Don't Break Things To Understand Them
A Gandalf 'Lord of the Rings' lesson on wisdom versus knowledge
Over the years I have collaborated on and off with an organization called White Coat Waste (WCW). Their mission is to expose and advocate against experimentation on animals by the federal government. It’s an area of pretty bipartisan outrage every time news leaks into the public square about the gruesome things being done in government labs for no discernable reason.
The most recent incident involved $10M flowing through the Department of Defense to expose the spinal cords of adult male cats so as to deliver electric shocks through their vertebral column to produce erections…...
Another round of experiments involved inserting marbles into the digestive tract to see if these cats could pass them in their stools. There are many more stories that will shock your conscience and leave you asking, “Why?!”
One Thing Leads To Another
Of course, this is Geeky Stoics and not a public policy newsletter. Why am I telling you about this? Animal experimentation, or vivisection (as it used to be known) is a frequent topic of concern in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis, all of whom were in their prime during the American progressive era which brought about a renewed interest in vivisection in the scientific community. This is a common theme in early 20th stories such as Red Dead Redemption with Dr. Harold MacDougal. There are so many mad scientists in that game bridging the uptick in interest in vivisection with eugenics. The dots are not hard to connect and infamously culminate in the Nazi experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
There is a curiosity within the human spirit to understand how every little thing works. As much as we like to think of it as a strength, one that has taken mankind to extraordinary heights, it’s also a legacy of darkness.
You only get intricate mappings of the inner workings of a rabbit if a rabbit was taken apart by people of good intent and a few who just liked it. You can only say with certainty the side effects of a pharmaceutical if there were tests done on living subjects to know what can go wrong.
We defile good things and dismantle innocence with a virtuous inner monologue telling us it is “for science” or the betterment of humankind.
As if the longevity of life is the only measure of its betterment.
"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere" - GK Chesterton
Saruman Of Many Colors
In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf famously confronts his old friend and mentor, Saruman the White, who now is in service of the Dark Lord Sauron. Something that didn’t make it into the beloved Peter Jackson film adaptations is that Saruman the White gives up the white cloth, symbolizing purity and truth, and adopts a shimmering robe of many colors.
“For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colors!'
I (Gandalf) looked then and saw that Saruman’s robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colors, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.
I liked white better,' I said.
White!' Saruman sneered. 'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.'
Gandalf concludes the conversation with a sharp rebuke
In which case it is no longer white,' said I. 'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
White was too plain for Saruman now after all he had “learned” about magic from the Palantir and Sauron. Too quaint and simple. So his new robes are described as being rainbow, but only in a certain light, like spilled oil beneath a car….or this fabric that changes in the light.
The layers of metaphor can get quite thick here. The fabric is presented as white till you look at it in a certain light, illustrating how corruption can be masquerading as wisdom.
Don’t you love that response by Gandalf? “He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” You can imagine the somewhat demented 5-year-old boy pulling the wings off a butterfly or zapping ants with a magnifying glass. Not uncommon.
Unfortunately, many of those boys become men without ever being told about their duties to creatures beneath their feet or how to steward animals who cannot speak for themselves.
Something I learned to a frightening degree during the COVID outbreak was how eager our institutions were to elevate scientists to being saints.
Lab leak theories were verboten and even I experienced being censored by YouTube when trying to talk about it back when I hosted a news program in 2021. That’s because the sainthood of the scientists working on cures could not called into question at that time. It was not useful for the machinery of state to have people discussing openly that a sickness was developed in a lab using public dollars and now those same people were working on the medicine.
Dark Knowledge in Narnia
In C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, the magician is the wicked uncle of a boy in London who practices a combination of science and magic in his home laboratory. Uncle Andrew, as he’s called, is exploding guinea pigs and transporting others into another dimension. His problem is that guinea pigs can’t talk and report back to him what is on the other side of the interdimensional travel. So he immediately opts to send his nephew and another innocent child into the void with the guinea pigs.
The magician/scientist no longer can distinguish between the animal and the human being in terms of how he treats living things. Everyone in his mind has become a subject to whom he has zero obligations or duty of care.
He is sort of funny, but also corrupt and unflinchingly evil. Of course, Uncle Andrew thinks himself quite wise. As does the wizard, Saruman.
Knowledge vs Wisdom
Just because you know that a US Dollar is composed of cotton, linen, embedded polyester, nylon threads, Intaglio ink, and iron oxide-based magnetic ink…doesn’t mean you know how to use a dollar well.
This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Who knows more about the chimpanzee? Jane Goodall or Edward Tyson, who dissected a chimp in 1699….No hair-splitting or equivocating. Choose! Who knows more?
All of us will struggle with what Gandalf and Saruman talked about in our lives, in some way, shape, or form. We will love a thing, then make it more complicated, layering on top of it our other wants or vices.
Saruman says of White…'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten, and the white light can be broken.'
He’s basically saying that “the more you know” the better off you are. If you’re a truly powerful wizard, you should practice all forms of magic and leave no stone unturned. Innocence is naivete. Simplicity, in his framing, is a waste.
Real-world application: Your gift for photography can pretty quickly become tainted by turning it into a business without proper thought and motivation. Monetizing your writing can quickly drain your pure love for it. I know all about that. Sex, maybe the easiest thing to corrupt, loses its power without a recognition of what sex is for.
A Sad Story
I remember a few months ago there were clips released from a documentary being done on the OnlyFans performer, Lily Phillips. She had opted to have sex with 100 men in 24 hours for her online subscribers. After it was all over, she spoke with the documentarian and couldn’t hold back the tears when talking about disassociating throughout the experience.
This generated quite a bit of buzz in the commentary class, and rightfully so. This young woman, whose own mother handled the bookings for her 100 visitors (yikes), ran straight into the brick wall of reality about sex, which is that it's not merely a physical act. In her violation of the body and spirit’s natural boundaries for sex, Phillips felt pain and confusion.
Knowledge about a thing, detached from wisdom about the thing.
These are the sorts of things I think about when I see yet another horror story about bizarre lab experiments being performed on animals. There is such a deep darkness in us that manifests itself in the spirit of curiosity.
We want to know things, turn systems inside out, and see the inner workings.
We want answers.
It’s all Biblical. We know it from the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. It’s the choice between obedience (to God) versus self-determination that ultimately ushered humanity out of the Garden of Eden and into the cloudy world we inhabit today.
Keep things simple.
Love beauty for its own sake.
Ask questions but don’t let knowing the machinery of every little thing take priority over awe and wonder. You don’t need to know it all. Focus on making sure what you do know is aligned with a higher truth and being used for the right ends. Nothing is more important.
Thank you incredibly much for shining light on animal vivisection. I don't gather that many people give it much thought because 1) they think human animals are above non-humans, hence their lives are more expendable and the taking of their lives worth the cause; 2) most people have NO idea what goes on behind laboratory walls. None at all. There are millions being made by animal breeders who sell their animals to "scientists" for some kind of noble testing. This shit gives me nightmares. It's almost too much to think about. I believe that this disregard for non-human animals will easily be directed towards humans as well. We have no idea what's coming. Anyway, it's a hard topic, I would guess, to write about; certainly it's a difficult one to read about...but we must. We can't heal what we don't acknowledge. A quote by Gandhi comes to mind: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”. That doesn't say much for our (or most other) nation, does it? Again, thank you.
Lily Collins *was groomed by her mother, all the men involved in creating and viewing her content, and wider society* to have sex with 100 men in 24 hours for her online subscribers.
How hideous that so many women and girls are taught that their sole of main value is sexual availability for and compliance to repulsive men.