Framing the moron

The social construction of feeble-mindedness in the American eugenic era

Gerald O'Brien

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784991074
• eBook ISBN: 9781526103437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Framing the moron details the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric employed by the American eugenic movement during the early twentieth century, which led to tens of thousands of innocent people being involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated.

1

METAPHORS AND THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MARGINALIZED GROUPS¹

Why is one person, or animal, abused and not another? If this is understood, everything is understood. In the face of greatly mounting criticism, one Canadian official commented on the slaughter of 50,000 harp-seal pups each year in the Maritime Provinces: ‘If we could find a way to make pup seals look like alligators, our problems would be over.’ It was the job of Joseph Goebbels to make pup seals look like alligators and Jews and Poles look like subhumans.²

Metaphors, problem framing, and social policy

In his book Dinosaur in a Haystack, Steven Jay Gould tells of a visit to Greece, where his view of the Parthenon was briefly obscured by a moving van. His annoyance turned to amusement when he saw that the sign on the van read ‘metaphora’. As a vehicle for changing the location of things (‘meta’) by moving or carrying them (‘phor’), Gould noted, the van symbolized what a metaphor is.³ Schon writes that ‘[m]etaphorical uterances’ constitute the ‘“carrying over” of frames or perspectives from one domain of experience to another’.⁴ At their most basic, linguistic metaphors include a source domain and a target domain. In the case of the ‘Jew as bacillus’ metaphor that was frequently employed by the Nazis, for example, the bacillus constitutes the source domain, the Jew the target. The primary rationale for the metaphor, then, is to ‘carry over’ or transfer important, though often covert, aspects of the source object or person onto the target.

Those who perceive metaphors simply as providing an interesting or picturesque mode of describing people and issues with litle real impact fail to understand their importance.⁵ Susan Sontag noted that metaphor use has existed for a very long time in human societies and has served as the ‘spawning ground of most kinds of understanding, including scientific understanding, and expressiveness’.⁶ To quote Steven Jay Gould, ‘a scholar’s choice of metaphor usually provides our best insight into the preferred modes of thought and surrounding social circumstances that so influence all human reasoning, even the scientific modes often viewed as fully objective in our mythology’.⁷

As many writers have noted, the use of metaphors is a principal way in which we comprehend the world around us, even if we seldom realize it. According to David Allbriton, the metaphoric connection of source and target domains can have a strong influence on how we come to perceive and thus respond to the later. He added that a ‘related cognitive function that metaphor often fulfills is that of providing a framework for understanding a new domain or for restructuring the understanding of a familiar domain’.⁸ George Lakoff, the leading contemporary metaphor analyst and scholar in the United States, contended that ‘[a] large proportion of our most commonplace thoughts make use of an extensive, but unconscious, system of metaphorical concepts, that is, concepts from a typically concrete realm of thought that are used to comprehend another, completely different domain’.⁹

Metaphors may not only carry meaning about the alleged ‘essence’ of a thing, person, or group, but may also serve as a vehicle for communicating overt or underlying messages about the recommended modes of treating or responding to the target.¹⁰ For example, the ‘Jew as bacillus’ metaphor obviously was useful to the Nazis since many of the aspects of a bacillus (potential for harm, spread, inconspicuousness invasion, etc.) served to aptly describe Nazi presumptions about Jews, especially those on their eastern border (e.g., Polish, Russian, and Hungarian Jews). Moreover, if Jews could be perceived as being like a bacillus that threatened anyone with whom they came into contact, their segregation from the rest of the community in ghetos, and later their ‘disinfection’ or mass killing, might be more easily accepted by Germans. As will be further described below, in the political arena selected policy responses underlie the employment of particular metaphoric paterns and ‘framings’ of social issues and marginalized groups.

In addition to drawing atention to linguistic metaphors, scholars frequently point out the importance of more broad ‘conceptual metaphors’. Indeed, it is conceptual metaphors that are primarily described within the analysis section of this book. According to Allbriton, a conceptual metaphor relates not just to a metaphorical term or phrase, but to a general way of thinking about a particular object (or objects) or person (or persons).¹¹ To continue the above example, the general perception that arose in Nazi Germany that the Jews were a plague or disease was reinforced not only by linguistic metaphors such as ‘the Jew is a bacillus’, but also by numerous non-metaphorical arguments and actions, including ‘quarantine’ measures, questions about the physical health and cleanliness of Jews in eastern territories, a belief that the Jew’s ‘essence’ could be transmited to non-Jews and indeed could easily contaminate the Aryan gene pool, and the victimization of those who assisted or even simply communicated with Jews. German citizens realized that, for their own protection if for no other reason, they should treat Jews as if they carried a contagious disease. Even those persons who might have ‘Jewish blood’ but who identified themselves as Aryan were to be avoided, just as one might refrain from contact with an asymptomatic carrier of disease.

In addition to providing a general ‘frame’ against which the target is described, conceptual metaphors, Allbriton wrote, can influence the way in which information about the target ‘is processed and represented in memory’.¹² In other words, additional knowledge about the group or event is considered in light of the existing conceptual metaphor. Once a particular conceptual metaphor is embraced as an apt way of viewing the target, it may be extremely difficult to replace it with a contrasting mode of framing the issue or group. De Vos and Suárez-Orozco contended that once we come to embrace ‘feelings of social revulsion and disgust’ toward a particular group of persons, it is extremely unlikely that newly acquired information that runs counter to this stereotypical image will be mentally processed in a way that allows us to engage in a marked readjustment of the original image.¹³ In part this is due to the fact that metaphors often act subconsciously, impacting our feelings and actions in ways that we are not even aware of, and their effects are often long-lasting.

