The Courage of Cowardice

 

This may sound painfully honest to some people, but in a way, it is the true meaning of Easter. 

C. S. Lewis once argued that cowardice was never seen as a virtue. He claimed this objective moral understanding demonstrated the existence of a moral God;  a moral God that created humanity to have this unifying moral understanding, so it would learn how to obey by being forced to accept their suffering was the consequences of their disobedience. 

But look at the courage of the "cowards" of World War I. Men whose patriotism was to life itself, more than to their country or their Gods. They were the men often defined as "shell shocked." 

Unlike the plethora of brands of designer mental diseases to choose from today, thanks to the billions to be made in "selling sickness" of people's normal response to the pressures of their environment, "shell shock" was an example of how an environment of death and hatred could physically cripple a person's spirit and soul, because a person's soul is their mind, which exists on some levels wholly independent of our physical brain. 

Because science was not sophisticated enough at the time to demonstrate the neurological damage that resulted from existing even for a brief time in such an environment, since neurons had only recently been discovered by then, a person could be court-martialed for demonstrating "cowardice." A person was judged to be a coward if no physical symptoms could be convincingly demonstrated to exist by the patient, for which the punishment was death by firing squad. 

 Religion claims to be the defender of that part of the person that values life more than anything else, even more than one's own religion. Yet religion is too often used as a means of requiring the same amount of obedience to itself, calling its own patriots "martyrs" instead. 

Solders were thus rewarded for their willingness to slaughter for their flags and their religions alike, which physically means they were addicted to the endorphins of their beliefs. While neurons were discovered in 1888 - the same year as Jack the Ripper, by the way, a man who turned the cruelty of his indifference for others into a kind of hobby or game - scientists had not discovered the endorphins that acted to transmit messages between neurons until 1975.  That transmission system  functions as the "e-mail" system  used between the neurons in our brain, and our endorphins are the emails being delivered between those neurons. 

Endorphins, in this respect, can be thought of as calories for one's heart, which nourishes our sense of empathy and love for others. But like real calories, our minds prefer sugars and salt, which comes from the endorphins we release when we revel in our "sacred" beliefs. And Shell Shock might well have been a breakdown of endorphins, and thus a virus in the email server of our brain, like an engine being forced to run without oil or gas, or a soldier demonstrating their "patriotism" by being as brave as a tank or a gun; which is to say, indifferent to life itself. 

The vital role that love plays in human sanity, well-being, and emotional development was demonstrated in a study by Dr. Rene Spitz in the 1940’s, and again in the Harlow Study of the 1960’s. Spitz examined institutionalized children that were raised in a nursing home. While these children were properly fed and taken care of, the limited number of staff working in the institution meant that many were deprived of touch and affection; and those who were deprived suffered devastating symptoms. By two years, for example, a third of them had died. Those who survived to three years could not walk or talk. After 40 years, twenty one were still living in an institution. These same children also showed progressive mental deterioration, extreme bodily retardation, and lowered resistance to disease. Spitz ultimately concluded from his study that such damage inflicted on children during their first year of life was irreparable.

In the 1960s, Harry Harlow performed an experiment that similarly demonstrated the importance of love to keep a person's brain healthy enough to maintain a normal mind. Love, in other words, is an antivirus of sorts, just like REM sleep. Harlow removed baby monkeys from their mothers at birth and provided them with all the necessities of life, such as food and warmth (temperature), but the babies had no contact with other monkeys. From his experiment, Harlow concluded that the social isolation was “so devastating and debilitating that (he) had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional (damage). This assumption proved to be wrong: 12 more months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially."

Institutions teach us to "believe" that grown men who require the same amount of love as a an orphan or a monkey to maintain their level of "sanity" by not completely destroying their own mental "e-mail" system, should be called "cowards," even though the person who is convicted of being a coward faces not only death, but public shame as well; and if they are particularly well known, perhaps even infamy.   When in fact what had really happened to these men was that they had simply run out of hate, which is the sugar of the brain, and needed to love, the vitamins and nutrients of our brain, and be loved in return, which is like sunlight to our soul. 

We saw this occur in mass in the trenches of World War I. Known as The Christmas truce of 1914, men who had all simply run out of hate for their fellow man began a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front. They climbed out of their holes, and wandered into no-man's land between their trenches, the killing floor of their allegiances, with a desire for nothing more than to be purely human for Christmas. The ring leaders were all court-martialed, of course, for failing to keep their men from acting like anything but machines for God and country. For in the army, one can only demonstrate their love and courage for God and country, through their unflagging devotion to kill and die hating anyone who is ordered to do the same thing for their own God and country. 

I don't know about you, but that "coward" for patriotism and dogmatism is a martyr for the love of life and others above all other things. And this is just as courageous as being crucified for the love of humanity overall all other divisive distinctions we dream up and come to depend upon, out of an addiction to our fears of others masquerading as a love of God, so often called "religion." 

The world doesn't need the "courage" of which Lewis speaks, which has only sacrificed countless billions to the greatness of one brand of beliefs and ideas or another, it needs cowards; cowards who are so terrified of hate in all of its forms and disguises, that they are courageous enough to love humanity as their only begotten family, to which they have the privilege to belong, but of which they are also ashamed of as well, for what we have become as a race of homo sapiens.  

And out of a love for that privilege, however daunting the mountain looks they must climb or the weight of the cross they must carry,  they work and pray to amend for that shame; and to be forgiven by life itself, for failing to appreciate it for others as much as oneself, over everything else, and especially over death with honor, for one brand of beliefs or another.