Sometime before the dawn of history, I had an ancestor who was a killer. Every day he thirsted for blood. Maybe he was a hunter, maybe a warrior, maybe a murderer, I don't know. All I know is that he only felt alive when he was taking life. He would tingle and burn with excitement as he set out from his home in search of fresh prey. As he stalked his quarry in ever-narrowing circles, he would feel the tension building inside him, as though every cell in his body were screaming to be fed. And when he could no longer bear it, he pounced—then came the rush of the chase, the mad frenzy of the fight to the death, and finally the sublime release of the death-stroke. As his victim's life drained away, he closed his eyes and shuddered with silent ecstasy. His surging blood felt like the first rain after a summer drought. Perhaps he brought the dead thing home with him as a gift to his family or his village, or maybe an addition to his trophy room. Or maybe he just offered it a little prayer of gratitude and returned with a new spring in his step.
This spring, though, would be all too brief. It might last him two weeks, maybe a month, but soon enough he would feel the urge once again. And if, owing to some unfortunate circumstance, he could not do what he was born to do, he would suffer. His face would become pale and fallen; his hands would begin to shake; his food would sit in his stomach all day undigested. He felt neither comfort among his friends nor desire for the company of women. Some mornings he would wake up with that salty-metallic taste on his tongue—it would linger for maybe a second and then vanish, the last remnant of a blissful dream he'd already forgotten. Slowly he would pass into living death. He would feel as though his spirit were eating itself alive, leaving nothing but a lifeless, bloodless shell of a man. Eventually all he could do was lie on the ground and weep like a starving child. When the unfortunate circumstance had passed, and he once again held a weapon in his hand, it felt unfamiliar; it could take him many weeks before the ice thawed enough for him to kill again.
A lot has happened since then. Needless to say, I'm no killer. I've never been hunting, I've never been in a fight, and I don't even kill bugs—I pick them up and release them outside, usually with an affectionate pat on the head. I am thoroughly civilized. But my killer ancestor lives on within me, civilization or no. The same is true of all artists. We all have predatory natures, which is why we all feel a bit out of place in the civilized society to which we owe our security. Art is no game for us; it is the only way we have found to satisfy our primal bloodlust. Without it, we too would be walking dead. Carrying a pen or paintbrush instead of a spear, we search the night for fresh meat flitting through the jungles of our minds. As the elusive thought comes momentarily into view, we pin it down, freezing it into the rigor mortis of concrete representation. The blood courses through our veins; we feel so alive; and we say thank you for this blessed moment to whoever might be listening. Critique, my art-form of choice, tends to be more overtly violent than most. It often feels more like vivisection than hunting—not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm always watching for worthy victims. A few weeks ago, when I slipped the Princeton Tory into my desk drawer to save for later, I didn't realize this hapless creature's last words would directly address my inner killer—and under my knife, what juicy truths did it let slip!
This "Last Word," as the final article in the Tory is fittingly called, was entitled "The Raskolnikov Temptation: Why It Is Never Mind Over Morals" (see p. 14). The author, Tory Editor-in-Chief Brian McGinley, begins by relating the murder scene in Crime and Punishment as well as Raskolnikov's theory of "ordinary" and "extraordinary" people that led him to commit the crime, and goes on to remind us that morals apply to us just like everyone else and we can't go around putting axes in people's heads. Fair enough. But surgical examination shows that his line of argument, which underpins the whole piece, rests on a fascinatingly revealing blunder: a short ways into the article, McGinley summarizes Raskolnikov's "animating principles" as follows: "some men are of superior worth due to their intelligence and that traditional social barriers can therefore be rejected." Wait a minute..."due to their intelligence"? Where did that come from? Let's be clear here: "intelligence" does not make you extraordinary—you just are. An extraordinary person is not a person with superior intelligence; an extraordinary person is simply someone who does whatever is necessary to accomplish his ends. If that means killing, he kills without thinking about it, gets away with it, and never feels a shred of guilt. By erroneously inserting intelligence into the equation, McGinley is ironically making the very same mistake that Raskolnikov made, although fortunately for us he came down on the right side nonetheless—I wouldn't want him coming after me with an axe after he reads this article.
But it doesn't stop there. Oh no, the entire article revolves around "intelligence," which McGinley sometimes refers to as "cognitive ability." While he never explains exactly what this "intelligence" is, one thing is clear enough: we Princeton students have a lot of it. "Simply being here," he writes, "entails a validation of the superiority of our intelligence." So there you have it: we're super intelligent. You already knew that, but it always bears repeating. McGinley then quickly goes on to say that, although we have superior intelligence, that does not give us the right to declare ourselves superior human beings, because that would "necessarily entail a denial of the equal dignity of humanity." He cautions us not to "distribute dignity based on intelligence," and encourages us to "reject entirely intelligence as a measure of value," warning that "extraordinary intelligence tends toward pernicious elitism" as a matter of course. Intelligence only has value, he says, if it is applied to moral ends.
So what is this "intelligence" that we all have in such abundance? Nothing if not raw power in the sphere of the imagination. It is the buzz of desperate calculation that goes on silently in some overdeveloped part of the brain. It lets us turn the world in our heads into a place more to our liking, if we lack the strength to change reality. Where did it come from? I think it came from torture. Let me explain: one day in the darkest recesses of prehistory, one of my murderous ancestors did something he had never done before: he caught his quarry alive. As he set to work killing the poor creature, something resembling a thought bubbled to the surface of his early hominid brain. And the thought said to him, this doesn't have to be over right away. No, this can keep going and going. My ancestor's eyes widened—he'd never thought of this before. That moment of consummation could last as long as he wanted it to. He began to slow his work, and with every shriek that escaped from the mouth of his prey he felt torrents of pleasure ripping through his body. This is how killers became torturers. And for the poor tortured creatures, eventually the pain was so unbearable that their brains created another world to let them escape it. This other world came to be called "the mind" and the descendants of the tortured creatures, myself undoubtedly among them, now attend Princeton University.
Regardless of how inauspicious its origins may have been, intelligence has come to be highly prized in our society. We who possess it in great quantities get to be masters of the world. We are terribly proud of it, even McGinley—if he weren't I don't think he would have made that little leap of logic so easily. And even now, after all these millennia of human evolution, we're still using it for the same purpose for which it originated: to imagine ourselves masters. Intelligence, as McGinley points out, does indeed "tend toward pernicious elitism," but that elitism is only pernicious to our own selves—the more fully we enshroud ourselves in the happy illusion that we are masters of the world, the more we blind ourselves to the pathetic absurdity of our situation. We may not "distribute dignity based on intelligence" for fear of appearing to ourselves as we actually are, but we certainly feel ourselves in the position to distribute dignity, as we did at the International Festival on Saturday night. The procession of flags, arranged alphabetically by country, showed the sparse audience in Richardson Auditorium that we distribute dignity equally to every country, one after another, like a rich banker giving nickels to orphans. The tortured creature, now master of the world, squirms with pleasure as his world processes by before him. The killer in him, if there ever was one, has long since died; the tortured creature is all that remains.