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
