Posted on 17 Jun, 2009 -
Twitter, The Holocaust and the Dignity of Men
Have aliens infiltrated the human race?
The one factor responsible for much of the financial mess we’re in today
The way we deal with our suffering tells us a lot about man’s soul
Contrary to my normal upbeat outlook on life, I feel that it has come a time for me to have a bit of a moan. Or rather, while most of what I personally tend to be concerned about looks inwards into the person, there comes a time when you can no longer ignore what it is going on in the world around you. And nobody always remain cheerful.
First of all, it’s personal. Why is it, for example, that 30 minutes after I’d finally got round to watering my parched collection of sorry plants, it decides finally to rain? Why has the garden furniture I bought already started to go rusty? And why I am allowing myself to get so totally wound up about the tiniest things today even down to the presence of crumbs on my desk and the itch on my elbow?
As you can see, I’m having one of those days. I get easily affected by pressure in the weather and I guess you’ve just got to suffer a few downs with your ups. I know there is also something that happened in the course of the morning (or perhaps in my dreams) that is niggling at my mood far more than I would like to admit to.
My moans, however, you’ll be glad to hear, go beyond the mundane and personal.
I just don’t seem to feel that connected with the times
First of all, can anybody explain to me the mystery of Twitter? My current assessment of this phenomena goes beyond disdain to complete disbelief and an emotion that I have never felt towards anything else before. Are aliens infiltrating the human race, perhaps?
And this is not the only thing about the human race that is concerning me at the moment.
Number one on the list at the moment is probably the way in which we have completely messed up the way we run anything to do with money. The banking system all but collapsed. Thousands are losing their jobs and their houses. Companies are now declaring they will not be able to pay people the final salary pensions they were promised. And it surely can’t be long before our horrendously over-drawn government will have to do the same.
And what single factor is to blame? The expectation of continual GROWTH. If companies and the government had not predicated all their plans for the future on the idea that the economy would steadily keep on growing (not staying good, but continually getting better) then their plans would not currently be coming a cropper. If we had not all believed the lie that house prices always go up then thousands would not not now be losing their homes or suffering the disappointment of shrinking assets or negative equity.
It’s like somebody came up with a Law of Money akin to Newton’s Law of Gravity that had growth of more than 3% a year as a given law of nature in it and now everybody’s amazed that the financial world is collapsing.
Winners or losers?
And another question is this: Who were the benefactors of this growth - of things apparently getting better - anyway? Who were things getting better for? For most of us in this country for a time at least admittedly but for an elite and greedy few certainly a lot more than others.
But what about the poor? What growth did they see? Only the growth of wealth around them.
And what about the planet earth that we have been raping? Or the billions of people for whom the attempt to get enough food to stave off hunger for another day is the thing that fills every inch of their being?
But is it really that bad?
I have been reading this week a copy of Victor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning - an account by the famous psychotherapist’s three years stay in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
It has been a very powerful experience to read details of the lives of the more than 10 million people who suffered at the hands of this event in history. People sent to the camps had everything they had owned before taken away from them - including not just their families and homes and possessions but the stories of their lives up to that moment.
Victor Frankl, (one of the very few lucky survivors of the holocaust) who had been a newly married and successful doctor before his capture, recalls how in the greyness, squalor and perpetual suffering and starvation of camp, “In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centred on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.”
He also tells of the pain of not knowing whether his wife was still alive (she wasn’t). Of having to sleep so tightly squashed together each night that there was no possibility of moving. Of being so used to horror that the site of a heap of dead human bodies brought even no feeling of sympathy or sorrow. Of staring at disbelief at the skeleton-like appearance of one’s own body. Of having to work 12 hours in frozen fields with no shoes, on daily rations of a tiny piece of bread…
There is always the insane beauty and glory of life
But he also tells of the times when the nearly-dead inmates would drag themselves out of their huts to see a particularly beautiful sunset. Of the men who went without their daily ration of bread in order to listen to the performance of some music. Of the time when, despite spending a night outside wet in the freezing cold, they were all filled with joy because they had just arrived at a camp with no gas chambers, no ‘chimney’. And also of the time when…
“In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet - and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers… Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.”
If we can suffer with dignity and courage then we are suffering well
Men, you see, have always got themselves into trouble. And the trouble we are currently suffering today is not by far the deepest trouble we have ever found ourselves in.
“To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. The suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore, the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.”
So yes, there is always suffering. But is there something in our suffering that makes us what we are?
What Frankl seems to be saying in the book, in fact, is that it is almost as if there is something good in being given the chance to suffer well: to face our suffering with dignity and courage.
So I guess it’s probably time for me to brush off the crumbs, collect my little one from school and give her a really big hug.
