THE STARE THAT DEHUMANIZES

The cowpuncher sat his horse loosely and his fingers hovered

above his gun while his eyes, ice cold, sent chills down

the rustler's back.

A familiar situation ? It happens in every Western novel,

just as in every love story the heroine's eyes melt while

the hero's eyes burn into hers. In literature, even the best

literature, eyes are steely, knowing, mocking, piercing,

glowing and so on.

Are they really? Are they ever? Is there such a thing

as a burning glance, or a cold glance or a hurt glance? In

truth there isn't. Far from being windows of the soul, the

eyes are physiological dead ends, simply organs of

sight and no more, differently coloured in different

people to be sure, but never really capable of expressing

emotion in themselves.

And yet again and again we read and hear and even tell

of the eyes being wise, knowing, good, bad, indifferent.

Why is there such confusion? Can so many people be

wrong? If the eyes do not show emotion, then why the

vast literature, the stories and legends about them?

Of all parts of the human body that are used to transmit

information, the eyes are the most important and can transmit the most subtle nuances. Does this contradict

the fact that the eyes do not show emotion? Not really.

While the eyeball itself shows nothing, the emotional

impact of the eyes occurs because of their use and the use

of the face around them. The reason they have so confounded

observers is because by length of glance, by

opening of eyelids, by squinting and by a dozen little

manipulations of the skin and eyes, almost any meaning

can be sent out.

But the most important technique of eye management

is the look, or the stare. With it we can often make or

break another person. How? By giving him human or

non-human status.

Simply, eye management in our society boils down to

two facts. One, we do not stare at another human being.

Two, staring is reserved for a non-person. We stare at

art, at sculpture, at scenery. We go to the zoo and stare

at the animals, the lions, the monkeys, the gorillas.

We stare at them for as long as we please, as intimately

as we please, but we do not stare at humans if we want to

accord them human treatment.

We may use the same stare for the side-show freak, but

we do not really consider him a human being. He is an

object at which we have paid money to stare, and in the

same way we may stare at an actor on a stage. The real

man is masked too deeply behind his role for our stare to

bother either him or us. However, the new theatre that

brings the actor down into the audience often gives us

an uncomfortable feeling. By virtue of involving us, the

audience, the actor suddenly loses his non-person status

and staring at him becomes embarrassing to us.

As I said before, a Southern white may stare at a black

in the same way, making him, by the stare, into an object

rather than a person. If we wish pointedly to ignore some- one,
to treat him with an element of contempt, we can

give him the same stare, the slightly unfocused look that

does not really see him, the cutting stare of the socially

elite.

Servants are often treated this way as are waiters,

waitresses and children. However, this may be a mutually

protective device. It allows the servants to function

efficiently in their overlapping universe without too

much interference from us, and it allows us to function

comfortably without acknowledging the servant as a

fellow human. The same is true of children and waiters.

It would be an uncomfortable world if each time we were

served by a waiter we had to introduce ourselves and

indulge in social amenities.