The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Under normal circumstances, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible is a more accurate translation than the King James (or “Authorized”) Version. It should be noted, initially, that that is an opinion, and not a fact. Others would claim other translations are preferable to either the RSV or the KJV. But that is not the issue being addressed herein.
The above notwithstanding, there is a phrase in the King James translation of Psalm 139:14 that is not found in the Revised Standard Version, and that prompts the title of this particular philosophical musing. The RSV says, speaking to God, “I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful.” But the KJV says, “I praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
The two translations of that verse obviously do not convey the same meaning at all. I would guess, having no linguistic certainty of it but trusting it is so, that the RSV is closer in translation to the intention of meaning in the original Hebrew. Nonetheless, whatever the psalmist meant, it should be evident to everyone that all of us indeed are fearfully and wonderfully made, whether or not that is truly what the writer meant to say.
My purpose here is not to delve into who made us. The Psalm writer believed God created us. It is possible, however, as many have suggested, that we “just happened.”
However we came into being, we are; we exist. And our existence as created and/or evolved beings is astonishingly complex. Human bodies and minds are exceedingly intricately put together. To deny that is to ignore biological and psychological reality.
But it is solely on the mind that you are being asked to focus now.
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Two recent articles in two popular magazines illustrate how complex is the human mind. In the April 3 New Yorker, there was a fascinating story called The Apathetic: Why are refugee children falling unconscious? It described a situation in child psychology which appears to have become unpredictably unique to Sweden.
Over the past generation, tens of thousands of people from war-torn states all over the world have come as refugees to this Scandinavian nation of unusually democratic, politically liberal, happy citizens. Many of the refugees have been granted citizenship fairly quickly; others are still caught up in the lengthy process of having their status officially determined by the Swedish immigration authorities.
A strange phenomenon has transpired among some of the refugee children and teenagers from Russia and other Slavic states, particularly including the Balkans. When some of them hear that their families may be deported back to their countries of national origin, within days they fall into a psychological condition the Swedes call uppgivenhetssyndrom, literally “giving-up (or resignation) syndrome.” The young people themselves are referred to as de apatiska. “The Apathetic” become comatose. Without intravenous feeding and hydration, they would all die, because in their unconscious state they are totally unable to eat or drink normally.
Not surprisingly, many Swedes thought these children were faking this heretofore unknown malady. Even some psychologists and psychiatrists initially thought that.
Upon careful examination and closer reflection, however, the Swedish medical community has concluded that The Apathetic represent a singular psychological category, and that Resignation Syndrome is a genuine medical abnormality. Upon the most careful investigation, nearly all Swedish skeptics themselves have come to believe the syndrome is real.
By 2005, more than four hundred youngsters between eight and fifteen years of age had fallen victim to the condition. By 2017, several hundred more have succumbed to Resignation Syndrome when they learned they and their families would be deported.
Why? How could this have happened? No one knows for sure, but here is what the professionals speculate: All of these children were born into nations of severe political or military repression. Their parents happened to seek asylum in one of the most generous welfare states on earth. Within a few months or years of arriving in Sweden, the children thought of themselves as bona fide Swedish citizens, even though technically they were not, because they were still in Sweden as refugees.
When they were informed that their families would be sent back to their birthplace, where authoritarian regimes rule and where there is little or no true freedom, some of these adolescents rapidly plummeted into a state where they simply gave up on life. Subconsciously they believed they were doomed, and so they went into death-like comas, unaware of anyone or anything around them. Tests illustrated that they had virtually no cognition. Or if they did, no medical personnel were able to determine that they had cognition of anything being said or done in their presence.
Nevertheless, sometimes Swedish immigration officials decided that for the good of the child, and thus the family, acceptable morality required that the family must be given Swedish citizenship. What that happened, somehow these comatose youngsters sensed the change, and gradually they emerged from their comas. No one has been able to pinpoint how they know their immigration status changed while they were in their coma, but they did sense it. It is an amazing phenomenon.
A boy particularly featured in the New Yorker article is named Georgi. His father Soslan had been the leader of a pacifist sect in Ossetia, a Russian province adjacent to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Russian security forces demanded that Soslan disband the sect, or they would kill him. He refused, but he and his family fled, eventually ending up in Falun, Sweden.
