In Defense of the Flying Pig

The revival of republican virtues will depend on the acknowledgement of things humble and improbable.

Illustration by author, January 6, 2025

Saving democracy from itself will require leaps of faith beyond the currently imaginable. In recent years, the dynamics of self-rule have made evident what political philosophers had long predicted and the framers of democratic constitutions sought to delay: The demise of even the most solid institutions is inevitable. The governance of the people by the people is a fragile affair and it comes with a half-life that plays into the hands of despots and tyrants.

Yet, all is not lost. Our conversations about the relative health of our democracies attest to our awareness of the challenges facing us. We are not hopelessly overwhelmed by the unknown nor are we fatally numbed by the insurmountable. Rather, it seems to me, we resemble Plato’s cave-dwellers who have come to believe that the shadow images projected unto the wall in front of them are the only acceptable frame of reference even after we’ve been told of an incredible world outside our dark refuge.[i] But not having experienced a larger, brighter reality ourselves, we remain unwilling for many reasons to tap into it. Getting off our couch and leaving the comfort of a warming fire to explore the realms beyond our own door becomes an absurd proposition. It would entail turning our backs on those mesmerizing dancing images on the wall as a source of both meaning and orientation.

Much of the political discourse these days mirrors our keen awareness on the one hand and our grand inertia on the other. The resulting frustration is often projected onto others. Blaming outside forces beyond our control or people we don’t like very much anyway may be emotionally satisfying but futile. It is a strategy contingent on change beyond our own responsibilities and it forfeits our accountability as citizen-rulers, reducing us to something akin to political slaves while giving those dominating our lives even more power. Still, we rather like our passivity because inaction flatters our need for continuity whereas activity necessarily raises the ghosts of incalculable risk and even failure.

Thus, we continue to stare at the wall in front of us, together with our fellow cave-dwellers who dispute as a matter of principle everything we see. They may even see the same thing but interpret it in a way that alienates and offends us. We are united only by the warming fire behind us but irreconcilably divided by our antics that project clashing shadow images on the cave wall.

Our desire to improve our condition is half-hearted because we firmly believe that moving about wildly and projecting impressive images on the wall in front of us – and reserving the right to interpret them – feels like real power. By contrast, leaving the cave altogether would most certainly ruin our sense of power. The promise of even supernatural wisdom beyond the cave is not enough to entice us to surrender what we have come to understand real power means. Indeed, wisdom is not what we are after. For we know beyond the slightest doubt of wisdom’s corrosive effect on the kind of power we seek to gain, hold, and expand.

The strategy to break loose and save the republic (any republic, really) then would aim to overturn the very notion of power. It would require wit, humor, and wisdom. Such are the qualities that those in power, conventionally speaking, will always try to suppress. Ask any dictator. Wit, humor, and wisdom are subversive elements that signal danger to those in charge of dominion. They are the intangibles with the potential to corrode the power of those whose self-worth and political leverage is built on tangibles, too often involving brute force.

Democracies depend on citizens regularly and effectively curtailing the reach of those in power. Institutional limits on power help, such as regular elections, term limits, checks and balances, as well as journalists willing and able to expose the abuse of power. But that is not enough. In fact, we have seen the usurpation of the instruments designed to curb excessive power, weakening their purpose, or rendering them ineffective. Worse yet, relying exclusively on institutional guardrails to channel political power may serve to bolster the prevailing paradigm of power, relying too heavily on those images we love to project onto the wall and defend on principle because we cannot conceive of power in any other way.

We need to break the mold. I alluded to taking a fresh look at power in my previous essay on the working class by looking at a map of the flyover country. Maps tell many stories. While the recent election in the United States shows an urban-rural divide, that by itself is not a sufficiently good definition of the flyover country even if the electoral results by county clearly show exactly that. It may even be more useful than the classical left-right continuum in discussing the political landscape of modern democracies. But it may also distract from the more obvious insight that the flyover country might serve as a metaphor with some potential for reframing our discourse and perception of power. Ted Gioia’s discussion of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1929 book The Revolt of the Masses offers an up-down perspective that fits the image of the flyover country quite well. We should hasten to reiterate here that the vertical divide is not economic or socio-economic in nature. Rather, Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) observed how the masses hate experts. Or, to go back into Plato’s cave for a moment, there is a relatively small group of people that is simply much better at interpreting the shadows on the wall than those other cave dwellers who in turn resent being told how to make sense of the world. The larger group hates being talked down to and prefers to listen to their own less articulate interpreters of the cave’s reality. I mentioned the seditious effect of this kind of condescending experience in my previous essay and I return to it here because Ortega y Gasset sheds additional light on the alienation of the masses and the isolation of the elites.

