Depending on the translation of Psalms 8:5, “man is a little lower than the angels” or a “little lower than God.” Let’s use the former.
The Great Chain of Being and the Human Chain of Being
In the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being that has literally dominated Western Thought for more than two millennia, humans stand high on the scale of existence. That “chain of being” runs from Deity at the top to rocks at the bottom, or from intangible Spirit through organic life down to inorganic objects. And even today, in spite of efforts by PETA and other groups to raise animals to humanity’s position on the chain, most of world of opposable thumbs still ranks people above other life-forms. Be honest now. Did you ever think of yourself as somehow “less than” animals? Cole Porter said it best in his lyrics: “You’re the Top” * At least, you’re the top on Earth, the Coliseum of buildings, the Nile of rivers, the Mickey Mouse of cartoons, the Derby winner, a Botticelli painting and a poem by Shelly, as the song goes..
The “Chain” says nothing, however, about what that hierarchical position means for individual humans. It speaks nothing about human folly, contradiction, depravity, and downright absurdity. It relates nothing about concerns and human economic and human status save that in all monarchical and feudal systems, it transfers esteem and rights to a few through ideas like primogeniture and “royal” blood. But those transfers of value beg a question: Why do we still establish hierarchies of importance within our own ranks when, in truth, we’re all in this together, and we’re all in this world for just a blink of an eye?
Why do we make so much of others’ lives, particularly the lives of those who walk upon the stages of politics and entertainment? Take, for example, the petty controversies centered on actors. You realize, don’t you, that as humans they are just others that with you and everyone else make up a single link on the Great Chain of Being? God-angels-humans-animals-plants-rocks: If you picture that chain hanging from “heaven,” all humanity is a single link. But that’s not how humans think, is it? No, we see differences and levels. And those levels aren’t necessarily linked to genius or talent. Whims, propaganda, traditions, and fortuity are the dominant drivers of human hierarchies. To those drivers we can add a need driven by the search for identity through a kind of virtual communion or a “virtual cannibalism” of “spirit” that connects idolized human with idolizing human that often results in the accumulation of relics in the form of souvenirs and signed photos that clutter the rooms of fans. At the top are links in the human chain that have been forged from glitter and gold and at the bottom are those simply plated with base metal filings found in a waste pile alongside the smelter of humankind; one forged in five-star adulation and the other plated in ridiculed People of Walmart photos.
In every century, that metaphor of a chain within the Chain marked the differentiation between owner and slave, king and peasant, lord and serf, and believer and barbarian. In the minds of nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalists like the captain of HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Darwin to his discoveries, humanity was divided. Robert FitzRoy, believed the Tierra del Fuegians were “lesser human beings,” mostly because they were in his mind a people farthest removed from the supposed site of the Garden of Eden that he assumed was located somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates valleys and the westernmost branch of the Fertile Crescent. Like FitzRoy, most see a chain within the Chain, one hanging from those idolized humans at the top to disdained humans at the bottom.
Appropriating Other Links and the Artificially Positioning Lower Links
Not too long ago, vaudevillian Al Jolson (d. 1950), painted in black face, entertained audiences that thought his imitation of a minstrel was worth the price of admission. That a whole segment of the American society might have been offended by his act meant little to mainstream reporting at the time. It was an age before social media and talk shows. It was an age before the Civil Rights movement and modern wokism and virtue signaling. And Jolson entertained in a time when the roles that African-American men and women played for Hollywood studios was typically stereotypical and secondary, often roles like maids and butlers. Main characters?
DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, based on the life of Samuel Smalls, was an early look at the African-American population without caricature. George Gershwin, insisting on having Black singers rather than white people wearing Al-Jolson-type blackface, turned the novel and subsequent libretto into a Broadway musical, elevating a segment of the entertainment population to a status above secondary roles. But it took Hollywood decades to recognize the talent and dignity of people like Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington, both becoming renowned for their acting, and both helping to advance the cause of African-American actors. For so long, Hollywood had its own “chain of being,” a pyramid of importance on which African-American actors were “a little lower than Caucasian actors.” Take, as an example, the first major filming of Othello (1965) that starred Laurence Olivier, 30 years before Laurence Fishburne played the lead.
