Brains & Stomachs - Part Two

What happens, then, when we attempt to meet people's minds at the expense of all else? History also has much to tell us here. You will have to bear with me, some of this has already been stated.

What we tend to forget is that, during World War II, the most intelligent nation in the world at that time spent their evenings enthralled by the music of Wagner while, at the same time, that nation also marched six million Jews off to concentration camps. If you go to Auschwitz, you will see a plaque on the wall with the words of Hitler himself, that reads: "I want to raise a generation devoid of a conscience; imperious, relentless and cruel." And you see the cruelty that Hitler's doctors, most notably Mengela, had performed on children and the mentally handicapped; their little shoes and suitcases, the pictures of them having been castrated, and so on.

But here is the point through which I tie in this post and the last one: when life is diminished to a random mass or collocation of molecules, there is no way to ascribe essential human dignity to that mere mass of elements and atoms. And when this idea reaches its full run, the idea of us being nothing but matter and we having only minds and stomachs, without heart and soul, it eliminates the shame that someone like Mengela ought to have felt as he went about his awful work. When we remove the soul, and God from our lives, we are left only with the body (mind and stomach) and when we do that, we eliminate the legitimate shame from our lives that also can speak to us truthfully about reality.

That is why, as Newsweek carried the story, a Californian doctor could choke the baby that was meant to have been aborted but emerged alive from the mother, in the sink and claim the whole time that the baby had been born dead despite the testimony of two other hospital workers in the room with him at the time. The doctor could obviously lie and walk into the courtroom with his head held high, because there is no such thing as shamefulness, it is only in the glands.

Evidently, both Mengela and this doctor had been good boys and read their Green Book.

But isn't it fascinating that psychologists are still grappling with this sense of shame in a culture that has jettisoned moral absolutes, denies the soul and God and worships the body, but is still unable to jettison a very real sense of shame from the populace.

The mind can be a good thing. I am not for an instant decrying technology or education. But as someone once told me, "nothing good can come if the will is wrong." Or to popularize that saying, I quote Malcom from Jurassic Park who said, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Victor Frankl said this concerning the Holocaust, "The gas chambers of Auschwitz were not born in some General's mind, but in the classrooms and lecture halls of nihilistic doctors and philosophers."

The possibility of abuse of the mind is not something that can be regulated by the mind. That is why nearly sixty years after the Holocaust, the band King Crimson sings, "Knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules."

If our problems could be met with simple intellectualizing, than once everyone had enough doctorate degrees then humanity would be all set. But as I said in my last post, it those who have the fullest stomachs, and by that I mean either through education, wealth or sheer resources, that are ever the cause of the most horrendous evils.