Modernity Means Vivisection.

Vivisection.  noun

1.  The act or practice of cutting into or otherwise injuring living animals for the purpose of scientific research.

2.  Dissection of a living body; the practice of anatomizing alive, or of experimenting upon living animals, for the purpose of investigating some physiological function or pathological process which cannot well be otherwise determined.

3.  The dissection of an animal while alive, for the purpose of making physiological investigations.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition 

New York City recently removed a statue in Central Park of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology.  Sims experimented on living slave women in the American South, without the use of anesthesia.  The fact that we managed to admire and celebrate this monster reveals something about the mindset governing our whole civilization, from the so-called Enlightenment on.  I believe this got articulated most directly when people understood Francis Bacon as declaring that now humans could strap nature to a table and torture her secrets out of her.  

Under Modernity we applied that sentiment to everything, including other humans, right down to atoms.  Dr. Sims' atrocities do not present a special case by any means.  Modernity means the use of power to impose one's will upon another by violence.  When a coal executive looks at a mountain and sees only the fuel that he can extract from it by violence, we see the same way of thinking at work.       

Christians believe that God created the universe by speaking it into being and declaring each thing created "very good."  All things therefore bear the Voiceprint of the Creator, and exist as the Creator's beneficent expression.  All things reflect and express the Life of the One who created them.  We may dismiss nothing as inanimate, inert, or lifeless.  The Scriptures reveal a Creator who permeates the creation, a doctrine called panentheism: God in all.  (Panentheism, as distinct from pantheism, which identifies Creator and creation, means that all things participate in the One who created them by resonating together according to the Creator's pattern, first uttered in Word and Breath.)  "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein" (Psalm 24:1).  It all belongs to God.

This doctrine eliminates the right of any human to dispose of anything in creation as a neutral, lifeless object, an "it," a "thing" of no intrinsic value or connection to its Creator, to everything else, including the human.  It means that our approach to anything -- from a rock to another human being -- needs to show deference, respect, gratitude, humility, and grace.  In terms understandable to the Modern mentality, it grants inalienable rights to everything in creation.

Obviously, to think this way runs diametrically against that Modern mentality.  For from the so-called Enlightenment on, Modernity has only granted rights and freedom to humans, usually only to certain, privileged humans at that.   The exaltation of the human we get in Modernity necessarily and intentionally dehumanizes both the objects of such gruesome attention and its perpetrator.

An essential element in moving out of the Modern mindset means getting it into our consciousness and practice that nothing belongs to us and we are not free to do whatever we want with anything.  Everything belongs to the One who made it, and everything connects with everything else, including you.

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