And Native Americans were lower still on the artificial human chain of Hollywood. I remember seeing “cowboy and Indian” movies in which the roles of “chiefs and Indians” were filled with Caucasian actors in body paint and feathers: Rock Hudson in Winchester ’73 (1950), Henry Brandon in The Searchers (1953), and even Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven (1960). Oh! My gosh! Can you imagine those actors getting those roles in today’s woke and virtue-signaling world in which only actors of a particular ethnicity or race can play roles of humans of similar heritage? With the exception of Johnny Depp as Tonto in the satirical Lone Ranger, of course. Woe to the writer, producer, and director who casts a Laurence Olivier as Othello or a Rock Hudson as Taza, son of Cochise (played by Jeff Chandler, another white guy).
Acting
That Hollywood was given to portraying stereotypes isn’t surprising, nor it is surprising that it passed over actors of “different ethnicities and races” for key roles. After all, writers, producers, and directors probably grew up under cultural influences like those that motivated FitzRoy. The pervasive premise is that humanity was a link divided, a chain unto itself. And today, that chain within a link has in itself many links, as protestors around the world demonstrate by shouting for genocide of those they envision standing far below them on the scale of value.**
We’re all screen writers and actors in a way. We script and play the role that fits our culture, or we play a role that runs counter to culture in a show of defiance. As Shakespeare has Jaques say in As You Like It,
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
Funny How the World Sees Actors
Recall from your high school lit class that only male actors played roles in Shakespeare’s time. That film Shakespeare in Love portrays an era when males commonly took the roles of females. To cast a woman as a woman was scandalous. But today, casting a woman as a man or a man as a woman is ordinary. And that Hollywood concession has altered the human links throughout society as male athletes dominate women’s sports. We’ve added links to our human link on the Great Chain.
But Acting Is Pretending, Isn’t It?
Everyone pretends at some time. Think of giving a toddler a “horsey-back ride,” or of pretending to be a character represented by a puppet, or of simply saying “Mooooo” in imitation of a cow. Where’s PETA when this last violation of animal dignity is being portrayed? How dare a parent appropriate cow language and mannerisms!
Most people (Note bene: I never took a survey) realize that acting is pretending. So, this “appropriation outrage” is just an example of people removing themselves from the reality that humans can imitate any link in the Great Chain of Being, even the topmost link. Think Morgan Freeman (Bruce Almighty, 2003), Alanis Morissette (Dogma, 1999), and George Burns (Oh, God! 1977). Did anyone think that such appropriation was anything more than pretending? Should only God play God in movies?
Trans athletes pretending to be women seems to be another story. There are consequences, mostly detrimental ones for biological women competitors. Years of all that testosterone coursing through those arteries and veins of the transitioned athlete have made such actors truly different from the characters whose roles they play on court, in field, or in pool. There’s another link added to the chain of human links, one that never before existed, not even if one counts the soprano-voiced eunuchs of eras gone by.
Men participating in women’s sports is the ultimate appropriation. Well, maybe not the ultimate if one considers those actors who played God. That’s gotta be the biggest appropriation. But then, we’ve never heard God complain about it—although that applies only to this life and not to the afterlife. (Can you imagine Freeman, Burns, and Morissette at the Pearly Gates seeking entrance to an eternal life with God and having to account for appropriating Him in a film? “Sorry, Lord, but it was just an act. I really didn’t claim to be You as though I were some man claiming to be a female athlete”)
Pretending? We all do it in some manner occasionally: Maybe it isn’t a role playing God in movies, but rather a daily role of playing one who knows more than others, a role in which the actor dismisses as irrelevant the knowledge and logic, even the history that others not to their liking know. Or maybe it’s a matter of standing in judgment like some King Solomon—only without the accompanying wisdom.
Is There Some Point to This?
When Carl Sagan wrote that “we are star stuff,” he meant that everything save the hydrogen in our bodies (in water) came from the process of fusion inside stars that eventually went nova or supernova or even hyper nova. Everything in the visible universe is related by composition—let’s ignore Dark Matter for this. And among the grand interrelated Cosmic entities made from star stuff, the Great Chain of Being separates that which is conscious from that which is not. Then the only conscious link in the chain, humanity, divided and still divides itself into the valued and less valued, or the highly valued and the valueless.
