To feel, feel, only feel - never think!

Herman Melville (1819-1891) used well his own experience among the primitive conditions of life on sailing ships to describe the nature of the human heart. Most clearly, in his Moby-Dick, also known as The Whale, he writes of Captain Ahab's state on the third day of stalking the ghostly white monster that had enslaved Ahab's mind and soul. Melville expresses a premonition of the state of the soul of so many in our time.

Here's what Melville saw in the heart of a man who had lost control of himself:

Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. 

As would be expected in any time but our own, the outcome of Ahab's self-obsession was tragedy. His decision to reject appeals to desist in his lust for the life of the whale that had deprived him of one leg and the respect of his men concluded with the loss of his ship, his crew (bar the narrator), and his manic self.

I read that excerpt and then the account of the paralysed man blessed with friends, who Jesus cured with the additional promise: "Courage, child, your sins are forgiven" (Matthew 9:1-8). The account seemed to have something to say about Ahab and the condition of many in our era.

What a commentator finds links the passages:

The man is told to complete his experience of healing by abandoning a life of sin, bringing body and spirit into full harmony and wholeness. This is not to say that Jesus is implying that the man had been unable to walk because of his sin. Jesus did not teach that. But what he is saying is that physical wholeness needs to be matched by spiritual wholeness, the wholeness of the complete person.

The issue of May 20, 2013

I note that, as far as the West is concerned, social observers identify that it was with the Baby Boomers that the rot set in. They (which includes me) were the first to be tagged the Me Generation, because they took delight in sloughing the discipline that enables social norms, in order to join the narcissistic Sexual Revolution. Subsequently we have had Me Me Me Generation, that is, the Millennials, and now Generation Z, with the degree of self-absorption growing, and social dis-ease mounting.

That Ahab's soul and that of our society in its state of ship-wreck are carved from the same block is certain. Ahab was called out by a plucky subordinate but he persisted on his deranged path. For our part, we have a tendency to identitfy our wants as an essential "human right", no matter the wider harm. Our society has a formidable challenge to realise it is not a mere collection of atomised personalities but that it is a living entity with members committing themselves to a bond of peace, as Augustine has it. Bon voyage!

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