Cardiac Famine
"First comes eating, Hard to argue with that. We are all always only 48 hours away from savagery. One day's fast will give us a headache, make us grumpy. Continue the fast into a second day, and what do you get? Trappings of civilization begin to fall away rapidly. Thinking loses whatever rational qualities it had. The mind-body focus becomes: FOOD. Extend it to a third day and it's instant time machine, back to the past: 1,000,000 B.C., and the devil take the hindmost. Which means, as Brecht pointed out, morality vanishes. Well. We know that, though we don't like to think about, so we don't think about it. Well-fed, we have more pressing worries: money, sex, work, family, and so on. Other persons, less politically driven than Brecht, have pointed out the harmful effects of other kinds of starvation. In our advanced society, the advice of these other persons mainly comes down to: "First learn to THINK the way I think, then you'll be happy and successful." Religionists, scientists, artists, capitalists, cybernauts, all strongly recommend their way of thinking. Sure enough, we wind up wandering through the old cultural supermarket of life, where we pick and choose: two pounds of entrepreneurship, a few ounces of brotherly love, a couple of quarts of rational analysis, a pinch of esthetic delight. As time goes on, we add more of this, take away more of that. The big surprise, of course, comes at check-out time. We wait in line with our shopping cart full of carefully selected items. Finally it's our turn. We glance down and are puzzled to find that THE CART IS EMPTY. We look around and are puzzled to find that THE SUPERMARKET HAS VANISHED. To update Brecht: The Western 20th century made a religion of despair. Everyboyd who was Anybody, from Nobel Laureates in physics to Nobel Laureates in literature, gloryed in their various concepts of "nothing," like adolescent boys wallowing in the pretend violence of games. (We were so proud of our vaunted negativism that we rewarded artists who embraced it with our highest prizes.) Childish? Yes. Superficial? Yes. But the despair turned out to be very dangerous and painful, depriving some 200,000,000 20th century people of their lives through war, revolution, and purges. We didn't realize we were starving. Yes, Mr. Brecht, you gotta feed the stomach. But you also gotta feed the heart. Feed the heart. Feed the heart. And the 20th century starved the heart, us, itself. Will the 21st finally learn that only nature nurtures?
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