It was reported last week that the butcher-jailers at the Copenhagen Zoo had killed four lions to make way for a new male. This slaughter followed last months murder of a giraffe allegedly to prevent in-breeding. The giraffe's flesh was carved up into chunks and fed to other animals in front of onlooking children.
The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria said that the Copenhagen Zoo had not broken its codes of conduct and that it "has been consistent in its approach to animal population management, and high standards of animal welfare."
We have quoted the Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar before and we will quote him again because he has said it better than anyone we are aware of.
Actually not. Its standards are on par with Heinrich Himmler's.
We have quoted the Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar before and we will quote him again because he has said it better than anyone we are aware of.
We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love"With a sneering smile, no doubt, the spokesman for the European Zookeepers Association will respond by saying that thanks to technology and cybernetics these animals species are being kept viable. Your "poverty" doesn't leave much room ecological beauty without knowledge.
But whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed (as happens... where 'faith' and 'knowledge' are constructed as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of 'knowledge', and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation — a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated —
To this we might reply by asking the Zookeepers of Denmark if they would support a euthansia programme for idiots and the insane?
Don't be ridiculous, comes the retort. Those are human beings!
And so?
So that's different!
Oh? Are you saying that they have a soul?
Of course not. Souls is silliness. But they are rational beings.
Oh? I thought they were idiots and imbeciles.
FOLK COMRADES! It's YOUR money. These poor wretches are useless. Either they suffer or they are unaware of suffering. LET US WORK TOGETHER TO BUILD A NEW RACE!
The advantage of utilitarian empiricism is that it discovers the workings of the material world. The pitfall of that same utilitarianism is that it reduces everything to the material level.
At that point there is no reason not to use or dispose of things as may be convenient because they themselves have no intrinsic value. Only the "mechanism" of which they are part matters, whether that mechanism is the pride or the state.
But if the parts don't matter neither does the whole; for the sum of zeros is simply zero. It's only rational.
The Danish zookeepers are Nazis. Plain and Simple.
The propaganda that has been spun around Nazis is full of fantasmagorical nonsense. They were not out to do evil but to do good, to build a better race a better society in a methodical rationally ruthless way unswayed by cob-webs of sentimentality. Conrad Heiden, an opponent of the regime, called them intellectual brutes by which he meant something very much along the lines of von Balthasar. Rationalists without deviation or mercy.
Beauty demands her portion as much as reason. Mere sentimentalities will not save a species or the "home" that is Creation. But neither will mere utilitarian empiricism. Man was given both faculties -- knowledge and sentiment -- so that the two could work together and enrich the result.
The zookeepers may have been right to seek to diversify the giraffe gene pool, or to propagate the lion population. But it is a pure contradiction of will -- a heteronomy -- to achieve propagation by killing.
At that point there is no reason not to use or dispose of things as may be convenient because they themselves have no intrinsic value. Only the "mechanism" of which they are part matters, whether that mechanism is the pride or the state.
But if the parts don't matter neither does the whole; for the sum of zeros is simply zero. It's only rational.
The Danish zookeepers are Nazis. Plain and Simple.
The propaganda that has been spun around Nazis is full of fantasmagorical nonsense. They were not out to do evil but to do good, to build a better race a better society in a methodical rationally ruthless way unswayed by cob-webs of sentimentality. Conrad Heiden, an opponent of the regime, called them intellectual brutes by which he meant something very much along the lines of von Balthasar. Rationalists without deviation or mercy.
Beauty demands her portion as much as reason. Mere sentimentalities will not save a species or the "home" that is Creation. But neither will mere utilitarian empiricism. Man was given both faculties -- knowledge and sentiment -- so that the two could work together and enrich the result.
The zookeepers may have been right to seek to diversify the giraffe gene pool, or to propagate the lion population. But it is a pure contradiction of will -- a heteronomy -- to achieve propagation by killing.
Fed to Lion before Killing Lion
©Barfo 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment