Michael Reid Trice, Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011)

As many violence scholars, I have not found myself to be greatly interested in cruelty, for the simple reason that instances of cruelty are relatively rare, if we accept its usual definition as “willful indifference to suffering, or taking pleasure in inflicting such suffering upon sentient beings.” Most people do not actively wish harm to others, and for this reason, the harms that keep our societies running smoothly and in ordered fashion must be kept in concealment, far from our direct vision, if we are to be asked to tolerate them—cruel punishments, executions, exclusions of minorities from the full benefits of the society, etc. However, Michael Trice’s new book, Encountering Cruelty, renews a fresh interest in this dark topic by redefining cruelty as an ordinary, common occurrence, infecting the everyday in ever more subtle forms. Trice reveals how a too narrow definition of cruelty may grant us the comfort of believing its occurrence to be minimal, but it robs us of the opportunity to track its traces writ large across the landscape of the human world. We cannot hope to understand, and ultimately heal, the rebounding effects of suffering across the broader social terrain, unless we are willing to admit the cruelty that underlies modern institutional life.