I vaguely remember being at a circus or fair when I was about six or seven and encountering a carnival barker inviting patrons to pay an extra dollar to see the freak show. Bearded ladies? A half-man/half-woman? The Snake Boy? Who wouldn’t want to see that?
Well, actually, my mother wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t cough up the dough to let me see it either. Moms never get it.
But, let’s face it, kids are interested in stuff like this. They always have been. When I began as a Waldorf teacher in 1992, I was surprised to find fifth grade boys gathered around a library table looking through The Guinness Book of World Records and laughing and marveling over the photos and stories of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins” as well as that one Italian guy with three legs (who said he used his third leg to play soccer), the tallest woman ever, the shortest man ever, the person with the longest fingernails ever recorded…. You know, the important stuff. But what surprised me was not that they were looking at these images: what surprised me is that was exactly what my friends and I did in the library of Our Lady or Loretto grade school when we were in fifth grade. Students don’t do that anymore, of course, but not because they’re not inclined to: The Guinness Book just doesn’t include that material any longer. Apparently it’s considered “offensive.”
But kids aren’t interested in this stuff due to immaturity (though they are immature, being kids and all); they’re interested in these exceptional stories for the same reasons that they are fascinated by who hit the most home runs, who stole the most bases, who won the most gold medals at the Olympics, who ate the most hot dogs at a sitting, or who holds the world records for every other area of human endeavor. As the late Kieran Egan writes in his essential book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding, kids of this age (roughly 11-15) are interested in this stuff—as they are with the possible existence of ghosts, faeries, zombies, and so forth—because they are interested in finding out the absolute “limits of reality, the extremes of experience” in the context of a human existence. Following Herodotus, he calls what draws these kids mega argon, “great achievements.” (Herodotus includes a lot of weirdness and curiosities in Histories.) This is the same quality that causes middle school boys to argue about whether or not Batman or Superman is the greater superhero, or whether Achilles or Hector the better man. (And, in case you are interested, in addition to Egan’s book, the other text I think indispensable reading for anyone wanting to be a school teacher is Lucy Maud Montgomery’s immortal Anne of Green Gables.)
This all came to mind this week after my two youngest boys, aged 13 and 15, watched the 1932 classic pre-code “horror” film (it’s not at all frightening) Freaks. Freaks, directed by Tod Browning, a cautionary tale featuring a number of “circus freaks,” scandalized audiences when it was first released. In fact, it was pulled from theaters and even banned in the UK until the 1960s, when it received a new lease on life in the midnight movies that were becoming popular with college students on both sides of the Atlantic. Browning, the son of an affluent Kentucky family, literally ran away from home at the age of 16 to join the circus, where he performed many jobs, including that of sideshow barker. It was in this milieu that he came to know—and love, might I add—the subculture of the circus freak. His affection for them really comes across in the film.
I’d seen the film before, and my older boys watched it about 15 years ago, but I was really struck this time by the film’s relevance to our own cultural moment, characterized as it is by the cult of DEI—especially in the higher education environments in which I often travel.
For example, a local community college has gone all in on DEI with its curriculum—and across all courses and disciplines. Here is an example from the requirements for a composition course:
Step 2 Choose and Narrow a Topic The Semester Topic has been chosen for you. It is Cultural Diversity. This topic must be the foundation of all writing assignments for the semester. All three of your writing assignments will be on this topic. There will be no exceptions. a. Choose as your broad topic, Cultural Diversity. b. Choose one of the following cultures: Cultural Diversity and Languages Cultural Diversity and Education Cultural Diversity and Socio-economic Status Cultural Diversity and the Military Cultural Diversity and Giftedness/Exceptionalities/Abilities/Disabilities
Freaks would be a great addition to the syllabus of such a course, don’t you think? I bet not many DEI officers would be thrilled about its inclusion, though.
But another thing also occurred to me while watching the film.
Since it was first published in The Journal of Medical Ethics in 2011, I have been using Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva’s article “After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” with college students as an object for dissection in the noble endeavor of rhetorical analysis. (It’s a short article and easy to get through in the typical 75 minute class.) As you can probably guess by the title, like Freaks in 1932, their article likewise generated a degree of scandal when it appeared thirteen years ago.
Among other things, Giubilini and Minerva propose the idea that people born with previously undetected birth defects or other abnormalities (conjoined twins, for example) could be considered people whose lives “might not be worth living,” and argue that what they call “after-birth abortion” should then be permissible:
“First, we do not put forward any claim about the moment at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible, and we do not think that in fact more than a few days would be necessary for doctors to detect any abnormality in the child. In cases where the after-birth abortion were requested for non-medical reasons, we do not suggest any threshold, as it depends on the neurological development of newborns, which is something neurologists and psychologists would be able to assess.
