In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov observes how “People speak sometimes about the 'bestial' cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” Brother Ivan nailed it, and he did so before the rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, and countless other instances of the shocking cruelty sometimes found within mankind.
Just the same, it at least seems as though people are becoming nicer. Maybe the person you’re reading is sheltered, but it was happily difficult not to conclude from the obituaries of recently passed actor Patrick Stewart that human cruelty is on the wane. While Stewart’s childhood was brutally traumatic, and included routinely seeing his wasted father come home on weekends swinging at his mother, it seems like a growing number of kids coming up today wouldn’t recognize what Stewart endured.
Thoughts like the ones about Dostoevsky, along with Stewart, kept coming up while reading Samuel Gregg’s excellent new book, The Civilization of Commerce. In it, Gregg is making a case for the civilizational genius of commerce, of work divided, and the division amply powering (p. xvi) “a process of improvement in the human condition.”
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