Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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because of some bout of amnesia—because of some blow on the head or because of too much alcohol. Something deeper and more radical eats away at us. In a sense, we have been programmed to experience “amnesia.” Despite the insistence from Freud that the pleasure principle drives people’s behavior, everything around us encourages turning aside from tragedy to just have a good time.
Some critics argue, Well, the numbers are just too overwhelming, the scale just too huge, for anyone to even begin to feel the pain and shock of death. Forty thousand die in a mudslide in Central America, another sixty thousand in a tsunami in Indonesia, perhaps one million or more in Darfur, and tens of millions of human beings from AIDS worldwide. I say the numbers matter little. Something more basic shapes today’s attitude toward such a ghostly way of dying. Beneath those euphemisms of death lies a grim reality; but to really see it, we first have to hold in our minds the concept of the human being as something vital and crucial. Human beings first have to come fully alive for us, before we can consider them dead. (In order to truly fall asleep, we must first come fully awake.) And, for a great many people, living seems just too confusing, too remote, or, worse yet, too difficult. The “isness” of being eludes us. A life is easy to come by, but living seems to remain just out of reach. We owe this strange state of affairs to a legacy we inherited from the nineteenth century.
Something new started in the nineteenth century: For the first time, people “had” lives. Which meant that they were in possession of an entity that one professional or agency or corporation could then manage and direct. Life existed as a concept outside of being alive, or simply living. One could objectify “life,” analyze it, make plans for its improvement. One could even redirect its course and redefine its goals.
President George Bush marked the first anniversary of his inauguration, on January 20, 2006, by reinforcing a national holiday called the National Sanctity of Human Life Day. (Note: It is only human life here that we celebrate; other animals can agitate for their own special day). The proclamation reads, in part, that on this day “we underscore our commitment to building a culture of life where all individuals are welcomed in life and protected in law.” If that sentence makes any sense at all, and I am not convinced that it does, then the sentiment sounds like something churned out by an ad agency announcing the arrival of the latest model car, one that comes complete with a lifetime guarantee. But as odd and bizarre as the proclamation sounds, it describes our current condition, where phrases like a culture of life and welcomed in life look like they might refer to something significant, or describe some actual reality, but on closer inspection point to nothing at all.
In 2008, after two years into its movement for sanctity, the White House made slight changes to the proclamation: “On National Sanctity of Human Life Day and throughout the year, we help strengthen the culture of life in America and work for the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.” The White House, in order to display its much larger ambitions, had added “and throughout the year.” No more one-day sanctity for this administration. The White House also replaced the phrase “building a culture of life” with the more realistic “work for the day when . . . ” (President Bush may have found it hard to talk about building a sanctity of life after so many years of killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.) And finally, whereas the 2006 proclamation made reference to “all individuals,” two years later the president had lowered his sights to focus instead on “every child.”
Perhaps abortion activists on both sides feel free to argue the question, “When does human life begin?” because we are so unsure, these days, of what or who is human, and what or who is alive. A great many of us, I would argue, have a difficult time knowing what it feels like to be alive. The minute we get out of bed in the morning, we confront a barrage of advertisers and professionals just waiting to sell something to us, prescribe something to us, and repeat some durable commercial mantra in our ears. To ask the question, “When does life begin?” lays bare a conception of life as something mechanistic, a process that supposes a millisecond when a switch gets thrown and that certain something called a “life” begins. Ironically, under those artificial conditions, people acquire a life from which, inevitably, all living has been drained. In the eyes of the commercial and professional world, we walk about as nothing but bipeds fitted with monstrous and greedy appetites. Who can satisfy us? No one, it seems, even though many keep us enticed and tantalized and fully distracted. But, again as the advertisers instruct, we must keep on trying; we must keep on buying and consuming.
We pay a stiff price for the erosion of human essence. Today’s wholesale torture and killing almost everywhere we look has been made easier because of the erosion of human sensibilities in the nineteenth century. Although no one talks about this, when members of the CIA torture prisoners, they no longer torture actual human beings. A radical shift in the nature of the human being, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, emptied ordinary people of their philosophical and psychic essence; and in the end made this task much easier. I locate this shift, in great part, in the collapse of the Great Chain of Being and the subsequent birth of evolutionary theory. I also point to other eroding factors, like the rise of the machine and the explosion of a capital economy. I give a name to this peculiar phenomenon of loss: the disappearance of the human being.
Loss at such a basic level produces a disregard not just for other human beings, it appears, but for all living things. According to the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, by the twenty-first century’s end half of all species could vanish, resulting in what he calls the Eremozoic age—an age of hermetic loneliness. One way that we might begin to reverse such an unthinkably dangerous and tragic course is by understanding the disintegration of the human being—disembodying in its broadest sense—that began in the nineteenth century. In its power to shatter traditional meaning at the most basic level, the nineteenth century marks the beginning of the modern condition and carries the seeds for the consciousness associated with postmodernism.
As people began to lose the certainty of their own sentience, nineteenth-century philosophers, artists, and the new social scientists took as their task the recalculation of what it meant to be a human being. Professionals in the emerging academic disciplines and in the laboratory sciences tried to define the basic qualities of humanness, to locate the core of human essence. It is hard to talk about the nature of experimentation because so much of the modern apparatus of science comes into being just at this time. Even the word we take so much for granted, scientist, to refer to the person and the concept, does not enter the English language until about 1840; and even then the examples intrigue and baffle. This citation from Blackwood’s Magazine, for instance, gives one pause: “Leonardo was mentally a seeker after truth—a scientist; Coreggio was an assertor of truth—an artist.” A difference in manner or attitude or style, it seems, is enough to separate the artist from the true scientist.
As I hope to show in the following chapters, the close connection between science and art makes sense. The human body, in all its forms and permutations, states of aliveness and shades of decay, took on the same kind of fascination for various kinds of emerging scientists as it did for poets and writers. London physicians began dissecting cadavers, many times before large audiences, and pursued their slicing and chopping at such a furious pace that members of a new underground profession, grave robbers, came to their aid. Under the spell of the late Luigi Galvani, the Italian physicist, doctors all over Europe and in America tried their skill at reanimating the recently dead. Parisian high society gathered at a newly opened institution, the morgue, for extended evenings of gawking, gossiping, and sipping wine and champagne. Americans ate their summer dinners on the great green lawns of cemeteries in the 1830s.
Effigies, mannequins, automatons, wax models, talking dolls—the ordinary person grew hungry to gaze at the human in all of its disembodied, lifeless forms, and to render it in all its horrendous beauty on canvases and on the pages of novels and poems. Madame Tussaud, who thought of herself as an entrepreneur and artist, showed two lavish and detailed examples, fashioned in perfect detail out of wax, of the period’s iconic image “The Sleeping Beauty.” (Were we all just waiting for the right kiss, to be aroused from our slumbers?) People began to view the body as something detached and clinical, as something removed from themselves. They went to operating theaters to look at flesh investigated, probed, poked, and sketched. The body, like life itself, turned into something that people