Extermination
If there are no spirits to placate, human beings can do anything because they feel there are no consequences or boundaries. The inability to “feel them spirit,” as Bob Marley put it, was the gravest dilemma of modern times because in the absence of palpable spirits human beings were left with little more than their specious control of life. If there are no spirits, there is no give and take between human beings and the world around them. No one is speaking back to people and reminding them of their obligations. No one is telling them stories that come from some other perspective than the human one. No one is showing how minute yet vast the thread of life can be. If the world seems inanimate, something composed of objects to be bought and sold, something that has no life of its own then people will seek more and more desperate answers, in order to feel animate or to welcome oblivion. The stimulation of violence and the de-stimulation of opiates barely mask the despair of purposelessness, of being an outcast on the sea of life, deaf to the vibrancy of the spirits.
To speak of spirits may seem like outright malarkey to even a mildly rational person. Where are these spirits and what do they constitute? One response is to ask what is left when any creature leaves this world? “Spirit” has been the answer that many cultures have given. The rage for understanding pretends this spirit is inconsequential because it can’t be quantified or codified. With human beings, this spirit tends to be taken for granted—the froth of personality—or dissected into psychological components. With other creatures, it is often dismissed outright, though the enormous importance that pets took on in modern times testified to the craving for animal spirit.
Modern times exposed a sort of calcification of the soul. If some creatures became extinct that was their problem. Extermination was an event among many events. There was no impiety involved, no sense of a taboo being violated, no sense of sacrilege, no sense of desolating loss. Similarly, if some people were killed off that was their problem, too. The sense of interconnection among creatures that the spirit world breeds was lost or put aside in the rush toward technical and ideological control represented by the shibboleth of “national security.” If some of the modern discoveries seemed barely controllable, such as atomic weapons, that seemed unfortunate but little more than that. Progress did not seem to include catastrophe, even though modern times were sown with man-made catastrophes.
When Hitler proposed to exterminate the Jews, he was making a modern statement in the sense that along with the hatred, he had the means to do it. He was, so to speak, a dead man living in a dead world who wanted to make more death because that was what he esteemed. The ultimate power is to remake the world in your own image. Whether through scientific pursuits such as cloning, environmental ones such as destroying habitats, or political ones such as ethnic cleansing, the human race in modern times has pursued this task ardently. Hitler was offering his malign improvisation on that theme. Over the course of millennia, many a populace had been put to the sword. In modern times, it became possible to expand the lethal wrath of the sword to all creatures. As DDT exemplified, the wrath could be nothing more than science and business going about their can’t-stop-progress handiwork.
Humankind owes much to the likes of Rachel Carson who felt the anguish of what a silent spring would be like. The categorizing, specializing, objectifying, quantifying habits that went with modern life were useful to a scientist like Carson but meant nothing if they were not in the service of the interdependence of living beings. Whether accidental or intentional, the prospect of extermination results from separation. Once the separation occurs—Aryans here, Jews there; Whites here, Colored there—any malice is possible.
The malice is painful but so is the negligence that accompanies it. Modern times were devoted to the genius of action not to the wisdom of listening to the living world’s breath—an activity that seemed not an activity. If there is no listening, however, then nothing can be felt in any deep, soul sustaining sense. The frenzy of action for the sake of action was played out in the ghastly macht schnell of the Nazis—hurry to death. Like the bitter words, Arbeit macht frei, this would be a parody if it were not a nightmare. The mundane nightmare of modern times—the mania for efficiency, the pointless, compulsive, and endless making of things, the exhaustion of finite resources—was taken to extremes, but the impulses were there in daily life. For the people who worked in the camps, it was daily life.
That which has been taken away can no longer be heard or seen or felt. Beneath the hubbub of modern times lay a terrible silence and emptiness. No passenger pigeons filled the sky. No voices emanated from synagogues in countless numbers of towns. Whenever there was extermination, the volume and scope of felt life diminished. No amount of synthetic or artificial reality could make up for such losses. Life is precious or it isn’t. There is no in-between.
One place the spirits dwell is in the haunting powers of memory. The memorial faculty gives a voice to the slaughtered and offers a testament to the living. “Gives a voice” is not just a phrase. Remembrance calls up the voices of the spirits which, each day, want to be heard. To live on the earth and to have no sense of those who have come before is to live in a state of dire inconsequence, as if a person were nothing more than a colander through which a quantity of time was poured. The vision of such modern books as Orwell’s 1984 is that of a world in which spirit has been rooted out utterly. Only the State’s dictates apply and its dreadful, exterminating expediencies, its slogans for murder, its yearnings for the blankness of total obedience.
Another brilliant, right-on-the-money essay, Baron! Keep 'em coming!
Sarah Stromeyer - Linking 'spirit' and 'extermination' is as startling as it is brilliant. These essays are a treasure.