The Genesis of Malice

THE dictionary is rich in partial synonyms for what I mean by malice — namely, the finding of satisfaction in the downfall of another’s pleasure or pride. But cruelty, I think, is a naïver thing than what I have in mind. Pure honest cruelty contains so much simple curiosity! It is a childish, thoughtless, brutal satisfaction of the exploring impulse. And vindictiveness and revenge convey too energetic a notion. They convey the notion of a conflict. They require a give and take of thrust and reprisal. Malice, as I conceive it, is a more coolly passive thing. Hatred, again, is highly conscious of itself, indulges a passionate fixed idea; hatred is dramatic, almost theatrical.

Malice I know has its lighter meaning, as of mischief; and it is used to describe some delicate wit, which, abhorring sentimental politeness, puts the vinegar into the salad of social life, and cuts the oil of compliments. Malice in this sense is the piquancy of memoirs, of the good letters of fashionable persons, and verses of society. It seems to me that there should be three words here, for mischief is probably too gentle; something should be invented between mischief and malice; or, if malice is going to be used in this airy sense, perhaps malignancy could cover what I mean. The word ‘malignancy’ has as passive an air as the word ‘malice’; and by virtue of its ‘ mal ‘ it conveys somewhat the same impression, as of a secret watching, a silent licking of the lips, over some person’s comedown, embarrassment, or discomfiture, or at least freshly demonstrated inferiority.

Malice in this sense is said to spring also from jealousy. It infringes my patent to admit such a source. But I am afraid I must do so. Spirits which have been oppressed or irritated by the refulgence of another’s easy luck will witness the bursting asunder of that bright bubble with marked satisfaction. Sometimes they will prick it slyly themselves. I have no special considerations to offer upon this form of malice. It seems to me a kind of asperity and gall in our relations with each other, which admits of but one cure, the general tonic and panacea — namely, a far richer provision of the materials for happiness for all hands, and especially for the immoral and unkind. Let the heart of man but once bite into the nectarine of happiness, and the mouldy crusts of satisfied malice will cease to please his palate.

The malice I mean is the cursing vice of the honest and brave — it is the serpent that sneaks into the garden of duty; and I am sure that I have watched it sneaking in, and that I know the hole and corner it comes in by. It is the unsuccessful attempt to govern that lets malice in. Milton’s God was eaten alive by malice, as soon as he failed to make Satan obey him. He seemed almost to take more pleasure in devising torments for the mighty rebel than he would have taken in receiving his unbroken subservience.

I can show what I mean by running over the common varieties of this form of malice. There’s the teacher’s, or nurse’s, brand, the brand I have myself. The teacher has entered her profession because she likes children and enjoys their company. She comes into school on a Monday morning with a bright, benevolent look and heart. Some of the children run, perhaps, to meet her; she smiles at the crumpling of her hair and blouse in their embraces. A happy and harmonious morning seems to lie ahead of them all; and she is well prepared to do her pleasant duty of steering them through the appointed lessons.

In the course of the morning comes an unexpected baulk on the part of one or two of the children. The teacher knows both in theory and in practice what to do, but, taken unawares, she applies her tact and discretion a bit stiffly; they are not fresh enough. They worked last week, but, even with a new approach, they don’t work now. Other children here and there inject some objectless and unprovoked giggling; the baulkers not only continue to baulk, but start something in the teasing line. The teacher maintains the outer shell of that bright cheer and comradery with which she entered the schoolroom; she maintains her outward calm; but within, what a fermentation has been set up! What a struggle between the realization that she must govern the children, must conform them to the patterns of their work and progress, as laid down by the Board, and the knowledge that to-day, at any rate, the spirits of half a dozen children are not to be conformed to the patterns without pursuit and capture! She knows the axiom, ‘Never let a conflict arise; see it coming, and rearrange your programme,’ and so forth. But she did n’t see it coming soon enough; and she did see the supervisor coming. She must get the room in hand, by hook or by crook. And now she is truly horrified to realize that the thin features of Tommy and the freckled face of Josephine, both of whom ran to meet her when she came, arouse in her heart a dreadful feeling. She can’t bear their impudent, free, gleeful contempt for her responsibilities. She wants to humble them, and see them look reduced and sorry. She realizes with horror that she wants this very much.

It’s all mixed up with the sense of duty, the most anxious duty, to the widowed mother she supports, and to the Board, and to the supervisor, and to her own professional credit, and — yes, certainly, to the children themselves, that ninety per cent of them shall make their grades.

