Next week I’m going to be putting up a review of Chiara Frugoni’s book A Day in a Medieval City. One of my cautions about that book is that it includes a number of very graphic images (all period) of the brutality of that era. She focuses on Italy in the late medieval period, and from reports I’ve heard elsewhere, it was a particularly nasty moment in the history of warfare. It was in reading this book that today’s topic came together.
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When Mr. Boy was preparing for his first holy communion, the question of eucharistic miracles arose. We looked up a few, and as often happens when learning about miraculous events of the past, I found myself asking, “Why no more? Why then and not now?” I contented myself with the standard response, that God will send what is needed to those who need it, and if those miracles were what would really help our faith today we would have it, so on and so forth.
More careful thinking gave me another answer: Because it would make us vomit.
You can believe in the assorted miracles associated with the holy eucharist or not (regardless of whether you are catholic), but the sordid truth is undeniable: we are squeamish people these days, not of the type to find our faith fortified by seeing the sacred host turn into a slab quivering flesh and blood.
For the average American today, exposure to gore tends to be an all or nothing prospect. Either you’re in one of the corpse-tending professions, or you aren’t. Either you deal with raw sewage for a living, or you don’t deal with it all. The occasional small farmer excepted, slaughtering animals is either what you do all day long, or what you expect to be long since completed before ever your dinner makes its way to grocery cart.
When we look at history, it is important to remember this. We who live the sanitized life are the exception, not the rule, to the human experience. We’re kidding ourselves if we think every one else throughout the millenia were the ones who were so disgusting; rather we should remember that our special label in history is going to be “those really wimpy people”.
I sometimes think our underexposure to gore – in particular, the shortage of brutality that we modern americans run into in day to day life – is a good thing. Perhaps because we are more sensitive to the yuckier parts of human existence, we are more sensitive to human suffering, and thus more compassionate, more peaceful, more kind to others. But lately I think not.
Rather I think that we’ve gotten ourselves into the habit of whitewashing. It isn’t that we mind abortion – and now torture – it’s that we don’t want to see images of it. So long as these practices are hidden from view and referred to with euphemisms, the same way we use modern plumbing and clever nicknames to gloss over our excretory functions, we are, as a society, really okay with them. The offensive person is not the one who supports the right to abortion or torture, but the person who has the nerve to discuss what those procedures actually entail.
There is an important distinction here for those of us who enjoy studying history: the acceptance of brutal practices, verses the acceptance of the viewing of that same brutality. If two societies both rejoice in the executing of enemies, it doesn’t make much difference whether the one rejoices at what happens in a discreet prison room far from view, and the other rejoices when it happens in the public square where everyone can see. Either we execute our enemies or we don’t; either we derive a certain pleasure from it, or we don’t; whether or not our stomachs are strong enough to view the actions we so approve is rather besides the point.
If we can be honest with ourselves about our own societal weakness, we can have more compassion on our ancestors and their particular versions intolerable brutality. Not to excuse them, but to see their world through their eyes and at least have a little pity on them, the way hopefully they are having pity on us.