The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an exchange:

ABOUT ZIMBA, THE LION, AND OTHER THINGS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 16, 2017

A READER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

Personally, I found the start of this book on the life of lions truly very interesting and believe it will capture your readers. However, thereafter I felt like I was out in "left field" when it came to the pages devoted to John David Morley’s “The Case of Thomas N,” where you site a conversation between Thomas N and the man at the "window," as quoted from that author.

I worry you may lose your audience in that part of the book, but I stuck with it and was awarded for the attention, finally seeing the purpose of that part of the story. Indeed, a light bulb lit for me at the end of that discourse, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, I get it!” Suddenly, I understood what this little book was all about, not only about Zimba, the lion’s tragic life, but a wider relevance to us in this particular time in our history. Hopefully, readers will stay with this little book and understand what you are trying to express.

Carole


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:


Dear Carole,

Thank you for your most cogent letter.  Yes, Carole, we try.

What this little book attempts to show is that the cruelty shown to Zimba, taking him out of his natural environment, something he couldn't understand and to which he became accustomed, only to have in his innocence his nature come to the fore, pawing the boy, with the repercussions that followed.  They should have been expected.

Alas, this type of behavior is repeated incessantly in our society "in human cruelties of a similar kind" where conscious individuals exploit our collective innocence with ulterior motives and often with impunity.

Thomas N is a story, but a story -- like Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" -- that is reflective of how in an attempt to escape the demands of freedom out of fear, we too often chase ourselves into a cage, and then into the arms of exploiters purporting to be otherwise intending.

To illustrate this nefarious business, I use high profiled Evangelical preachers, Bill Cosby and Bill O'Reilly, as well as the contentious presidencies of Bill Clinton and Dick Nixon.

With regard to evangelism, it is not my intentions to sully this Christian sect, but to show how frequently televangelists have used this enticing format to take advantage of the poor and the lost looking for a father figure with which to identify, only to find, once exposed, that these preachers as father substitutes were not only found to be flawed, but con artists and charlatans as well.

Bill Cosby and Bill O'Reilly are representative of our cultural obsession with celebrity, taking their projections on the tube to be representative of their character and values as persons, while presidents Clinton and Nixon demonstrate aspect of the same in terms of the abuse of power.

Those profiled here illustrate our vulnerability to “human cruelties of another kind.” Men of otherwise distinctive lives, but with faulty consciences can and do exploit our collective trust and herd us into what resembles a cage despite our consciousness and discriminating minds.

To demonstrate this susceptibility, and as complement to the Zimba story, the last section is divided into a FAILURE OF MEMORY and FAILURE OF CONSCIENCE in contemporary society.

“Failure of Memory” deals with the eroding of our American Judaic-Christian ideals and traditions of being self-activated, self-responsible individuals, and therefore at the ready to protect our way of life and our freedoms as our brave men and women have done so for us throughout our history on the battlefields across the globe and across our United States.

“Failure of Conscience” deals with the fact that we are now in a kind of limbo where we once trusted our leaders to be loving and considerate of us as individuals, and for that we valued them in the discharge of their function. This no longer is the case as American society is not driven by the "common good," but by "personhood" as "we" has been superseded by "me."

In this climate, where memory of our own American history is not common knowledge even to the educated, these exploiters have had a field day.

As a consequence, people behave as if they have no conscience, no sense of right and wrong, good and evil, or respect for other people's property or persons.

Once this was impossible because of one thing: Shame was like an invisible hand that controlled all untoward behavior. Shame no longer exists.

When conscience is missing, when our spiritual moorings are in shatters, and our historical perspective is nonexistent, there is little sense of our having roots or even the desire to preserve what we are.

Then, like Thomas N, we are vulnerable to the cage of our own making; believing in people of the cloth as being committed to saving us from ourselves only to find they are otherwise occupied; trusting our presidents to be governing with transparency only to find they are not; elevating our entertainers to hero status as they titillate our imagination with uplifting messages only to find they are living a lie; while believing our commentators stand for truth and are looking out for us only to find they are misogynists hiding behind that false premise with their spin.

When we elevate anyone above the level of reproach, where they believe they cannot be touched, bad things are bound to occur.

The Zimba book is purposely only a little book but meant to contain a powerful message, which is to alert us as individuals and as a society in general that our precious freedoms and spiritual foundation are in trouble; that they have been commandeered and no longer dominate our daily discourse.

Thank you for writing, and thank you for reading the book.

Jim

Amazon's Kindle Library, $22.00, 132 pages