The Bell Has Donne Tolled Me Deaf

It is reported as an historical fact that F.W. Nietzsche became as crazy as a bedbug; few argue with that. Before he did, like most bright people, he said a few things which one would wish to remember. Here is one:

"I want, once and for all, not to know many things. - Wisdom sets limits to knowledge too."

I am not familiar with the context used by Nietzsche, nor do I particularly care. Aphorisms do not always hold up when fit back in the mold from which they came. But I read it, and it has stuck with me.....although not particularly at first. I was somewhat younger when I read it, and although it was one of those things I suspected may be important, the full subjective import of it had to mature in me for some years. But I am there.

We live in a world in which the affairs, enormities, and travail of millions -if not billions- of, as one thinker puts it, "distant others" are dinned constantly into our ears or dangled before our jaded vision, and every minute of every day were it not for the blessings of sleep.

In his Meditation XVII, John Donne espoused what has become a classic line, but a part of a larger quote, and important enough to be remembered in full:

"No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

And all in the lovely English of the 17th century, full of a sweep and power that may finally be fading. A great humanistic statement, an appeal to the importance of human society at large rather than one's particular nation or tribe. It is a quote borne along on the tide of events that emerged from history in the Renaissance, and has been a flood engulfing the world. And yet, for all that, here we are.

In the aftermath of not only the Age of Genius but the Industrial Revolution, we live immured in a global network of technology that brings, in the words of a somewhat lower philosopher, "-the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." We watch people at the trivia of their daily lives, and we watch the extremes of thousands washed away by a tsunami like dust before the wind, and the pinnacle of our time as men walk on another world.

And unless we refuse to participate, it is very difficult to escape for anyone in the developed world, where both traditional and electronic media are ubiquitous. But escape is, in the modern world, as near a sin as some can imagine. We must "be involved," we are thoroughly Emersonized into believing that "A man who does not share in the action and passion of his times may be judged never to have lived." But that was then, in a nineteenth century wherein the full impact of sharing the lives of anonymous billions had not yet become so personal. And this is now, where it requires considerable effort to escape it.

We have arrived at a time where it becomes necessary to advance an actual apologia limiting one's sphere of legitimate attention, interest, and concern. It has been demonstrated that most human beings are incapable of having any meaningful personal interaction with more than 150 people. I would submit that for most of those, it's significantly less, and in no case is it very much more.

This then poses the very important question of how we can possibly feel actual concern, sympathy, or empathy for people for whom, in reality, we cannot relate. I submit that we cannot. We are therefore claiming some sort of subjective, personal involvement with symbols abstracted from the people we know, and claiming by that tenuous connection to have genuine affect for them. And I submit that this is impossible, belief to the contrary notwithstanding.

The connections therefore proposed by some, that we have not only to pay attention to global humanity, but that we also have moral obligations to these distant others, is an illusion. The issue is not whether we want to; it's that we're incapable. And this may explain that the greater the leader, the more likely they are to represent a power that will be used irresponsibly and brutally. Not that this will be done out of some calculated viciousness (although this has been done, most notably in the past century by the Nazi government of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China, as well as other places). It's just that ultimately power is implemented on millions via impersonal policies that must needs grind up some of those people in the gears of bureaucracy. The American Indian was never viewed as some great enemy, nor was that ever the case. The Native American was simply an inconvenience in the way of those same statutes and procedures, and again like dust they were swept away.

There is universal distrust of the system of "spokespersons" and "experts" who appear in suits and skirts and chatter away in the hermetic universe of set-piece political discussions or press conferences. We now perceive that we are only told a crafted, deeply invidious version of a particular story or issue, and the "what" of things is hardly addressed at all, except in passing. No one cares whether the audience understands or not, one must only lend credence as demanded by the man or woman on the screen or behind the podium.

This anomie stems perhaps from our deepest human sense that we can't possibly relate personally to what's being discussed, and yet we are supposed to believe that those who prate so convincingly have somehow managed to do so. Absent a belief in magical powers, I submit they have not.

To revert to the opening statement, I am past pretending that I want to be force-fed any more of the grief of Germany, the trials of Thailand, the idiocies of India or Iran, the paranoia of Paraguay or the arrogance of Argentina. Stereotyping is generally decried among educated persons, and yet it is still almost a given when applied to presenting stories on a global level. The French are reported to think thus-and-so, and the South Africans this, the few people in the Yukon another thing. And if it is presented as a poll, and 56% of Laotians are opposed to the use of the Western toothbrush, what am I to make of these figures? Outside of context, how am I supposed to know whether or not 56% of Laotians even know what a toothbrush is? Or whether they use a magic bubblegum to clean their teeth that is far superior to my Pix-o-Dent? I cannot make sense of this, and unless I grant a special dispensation to the various pundits, gurus, politicians, and experts (which I have previously indicated that I don't), I do not believe they do either. At least they no longer sing to me.