Ah, well! Perhaps some day she’ll get a job in a libertarian school where it’s not altogether dependent on your tact and discretion to keep order — where order is occasionally let go of, so that the children can find it for themselves; where the teachers try to fit the patterns to the children, and not the children to the patterns. Or where, in theory at least, this is the rule. Of course the libertarian school-teacher too keeps slipping and stumbling back into the old authoritarian ways; only murmuring to herself from time to time, ‘But thank God, they never work very well! ‘

If malice had a sunny side, it would be in schools, and by teachers, that it would be shown, I suppose. Certainly it would be in prisons that the blackest side would appear. Unmitigated is the malice that the prisoner receives from society — and all in that unbecoming costume, the garb of duty. Frank Tannenbaum maintains that wardens and guards are not Torquemadas by nature. He thinks, and indeed it seems reasonable, that they begin as mere human beings, and often quite goodnatured ones. But in their business, society has ordained, the prime requisite is to be obeyed. And the ineradicable human nature of the men under them breaks through this unnatural obedience tragically often. Punishment then results; and when the high-spirited variety of human nature sees punishment coming in at the door, all chance of coöperation of course flies out the window. Reckless and desperate persons react as the high-spirited do, only more so. But even among the few characters who are meek and at the same time hopeful, or those very few indeed who are too philosophical to be seriously angry at anything personal, a touch of human nature sometimes prevails, a touch of spring fever, perhaps; and they too break a rule the second time. Punishment then redoubles, and the rebellion which it is the nature of punishment to bring on redoubles too; and soon we also, reader, were we prison guards, would find ourselves flogging our brother and sister creatures, and locking them up in stone dens to go insane; because we had been told to govern them intensively, and no man, child, or beast submits to such government if he can help it.

Is n’t it the same with national governments? A certain proportion of the community are of one mind with the government, and they coöperate with it, and call their voluntary action ‘ submitting to government.’ The rest of the population, who are of a different mind, and at one point or another feel tyrannized over, oppose the government, or circumvent it, as far as they can arrange to do so. But the government must govern everybody whom the abstract includes. It therefore, like the warden and the guard, begins to punish, and if libertarian ideas are mixed up, in its tradition, with the obvious necessity for punishing, it does so under a veil of libertarian language. At first it punishes ‘acts’ of opposition only, leaving ‘opinions’ free; but opinions are so rebellious, government soon discovers that it is an act to make a speech, and it then begins to punish for speeches. Free opinion is such a luxury that it seems cheap to its lovers at the price of a few fines, or a little life in jail; and then it becomes necessary for the government to extend the sentence, and expose the prisoner to those secret prison punishments of which Miss Mary Winsor truly says that, if a judge ever mentioned them in his sentence in open court, the public would end them at once. That is, they would end them on paper, with unequivocal words. The statute which forbade them would not even leave the desired phrase ‘unless imperatively necessary.’ But nothing on paper will stand before the imperative necessity of governments to govern. We saw this most clearly, because most suddenly, in time of war. Leaning back upon the Third Amendment to the Constitution as upon a granite monument, free speakers found it to be a bag of sawdust with a little hole in one corner. What has been so in this country has been so, apparently, in every other. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat must govern, too. It also must govern those who do not cooperate with it. The ends of the Russian Government are different, very different, from the ends of other governments; but the means are the same and, the means being the same, the results are far more alike than a humanitarian like Emma Goldman can endure. And therefore I suppose it is that Bertrand Russell says it will revolutionize a government far more to use a different means than to keep the means unchanged and adopt a different end.

We have as yet no libertarian governments, like the two or three libertarian schools the teacher can visit and envy, and the many and flourishing libertarian families. Governments follow; they cannot, in the nature of things, lead. When schools and families and jails have become prevailingly libertarian, a government may be attempted which really trusts in freedom. I have a notion that some day it will be an axiom of legislatures not to pass a law that is not unanimous.

