On the dangers of reading Vonnegut

"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal."

Have you read Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopia "Harrison Bergeron"? If you haven't, do so; if you have, try to disregard what it implies as completely as possible. I think this short story not only misses the mark by a wide margin, but it actually does harm.

In the story, George and Hazel Bergeron, the parents of the superman-saviour Harrison Bergeron, vegetate in an ideal society in which everybody is equal. Or, if not, then made equal by the "Handicapper General" and her agents. People of qualities above average are made to wear handicaps -- weights to weaken them, earphones to hinder their thinking -- so that people would not compete against each other and nobody would feel inferior.

In this ideal society, everybody is given a chance. On the television, for example, "it wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment." When finally the announcer gave up trying to read out the bulletin and handed it to a ballerina to read,

she had to apologise at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. 'Excuse me...' she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

The story goes on relating how Harrison arrives at the television studio heavily handicapped but not at all impeded, and how -- watched by his parents -- he cries 'I am the Emperor!'; how he selects a ballerina as his Empress, starts dancing with her, defies Newton and gravity, and is shot down by the Handicapper General.

The story appears to be a critique of anti-discriminatory policies, of instances of positive discrimination, and -- indirectly -- of political correctness. And, as such, I think it is of exceptionally poor taste. The fact that even the "saviour," Harrison, seems to be ridiculed as he is preoccupied with childlike roleplay instead of ripping the hideous Handicapper General into tiny little pieces, offers little remedy. When we consider that Love and Arts are on his side, the picture gets even more unbalanced. This piece of black humour is a far cry from even-handed lampooning.

Where Vonnegut misses the mark is, I think, shown by the excerpts I quoted. For it has never been the goal of anti-discriminatory policies to eradicate differences between human beings. They are there to ensure that if a personality trait is irrelevant in a certain context, it is not taken into account. There has been no equal-opportunity policy that ever required the hiring of a man as a female stripper; or someone with a speech impediment as an announcer. But such policies do require that a non-white person's application be not turned down on the basis of skin colour, and that public transport be accessible to people using wheelchairs.

In a likewise manner, political correctness is not there to hide facts; it does not require one to use "he or she" to refer to Sir Winston Churchill. It is precisely there to help us avoid inventing facts by, for example, presupposing that a specific person of whom only the occupation is known is male.

Such precautions can, naturally, be carried too far. But even in that case, it would never result in Bergerons' dystopia, because anti-discrimination policies come into play only if a personality trait is irrelevant and immaterial. I think minorities have a time hard enough fighting discrimination and abusive language without Mr Kurt Vonnegut coming and blasting equal opportunity with sarcastic humour. At that point in Western history, this short story was a careless, harmful and insulting thing to write.