In the Seventies when the two main activities in my life were employment as an animal control officer and activity in the Portland First Unitarian Church, I got a Saturday morning phone call from a member of the church. He was an outstanding research scientist who had barely escaped the struggle in Europe during WWII. He was quite emotional though he always prided himself on being logical and rather distant.
The problem was, he said, that a dog had been killed by dismemberment and its head was on the lawn outside the couple's apartment. Would I come and deal with it? He did not want to call the shelter because he didn't trust authorities and he thought they would be callous and not timely. So I went to see what to do.
As it turned out, the "dog" was a deer and the head had been cut off but some enterprising dog had carried it to the scientist's lawn. It was not as horrible as an earlier event when someone's severed hand had turned up. That time it was from an orthopedic school in the process of moving. The hand was used for anatomy studies and again a busy dog had spotted it in a container and made off with it.
It was easy enough to bag the head and remove it. To distract the scientist, I chatted with him He had lived a life of strange contrast between deadly horror and protected scientific work. None of it had taught him much about real life, esp out West where people mix with animals in many ways.
"Selyeános Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye (January 26, 1907 – October 16, 1982), was a pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist. He conducted important scientific work on the hypothetical non-specific response of an organism to stressors. (wiki) At the time he was getting a lot of publicity.
"Seyle termed this collection of responses general adaptation syndrome (GAS), a 3-stage set of physiological processes which prepare, or adapt, the body for danger so that we are ready to stand a better chance of surviving it compared to if we remained passively relaxed when faced with a threat." This work was a kind of precursor of Porges' present research.
At some point this dignified and erudite old man who couldn't cope with the head of a deer, remarked with surprise that I knew about Selye. To him it was impossible that I knew about Selye because I was "only a dogcatcher". (I was working on a clinical psych degree at night.) To him, knowledge was a matter of hierarchy and his kind of knowledge was elite.
This fishhooked me. A decade later, after finishing seminary and while serving as a Montana circuit-riding minister, I had coffee with a distinguished researcher and professor of endocrinology in Bozeman and told him this story. In return, he told me a story about Selye. The latter had a theory that the shrinking of a rat's uterus after giving birth was a trigger for hormonal response. He was testing it by injected paraffin warm enough to be liquid into the uteruses of rats who had just given birth. The wax would harden and prevent contraction. He would squirt in a syringe of wax, set the rat on a shelf in a pan, and then do the next one. What the Bozeman doc saw was that the act was putting each rat into agony, fighting internally to normalize. Selye never noticed. He didn't say whether he intervened -- he was only a beginning student.
Expectations, blindness to reality, insistence on bad categories -- these are all part of being human, but also part of the work of professionals is to identify and oppose them. Not just professionals -- thoughtful people with aware lives. Today's excruciating crises with disease and politics are good examples of what happens if we never challenge lies, cheating, bad judgement, and lack of respect, even for rats.
The men in these vignettes were all working in one of the most difficult parts of medical knowledge, the molecules floating in our bodies, both elusive and powerful. The scientists were from a time and place -- Germanic Europe in the early 20th century -- that devoutly believed that rationality was the only path to truth and that emotion or human relationships were obstacles to be resisted, confusions to stamp out. The irony that hormones enable the quality of human relationships was ignored. Suffering was irrelevant except as a symptom.
In fact, disabled, minority, marginal people should be destroyed. It was their only cure, an idea endorsed by a perversion of Darwin and the opinion of Hobbs. And so we had another holocaust, because if there is a group that these control-obsessed people didn't like, it must obviously be caused by their inadequacy. Or their competition. Or their attitude.
These three endocrinologists, including Selye, had no idea that maybe they were not working for the common good. But they were lab people, researchers. The Bozeman doctor had the same training and work except that he was treating patients and interacting with students. He cared about them as individuals and how their feelings drew them towards truth and service. He knew that whatever they did for a living was not the same as being limited in terms of knowledge or understanding.
Nevertheless, the work that Selye did was a platform for later understanding of the human autonomic system still being worked out by Porges, a deeply humanistic, accepting, and peaceful man. I once heard a story about a woman who worked on a chicken meat-packing assembly line separating dark meat from white meat for the purpose of canning. In time she went mad and believed she was a god separating the good (white meat) from the bad (dark meat). Binary obsession. You'll never get to a whole chicken that way or even realize that dark/light is a feature of "God's creation". Mixed is the way life is, and our emotional responses are also a part of rational thought.
Trump is not empty of emotional relationship because of elite work. He is simply hollow. There's something in our society that eats "insides" and kills people. No one puts the head of his beloved horse in his mafia bed because it would be no use. He doesn't love animals. Without love there is no horror. It is we who are suffering from horror.
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