Let us face it, this world is crueler than it was ever before. If you talk about the pre-historic world, when men preyed upon men in their fierce struggle to survive, life was at the centre of everything they did. People killed because they wanted to live, and that was the only way they could eliminate enemies who posed them a threat.

But you must give credit to them as well for in the midst of that struggle they pushed the world towards the light. Yes, people have fought wars and battles, and history is rife with examples of man slaughtering man. Yet you could not deny that they also created many institutions, many values, to bring human civilization to newer heights. People were cruel in so much as it was necessary to be kind.

Now people are kind in so much as they need to be cruel. Take the example of launches. They convince people to board their vessels, which overturn in the mid-water and throw those people into the gorges of death. Look at the garment factories, where, every year, some employees are trampled to death. Then you have bus and train accidents, shipyard explosions, fires in the shanties. Or simply talk about those who sell adulterated food, spurious medicine, and artificially preserved fish and fruit.

Cruelty has turned into a vicious cycle when death chases life because life chases death, and keeps on visiting our lives like repeat customers in a convenient store. John Foster, an English Baptist minister from the 19th century asked whether a principal part of the gratification of cruelty was not the pleasure of feeling and exhibiting power over other beings.

Our civilization is engaged in the gratification of cruelty by man over man, in the manner a revolution devours its own children. All the institutions and values, which were propped up to uphold human dignity, are either being deserted or demolished. This civilization was seeded in the unassuming progress made during the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the dignity of man and the beauty of his body were given increasing importance.

Now we are going in the opposite direction, making human dignity and the human body the targets of all destruction. Now we blow up men or cut them into pieces. Now we break them, bruise them, burn them, and even peel off their skins. If launch tragedies, deaths in garment factories or road accidents are death in its wholesale business, then you have also the retail side to it, the one or two killings, which are taking place in one neighborhood or another on a daily basis.

Cruelty is a lot like sex, which is healthy within a limit, after which it turns into perversion. "I must be cruel only to be kind," proclaimed Hamlet in Shakespeare's celebrated tragedy about a young prince who avenged the murder of his father. What is cruelty after all if not willfully causing pain or distress to others? And how can you avoid it in a world, where others are waiting to hurt you anytime?

So you hurt people every now and then and that is only human. A threshold level of cruelty is as common as asking someone to keep the change. But we are talking about senseless killing and maiming, when you kill many to get one, when you use extreme prejudice to take a life or mangle a body, when you kill a man and then dissect him. That is when your cruelty runs an extra mile, which is a sign of disorder, the symptom of depravity.

British moral philosopher Jonathan Glover argues in his book In Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century, that the last century has been the bloodiest century ever, characterized by the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, Pol Pot's decimation of the Cambodian population, and tribal and ethnic violence. Why? Because, never before had mankind fought so much at the ideological level. Never before had man so many conflicting worldviews, which sparked so much righteous outrage.

C.S. Lewis, the Irish-born writer, tried to explain why that outrage could become dangerous. He said that people were much more likely to be cruel, not when they were doing something bad, but when they were convinced they were doing something good. The Americans are fighting terrorism because they believe it will save the world. The terrorists are fighting the Americans because they believe it will save their cause. Cruelty is exacerbated when people try to push their beliefs to logical conclusions.

That is why, cruelty is fermented most in the clash of convictions. After all, it originates in the thoughts before it is organized in the body, the beast crouches in the mind before it leaps forward to attack a victim. In most cases cruelty is pre-meditated, planned like a project and implemented on target. At times cruelty is cultivated in the character as impulses and instincts are conditioned, like Pavlov's dog, to respond to certain stimuli with inordinate atrocities.

Although you must not confuse cruelty with fits of anger any more than you confuse convulsions with fever. People often lose their minds when they lose their temper, and do senseless things on the spur of their anger. That's cruelty in its natural form, which is expected to happen in the conflicts of life in so much as you are expected to sweat under the hot sun.

Going back to the sunken launch, I saw this picture on the front page of a newspaper, the folded body of a woman floating in the hands of a man whose face was distorted with the anguish of despair. The man had pulled his dead mother from the depth of the river, which had a twist of irony about the way it happened. This man once floated in the amniotic fluid of this woman, who was floating in the cradle of his hands immersed in the waters of a river.

On the face of it, it was a simple scene: a stream of life had poured into the river. But there was ecology of cruelty, which hovered in the air. The man standing waist-deep in the river was lifting the burden of grief imposed upon him by the cruelty of other men, who carried his mother to that gorge of death. As his tears rolled down to the waters of the river, the source of his birth dead in his hands, that confluence of lives was a stern reminder that albeit we lived to die, we also lived to kill each other.

The savage man killed if he was threatened, and never killed to make a living out of it. But we have professional killers in the civilized world, who get paid to do the job. Nobody told us why the owner of the launch should be any different. And what looks like the ultimate cruelty is that his victims had paid him to do the job.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.