The evolution of the experts as a seemingly indispensable group is closely linked to the development of an industrial economy dependent on highly trained workers, engineers, managers, and advisers. We have grown accustomed to a stratum of society whose reference is empirical knowledge rather than reliance on handed down notions of doing the right thing or intuiting answers to tricky problems. The new expert-elites do not seek prestige based on economic prowess necessarily and most certainly not on hereditary titles. Whatever material advantage they may showcase is derived from the meritocratic system they favor because it reinforces their normative claim of superior training as a key to interpreting the world more comprehensively. Their prestige is based on obtaining and disseminating knowledge and skills, and peers acknowledging their success in doing so.

However, the experts are still cave dwellers. They do not question the prevailing paradigm of power and indeed defend it vigorously. The status quo offers them privileges and prestige. They are in demand! They are invited to conferences and symposia in faraway places which they invariably reach by boarding a jet. Quite literally looking down on the placid landscape and its inhabitants below, they come up with many reasons why being up is much better than being down. Their 30,000-foot detachment feels comfortingly natural, shoring up their deeply held belief that the world’s problems could by reason be tackled the way their airplane is a marvel of defying gravity, the cogent, logical result of expert knowledge, superior engineering, and indomitable determination.

Shall we call them Flying Pigs? From the point of view of the masses, that is a tempting proposition. But it would be humorless, not so witty, and lacking much wisdom. It would also obscure our own collusion in the matter. We’ll have to return to the Flying Pigs later and stick with the experts for the moment.

Experts have little patience for people looking up at them, vacuously, not only scoffing at their expertise but challenging its relevance. Mutual distrust grows into mutual hatred. Whereas Ortega y Gasset focused on the hatred the masses show for the experts, we concede today that the feeling is mutual. Both like their places in the cave a lot; leaving them would mean abandoning heart-warming grudges, the satisfaction of being someone’s enemy, and the loss of a cause. Holding on to power, or turning powerlessness into a virtue, which is to nod to its desirability, becomes an obsession.

It must be serious. There is too little or no room for humor, wit, and wisdom. Simone Weil, the French philosopher-mystic (1909-1943), in her essay on Abolishing All Political Parties, has remarked that in the Anglo-Saxon world political parties had an element of game, of sport, conceivable only in institutions of aristocratic origin. By contrast, continental European parties, having evolved from plebeian roots, insist on always being serious. More than eighty years on, there is little left of Anglo-Saxon playfulness. Politics in the English-speaking world have also succumbed to the seriousness of the empirical quest for teleological truth. Guided by armies of experts, political discourse has liberated itself from the harness of seeing the world as a stage for the interplay of uncertainty, contradictions, speculation, enchantment, and intuition. Plato’s cave is now meticulously surveyed, assessed, catalogued, and systematically analyzed for sustainable improvements opportunities using the best tools available. The possibilities are commensurate with the onus of attained expertise that leaves no choice and nothing to chance.

Holding on to power, therefore, becomes existential. Doubting conventional power or even ridiculing it is tantamount to sullying the reputation of experts with their canon of superior methodology and professional training. The experts’ seriousness becomes a precursor to authoritarian rule because they cannot conceive of truth outside the empirical realm which they will defend by all means available to them. They would reject the image of the Flying Pig as ludicrous and hate it for its outlandishness, which is another way of saying that they admit its subversive potential.

The author was first attracted to this organic French wine because of its hilarious label. He now serves Cochon Volant, the Flying Pig, to dinner guests with a self-deprecating sense of humor and a curiosity for pictorial wisdom.

Hence, actively shifting the notions of power will require courage, wisdom, and a knack for playful, disarming tactics. Facing the harsh truth that we are sitting in a cave together is an important first step. Our predicament is no better or worse than that of the other cave dwellers. Look around our dimly lit dwelling. We may think it is grand and luxurious, but in truth it is but a cave. It is damp, often cold, with bad air and rather filthy, if we’re honest, and it could give us lots of reasons to feel humble. If we saw it for what it is, instead of pretending to live in castles, we would create the conditions for changing the way we think about power. The implications would be huge.

