I was in a Literature class this morning, taught in a very engaging way. While discussing Orwell’s classic essay, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the teacher inadvertently referred to the title as ‘Shooting as an Elephant’.
For those new to the essay, it recounts Orwell’s experience of shooting an elephant while serving as a policeman in colonial Burma. The Elephant in musth has killed a man, and Orwell must uphold the established trope that an imperial officer must unequivocally embody power and authority. A white man cannot appear frightened after all, and surely not in front of the ‘coolie’ natives. The Elephant, who, to Orwell, when he finds him grazing peacefully, “looked no more dangerous than a cow,” is thus annihilated. The local mob sublimates their own imperial oppression on the animal, celebrating the tragic occurrence with a “devilish roar of glee”. Orwell, the in-evidence displayer of Imperial authority and power, avoids looking foolish and stands vindicated to the mob. This entire collective, one may argue, is summarily unacquitted of the horror of the act. As Orwell sees him fall, “one could have imagined him thousands of years old”. After the incident, there was the usual analysis on whether the animal should have been killed or not, its economic worth, the legality of the action and a few other points of contention.
‘Shooting as an Elephant’, led me to reflect on the minor slip. It reminded me of one of my favourite essays by Nagel Thomas, ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’ Shooting an Elephant gave us Orwell’s rendition of a shame-inducing, cruel episode in his life as a police officer in British-ruled Burma.
‘Shooting as an Elephant’ changes the narrative entirely. Nagel asserts that what is incomprehensible is best described through what is familiar and well understood, and hence allows familiar kinds of reduction. How would it be if we could have a conception of a certain phenomenon through another’s consciousness? How more does the world look from the consciousness of an elephant? Can we even be sure that an elephant has consciousness? Even if they exist, such mental states may be completely alien to human consciousness and, even more, impossible to appreciate from a human vantage point. If for some Imperial officers, the life of an elephant can be more valuable than a ‘coolie’, then in the consciousness of such officers, an enslaved oriental meant less than an animal. Hence, when Kamel Daud’s Meursault Investigation manoeuvres his inquiry into the absurd through Harun, the brother of the murdered Arab, a new consciousness emerges. The Arab now has a name – Musa. He also has a brother, a mother, and people. Now, from being a subaltern, he emerges into the narrative with some dignity, which Daud thrusts into the colonial lens and says, “Look, with eyes that refuse to see, what you have done to me. Your ‘absurd’ is perhaps a privileged philosophical excursion. Mine is a tragic existence, broken and scattered to the winds. Now I gather these broken pieces and present to you an image that has yearned for a reclamation. Musa must be avenged, as unnecessarily as he was murdered by a delicately skinned white man unable to bear the harshness of the afternoon sun that has been part of our existence every day.” ‘What is it like to be Musa?’ Meursault may never comprehend. For Nagel, this can be ‘the subjective character of experience’. Experience is not immune to error, as is evident since experience is not incorrigible.
The Elephant, like a Bat, both being mammals, does not require us to travel way down the phylogenetic tree. The elephant can have experiences that we will anthropomorphise, as in stories of ‘Dumbo the Elephant’. But a reality can hold that an elephant has experiences that determine its elephant state and are completely outside human comprehension. Like a Bat’s sonar-based vision, which, as a form of perception, operates differently from how we perceive objects through our vision apparatus – our eyes. Hence, the inner life of a Bat is unknown to man through our consciousness, which limits how we can imagine and construct a world as experienced by a Bat. Or Orwell’s Elephant.
Now what if Orwell’s elephant had a gun? Nagel writes, “….if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, which are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications….my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals.”
In our conscious imagining, the experience of the Elephant in this entire encounter will be impossible to conceive. How do we conceive of a marauding elephant suddenly found placidly chewing grass a while after killing a man? All of Orwell’s instincts appear to inform Orwell that this elephant poses no threat to life any further than what would have made it commit to killing a while ago. For Orwell, there is now a reputational threat – one to his own image in the Burmese community as well as that of the Imperial Crown that he represents. For this, he must kill the elephant back. Even if it becomes quite possible that the Elephant will shoot at his violators in an elephant way and with an elephant gun, which is beyond our ability to construct in our consciousness due to limits imposed, how do we imagine and develop this idea? How can we even imagine this, when, even as a species, we struggle to embrace into our consciousness the incorrigibility that human races and social classes prescribe to our cognitive and sensory faculties, prompting our conscious and unconscious actions?
We must conclude that there exist facts which we find incomprehensible in the language that we can know. Some distances can be covered through experience. Some can be covered by extending beyond the prejudices that condition our decision-making faculties. In that “even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view-to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak.” This much by itself perpetuates the conflicting condition of being human. Our preconceptions are projected onto any experience, even when one is being experimentally designed. Others, like knowing how to shoot as an elephant, seem impossible since experience has an objective character that is experienced differently by humans, bats, and elephants. This also means that, though the elephant and I can both understand the nature of an object’s characteristics, the phenomenal experiences we both encounter when interacting with it are incomparable.
Paco Calvo refers to plant neurobiology, which examines how plants perceive and act. Calvo will further challenge the question of bats and elephants having consciousness. By asking, “What is it like to be a plant?” Calvo equally challenges the ideas of anthropocentrism and the notion that man is the measure of all things. If plants can actually feel and have subjective experience, then would they deserve moral and ethical consideration that we construct for humanity? Roald Dahl’s short story, ‘The Sound Machine’, asks, “What if plants feel pain?”
I think shooting an elephant is easier than shooting as an elephant. In my head, the inadvertent introduction of the conjunction ‘as’ changed the nature of the conversation.
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