Americans, perhaps most human beings of the Modern Age, don’t perceive what’s inconvenient to their desired worldview. This is hardly a new observation — Tocqueville was puzzled by this trait back in the 1830s and others since, including Hawthorne and Melville and Solzhenitsyn and Ray Bradbury have at least spoken of this problem. Perhaps Tocqueville in Democracy in America, a book mostly complimentary to Americans, and Solzhenitsyn in his critiques of the West including the forward to the abridged edition of The Gulag Archipelago, were the most direct in their observations. Solzhenitsyn was forced into a renunciation of his almost unqualified high opinion of Americans by one specific spree of systematic criminal behavior committed by the U.S. Army according to agreements involving Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin — see Operation Keelhaul for a summary discussion of the brutal betrayal of many Soviet refugees and even some descendants of refugees from prior generations. All the betrayed human beings were tricked or forced back to the Soviet Union where they were sometimes sent into slave labor camps and sometimes executed right in front of the Allied soldiers. Solzhenitsyn was forced to realize that Americans had been able to walk away from their crimes and to wash their own memories of the horrors they’d participated in.
Maybe, we should be careful in condemning the young soldiers who were probably confused about what was going on, but we have to place full responsibility upon the older and more experienced American and British participants in this crime, including chaplains and medical personnel and senior officers and State Department officials, who would have known pretty well what was happening. They kept their mouths shut in the same cowardly manner as the nice middle-class Germans who served Hitler rather than risking punishment or loss of respectability. Yet, we still have to ask even of those young soldiers: how many of them were paying enough attention to be suspicious at least when they saw the brutal executions of ex-POWs whose crime had been to be captured when Stalin had ordered them to fight to the death? Did they remember what they’d helped to do or had at least witnessed?
What frightens me about talking to those just older than me, Vietnam veterans, is the small percentage who were observant enough to notice, for example, the almost total lack of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers in the villages invaded by American troops. Some were deeply disturbed to find themselves fighting teenagers and old men who were fighting in front of their family homes and others either didn’t notice the suspicious demographics, if that’s a proper word for the age and sex distribution of corpses. Still others just echoed the government line that these people defending their villages were commies who didn’t place any value on human life. They deserved to be shot down because they were trying to kill Americans who were only there to help the Vietnamese. Those who wish to read an account from a Washington perspective of an awakening awareness of the criminal nature of the war against the Vietnamese people can get hold of a copy of In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by Robert S. McNamara and Brian VanDeMark. This book speaks about some of the policies set in Washington which led to American soldiers waging war upon Vietnamese civilians and also speaks of the willful ignorance of those managing the war when McNamara was able to confirm by his early access to the libraries of Kennedy and Johnson that the facts of a criminal war were sitting right in front of them during their many meetings where government officials crossed items off their to-do lists and worked towards their career goals before heading home in their nice cars to their nice homes with their nice families.
The sheep can’t be deemed totally innocent but the primary blame belongs to the shepherds. Our moral and spiritual leaders, our so-called thinkers, clergymen and philosophers, theologians and poets, have refused to pay attention to the world around us. Empirical reality has created problems to our established moral views to be sure and it’s just when empirical knowledge threatens to be inconvenient that we human beings are strongly tempted to misperceive or ignore even the most obvious of facts. We need to pay attention most intensely just when empirical reality is most bothersome or most painful.
In fact, empirical knowledge seems to always come into conflict eventually with any set of ideas, political or economic, scientific or philosophical, technological or domestic. The Creator’s thoughts lie always above and beyond us and those thoughts are best seen by way of human thoughts and human behaviors which are active responses to Creation and which prove to be appropriate responses. Even those few doctrines which we Christians claim to be revealed truths have had to be reinterpreted under the pressure of changing understandings of empirical reality. For example, we believe God has promised a resurrection into life without end for those who belong to His Son, Jesus Christ. He didn’t give us detailed instructions and we should pay more attention to modern biology, including evolutionary theories, as part of the process of understanding those promises of resurrection. After all, our inherited understandings of those promises were partly drawn from (often misunderstood) doctrines of pagan philosophers. For example, the idea of the immortal soul came largely from Plato though there’s no reason to believe that Plato’s ‘immortal soul’ had anything to do with individual human beings.
To see truth, we first must pay attention to the things around us, to reliable histories of the West and of our own particular parts of it, to the best knowledge gathered by physicists and chemists and engineers, to the needs and desires of those around us, and to other aspects of empirical reality. In these early years of the 21st century, our environments include the abstract domains of modern mathematics as well as our best views of the space-time regions when the universe first expanded out from an extremely dense state. The environments of anyone who reads regularly or even watches decent documentaries on television also extend to ancient Egypt and to the highlands of Kenya.
Pay attention and think if you would ascend towards some plausible view of the nature and meaning of Creation and all the individual creatures it includes.
Right now, we Americans are paying a price for not paying attention because our economy has been gutted by the various criminal activities, domestic and foreign, of our government and big-business leaders. This isn’t the place to discuss those details and there are others far better informed about the details than I am. I’m merely pointing out that we could have stopped this disaster years ago as it was developing but we didn’t pay attention. As for me… I haven’t voted for a major party candidate for President of the U.S. since 1988 and few other major party candidates for any political office in these past two decades. I even turned in a blank ballot once when there were no acceptable alternative candidates. For what it’s worth, I also gave up any hope of ever receiving significant Social Security or Medicare benefits back in the late 1980s. These problems with our political and economic systems were not so hidden except to those who were willfully blind.
In any case, a morally well-ordered society, and all the attendant practical advantages, comes into being by actions that can only be proper if they are in response to a properly perceived world, a world to which we pay attention.