The danger we impose upon ourselves stems from the assumption of greater or lesser worth, of idolized individuals vs. idolizing individuals. And almost every time we make the distinctions, we find ourselves causing problems we cannot solve, such as the disdain of groups that believe themselves to be higher on the human chain than others. Serfdom, slavery, abuse, disabuse, and depravity result. The links within the link also mean that we take the opinions of some to be of greater value than the opinions of others, even when the opining top of the chain speaks with little knowledge and even less logic, and even when some at the top in their bias reduce others to caricature and stereotype.
But nothing in this practice of making a human chain of value will change as every generation becomes infused with bias before it has the time to consider the commonality of our species. The effect will be a continuing bias and a constant resurfacing of disdain or disrespect. The effect will be college students and others like famous actors and politicians denying that atrocities occurred when Hamas massacred Israelis. Those standing on the stage of public opinion will forever choose whom to support and where to put those they support on the chain of value.
Come on, now, be honest: Do you impose a chain of value? Are you the top link?
*Cole Porter’s 1935 song “You’re the Top” offers a number of metaphors. You can read the lyrics here: https://www.bing.com/search?q=Lyric%20You%27re%20the%20top&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=5330 You can also see the song performed by Cary Grant and Ginny Simms in the 1946 movie Night and Day in a YouTube clip or hear it performed on other YouTube clips, such as the one from the 1956 movie Anything Goes with Bing Crosby, Donald O’Connor, Mitzi Gaynor, and Zizi Jeanmaire.
**Thus, the recent comments of actors and actresses equating the massacre of Israelis to payback for some perceived offense against Palestinians whose governing Hamas leaders kept in check and poverty, comments represented by the those of Susan Sarandon who seems to ignore two millennia of antisemitism and events like the pogroms of 1391, those massacres in and around Castile and Aragon, the Alhambra Decree of 1492 that exiled Jews from Spain or forced them to convert to Christianity, and, of course, the Holocaust of WWII. She said, “There are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.”
The Great Chain of Being and the Human Chain of Being
In the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being that has literally dominated Western Thought for more than two millennia, humans stand high on the scale of existence. That “chain of being” runs from Deity at the top to rocks at the bottom, or from intangible Spirit through organic life down to inorganic objects. And even today, in spite of efforts by PETA and other groups to raise animals to humanity’s position on the chain, most of world of opposable thumbs still ranks people above other life-forms. Be honest now. Did you ever think of yourself as somehow “less than” animals? Cole Porter said it best in his lyrics: “You’re the Top” * At least, you’re the top on Earth, the Coliseum of buildings, the Nile of rivers, the Mickey Mouse of cartoons, the Derby winner, a Botticelli painting and a poem by Shelly, as the song goes..
The “Chain” says nothing, however, about what that hierarchical position means for individual humans. It speaks nothing about human folly, contradiction, depravity, and downright absurdity. It relates nothing about concerns and human economic and human status save that in all monarchical and feudal systems, it transfers esteem and rights to a few through ideas like primogeniture and “royal” blood. But those transfers of value beg a question: Why do we still establish hierarchies of importance within our own ranks when, in truth, we’re all in this together, and we’re all in this world for just a blink of an eye?
Why do we make so much of others’ lives, particularly the lives of those who walk upon the stages of politics and entertainment? Take, for example, the petty controversies centered on actors. You realize, don’t you, that as humans they are just others that with you and everyone else make up a single link on the Great Chain of Being? God-angels-humans-animals-plants-rocks: If you picture that chain hanging from “heaven,” all humanity is a single link. But that’s not how humans think, is it? No, we see differences and levels. And those levels aren’t necessarily linked to genius or talent. Whims, propaganda, traditions, and fortuity are the dominant drivers of human hierarchies. To those drivers we can add a need driven by the search for identity through a kind of virtual communion or a “virtual cannibalism” of “spirit” that connects idolized human with idolizing human that often results in the accumulation of relics in the form of souvenirs and signed photos that clutter the rooms of fans. At the top are links in the human chain that have been forged from glitter and gold and at the bottom are those simply plated with base metal filings found in a waste pile alongside the smelter of humankind; one forged in five-star adulation and the other plated in ridiculed People of Walmart photos.
