Just So Stories
But this man–who provided the inspiration for Disney’s warm and fuzzy The Jungle Book–also introduced the world to “the white man’s burden” and recommended that “if you hit a pony over the nose at the outset of your acquaintance, he may not love you, but he will take a deep interest in your movements ever afterwards.” George Orwell wrote of him: “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilised person…there is a definite strain of sadism in him.” Kipling’s moral and political philosophy is perfectly suited to an apologist for imperialism: what he called the “Law of the Jungle”–after which “all the rest followed as a matter of course”–demands obedience to those in power. Lionel Trilling suggested that “no man ever did more harm to the national virtues than Kipling did. He mixed them up with swagger and swank, with bullying, ruthlessness, and self-righteousness, and he set them up as necessarily antagonistic to intellect.” Trilling added, lest he be thought a pantywaist, that Kipling’s jingoism was most distasteful because it was not “manly.” “His imperialism is reprehensible not because it is imperialism,” Trilling wrote, “but because it is a puny and mindless imperialism.” Orwell made no such distinction: “Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that.”
