People Are Sentient Beings, Not Monkeys...

It’s always interesting when what I’m learning in different classes starts to mesh together…of course, this generally means I’m going to be having a couple of sleepless nights trying to figure out just what I do believe. Imagine the two classes being a galaxy, and then both of them smashing together (which Hubble just released pictures of that are INCREDIBLE. I know, Star Trek has poisoned my brain with no help for it.). That’s a fairly accurate parallel for today.

In my American Literature class with Dr. Jenkins, we’ve been reading one his favorite authors, Walker Percy. I like Percy—he’s a lot easier to read than some of the authors we’ve had this semester while still presenting pleasingly knotty philosophical questions. The book we’re reading by Percy is called The Thanatos Syndrome, which translates into “The Death Syndrome.” The plot is incredible, focusing on a psychologist working to expose a plot in Louisiana to poison the water. This toxin isn’t your usual arsenic and heavy metal cocktail, though: it’s some kind of special sodium that will supposedly fix all the problems in the human race. With this additive in the water, people lose the superfluities of language and action. Their sentences are confined to one or two word replies, something like binary. In essence, they become roughly comparable to a chimpanzee. Teenage pregnancies, child abuse, and discrimination: all these things utterly disappear. People act on their instincts, not on reason.

Why am I bringing this up, you ask? It all connects with my post just before this one People seem to think that losing language and all its meaning would really be a good thing. It’s all the same attitude: people just want to pay the bills and move from action to action without ever thinking on the meanings behind their actions. Let’s keep it short and simple, they shout. Little words, get the point across, and move on. Any extraneous material can be clipped away. Doublespeak may not be that far away for us, after all. This infuriates me.

These opinions collided in my Victorian Literature class with Dr. Callis. He asked me to read a portion of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s essay, “The Idea of a University” aloud. “Discourse 5: Knowledge Its Own End” had quite a few intriguing points. Newman states, “You see then, here are two methods of Education; the end of the one is to be philosophical, of the other to be mechanical; the one rises towards general ideas, the other is exhausted upon what is particular and external. Let me not be thought to deny the necessity, or to decry the benefit, of such attention to what is particular and practical, as belongs to the useful or mechanical arts; life could not go on without them; we owe our daily welfare to them; their exercise is the duty of the many, and we owe to the many a debt of gratitude for fulfilling that duty. I only say that Knowledge, in proportion as it tends more and more to be particular, ceases to be Knowledge. It is a question whether Knowledge can in any proper sense be predicated of the brute creation; without pretending to metaphysical exactness of phraseology, which would be unsuitable to an occasion like this, I say, it seems to me improper to call that passive sensation, or perception of things, which brutes seem to possess, by the name of Knowledge. When I speak of Knowledge, I mean something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees, which invests it with an idea.”

Did you make it through all that? Congratulations, Greatheart! You just earned some respect from me.

To recap, men are more than brute creation, more than primal monkeys. We have been given the ability to see more than what our mere senses convey to us. Shamefully, many people prefer to exist without meaning, without searching for the Reason behind their Knowledge. I shudder to imagine the future generations when they are handed Knowledge without the ability to reason whether they should use that knowledge or not. I shudder to think what will happen when people are so busy thinking in binary that they forget to say, “Once upon a time, there was an evil queen…”