In every century, that metaphor of a chain within the Chain marked the differentiation between owner and slave, king and peasant, lord and serf, and believer and barbarian. In the minds of nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalists like the captain of HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Darwin to his discoveries, humanity was divided. Robert FitzRoy, believed the Tierra del Fuegians were “lesser human beings,” mostly because they were in his mind a people farthest removed from the supposed site of the Garden of Eden that he assumed was located somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates valleys and the westernmost branch of the Fertile Crescent. Like FitzRoy, most see a chain within the Chain, one hanging from those idolized humans at the top to disdained humans at the bottom.
Appropriating Other Links and the Artificially Positioning Lower Links
Not too long ago, vaudevillian Al Jolson (d. 1950), painted in black face, entertained audiences that thought his imitation of a minstrel was worth the price of admission. That a whole segment of the American society might have been offended by his act meant little to mainstream reporting at the time. It was an age before social media and talk shows. It was an age before the Civil Rights movement and modern wokism and virtue signaling. And Jolson entertained in a time when the roles that African-American men and women played for Hollywood studios was typically stereotypical and secondary, often roles like maids and butlers. Main characters?
DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, based on the life of Samuel Smalls, was an early look at the African-American population without caricature. George Gershwin, insisting on having Black singers rather than white people wearing Al-Jolson-type blackface, turned the novel and subsequent libretto into a Broadway musical, elevating a segment of the entertainment population to a status above secondary roles. But it took Hollywood decades to recognize the talent and dignity of people like Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington, both becoming renowned for their acting, and both helping to advance the cause of African-American actors. For so long, Hollywood had its own “chain of being,” a pyramid of importance on which African-American actors were “a little lower than Caucasian actors.” Take, as an example, the first major filming of Othello (1965) that starred Laurence Olivier, 30 years before Laurence Fishburne played the lead.
And Native Americans were lower still on the artificial human chain of Hollywood. I remember seeing “cowboy and Indian” movies in which the roles of “chiefs and Indians” were filled with Caucasian actors in body paint and feathers: Rock Hudson in Winchester ’73 (1950), Henry Brandon in The Searchers (1953), and even Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven (1960). Oh! My gosh! Can you imagine those actors getting those roles in today’s woke and virtue-signaling world in which only actors of a particular ethnicity or race can play roles of humans of similar heritage? With the exception of Johnny Depp as Tonto in the satirical Lone Ranger, of course. Woe to the writer, producer, and director who casts a Laurence Olivier as Othello or a Rock Hudson as Taza, son of Cochise (played by Jeff Chandler, another white guy).
Acting
That Hollywood was given to portraying stereotypes isn’t surprising, nor it is surprising that it passed over actors of “different ethnicities and races” for key roles. After all, writers, producers, and directors probably grew up under cultural influences like those that motivated FitzRoy. The pervasive premise is that humanity was a link divided, a chain unto itself. And today, that chain within a link has in itself many links, as protestors around the world demonstrate by shouting for genocide of those they envision standing far below them on the scale of value.**
We’re all screen writers and actors in a way. We script and play the role that fits our culture, or we play a role that runs counter to culture in a show of defiance. As Shakespeare has Jaques say in As You Like It,
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
Funny How the World Sees Actors
Recall from your high school lit class that only male actors played roles in Shakespeare’s time. That film Shakespeare in Love portrays an era when males commonly took the roles of females. To cast a woman as a woman was scandalous. But today, casting a woman as a man or a man as a woman is ordinary. And that Hollywood concession has altered the human links throughout society as male athletes dominate women’s sports. We’ve added links to our human link on the Great Chain.
But Acting Is Pretending, Isn’t It?
Everyone pretends at some time. Think of giving a toddler a “horsey-back ride,” or of pretending to be a character represented by a puppet, or of simply saying “Mooooo” in imitation of a cow. Where’s PETA when this last violation of animal dignity is being portrayed? How dare a parent appropriate cow language and mannerisms!