Malice even¹ arises in a parent who has fallen into the vicious habit of governing. This is the most terrifying sensation, I think, that can come to a parent. The child for whom he would die, for whom he lives, has opposed his will and has become his antagonist — that is to say, his enemy in the first degree. Parents, I think, and those who stand in loco, and so forth, pretend to an Olympian detachment from temper and personal pride, class pride as adults, parental prestige, and the like, which they are far from feeling. Essentially, to be sure, they are anxious for the child, but their anxiety for him has temporarily taken the form of anxiety for the maintenance of adult supremacy. And if they peer deep into that terrible catchall, the human heart, I think they will find an ugly little temporary wish for their own child’s humiliation before themselves. We practise upon ourselves a few deceptions in this regard, which may not perhaps impose upon the subconscious perceptions of the children. The vain and picayune has a strange way of adhering in our hearts to the noble and tender. What, for instance, we call thinking only of the child’s good (as Dorothy Canfield Fisher long ago pointed out) is all too often thinking a great deal about our own reputation among our neighbors or in-laws as successful parents of well-behaved children. We want our children to ‘appear well ‘ — telltale phrase! Could we be serenely unconscious of other grown-ups, and their hasty, unimportant opinions about our children,

I believe we could serve our children more truly, influence their lives more deeply, and be all the time — that heaven of parents! — much closer to their thoughts and lives.

There is a superstition, ‘an unconscionable time a-dying,’ that adult judgment must at all times, and on all subjects, be superior to that of children — and so appear. The children often, in their hearts, know better. But, like all human beings, they will be docile enough where they really admire and respect. Adult judgment rightly carries great weight with children, and all the more so when it is expressed with due respect for their judgment. Far too great weight, indeed, it sometimes carries with them, so that it prevents them from exploring life sufficiently in the company of their own contemporaries. This enormous prestige which adults possess already in children’s minds arises naturally from our having been in the world longer than the young folks. ‘With life’ — presumably — ‘we are familiar, free, and wise.’ They will coöperate with us so often, in so many things will seek our guidance, that if we cultivate a little more humility toward them, a little more honest respect for their judgment and freedom, I truly think we shall find ourselves practically without any occasion to govern them, and therefore to expose ourselves to the terrible experience of feeling malice toward them.

Haste and health I believe are the two points in which government of children by adults comes to be, or to seem, necessary. A thousand complications which we could arrange with them by mutual agreement, if there were only time, have to be shortly disposed of, and therefore we must deliver a papal bull on the matter. This happens, of course, much more often than the health or safety emergency arises in which we must, and must immediately, prevail. It is school time — it is train time — it is time for supper — and ‘we can’t discuss it.’ Punctuality is indeed the thief of time! It is the most expensive of all our modern conveniences. The first element of a real Utopia, I believe, will be the abolition of a vast lot of our subdivided punctualities. In the meantime, what can parents do to avoid unnecessarily governing their children — just because they are in too much of a hurry to arrange matters by common consent instead?

For one thing, I believe, we can seize some leisure hour and have a family discussion on this point, to cover these cases beforehand by a sort of gentlemen’s agreement. Perhaps the children will have one or two propositions to make. Their thoughts upon the subject would be worth knowing. In case they have nothing better to propose, we might ask for an agreement, on their part, to follow our advice in emergencies. This might be too much like asking for a carte blanche to govern them, unless we offer to talk over the points of our emergency as soon as we can get time afterward. Such discussions ought to be a great help in family life. Be sure the children won’t bring up anything that is n’t still a live issue in their minds. They abhor post-mortems much more than we do. But if there is anything really fermenting in their minds, any sense of injustice or belittlement at our hands, how good for them and for us, and for the hoped-for sunshine and clarity of our life together with them, that it should be hung out in the fresh air of mutual discussion, instead of mildewing away for a psychoanalyst to try to wash out fifteen years from now!

Much can be done, perhaps, in ways which will arise from this way, to avoid occasions for the dangerous surgical operation known as governing, which so often infects the surgeon with the blood-poisoning of malice!

(I sometimes think that the owners of dogs present an interesting exhibit on the subject of Malice, its Cause and Cure. There are those who make dogs ‘sit up’ for long stretches of time, to show off their perfect authority—‘I just want to show you how well my dog minds me.’ This is a good soil in which to grow some of the cruelties on account of which Humane Societies have to step in and take animals away; often with a troubled wonder whether there are children in that house, too, who should be rescued from their parents. The delights of having a dog obey you are not the best delights of having a dog. Some owners delight in the freedoms their dogs take with them — in being trusted not to make too much fuss about the inadvertent muddy paw; in respecting the evident wish of a dog to follow a dog’s pursuits rather than those of a mere parasite of humanity. The adults who brought us up used sometimes to say, in a hotel or railway station, ‘I wish that man over there would stop governing his dog and children.')