Great things begin in humble places. It could be a cave, or a stable, or a barn. Lasting change in the notions of power will take place against a backdrop of humility, not pride. Such are the conditions that let us see things that we had not previously been aware of. Suddenly, we not only see the cobwebs, but the message.

No doubt, the lasting success Charlotte’s Web testifies to our need to believe in miracles as well as our suspicion of a world seen exclusively as an experts’ laboratory. The author, E.B. White, tells the story of how the weakest and most vulnerable characters leverage their innocence, their moral strength, their creativity, and solidarity to overcome all odds. It is a wonderful tale of how conventional power is subverted and upended by tapping into the need of the powerful to prevail even as they are forced to abandon their original intention. They trade in their will for the sweet adulation that comes with suddenly being famous or indispensable, both being variants of latent power.

When farmer John Arable wants to slaughter the runt of the litter, which is what reasonable farmers do, his daughter Fern, herself the most vulnerable member of the family, pleads with her father to let the piglet live. He relents and Fern raises the runt she calls Wilbur as a pet. When the pig is fully grown, John sells him to Fern’s uncle Homer Zuckerman. The other animals on the farm become friends with Wilbur. Soon rumors spread that the new owner wants to slaughter the pig. A spider called Charlotte, certainly the most vulnerable of all animals in the barn, comes up with a plan to save Wilbur’s life. She surmises correctly that no reasonable person would kill a famous pig. Using her skills, she weaves key words into her web, beginning with “Some Pig,” which soon turns the barn into a tourist attraction, effectively canceling all plans to slaughter Wilbur for the moment. However, excitement eventually abates and Zuckerman reverts to his intention to sell Wilbur for meat. Even the word “terrific” does not change the farmer’s mind. Only when the word “radiant” appears in Charlotte’s web does he agree to enter Wilbur at the county fair. At the peak of his fame, Charlotte weaves one last word: “humble.” After having saved his life, she now saves his legacy.

Much more can be said about E.B. White’s classic and it’s certainly worth the effort to explore its various layers of meaning. For the noble purpose of reviving republican virtues, we cannot ignore the story’s insistence that reinterpreting our notions of power will require an eye for the improbable, the vulnerable, and the humble. Wilbur may not be a flying pig, at least not literally, but his life depends on someone seeing him as such. And his legacy depends on someone reminding him to be humble at the peak of his fame. Charlotte, not incidentally because she is the most vulnerable of all, attributes outlandish qualities to him, using her outstanding skills to build his fame, not hers. She turns the fragility of her cobwebs into something life-savingly graceful and therefore powerful. She redefines what it means to have and wield power. Wilbur needs her because he cannot save himself. No one can.

It’s time to admit we need each other. Magdalene J. Taylor makes the point in her insightful essay, and I think it’s worth adding that opening oneself to harm is the beginning condition of all that is to grow into love. It’s risky. But to hedge against it is to forfeit its possibilities. Charlotte does not have a plan B. Her cobwebs are fragile but her love for Wilbur is firm, indomitable.

We’re all in this barn (or Plato’s cave, if you will) together. Making sense of our predicament will require exposing the futility as well as the preposterous nature of conventional power by playing on its weaknesses. Pointing to the improbable flying pig, metaphorically speaking, means to demystify the expert-elites’ faith in their power based on the assumption that we can save ourselves. We need to point to the weak and those at greatest risk by opening ourselves to harm. There is real subversion of power in that. Again, it’s risky, but there is no moral alternative.

Today is January 6th. In the United States, the day is associated with presidential power. I think of Jimmy Carter and how he built homes for people who needed a roof over their head. For many people around the world, today marks the day the Three Kings followed a star to a barn (stable, cave) to a vulnerable newborn in a manger. They are called wise because they saw conventional power for what it is: prone to corruption, abuse, and self-delusion. They found wisdom in humility, and on the way home, they avoided the palace.

Epiphany is light in a cave.

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[i] Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a key dialogue in his Republic and is used here to illustrate our human condition in general terms. Plato emphasizes the value of education in overcoming our natural limitations.