Personal conscience encompasses a person’s individual relationship with the environmental situation because everyone has a different experience of reality. It can be interpreted as one’s individual thoughts, feelings and emotions based on the way they perceive things. Stanley Milgram, an American Social Psychologist, conducted a series of social psychology experiments in which he measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. He states, “for many people, obedience, is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy and moral conduct.” George Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant” and Langston Hughes in “Salvation” both face social pressure from those around them which can influence one’s decision in a positive or negative manner. Unfortunately, for these two authors, their decision left a damaging impact on their moral conscience, supporting the claim made by Stanley Milgram.
In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell struggles to take on a performative persona that makes him act counter to every reasonable impulse he has when placed in front of a crowd. He is compelled to entrench himself further in barbarism, simply because he feels that propriety dictates that he do so; “the people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.” That is the paradox of colonialism, colonial propriety comes to force the colonizer to act barbarously. He is constrained by having to “impress” the empire’s subjects by embodying the “conventionalized figure” of Western authority.
Due to the heavy social pressure, Orwell felt compelled to perform a particular inhumane and irrational role. Orwells desire not to be laughed at trump’s his cognitive dissonance. He is more afraid of humiliation and of the way that humiliation might impact the local’s sense of him as an authority figure. In addition, his hesitation with killing the elephant shows that he had a conscience and he tries to justify himself after he kills the elephant as a revenge for the coolie.
One could argue that Orwell could have chosen not to kill the elephant. Our reaction to a situation has the power to change the situation itself. He could have shot the rifle in the air to get the crowd to disperse or simply walk away from the situation and the Elephant would have lived. However, would one really have thought of that in that moment? Orwell’s final observation is that, while logic can be read into colonialism from a distance, the real motivation of its savagery is simply the triumph of irrational insecurity and role-playing over ethics or human compassion. Imagine the scenario, If he walked away, what would’ve happened? Think of the consequences, would it have led to an uproar, something worse, or nothing at all?
The title “Salvation” is ironic because it means believing in Jesus Christ, yet Hughes is describing a situation where he loses faith in Christ. He displays the extreme contrast between the “purpose” of the revival and what actually happened. “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen but not really saved.” This quote introduces irony into the story right away because his statement doesn’t match the title of the story. The singing, preaching and praying in the crowded church makes for a highly charged religious environment and all the children who “have not yet been brought to Jesus” sat in the front row so that the rest of the congregation can pray for them. The use of imagery when describing the church brings great discomfort to him and an overwhelming experience. The misinterpretation of his Aunt’s abstract definition of salvation as the visceral sensation of seeing, hearing, and feeling, articulates for his loss of innocence and faith because he believed that they were literal and concrete. When the preacher preached and sang a song, Hughes states “but one little lamb was let out in the cold,” he was referring to himself. He felt the social isolation to resonate with the audience and emphasizes on how singled out he felt.
Young Hughes and another boy, Westley, are left after all the other children get saved but Westley decides to get saved because he is tired of sitting at the center of attention. Since Christianity is predominantly the main religion for African Americans, the fear of being rejected by the church if not saved is evident through the eyes of Hughes; the Minister at his face, begging him, repeating “why don’t you come,” “why don’t you come and be saved.” It seems as though Westley went up so he won’t be looked at differently from the church but it leaves Hughes wondering why God had not stuck westly dead for taking his name in vain or for lying to the congregation. Again, the “wages of sin” have been misinterpreted by the child incapable of understanding the abstract religious metaphors conveyed by his elders. The misunderstanding here creates the main irony of the story; though the elders of the congregation intend on securing the children’s salvation through the ritual, it does the opposite effect and results in a child’s loss in faith.
He conforms to mob psychology by pretending to go to Jesus even though he is convinced that the other children are lying about it. The crowd is jubilant about his decision, but that night Hughes cries in his bed because of matters too complex for his young mind to fully decipher: he feels guilty for lying to the church and loses faith in Jesus because Jesus did not show up as expected. However, the guilt Hughes feels as a result of lying draws the conclusion that he has discovered the true spirit of religion. He uses metaphor to convey and argue that religious indoctrination could result in spiritual alienation when he does get up. “Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place.” In describing the room, he connects the elation to water, perhaps to emphasize him drowning in drowning in the hubbub that ironically follow an insecure salvation. He could also be mocking the elders of the church for their lack of situational awareness. Additionally, Hughes uses the figurative imagery of the implied movement of “waves” and his explicit “rising” to create a sense of movement, in effect, breaking the tension that had existed before when Hughes was waiting to “see Jesus.” The description of the scale of events (the “sea” vs. the child) and movement are intended to persuade the audience to empathize with the child, who is “swept” up in an uncontrollable, chaotic situation. Hughes calculates that an audience empathetically.
“The dilemma inherent in submission to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham, and the question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience has been argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and treated to philosophic analysis in almost every historical epoch” (Milgram). With the conflict of obedience so old there is no question as to why George Orwell and Langston Hughes went against their own thoughts and just did what everyone else wanted them to do.