When Truth Is Denied Its Own Voice - the Ordeal of Galileo and Ignaz Semmelweis
Truth can unsettle the status quo, making it so often the object of anger
and censorship.
Yet we can know truth only by standing up to these unconscious forces that govern us.
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The cart gets put before the horse when, under fear & Co.’s
auspices, “authority” asserts itself over all else.
The absurd consequence is that even truth gets treated as uncouth.
Just ask Galileo, who, in 1632, challenged the official view that the sun revolved around the earth.
“Sorry folks,” he humbly proposed, “but in the dance between ’em, the sun is the one who stands his ground, while the earth it is who makes circles and twirls.”
Although (or because) he spoke the truth, Galileo was branded a heretic and sentenced to life imprisonment. Galileo's findings about our humble planetary place in the universe were suppressed.
Those at the top closed rank, and the pecking order was duly defended.
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Alternatively... by paying it our heed, truth can slip its censorship and speak. Like in 1840’s Vienna, where one Ignaz Semmelweis discovered hand cleaning as a remedy against the “childbed fever” then raging on the labour ward.
An obstetrician by profession, Semmelweis was used to delivering babies. But when it came to the job of delivering a little life-saving truth - as to
his breakthrough
use of handwashing that back then was all-new - he was prevented by his jealous peers, and excommunicated from his professional tribe.
His crime? By standing outside of establishment opinion, he was regarded as a threat.
Disregarding the welfare of their patient, Semmelweis' colleagues made him pay a real price. He ended up shackled and restrained, succumbing to sepsis from the wounds he thus sustained. Only decades later was conventional wisdom brought up to date and his efforts finally paid. Then, at last the need for hand-washing was accepted, and the era of safer labour came of age.
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Semmelweis was surrounded by "experts" so vain that they insisted they knew best.
“It’s in bad air that the fever spreads,” they said, seeing the merits of cleanliness as far-fetched.
Indeed, these peacocks-for-docs saw Semmelweis as a rebel and threat. Clinging to their dogma like their lives depended upon it, they doubled down too proud to doubt, and marched about with hands untouched by soap or towel. From then on, decades came and went and still the infection raged, while these naysayers continued to ply their trade of playing fast and loose with their patients’ lives.
As for Semmelweis, for his lack of professional deference to senior obstetricians, he was driven out of town in disgrace - and to an early grave.
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So what accounts for truth-tellers like Galileo and Semmelweis being so shockingly discriminated against, even such that lives are put in danger - and all our human potential gets squandered?
A few plagues as deranging as they are commonplace:
(1) Compulsive desire
plus anger... that leave us big-headed, judgemental and intolerant, even as their presence in our mind stays veiled; and,
(2) Fear... that can make us too frightened to hold up our hand and be honest about our own (albeit often unconscious) failings... in the face of power games that leave the truth swapped for a fake namesake.
To stress’s tastes, truth should be forged, bought, silenced or forced. And all of this is for the same old cause: might’s “right” to define truth however it likes, with fear & Co.
being the worst offenders of all.