A fraternal apologia for pigs

There were hints of a divergence about swine flu and the opening of schools in the coming weeks with apparently some teachers showing more alarm than the Education Ministry. Do you think there is any hidden background? Or is this just another instance of a structural difference in point of view?

Whenever there is an epidemic, invariably a search for a scapegoat begins. Usually the blame is put on outsiders, such as foreigners. Often it is put on animals, although it is obvious that many of the worst illnesses that affect animals are actually caused by the treatment meted out to them by human beings.

Among animals, the alleged culprits are most often certain particularly unloved species. Abroad, these include crows and wolves, but here in Malta it is mostly rats and pigs.

There is no doubt that the panic fear of swine flu is partly due to its name, even though or perhaps even more, because the connection between the flu and porcine animals is altogether unclear in most of our minds.

For instance, a massive slaughtering of pigs was reported in Egypt even though there had not been one proven case of flu incidence. Throughout the world, the severity with which the feared pandemic has been greeted is very striking in comparison with the laxity in the reaction to Avian Flu.

Manifestly, in our sub-conscious, a disease coming from chickens or other feathered friends, normally two-legged like us, is necessarily much less appalling than a disease stemming from swine, hogs, sows or other four-legged pig-like creatures.

In London, the BBC has reported preparation of mass graves for prospective victims of the swine flu pandemic forecast to reach two billion cases worldwide by 2011, of whom 10 to 20 per cent will die.

Swine flu is arousing (to what extent simply in virtue of the name it is impossible to determine) the same kind of repulsion that Bubonic Plague (associated with rats) used to inspire until some years ago and perhaps an even greater aversion than sex-related Aids.

The panicky reaction to swine flu looks very much as if it were akin to the reactions of many of us at the mere sight of a mouse or a cockroach. It is due to what psychologists call a phobia, an irrational fear of an illusory danger.

Abdelwahab Meddeb, a well known analyst in Frankfurter Zeitung, has no doubt that the horrible looming on the horizon of the pig-associated spectre is related in his native country to the general attitude in Muslim societies to the Christian minority. Christians are often defined in the eyes of Muslims as lovers of pork, the flesh of the animal that is the very emblem of the unclean, and therefore not by accident the source of the current pandemic.

Is it not a paradox that pig should be (scape)goat?

Strictly speaking, a scapegoat is the animal, nowadays usually winged, upon which the guilt of people is transferred and which is sacrificed and eaten before the fast of Yom Kippur, the day of expiation, considered the most holy and solemn in the cycle of Jewish annual celebrations.

In biblical times, a goat was more usually set loose in the desert, and goats have retained a bad reputation for inelegant behaviour that is second only to that of pigs, but the idea of scapegoating is by no means related essentially to goats.

René Girard, a French professor of English literature, obtained a huge reputation especially in the US, where in fact he had pioneered attempts at dialogue between philosophers of the analytic and the phenomenological schools, because of his putting scapegoating at the centre of a socio-anthropological theory.

According to him, the most fundamental instinct of human beings is the desire to imitate one's fellows. This 'mimetic contagion' causes most of the rivalries and conflicts that afflict society, including wars between nations. The most typical way sought out of the bellicose situation is identifying a minority group or some outsider and making him suffer for it. Then, the situation will repeat itself. That is what happened, according to Girard, with Jesus Christ, except that he rose from the dead and so broke the vicious cycle.

So there is really no paradox in the idea of pig as scapegoat. Actually, although the Maltese equivalent of 'pig' is used to signify greediness, the image is not always totally negative.

For instance, one of the most fascinating traces left by the builders of the megalithic temples at Tarxien is a picture of a sow with 13 suckling piglets, which certainly alludes to fertility and may also possibly be some kind of calendar marker.

D.H. Lawrence, when in Malta, penned a pig-related declaration. It always surprises me to note how little it is used as a tourist advertisement.

He remarked that Malta afforded the visitor a consolation prize for any hardship endured at the time, in the shape of bacon that was of analogous quality to that had in an English breakfast.

My late brother Franco, who, besides having as Director of Agriculture some overall responsibility for pig farming, was also an inventive cook, published a small book of pork-based recipes that must still count as one of the most distinctive Maltese contributions to haute (if certainly not nouvelle) cuisine.

How does the way in which our Department of Health is meeting the 'Swine Flupocalypse', as it has been called by dabblers in portmanteau words, strike you?

My impression is that the sector of the health service that deals with these imagination-stimulating contingencies (the dramatically announced first swine flu fatality in Malta turned out to be an octogenarian) is excellent.

The dismal performances are both in the waiting lists for operations at Mater Dei and in the community health centres.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Alessandra Fiott.