Blowing the Whistle

It is said that the only major Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable is original sin, which is confirmed by the experience of parenting.  It is further supported by linguistic history, which reveals the tendency of the meanings of simple nouns to deteriorate with age, rather like the portrait of Dorian Gray.  Just look up such words as villain, boor, or harlot in the OED to see what I mean.  Fortunately there are still a few distinctions between art and life.  For example, playing second fiddle is regarded as a slightly subordinate occupation, whereas blowing second whistle is about as good as it gets, whistleblower-wise.   At least this is what I surmise from the journalistic excitement revealed in such headlines as “Second Whistleblower Comes Forward!”  The utterly depressing nature of what I shall call the continuing Ukrainian “revelations” forces me once again to eschew the substance of a major political crisis and to wander about in its philological periphery.

For the news is bursting with much admired whistleblowers.  The current whistleblowers in the Affair of the Ukrainian Telephone Call, though their actual identities remain so far unknown, and are meant to stay that way, are being called “heroes”.  I am a little leery of calling conscientious good citizenship “heroism”.  Why one should be called a hero for testifying truthfully in exposing malfeasance on a matter of great political significance, or why such a person would have to be protected by a Whistleblower’s Protection Act, needs some explanation.

The explanation is to be found in the social odium surrounding the word informer. When I joined the Princeton faculty in 1965, there was still a mandatory meeting for all new faculty to be instructed in the elements of the Princeton Honor Code.  This compact, which all incoming students had to sign, affords students the right to unmonitored final examinations in exchange for their signed pledge that they have not cheated on the exam and the sworn obligation to report any instances of cheating by others of which they became aware.  It is similar to dozens of other such compacts at other institutions.  An elderly dean, very much Old Princeton, made the presentation.  When he asked “Any questions?”, there amazingly was one.  A smart-ass young French mathematician expressed the opinion that he saw but dubious honor in an arrangement requiring you to be an informer against your mates!  The dean actually sputtered.  Here was a perspective never previously encountered in his seven decades.  “Young man,” he replied, “the Princeton Honor Code is based on universally acknowledged moral principles, which anyone can accept, be he Christian, Catholic, or Jew!”

This unusual ecumenical claim notwithstanding, the English language is rich in its colorful vituperation of tattle-tales, also known as snitches, squealers, stool pigeons, grassers (British), rats, finks, and the combinatory ratfinks.  The refusal to blow one’s whistle has won high praise in odd places.  Here is Richard Nixon, caught on his White House tapes, praising the traitor Alger Hiss. “You know the great thing about—I got to say for Hiss.  He never ratted on anybody else.  He never ratted!”  So far as I know, the term whistleblower had to be imported from the domain of field sports for lack of any extant affirmative term.   It is so new that standard usage has not yet decided whether it’s a compound word like pipefitter, or a hyphenated one (whistle-blower, apparently the emergent journalistic choice).   And as to its exact meaning, so much depends upon situation and context—on who is the truth-teller, what truth is being told, and to whom.   Was Daniel Ellsberg a whistleblower, or an egomaniacal blabber-mouth?  How about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning? 

Whittaker Chambers, super-snitch

I mention Hiss as he was the occasion, more than ten years ago, of my own realization that in the popular mind “bad” informers outnumber “good” ones about ten to one.    I was at an academic conference entitled “Alger Hiss and History”.   You will recall that the heart of the “Hiss case” was the testimony by the government witness (informer) Whittaker Chambers that Hiss, a darling of liberal New Dealers, had been a Soviet spy.  Today this is a fact scarcely doubted by any serious historian.  But on that day it dawned on me only gradually that out of about 450 mainly academic participants gathered in the auditorium of the NYU Law School, I was perhaps one of ten who believed that Hiss had been a covert Communist and that Whittaker Chambers had been a generally truthful witness.  For as the ancient seer Cassandra so tragically discovered, the zeal of many ostensible seekers after truth is satisfied not by the truth they hear but by the one they want to hear.

It is possible that you never will have heard of the most famous whistleblower of the modern era, partly because he may never have existed but mainly because, well, it’s all so unpleasant.  His name was Pavel (Pavlik) Morozov, and in 1932 he was a young peasant living with his parents on a farm in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of the Soviet Union.  This was in the mopping up period of the forced collectivization of agriculture in Russia, the same period that a thousand miles to the south witnessed the engineered famine in Ukraine, called the holomodor.  Central Party policy was to extract as much of the grain harvest as possible from its rural producers in order to be able to feed the industrial workers in the cities.  The confiscation was ruthless, often leaving the farmers themselves starving and lacking even sufficient grain to reseed the fields.  Resistance was widespread and ingenious as the peasants attempted to secrete some grain for their own necessity.  But resisters, who were called “hoarders,” saboteurs, wreckers, and “hooligans”, were treated with utmost severity—usually summary execution or the gulag.  Young Pavlik knew that his father had stashed away a couple of bags of grain.  He  was a Pioneer (Communist Cub Scout),  and he saw his socialist duty clear before him.   So he blew the whistle on his old man.  The Checkists came running and sorted the matter out in their customary ballistic fashion, rendering Pavlik an orphan but also an exemplar of social responsibility.  Some of the other adult peasants, criminal reactionaries, took another view of the matter, however.  A gang of them waylaid the boy and murdered him.  After the authorities sorted that one out, Pavlik was declared (posthumously) a “Hero of the Soviet Union.”  (That is one of the reasons I hope we can be satisfied by calling witnesses to our President’s derelictions merely upright citizens.  We don’t really need any more Russophilia at the moment.)  His story was told in song and story.  For a long generation of Soviet youth his exploit became a compulsory subject of political meditation by all junior students.  Hundreds of statues and other monuments were erected in his memory.

 

Pavlik blows the whistle