John Martin’s “Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council” (1824), engraving, Victoria and Albert Museum
As the Supremes were busy upholding gay marriage barely (5-4, still a win is a win) the dissenters among them went into overdrive with talk of the Aztecs, hippies and California not being part of the American West.
But leave it to Justice Clarence “Uncle” Thomas – a man who once dismissed a racial discrimination suit by noting that most of the players in the NBA are black – to come up with a point that really misses the point.
In his dissent he wrote in effect that gay people shouldn’t be worried about getting hitched, because, hey, equal rights are all in the mind and thus black people haven’t had it so bad:
"The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away."
Lawdy, Miz Scarlett, I don’t know nuttin’ about birthin’ no analogies.
Actually, Uncle Thomas does have a point. It’s similar to the point Viktor Frankl makes in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” born of his concentration-camp experience – that life has the meaning we ascribe to it. In our minds, we have a freedom and a dignity that no one can take away.
That’s true – to a point. But what about the external reality imposed on a private psychological perspective? What about the effect on the private psyche of forced labor, rape, murder, whippings and families ripped apart?
Gustave Doré’s illustration of Satan, the central character in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”
The mind-over-matter argument is a well-traveled path. John Milton frames it thusly in “Paradise Lost”:
Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor--one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater?
Heroic words, and no one who comes across them can fail to be stirred by them. But it’s important to remember that they are spoken by the Devil in “Paradise Lost.” And that the Nazis held a similar belief. (Hence the title of Leni Riefensthal’s Third Reich documentary, “Triumph of the Will.”)
When it comes to mind over matter, we have to ask ourselves: Whose mind? And does it matter?