At the end of the article, a psychiatrist interviewed Georgi. He told the doctor that during the coma he felt as though he were in an enclosed glass cage deep in the ocean, and that if anything happened around him, the glass would shatter. So Georgi put all thoughts out of his mind, wanting to protect his family and himself from being ordered to leave their new home in their new happy homeland. Georgi had no memory at all of coming out of his coma, or why it had happened.
How fearfully and wonderfully we are made! The human mind is incredibly complex. The circuitry of the brain is so detailed and intricate as to defy description, now and perhaps for always. To ignore how fearfully and wonderfully the human mind is made is to overlook one of the most profound mysteries and realities of human existence.
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The April edition of Smithsonian Magazine also had an article about the complexity of a particular mind encased in a particular brain. In this instance, it was a mentally diseased brain which was the subject of the story.
Unmasking the Mad Bomber described how Dr. James A. Brussel, a New York widely-known psychiatrist, was asked by the New York Police Department to try to help them track down a serial killer back in the 1950s.
From 1940 through 1956, someone planted 32 homemade bombs in public places in and around Manhattan. None of the bombs killed anyone, because they were inexpertly constructed. Nevertheless the detonations had injured many people. When the last bomb exploded in the Paramount Theater in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in December of 1956, the police finally decided to enlist the services of the famous psychiatrist.
Dr. Brussel was given all the records regarding the bombings. In every instance after a bombing, a letter would arrive at the police headquarters. Each letter was hand-written in perfect English in an unusually steady foreign-looking script, and each was always signed with the initials “F.P.”
After taking many weeks to study the police reports, Dr. Brussel concluded the man who had become widely known as the Mad Bomber was indeed mad. He was, said the famed physician of the mind, a textbook paranoid schizophrenic. He said that people with that mental disorder often believe that other people are controlling them or are plotting against them.
“The paranoiac is a classic grudge-holder,” the doctor told the police. F.P.’s grudge seemed to have been directed against a large bureaucracy which had employed him, and by which he believed he had been treated unfairly. His arrogance and his confidence in his superiority would make it hard for him to hold down a job, the doctor declared.
Dr. Brussel further concluded as he studied the material given to him that F.P. felt a constant need to convey his superiority. He said that F.P. probably had fastidious behavior, and that he “was almost certainly a very neat, proper man.” (If parts of this criminal profile of F.P. reminds you of another famous – or infamous – man long associated with New York City, you came to that conclusion. I did not suggest it, not even for a fleeting instant.)
The more James Brussel thought about F.P., the more he was convinced that he was a man of Slavic background, and that he, a bachelor, probably lived with his mother either in Westchester County, New York, or somewhere in suburban Connecticut. There is much more to the story, including that the bomber probably wore glasses and that he would button his fastidious shirt or pajamas at his fastidious neck, but I shall not take the time to tell the rest of it. Look it up in your April Smithsonian or check it out online.
Shortly before midnight on January 27, 1957, three Manhattan detectives entered the home of George Metesky. He quietly answered the door wearing glasses and burgundy pajamas buttoned at the neck. He was a former Consolidated Edison Power Company plant worker who had been forced to retire after fumes from a furnace explosion brought on a crippling case of tuberculosis.
The detectives showed Mr. Matesky the search warrant. He showed no signs of resisting or fleeing. He lived in an old three-storey house in Waterbury, Connecticut with his two unmarried older sisters. In his meticulous bedroom they found a notebook with handwriting eerily similar to the letters F.P. had sent to the police. They asked him to write his name, and the handwriting looked strikingly identical to the letters still in the police files.
Before taking the suspect away in handcuffs, they asked him what “F.P.” meant. With a look of triumph, he smugly answered, “Fair Play.”
James Brussel met George Metesky only once after Metesky was arrested. It was at a hospital for the criminally insane where George Metesky was incarcerated for the remainder of his life.
The psychiatrist wrote in his notes of the meeting, “He was calm, smiling, and condescending.” He asked the prisoner if his behavior might have been the result of his being a paranoid schizophrenic. “He didn’t become angry….He smiled at me. With a wave of his hand he said, ‘It could have been, it could have been. But I wasn’t.’ Then,” Dr. Brussel wrote, “ he bowed graciously and left the room.”
How fearfully and wonderfully we are made! Considering how fragile and how many things can go wrong with our minds, it is a wonder that we are not all completely daft by the time we emerge from grade school!
