#99 George Orwell – Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

Everyone has their own stories from the first time they did a job. Orwell, however, has one that takes some beating. Orwell is famous for being an anti-imperialist, democratic-socialist champion of human liberty, so it’s a bit counterintuitive that his first gainful employment was as a policeman in Imperial Burma. His job there is partly about keeping the peace, and partly about ensuring the indefinite continuation of the British Empire.

The story is called ‘Shooting an Elephant’. One day, the young Orwell gets a call from one of his officers – a tamed bull elephant has ‘gone must’ (become highly aggressive because of its hormones), has broken his tether and is loose in the town. At first, it seems as if it may all be harmless enough. A little property has been trampled, a little food stolen from the marketplace and a lot of panic as people run to and fro with half-true stories; no one is hurt.

But as Orwell follows the damage, he finds something far worse. A native worker, unlucky enough to stumble round the corner straight into the elephant, has been caught by the elephant’s trunk then trampled underfoot.  The body, “grinning with an expression of unendurable agony,” means that the whole story has become far more serious.  Thinking of self-defence, Orwell sends away his orderly to fetch an elephant gun.

He has never had to deal with a rampaging elephant before. Gun in hand, he first sights the beast. Completely unconcerned by the crowd around it, it is happily munching its way through grass torn up from the roadside. As far as Orwell can tell, the attack of ‘must’ has passed, and the animal is largely safe.

“As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow… Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him.”

But then he looks over his shoulder. Word has already passed that the policeman is going to shoot the elephant. A crowd of natives, perhaps two thousand strong, is standing behind him, waiting for him to kill the animal.

Odds are that at some point in your life you may find yourself in a similar situation. Not with the elephant, perhaps; but where you are required, out of some position of authority, to do something that you find fundamentally objectionable. Most people think it is an honour to be in charge of something – and most of the time it is. But there are moments, such as the one that Orwell has suddenly found himself in the middle of, where you suddenly realise how little freedom the leader has.

At the start of the piece, Orwell explains that, though he has grown to despise the whole imperial system, he has an equal hatred for the mob of Burmese natives. It was all very well to believe in the abstract principles of liberty and equality, but it was utterly wearing to bear the daily, instinctive hatred of thousands of people.

“I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”

That crowd, standing behind him now, had gathered to see the white man kill the elephant. Orwell loathes the crowd, and knows its instincts to be wrong; yet if he fails to do what the crowd is expecting, he knows they will judge him for it. The show had to live up to its billing. Anything less would send the crowd away disappointed, especially in the principal actor.

“To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”

Orwell does not want to kill the elephant. But all of the steps that have led to this point means he has no choice. He settles himself down in the mud, takes aim, and fires. The elephant, puzzled, shudders and falls down to the ground. Orwell has to empty round after round into its head to ensure that it dies.

It’s an incredible essay, and it says a lot about what a terrible thing it can be to be in charge. Orwell thinks of his essay as a piece against colonialism, and about how the business of running an empire makes the so-called masters of the empire no more than its powerless pawns. He certainly had no love for his own position as the living embodiment of the greatest empire upon earth.

“Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys… He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

But I would say this story covers every situation where a person wields power, however small. Authority brings with it an unmeasurable, unavoidable sense of expectation. It sets unspoken rules about how the wielder must act, what their aims must be if they are to be worthy of bearing it. Failure to do so, especially in the world of laws and bureaucracies, means shame and humiliation.

The uncomfortable truth, which anyone who has led a group of people for whatever reason will have sensed, is that most of the time you do not exercise authority. Authority exercises you – it wears you like a jacket. Your limbs move to match whatever figure it makes. Orwell is not choosing to pull the trigger; he is in a position where he feels  no choice is left to him. It’s the same sense that a manager has if they’re forced to make someone redundant, or a teacher who has to send a child to another pointless detention.

Authority, when the stakes are high, doesn’t let you compromise; and for some people that makes the whole question of power deeply uncomfortable on a personal level. That said, there are many who seem to get far less sensitive  given time. I wonder (if against all the odds) Orwell had stayed in Burma he would have found it easier to stand against those eyes. Would he have learnt tricks to avoid standing near the elephant with his gun? Might he even have figured out how to tell the crowd that he wasn’t going to fire, without it being a disappointment? If one does decide to make peace with the compromises inherent in being in charge of something, it’s all about finding ways to avoid shooting that elephant.