Most people (Note bene: I never took a survey) realize that acting is pretending. So, this “appropriation outrage” is just an example of people removing themselves from the reality that humans can imitate any link in the Great Chain of Being, even the topmost link. Think Morgan Freeman (Bruce Almighty, 2003), Alanis Morissette (Dogma, 1999), and George Burns (Oh, God! 1977). Did anyone think that such appropriation was anything more than pretending? Should only God play God in movies?
Trans athletes pretending to be women seems to be another story. There are consequences, mostly detrimental ones for biological women competitors. Years of all that testosterone coursing through those arteries and veins of the transitioned athlete have made such actors truly different from the characters whose roles they play on court, in field, or in pool. There’s another link added to the chain of human links, one that never before existed, not even if one counts the soprano-voiced eunuchs of eras gone by.
Men participating in women’s sports is the ultimate appropriation. Well, maybe not the ultimate if one considers those actors who played God. That’s gotta be the biggest appropriation. But then, we’ve never heard God complain about it—although that applies only to this life and not to the afterlife. (Can you imagine Freeman, Burns, and Morissette at the Pearly Gates seeking entrance to an eternal life with God and having to account for appropriating Him in a film? “Sorry, Lord, but it was just an act. I really didn’t claim to be You as though I were some man claiming to be a female athlete”)
Pretending? We all do it in some manner occasionally: Maybe it isn’t a role playing God in movies, but rather a daily role of playing one who knows more than others, a role in which the actor dismisses as irrelevant the knowledge and logic, even the history that others not to their liking know. Or maybe it’s a matter of standing in judgment like some King Solomon—only without the accompanying wisdom.
Is There Some Point to This?
When Carl Sagan wrote that “we are star stuff,” he meant that everything save the hydrogen in our bodies (in water) came from the process of fusion inside stars that eventually went nova or supernova or even hyper nova. Everything in the visible universe is related by composition—let’s ignore Dark Matter for this. And among the grand interrelated Cosmic entities made from star stuff, the Great Chain of Being separates that which is conscious from that which is not. Then the only conscious link in the chain, humanity, divided and still divides itself into the valued and less valued, or the highly valued and the valueless.
The danger we impose upon ourselves stems from the assumption of greater or lesser worth, of idolized individuals vs. idolizing individuals. And almost every time we make the distinctions, we find ourselves causing problems we cannot solve, such as the disdain of groups that believe themselves to be higher on the human chain than others. Serfdom, slavery, abuse, disabuse, and depravity result. The links within the link also mean that we take the opinions of some to be of greater value than the opinions of others, even when the opining top of the chain speaks with little knowledge and even less logic, and even when some at the top in their bias reduce others to caricature and stereotype.
But nothing in this practice of making a human chain of value will change as every generation becomes infused with bias before it has the time to consider the commonality of our species. The effect will be a continuing bias and a constant resurfacing of disdain or disrespect. The effect will be college students and others like famous actors and politicians denying that atrocities occurred when Hamas massacred Israelis. Those standing on the stage of public opinion will forever choose whom to support and where to put those they support on the chain of value.
Come on, now, be honest: Do you impose a chain of value? Are you the top link?
*Cole Porter’s 1935 song “You’re the Top” offers a number of metaphors. You can read the lyrics here: https://www.bing.com/search?q=Lyric%20You%27re%20the%20top&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=5330 You can also see the song performed by Cary Grant and Ginny Simms in the 1946 movie Night and Day in a YouTube clip or hear it performed on other YouTube clips, such as the one from the 1956 movie Anything Goes with Bing Crosby, Donald O’Connor, Mitzi Gaynor, and Zizi Jeanmaire.
**Thus, the recent comments of actors and actresses equating the massacre of Israelis to payback for some perceived offense against Palestinians whose governing Hamas leaders kept in check and poverty, comments represented by the those of Susan Sarandon who seems to ignore two millennia of antisemitism and events like the pogroms of 1391, those massacres in and around Castile and Aragon, the Alhambra Decree of 1492 that exiled Jews from Spain or forced them to convert to Christianity, and, of course, the Holocaust of WWII. She said, “There are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.”
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