And yet most of us live three score years and ten or more years in relative good mental and physical health. Astonishing.
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Reading cartoons in the newspaper is a great pleasure, whether they are the comics page or the editorial page. One of my favorite cartoons is Shoe. In Shoe, all the characters are birds, but the birds are reminiscent of people. But then we people are actually birds of sorts in our own right.
The nephew of one of the main Shoe characters is named Skyler. That is not a misspelling; everyone in Wington, which is the fictional location of the cartoon strip, is a bird, see, so it is appropriate to be “Skyler,” not “Schyler.” Most good cartoons are “thoughty,” but Shoe is thoughtier than most.
Skyler is a gangly young pre-adolescent bird who wears huge glasses. He is an expert at giving double-entendred definitions to vocabulary words his never-seen teacher asks her class to define. Recently (4/12/17), in the first frame Skyler looked at a quiz question the teacher had written for the class, “Give an example of ‘redundancy.’” The second frame shows Skyler thinking, as it does in every similar cartoon. In the third frame Skyler writes, “Telling a mime to shut up.”
How wonderfully our minds are made! Whether one sees the humor instantly or has to think about it for a bit, that double-entendre example of the meaning of redundancy shows how complex the human mind truly is, when properly exercised.
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Robin Dunbar is a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University. Twenty years ago he did extensive research on the subject of social bonding in various species of animals. He concluded that the larger the brain is in a particular species, the greater is the ability of that animal to have close relationships with others of its kind.
“Social bonding” suggests intentional relationships as compared to instinctual relationships. In other words, the individual animal wants to become close to other individuals of its species and is able to act on that desire. It doesn’t simply hook up other with other fellow creatures of its unique species in order to propagate its own kind.
Another way to conceive of this notion is to say that the brains of social bonders impel them to seek out others of their kind intentionally, not just to keep their species going, but to keep themselves going. They recognize that they need others to live happy, fruitful, and contented lives. You need a big brain to be able to decide that.
To express this insight in ordinary as compared to evolutionary psychological terms, bugs don’t really bond with other bugs, because their brains are not big enough to realize the value of doing that. Fish, frogs, worms, snakes, snails, and most birds don’t bond either. They procreate, they congregate, but they don’t really bond.
Moving up the evolutionary ladder to mammals, genuine bonding starts to occur. And the bigger the brain in a particular breed of mammal, the more widespread are the intentionally chosen bonds.
Prof. Dunbar and his colleagues discovered that primates are the best social bonders of all the mammals. And of the primates, Homo sapiens is by far the best potential bonder. The psychologists’ research indicated that the average human being is able to establish intimate bonds with five other individuals besides the members of their immediate family, that we are capable of maintaining fifty truly close friendships, and that we are able to recognize by name up to fifteen hundred people with whom we are personally acquainted. (As a certifiable geezer, I would note that as time goes on, it becomes much easier to recognize many of those faces than it is instantly to recall many of those names.)
In terms of mental capacity, we human beings are marvelous mammals, fearfully and wonderfully made! Our remarkably-sized brains give us the ability to think, feel, and act on thoughts and feelings in ways that are physiologically impossible for other species. It can lead to dangerous or even delusional pride if we become too carried away with that insight, but we should be grateful that our particular species seems to have unprecedented abilities in the Department of Upper-Storey Operations.
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Did you ever wonder why more people don’t think the way you do? It is because we all have our own very individual and individualized minds, and we are free to think whatever we choose to think. And we also can choose not to think much at all about much at all.
Did you ever wonder why some people are liberals and others are conservatives? Or why some people love sports and others have no interest in sports at all? Or why are some so almost obsessed with politics and government, and others are utterly apathetic to such matters? Or why some people seem to be religious or spiritual while others do not appear to be religious or spiritual whatsoever?
Every individual mind encases and even creates its own individual world. We all live with one another, but we also live within ourselves.
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” That famous phrase has been the motto of a famous fund for college education for many years.
If minds are not exercised, they can begin to atrophy as surely as do muscles or nerves if they are not put to use.
Reading, especially reading things that force us to think, is one of the best ways to exercise our minds. Read. Read widely about many different kinds of subjects. Read even when you do not feel like reading. You and your brain will be happier and wiser because you do read.
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.