What Violent Mentality?

It was mentioned by someone recently that the solution to the massacre at Newtown, CT is to "change the mentality." Evidently such hope for change rests largely with another push to emulate failed gun control bills of days gone by, so let's examine the national "mentality," which one can only assume involves the social acceptance of violent acts.

Since everyone else is focused on guns, I'd like to offer some other items for consideration that make up that "mentality."

Let's start with the number of TV shows focused solely on mayhem of various kinds, but most generally, week in and week out, with murders, either singly, serially, or en masse. Just some examples, by no means exhaustive, would include everything in the "CSI" franchise, everything in the "Law and Order" franchise, Bones, Rizzoli and Isles, Criminal Minds. The Mentalist deals with the recurring theme of a serial killer, nemesis of the protagonist, who has now killed, singly or in groups, and with evident impunity, throughout every season of the show. But the crowning glory of contemporary TV has to be Dexter, now renewed for a SEVENTH season, billed by Showtime as "America's Favorite Serial Killer," in which the protagonist of the show, with whom we putatively identify, is both a law enforcement agent and a murderer. Res ipse loquitur.


I don't go to the movies a lot, but there's enough of a Grand Guignol there, too. Violence is as alive and well in the cinema as on the tube. Since I don't watch a whole lot of movies, I'll leave it at that, because I know that the First Rule of Fight Club is "Don't talk about Fight Club."

Shifting (only slightly) from entertainment billed as such to the increasingly entertaining "news" and "weather," we find not a complete preoccupation with all things violent, but a quite deliberate attempt to portray them in the most lurid and distressing possible light, by the use of the most extreme adjectives in Webster's. Everything is "devastating" now, my friends. And things most people have never heard of, and which are often unproven, are damned as threats to health and safety. Last year it was high fructose corn syrup, before that it was thimerosol and the whole vaccination hysteria, now it's the evils of gluten. How does this tie into the culture of violence? Because it is most often portrayed as the (assumed) intent of someone else to put this stuff into our bodies. Back in the 1950's it was shadowy forces trying to fluoridate our precious bodily fluids, but what was put down to the lunatic fringe then sixty years later has become a neverending series of assumptions: accusation is proof of guilt.

A large theme in that portion of television devoted to the weather and "reality" is the various sorts of catastrophes that, however remote the possibility, still could occur. And we're always left with the impression that these things are just around the corner. Mega-this-and-that, from hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, another ice age, large-scale desertification. And the recent trend is to move the paranoia off Earth entirely, and go on about all the things coming to get us from elsewhere in the cosmos: asteroids, comets, rogue planets, gamma and cosmic ray bursts, objects moving through the solar system at close to light speed, and, of course, the perennial favorite of some type of alien invasion.

Video games have been under scrutiny before, largely to no effect. But there is no denying that  many thousands of copies are sold of any number of video games devoted solely to killing or being killed by an amazing variety of anthropomorphic figures, ranging from the completely human through zombies, monsters, etc....but it's just nonstop mayhem, and it's not supposed to have anything to do with "reality," so the assumption is that it has no effect on people's behavior.

Well, if nothing has pissed anyone off yet, let's move on to.....SPORTS. How about sports that, completely within the rules and with the sanction of law and society, result in the absolutely unavoidable debilitating injury of the participants, often at a young age. I suppose the most extreme trend is in "ultimate fighting," but boxing has been controversial for years, with not much ever having been done about it. Then there's football, a pastime where Isaac Newton's laws of motion produce a neverending litany of injury. There hasn't been much serious talk about the consequences of playing football since it was up for being banned in 1906, but facts have finally accumulated that are difficult to ignore, and current lawsuits by former players against the NFL mean they aren't likely to go away. And because these sports may be the worst don't mean there aren't others.

When it comes to violence, we can hardly omit the increasingly questionable world of America since September 11, 2001. Even the question of someone  wishing the U.S. ill is now likely to provoke the most drastic sort of response, and the  dismantling of the Bill of Rights, unthinkable before, is now under way. The Fourth Amendment is falling by the wayside, and the Fifth is threatened. We are now told by some people that the Second must go, based up on the acts of a madman. How long before the First Amendment, however important, can no longer be tolerated- in the name of public safety, of course. It has become "necessary." As William Pitt remarked, "'Necessity' is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

I submit, based upon what I have stated in this brief essay, that there is a mentality in this society that transcends whatever may be employed to commit the violence. I would think any reasonable approach to change this state of mind would be welcome.