Diseased Reasoning

 By this point, we've probably all moved on from the Kristi Noem/"Cricket" news cycle—and rightly so. For those who have already forgotten it (as they probably should): this was the controversy about the South Dakota governor and one-time Trump VP contender, after she revealed an episode from her past involving the brutal slaying of a pet dog. What was especially bizarre about this scandal is that it did not emerge from any sleuthing or oppo research. Noem furnished the anecdote herself in a memoir, in which she described how she killed the dog for being difficult to manage. With needless cruelty, she added that she "hated" the animal. Apparently, Noem thought telling this story would make her look good. 

I wrote a blog post about this incident previously, when it was still in the news. In my usual style, I was focused on how I could connect the incident to Byron, theology, and a bunch of other typical hobbyhorses of mine. It took sending the piece to my dad for me to step back from this and remember the actual moral stakes involved. In his response to the post, my dad cut much more closely to the heart of the matter—i.e., what was actually wrong with what Noem did. I thought the way he phrased it was more eloquent and succinct than anything I wrote at the time, so I wanted to share it here. He said: 

I find this story deeply disturbing. Beyond feeling for the dog, I think it has to do with the idea that she presumes the right to kill a living being who depends on her, and may even love her, just because he doesn’t conform to her wishes in the moment. Normal people who have problematic or even dangerous dogs would take them somewhere for adoption even though they would feel regret about having to do it. The fact that she hated the dog so much that she had to go get a gun and kill it in a gravel pit, says a lot about her inability to care for anyone who doesn’t meet her own needs in the moment. That suggests that other people are probably only valuable to her instrumentally.

In her subsequent attempts to justify her behavior, Noem only seemed to heighten this impression. She talked, for instance, about how she would have taken the same approach to the Bidens' dog, Commander, after he reportedly bit a secret service agent in the White House. Disappointed that the American people disliked her decision to kill one dog—that is to say—she apparently thought she could improve their impression of her character by publicly fantasizing about killing another one. Even more disturbingly, she seemed to take a special relish in the idea. She imagined Commander and Cricket meeting together in some punitive doggie afterlife. "Commander, say hello to Cricket for me!" she said. 

I was thinking back to this whole disturbing episode—and to my dad's apt response to it—after reading W.G. Sebald's haunting and elegiac novel, The Rings of Saturn. The book is one of the most moving I have read in years—despite being almost impossible to classify in any traditional literary genre. It is more a set of essays and a travelogue than it is a plot-driven novel—but it is so infused with Sebald's humane spirit and a sense of sorrow and pity for the world that every page—even when Sebald is unexpectedly talking about, say, the Taiping Rebellion, the medieval history of Norwich, or attempts to use herring as a source of bioluminescence, that it somehow makes one's heart ache. 

One of the great themes of Sebald's novel (which is part of a trilogy, but it is the most poignant of the three volumes), is that of decay and deterioration. And for Sebald, nothing symbolizes this better than humankind's waste and destruction of animal and vegetable life. Time and again, he returns to this theme—whether he is discussing hunting, silk cultivation, the burning of England's historic forests for charcoal, or the herring industry. In one particularly haunting passage, he conjures the Biblical story of the Gadarene swine. Sebald wrestled on theodicy grounds with the question of why the anointed lord and savior would implant a demon in a host of innocent creatures, driving them needlessly to their doom: 

Is this terrible story, Sebald's narrator asks himself, [...] the report of a credible witness? If so, does that not mean that in healing the Gadarene Our Lord committed a serious error in judgment? Or was this parable made up by the evangelist, I wondered, to explain the supposed uncleanliness of swine; which would imply that human reasoning, diseased as it is, needs to seize on some other kind that it can take to be inferior and thus deserving of annihilation? (Hulse trans.)

Humankind's industrialized slaughter and maltreatment of pigs—who are intelligent and kindly creatures, surely capable of suffering—is without doubt an atrocity, and should end. But at least people largely do this for food. Kristi Noem's killing of her dog did not even have this excuse. Nor did she have the decency to treat the animal with some kind of dignity. Instead, she hates and mocks it, even after death. In this, she does indeed display that "diseased" human reasoning of which Sebald speaks—the kind that needs to imagine some other type of intelligence that is worthy only of "annihilation"—the kind that arrogates to itself a "right to kill other living beings" with impunity, as my dad put it. 

And, without putting too fine a point on it, the kind of "diseased" moral reasoning that imagines an unlimited right to kill animal life will not necessarily stop short of treating humankind the same way. In one chilling section of his novel, Sebald describes how Hitler's Third Reich briefly entertained an interest in silk culture. He quotes from their manual on the proper treatment of silk worms—which contains chilling echoes of the way the Reich's Nazi overlords viewed human society as well. The manual, in Sebald's telling, speaks of "the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to preempt racial degeneration." 

People who endorse the torture and killing of animals will often try to put their human victims in the same category. Donald Trump, for instance, is fond of describing immigrants and asylum-seekers as "animals." And as such, he has openly fantasized about subjecting them to the same humiliations and indignities that human beings have traditionally heaped upon animals—such as pitting migrants against each other in a fighting league, in a way reminiscent of cockfighting. Trump's notion of gladiatorial combat between asylum-seekers, waged for his own corrupt amusement, puts one in mind of a Roman tyrant, a bloated Nero, savoring the spectacle of Christians being fed to lions. 

There is a passage in Walter Pater's historical novel, Marius the Epicurean, in which Pater's protagonist is forced to attend a Roman circus in which animals are systematically tormented for sport. He is struck with unease by the fact that he is the only person in attendance to find these acts disturbing. This leads him to the reflection as well that, even though they were animal victims whom he beheld in the ring, the same bloody contests had been waged with human slaves in the recent past—and would be so again. A social system that tolerates gratuitous slaughter and cruelty toward animals, in short, becomes inured to suffering—and this same insensitivity may make them numb to the cries of human victims as well. 

The same "diseased" intelligence is at work in both cases—to Sebald's point: the kind that needs to imagine that there is another group of people—or beings—who are inferior to oneself, and who are therefore fit only for destruction. Noem's story—like the MAGA movement to which she belongs—is therefore about more than just her treatment of dogs (horrific though that certainly was on its own). It is also about what they intend to do to human beings. As my dad put it, it "suggests that other people are probably only valuable" to them "instrumentally"—and that these others may soon come to be regarded, in the eyes of MAGA—as "deserving of annihilation."