“Second, we do not claim that after-birth abortions are good alternatives to abortion. Abortions at an early stage are the best option, for both psychological and physical reasons. However, if a disease has not been detected during the pregnancy, if something went wrong during the delivery, or if economical, social or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone, then people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford.”
I couldn’t help but think of this as I watched Freaks.
The most famous scene from the film
Intrigued, I looked into some of the biographies of the so-called “freaks” in the film. What surprised me was that, though some of them experienced hardship, it wasn’t any worse than what “normal” performers have experienced. Poor Amanda Bynes, for example, seems to have had it far worse. But many of the freaks from the film actually lived fulfilling lives—and, as far as I can tell, they loved their jobs. If there’s a book on this—let me know! In fact, over the 1960s and 70s, as circus sideshows started to disappear and many of the freaks found themselves unemployed, they found their lives lacking in meaning and often slipped into depression. I doubt that any of them, even the performers, like Schlitzie, suffering from microcephaly (it’s where our pejorative “pinhead” comes from) thought of their lives as not worth living.
Indeed, where do we get this idea of a “life not worth living”? And who gets to decide? I’ve heard people in abortion debates raise this in the context of rape—and have even seen people argue that those conceived of rape should be aborted in front of my friend, Scot, who actually was. You can imagine the social discomfort when he told them of his origins. I have relatives who were also conceived in rape. But guess what? Their lives, like Scot’s, are worth living.
I do not know the political affiliations of either Giubilini or Minerva, but I’ve been around academia long enough to assume they are of the same ilk as those pushing DEI in education (and not just in higher education). As the Ghost of Christmas Present tells Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, commenting on Scrooge’s remark about “the surplus population”:
“‘Man,’ said the Ghost, ‘if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God, to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.’”
I know we like to pride ourselves on our culture’s superiority to those that went before—all those benighted dolts not benefiting from our so great wisdom. But, as E.P. Thompson observed so long ago, such are the pompous wishes engendered by the “enormous condescension of posterity.” We are barbarians, but our barbarism is more sophisticated.
A few years ago, a story made the headlines about Iceland’s “eradication of Down Syndrome.” But it wasn’t eradication. It was eugenics, but a kinder, gentler eugenics. The kind that is all around us. One of our neighbors has Down Syndrome, and we don’t consider him part of the “surplus population.” And neither does his family. Certainly not in the sight of Heaven. But in modernity’s sight? That’s another question.
We live in a world where many think there is a “surplus population,” but they, like the Icelandic authorities, do not advocate an active culling of the herd. Their methods are kinder and gentler, but have the same end. They’re playing the eugenics long game. Did I mention fertility rates are in rapid decline, especially in high-income countries?
Really, friends, is there such a thing as a life not worth living? Or is that a myth we tell ourselves to disguise our barbarity?
You can watch Freaks here.
This is wonderful! Thank you so much. In spite of his personal chaos, Jean Vanier was one of the first authors I read on what it means to be human, in his book Becoming Human, and I carried it with me like a sacred text, which it very well feels like when you read it. He made such a beautiful case for what “normal” really is, and how abnormal most “normal” people are in comparison to the love and compassion that flows from human beings who have birth defects and/or suffer terribly at the hands of “normal” people. Some things just never change. True is always true, love wins.
I published a short story some years ago called 'The Origin of Freaks,' a fictionalized account of Tod Browning's early life. For research, I read 'Dark Carnival', a biography of Browning. Yes, he was a carnival barker, but he also performed as a 'freak' himself in various capacities, such as a 'living corpse' and a 'geek' ('geeks' would bite the heads off chickens!). A fascinating life. One could argue even that the figure of the vampire, from his film, Dracula, is another sort of freak, of the myth/legend sort.
Your observations about the various ways our culture does not value life ring very true, and the situation is getting worse. Yes, it's 'soft' eugenics taking place on various fronts, in particular, the way we've taken so-called 'rights' such as abortion and 'death with dignity' (euthanasia) and expanded their social functions to kill more and more people, one of the most egregious being the spread of "medical assistance in dying" or MAID as it's called in Canada, which now has expansion to include mental illness held in suspension by the current government that wants it to happen. Gender ideology, too, has an aspect of the eugenics death cult to it, with the hormonal and surgical treatments that result in sterilization. All of these movements are covered under the term 'health care'.