A Raid on the Unspeakable

[H2O Man]

Last edited Tue Dec 18, 2012, 03:21 PM - Edit history (1)

“One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

“If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well. He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite ….

“Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in the past.... No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can he considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too. On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy. I am beginning to realize that ‘sanity’ is no longer a value or an end in itself. The ‘sanity’ of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ... perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally ‘sane.’”
-- Thomas Merton; Raids on the Unspeakable


The brutal mass-murder of 20 six- and seven-year-old children and six adult females last Friday was a stark example of what Merton called the “Unspeakable.” In recent years, a former student of Merton, James W. Douglas, has authored books on President John F. Kennedy and Mahatma Gandhi’s experiences in challenging the Unspeakable. I have found myself reading from these and three other related books, trying to make sense of this terrible incident.

Merton’s definition of the Unspeakable includes: “One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that (the world) stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of politics and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience.”

Douglass’s first book, on JFK, notes that President Kennedy would reach the higher level of consciousness required to recognize the Unspeakable, during the Cuban Missile Crises. The haunting thought of millions of little school children potentially being killed in a nuclear war fueled the rapid change in his level of understanding. Douglas provides amazingly detailed documentation of how, as the result of the missile crises, Kennedy evolved from a “hawk” (though a relatively thoughtful, careful one) to a Peace Maker.

Gandhi’s journey was one in which after years of meditation and prayer, along with his non-violent revolutionary struggle, he reached enlightenment. It’s fair to say that to have a true manner to measure a man or woman, you must have a basic understanding of their level of understanding. This is true not only of a President Kennedy or a Gandhi: we can see evidence of this phenomenon right here, on the many threads about the school shootings.

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We all view “the world -- and hence, this violent tragedy -- through our own prism; it is a lens that develops by both our life’s experiences, and equally importantly, our interpretation of them. It was heartbreaking, for example, to watch an itty-bitty boy being asked by a reporter about what he was thinking during the tense minutes inside the school? The child was silent for a moment, then said, “Whoa!” This makes an important point -- that identifying a person’s level of understanding is not a value judgment. Indeed, that boy’s brief statement was as profound as any reporting done by any journalist.

Thus, the many different ideas and opinions found on this forum, each attempting to identify the root cause -- or what is to blame -- for the school killings. Too many guns. Not enough people packing iron. Violent video games. Mental illness. In the media, we see others: Hollywood. Taking prayer out of school. And on and on, with each one expressing the person’s understanding, and coming through their individual prism.

The third book is Erich Fromm’s “The Sane Society.” Although it was published in 1955, I think that it can not only be applied to today’s world, but is actually more important now than it was at any time in the past half-century. Fromm details how conditions in the post-WW2 industrial society was resulting in increasing levels of social dysfunction: addiction, depression, anomie, and violence ranging from suicide to murder.

Next is Fromm’s “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.” This 1973 classic examines the personality traits which are related to cruelty and extreme violence. While there are descriptions from the past, for example, of psychopaths/sociopaths in pre-industrial revolution times, both the frequency and the technological advances that allow for larger violent outbursts in today’s culture are part of the Unspeakable.

The other book is James Carroll’s 2006, “House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.” The author provides a fascinating history of how good and sincere men entered the Pentagon with a goal of making it a more efficient machine for advancing democracy around the globe. (Obviously, not all of those who entered were good or sincere.) Without exception, those good people found their plans frustrated. Not only was the Pentagon an entity, but it exerted control over these people’s thinking.

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When I saw President Obama speak last night, I found myself thinking that he recognized the brutal killings -- especially of the little children (although each adult certainly used to be such children) -- as the Unspeakable. I am aware of the very real possibility that this is just me, seeing events through my prism. But his words, and their delivery, were different than at other times.

Perhaps he, too, has grown in office, and like President Kennedy, has learned from the enormity of understanding the reality of life-versus-death for children. This is not an intellectual ability: both Barack Obama and John Kennedy were intellectually gifted men long before really confronting the Unspeakable. (Likewise, Robert Kennedy’s journey from 1963 to ‘68 was not intellectual; more, his came as a direct result from his late brother’s.)

President Obama is 100% correct that no one law can solve the problems that create the type of violent crime suffered last week. He is correct in saying that this does not excuse us from trying our best. That must include evaluating, and changing, some gun laws. It will mean expanding the health care system to include affordable, available mental health services. And that requires the recognition that people with mental illness live a legitimate life experiences, worthy of respect and dignity. A society that treats human beings with mental illnesses cruelly is morally ill.

A society that puts “tea party activists” carrying dangerous weapons at political events on television, and gives coverage to people who question Obama’s birth certificate, and reports on hate-mongers wanting to separate from the United States because a brown-skinned man is president, suffers from as high a level of paranoia as does any sick individual. It can comes as no surprise, really, when this cocktail of hatred and paranoia results in violence.

A community that cares for all of its children will not sit by when children in the next town suffer. President Obama must recognize that, just as we love our children, people in other nations around the globe love their children, as much as we love ours. And so we must change our approach to foreign policy, especially to conflict resolution.

I’ve read where people dismiss the idea that American foreign policy has any connection to a domestic incident such as this. Those of us who lived through the 1960s know better. We remember four little girls dying when hateful, paranoid people dynamited their church. We remember that Martin Luther King, Jr., became the greatest American prophet when he connected civil rights and Vietnam -- something that Malcolm X had done before King.

There are numerous examples of “common folks” who have recognized and struggled against the Unspeakable. Like the more famous ones, they see -- and understand -- the connections between all of the various individual factors that most of us view through our limited prisms. And they all say the same thing: the change we need will not be delivered by a leader, or a law, or any other single thing. The change we need is found in all of us doing our part, to the best of our ability. And the best of our ability requires that we rise above hatred and fear.

Peace,
H2O Man