In writing about the aftermath of the Tuscon shooting rampage, Henry Giroux posits that “the general responses to this violent act are symptomatic of a society that separates private injuries from public considerations, refusing to connect individual acts to broader social considerations.” I could not agree more with Giroux on this matter. In fact, I have recently written about the American tendency to at best minimize or at worst ignore the structural underpinnings of violence. It’s a topic that I return to often.

Giroux makes the case that a ‘culture of cruelty’ permeates American society:

I want to suggest that underlying the Arizona shootings is a culture of cruelty that has become so widespread in American society that the violence it produces is largely taken for granted, often dismissed in terms that cut it off from any larger systemic forces at work in the society.

The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how entertainment and politics now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment — a moment when the central issue of getting by is no longer about working to get ahead but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, which are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of colour, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from “the American dream,” but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value.

How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform’s public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behaviour of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behaviour in need of compassionate goodwill and public assistance? Or for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system?

Giroux contends that since the mid-70’s the “social state” has been transformed into a “punishing” one. 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” has according to Giroux (2009) “both militarized public life and refashioned the criminal justice system, prisons, and even the schools, as preeminent spaces of racialized violence (p.71).” Giroux’s concept of the “culture of cruelty” becomes instructive to understanding the hyper/mass incarceration system that has emerged over the past 35 years in the U.S. A desensitized, fearful, and cowed populace that marinates in this culture of cruelty finds it difficult or perhaps impossible to see itself as complicit in the caging of millions of its fellow citizens. This same population easily accepts neoliberal policies that disenfranchise everyone except for the corporatists and their rich accomplices. In such a climate, mass incarceration becomes tolerable and even necessary as a mechanism for managing the labor supply.

Cruel culture lets us off the hook. We don’t have to understand the people who we lock up or those who work with them. Our society has come to view imprisonment as the “first resort” to addressing a host of social issues (which may or may not actually be criminal). In the U.S., the culture of cruelty it turns out is practiced and played with all of the time.

I’ll end with these words by Giroux that should give all of us great pause and cause us to mobilize to transform our culture:

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a spectacle of suffering and spectacle. While much of this violence is passed off as entertainment, it should not be surprising when it travels from the major cultural apparatuses of our time to real life, exploding in front of us, refusing to be seen as just another entertaining spectacle.