The death of sensibility

How would you like to cease to feel pain? It’s a good thing, I suppose, when you are numbed up at the dentist’s office, but I wager you wouldn’t want to live that way. People who cease to feel pain are in crazy houses, and nobody envies them, for a very good reason: They cease to feel pain because their very humanity is suppressed by large doses of medication.

The Beatles sang about people past feeling, in a song called “A Day in the Life”:

I read the news today oh boy About a lucky man who made the grade And though the news was rather sad Well I just had to laugh I saw the photograph.

He blew his mind out in a car He didn’t notice that the lights had changed A crowd of people stood and stared They’d seen his face before Nobody was really sure If he was from the House of Lords.

I saw a film today oh boy The English Army had just won the war A crowd of people turned away But I just had to look Having read the book …

The people appealed to in Lennon and McCartney’s grand finale from the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album are not drugged up, just blasé. Following these lyrics about two catastrophic events that prompt a yawn is the line, “I’d love to turn you on.” (Initially, the BBC banned the tune for suspicion of a drug reference, but there is no need to conjecture that the writer duo meant by “turning on” any more than that they wish people would wake up and be able to feel!)

The Apostle Paul also talks about people who have ceased to feel. I for one am scared sober by his description of Gentiles found in the final stages of moral turpitude that has rendered them emotionally dissipated:

“… you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality …” (Ephesians 4:17-19, ESV).

The single word translated “they have become callous” is the Greek apelgekotes, and it means “to cease to feel pain for.” Other versions translate it “having lost all sensitivity” and “being past feeling,” etc. By any phrasing, it is an apt description of a civilization in which, even after we have “the goods” on Planned Parenthood in hours of video confirming dealings in the merchandizing of baby cadavers, the news prompts a yawn. And the Senate cannot muster the votes to defund it.

The last of the three scenes lyrically depicted in The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” is not catastrophe but, on the contrary, a scene of the most banal idea one could come up with: the counting of every single hole in a town’s weather-beaten streets and the wholly superfluous calculation of how many it would take to fill a concert hall in northern London:

I read the news today oh boy Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire And though the holes were rather small They had to count them all Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I’d love to turn you on.

The failure of a people to distinguish between the importance of counting potholes in the town of Blackburn in Lancashire and the importance of life, death, and war is the malaise of 21st century civilized man who has lost sight of God and thus lost all sensibility.