by Robert Oscar Lopez
“Do not try to teach a pig how to sing.” That was a piece of advice given to me when I was a young man, by a witty and cavalier drag queen, someone who never had the benefit of reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The closest thing to intellectualism in our lives, circa 1991, was that we hung out in the smelly Bronx park in front of the historic cottage where Edgar Allan Poe had lived.
Nonetheless, there’s a lot of wisdom in his advice. There is something frighteningly bestial about people who think they are very clever but who can do little more than grunt and snort. You know this type: someone dumb who gets together with other dumb people and somehow gets his hands on resources, influence, and power.
Evil geniuses are scary, but at least they’re interesting. And, as the great philosopher Hannah Arendt once noted, often exceptionally evil people are not the ones who do the most damage. It’s the simpletons who can really do serious harm. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reflects on Adolf Eichmann, noting:
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.This idea of the “banality of evil” is useful in analyzing the smaller psychoses that take over seemingly innocuous milieus—even if we have little reason to fear concentration camps in the near future. Eichmann’s flaw was his bureaucratic tunnel vision, a combination of procedural jargon, petty red tape, and knee-jerk sanctimony.
So what do we do with such people? The “pigs” in the drag queen’s allegory are intriguing, as metaphors go. When pigs oink and writhe in their slop, don’t they probably think they’re right and their sty is wonderful? Who are we to correct them? Giving up on pigs is a comforting course of action. We can take a break from the exhausting exercise of trying to talk reason into someone unreasonable, and we also reserve a small part of our conscience for the self-justifying belief that it’s still the other person’s fault for being a pig rather than a rational human being.
The Bronx drag queen was only partly right, though. The problem, as George Orwell predicted in Animal Farm, and as we are seeing in campuses across America, is this: Pigs are never content with simply not learning how to sing. They end up taking over institutions and imposing their irrationality on everyone as nasty totalitarianism. They resort to the bureaucratic sadism that Hannah Arendt perceived in Adolf Eichmann. They inevitably become censors. They prevent speech from happening lest they be forced to do something other than oink.
Dehumanization through Censorship
In the closing paragraphs of Orwell’s classic, the reader finds out that “After that it did not seem strange when next day the pigs who were supervising the work of the farm all carried whips in their trotters.” The unforgettable closing lines of the book read:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.Because they are essentially boring and uncreative, they end up, so often, dehumanizing and demonizing people they can’t converse with.
The greatest, most insidious form of dehumanization is the refusal to let people speak. To impose silence, to take away language and expression from human beings, is to violate one of their most fundamental human rights. More importantly, it discounts their very personhood. This is precisely what mobs on college campuses do when they rally, petition, picket, and scream, preventing a scapegoated individual from speaking. Disturbingly, these tactics have become more and more common.
Aayan Hirsi Ali, for example, was too harsh for Muslim students at Brandeis. Those who protested her planned graduation speech seemed convinced that African women are great for diversity unless they didn’t have a good experience with Islam. In that case, they ought not to let people know their stories exist.
Similarly, Condoleezza Rice worked for George W. Bush and didn’t have the foresight to turn down a job as the National Security Advisor or Secretary of State. That she didn’t have the magical ability to stop war, enhanced interrogation, or Bush’s mispronunciation of the word “nuclear” is infuriating. Didn’t she know that one day such crimes against humanity might cost her a trip to New Brunswick, New Jersey? Isn’t it every statesman’s dream to speak to the hung-over graduates of the country’s “14th biggest party school”?
Just to keep up with Massachusetts and New Jersey, protestors at Pasadena City College forced Dr. Eric Walsh, the city’s public health director, to back out of delivering the commencement speech. He is, after all, a Seventh-Day Adventist and said something negative about homosexuality at some point. Or something.
Are you lost yet? Overwhelmed? There’s more.
Occupation and Rationalization ...
Room for Discussion and Debate? ...
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