Loss of touch with the heart

Pearl S Buck’s short story, The Enemy, set in Japan during the World War II, is a poignant lesson in the conflict between the heart and the brain. Dr Sadao unexpectedly comes across an American prisoner of war who was trying to escape from the convict ship. He was shot in the back and was wounded further by the sea waves that threw him against the rocks in the ocean. Dr Sadao’s dilemma is whether to save the young American’s life or to hand him over to the authorities. Sadao is one of the best surgeons in the country and he can save the man. But as a good citizen, it is his duty to report an escaped soldier. Soon the doctor’s heart overpowers his reason. He carries the enemy home and goes ahead with the surgery and treatment. Throughout the story which unfolds over a few weeks, the doctor tells himself time and again that the soldier in his house is his enemy, his country’s enemy. But the doctor is incapable of reporting him to the authorities. The report that he begins to type doesn’t go beyond the initial sentence. the story ends with the doctor helping him to escape. His heart won over his reason.

It is with our hearts that we see clearly, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery says in Little Prince. The most profound truths of life are hidden from our rational faculty; they reveal themselves to our hearts.

And the heart is being ignored by the young generation now. Psychologists say that. As a teacher who is in constant touch with youngsters, I’d agree with the psychologists. As Dr Jean Twenge and a host of others who studied youngsters say, the millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and the post-millennials (born between 1996 and 2010) are fast losing touch with their hearts. They are surrendering their hearts to the smartphone and social media. They are intelligent but the faculty is not being used properly. My own students [I meet 200 students of grade 12 almost every day in classrooms as well as outside] give me ample reasons to believe what Twenge and others are saying. 

The youngsters live in a world of their own and they are not interested in any other world. Their country’s rendezvous with the moon or the leader’s efforts to give one future to the whole world or the freak floods in Libya, whatever, is of no particular concern to them.

Twenge is of the opinion that the youngsters of today are narcissists at heart. There is no doubt that individualism is on a sharp rise now. Twenge also says that the transition from childhood to maturity is taking longer now than earlier. I couldn’t agree more with her on these and many other things.

As a teacher, I think the most dangerous aspect about the youth today is their loss of touch with their own hearts. Too many of them seem to be inhabiting a delusory world conjured up by the virtual reality they encounter more often than is desirable on their smartphones. If these youngsters were faced with the dilemma that Dr Sadao was faced with, what would they do? My hunch is that there wouldn’t be any dilemma for them in the first place.