other examples.)    

Cruelty is also deceptive. Cruel leaders may justify their abhorrent behavior and that of their followers as being in defense of the common good. But that perfidious cruelty is a form of protracted deception meant to unmoor us, loosening our hold on central truths.

Cruelty attacks the confidence of the citizenry in truth itself. Examples include appeals to “fake news,” or vilifying a wide swath of the voting public, or transmogrifying historical allies into adversaries, or stigmatizing—without evidence—the agencies that have historically protected our national self-interest.

Perfidiousness is so problematic because representative democracy, our very self-governance, depends upon a moral center. You and I live in a country that governs well when we have clarity and confidence about what is right and wrong. Think about this: the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act are all rooted in the central moral aptitude of free human beings, the heart of self-governance. When a leader attacks truth he drives to the jugular of that moral center, and of representative democracy. 

Our current administration is perhaps not unlike that of George III whom the Founders defied. Cruel leaders foment dissonance at the center of a nation’s being, confusing the national moral barometer with alternative facts. Today we withstand rapid directs and redirects on national and international policies, consternating us and our allies. In the maelstrom people seek safety and a sense of security by appealing to nationalist archetypes like “patriot” and a hypostatic neo-tribalism. In this way, the perfidious nature of cruel intent is a beast that draws a country into the liminal quagmire of moral turpitude.    

Cruelty is a swamp thing. History is littered with charismatic leaders and their false promises founded not on evidence, but on shame-based appeals to your loyalty and trust—as if your patriotism depended on it. The cruel leader aspires not to make a country great again, but only to wrench down its edifice in the time that remains to do so. None of this should surprise you. But knowing what cruelty is helps in part because cruelty emits anxiety like radiation; it is in our bones now, and we feel it deeply.

As is evident in the Declaration itself, some may wish to find a scapegoat for cruelty in hopes of ridding ourselves of its painful ugliness. But even impeaching a cruel leader doesn’t get at the source of the infection. Our national hubris, our ethnocentrism and xenophobia, our implacable racism point to something festering within us, underneath our national skin. The moral tripwire in our Constitution beckons us to do the right thing—to pivot from impotence and weak leadership and address the real concern, the thing within ourselves. 

History teaches that we can be a nation of astounding moral rigor, enfleshed in the living testament of self-evident truths, capable of astonishing advances in the community of nations. Manipulated or otherwise, we voted in favor of the forces that have finally hobbled us in this moment of crisis. We will need both courage and honesty if we are to liberate ourselves and renew the idea of American liberty for our, and our children’s, future.

Image: Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (1818)

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Michael Reid Trice serves as the secretary of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. He is associate professor of constructive theology and associate dean of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue at Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry in Seattle, Washington.

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Sightings is edited by Brett Colasacco (PhD’18). Sign up here to get Sightings by email. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.