Metaphors and marginalization

The more closely we look, the more we realize that a select collection of pejorative rhetorical themes have been employed over time for the purpose of denigrating various marginalized community groups. Wolf Wolfensberger, the Syracuse University emeritus professor who introduced the concept of normalization into the United States, noted that ‘[w]hen we review history and literature, it becomes apparent that regardless of time or place, certain roles are particularly apt to be thrust upon deviant persons. The way in which these roles transcend time, distance and culture is remarkable.’¹⁴ In the same vein Sam Keen wrote that ‘[w]hat we will find is that wars come and go, but – strangely, amid changing circumstances – the hostile imagination has a certain standard repertoire of images it uses to dehumanize the enemy’.¹⁵ What Keen says of warfare is just as true in regard to the many forms of oppression that are rationalized by arguments of self-preservation, economic security, race or class stabilization, the augmentation of control, the protection of one’s family, or paternalistic intent.

Metaphors and other rhetorical devices have frequently been employed as vehicles for fostering dehumanization,¹⁶ influencing societal ideology and policy development, and providing justification for the extreme actions that are taken against ‘deviant’ or stigmatized groups. When persons or groups are consistently compared to a denigrated, distasteful, or threatening object, animal, person, or group, it is the intention of the speaker or writer that facets of the pejoratively viewed source domain become associated with the target domain, for the purpose of diminishing the value of the later.¹⁷ As Burton Blat wrote, one of the principal ways ‘to create monsters out of human beings’ is to ‘construct a story so as to make them into something they do not want to be’.¹⁸

In his book Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives, William Brennan describes some of the important themes that function as source domains. As Brennan writes, ‘[i]n many instances, the most significant factor determining how an object will be perceived is not the nature of the object itself, but the words employed to characterize it’.¹⁹ Vitriolic language, he adds, often punctuated by metaphors, is a constituent feature of any major effort to dehumanize or oppress a marginalized segment of the population.²⁰ What he terms ‘semantic warfare’, Brennan adds, ‘does not ordinarily burst upon the scene helter-skelter. It is not an accidental, spontaneous, or chaotic episode, but a deliberate and unremiting phenomenon usually undergirded by fully elaborated systems of concepts, beliefs, and myths.’²¹ As a general rule, those who engage in violence or denigration, or advocate social control measures against others, do not want to be perceived as acting inhumanely or without compelling justification. Whenever, therefore, widespread efforts are made to control, disparage, or even exterminate stigmatized persons, various rationales are employed to portray the target group as a threat to society, a subhuman entity, or both.

The employment of disparaging metaphors as a means of describing an undesirable target group does more than simply present covert rationales for their possible control. Such metaphors also are a principal means by which those who want to expand their power or sphere of influence atempt to legitimize their role as definers of the group or of the social problem(s) targeted.²² Lise Noël noted that ‘[b]efore being stripped of their property or rights, the oppressed are robbed of their identity.’ ‘The dominator’, she continues, ‘defines this identity in their stead, reducing it to a difference that is then labelled inferior.’²³

As Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz, and others have noted, in the medical field, as well as psychiatry and other professions that are marked by the labeling of human conditions by established experts or authority figures, such diagnosis, while it may benefit the ‘patient’ in certain ways, also reinforces the power relationship between the diagnosed person and the ‘expert’.²⁴ Identifying the other is not only an important means of atempting to exert power, but may even carry with it presumptions of property rights. Many cotage industries have developed and numerous job opportunities have arisen as an outgrowth of expanded diagnostic ‘expertise’ and the subsequent reification of vague disability and medical and psychological conditions.

Efforts by marginalized community groups to reestablish their own identity in society are therefore a central theme in contemporary scholarship on prejudice and discrimination. Much of the current writing in disability studies, for example, deals with this issue. Some persons with a disability, such as many individuals who are deaf, do not even consider themselves disabled, and resent efforts by others to define them that way. Even many persons who self-identify as disabled do not necessarily consider their disability to be their primary identifying atribute, even if others consider it so. Additionally, in cases where persons do identify their disability as a core feature of their identity, the meaning that the condition has is often very different from that which observers assume, especially since many non-disabled persons tend to ‘awfulize’ disabilities and see only their negative consequences.²⁵

Identifying the target group as deviant or apart from the norm is also a means of affirming the ‘foundational values’ of the prevailing status quo, or of reinforcing expected normative behavior.²⁶ Identifying community subgroups as outside the societal mainstream or as rejecting cultural norms or values is a means of supporting the image of entrenched powers as being inherently superior to such groups. It also serves to foster ‘victim-blaming’ whereupon the oppression of such individuals is percei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Metaphors and the dehumanization of marginalized groups
• 2 The organism metaphor: the moron as a diseased entity
• 3 The animal metaphor: the moron as an atavistic subhuman
• 4 The war and natural catastrophe metaphors: the moron as an enemy force
• 5 The religious and altruistic metaphors: the moron as an immoral sinner and an object of protection
• 6 The object metaphor: the moron as a poorly functioning human
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index