Was Dark Helmet right about good and evil?

Americans are perpetually caught between their two selves. One is a happy-go-lucky bon vivant whose motto is, "Why worry?" This American is a ceaseless optimist. He's the reason stock markets continue to soar in expectation of more and more good bon temps ahead even when there are good reasons to worry. He's used to things working out for him, and he doesn't see any reason why that shouldn't continue. Even problems like global warming don't bother this guy. He figures scientists always figure problems out, and they'll eventually lick this one, too. 

The other American is an alarmist, willing to see even the smallest change from the world he's used to as the first step in a slippery slope to Armageddon. Especially if it's something he sees as cooked up by the other political camp from his own. News media, with its bad news bias, tends to feed this side of the American split personality. 

One side of the American personality wants to chug a beer and grill hot dogs on his lawn even while a nuclear missile is clearly raining down; the other wants to build a bunker and stockpile guns and ammunition when someone mentions changing rules about public bathrooms. 

Both sides reside in most Americans, and both have been evident in the past few weeks as we've watched events unfold in Ukraine. The optimistic American thinks that Putin has overplayed his hand, that all he's done is hurt Russia, reinvigorate a once-flaccid NATO, and even make America stronger. It's an incredibly sanguine way of looking at events when Ukraine's oil fields are being blown up, its dams destroyed, and civilians dying in a conflict that utterly flouts every norm we've come to expect. 

On the other hand, there's also been a lot of hand-wringing that this is the moment the whole liberal world order comes crashing down. It is proof that a particular view of the world has failed, and that we are now in an era of stark, power-based politics in which the loser will cease to exist. 

President Biden has mostly sided with the former version of events. That's probably the right thing for a commander-in-chief to do. Nobody wants a leader who will tell us we're all about to die in times of crisis. Even if Biden really, secretly feels like this is the beginning of the end, he ought to be telling us that everything is going to be alright. There's also a politically self-serving reason to frame the invasion in this way. While former President Trump is out saying...whatever it is he's saying about all of this...Biden needs to make it look like his policies have been good for American interests. So optimism is his best bet. 

I don't claim to know how this will end. It's certainly one of the most alarming events I have witnessed in my lifetime. I'm frustrated by how impotent my own country seems, how the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons is making us react very differently to this kind of naked aggression than we did in 1990 to an invasion of another country. The lesson to me seems to be that every country should have nuclear weapons or risk being invaded. 

But setting aside the specifics of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the more important general point is that US policy choices of the last 25 years do not seem to have helped promote a US world view. They do not seem to have increased the level of democracy in the world, nor helped secure peace. We have not turned from a Cold War world to a new world in which humanity, freed from focusing on war, solves the perennial evils that have plagued us as long as we've been a species. Geopolitics haven't improved anymore than anything else in the world has in my lifetime. 

I can't claim to be an expert on many things, but I am an expert on the Korean Peninsula. Would anyone say that the Korean Peninsula is in a better, safer place now than it was in 1994 when Kim Il Sung died? A series of US presidents have employed differing rhetoric, but basically the same, underlying policy: seek to isolate North Korea diplomatically and economically, then use the strength that isolation gives us to force them into concessions on nuclear issues. That plan can only be described as a spectacular failure. It has caused suffering for the already-suffering people of North Korea, and it has not, in return, brought them one step closer to freedom. 

I honestly believe that, in a choice between a flawed democracy like ours and a flawed enlightened dictatorship like Russia's or even a halfway decent enlightened dictatorship like China's, the United States is easily the best choice. It's the one that provides for the greatest level of human happiness. (Perhaps, in some ways, because human happiness isn't logical and neither is democracy.) So let's, for a moment, accept a very simplistic, George W. Bush "axis of evil" view of the world, and call us "good." 

Why has good been so bad at making the world a better place? Is it because, as Dark Helmet put it in Spaceballs, good is dumb?

The most unsettling thing in my life

I've been through four events in my life that have shaken my faith that I understood the world. The first was 9/11, the second was the election of Donald Trump, the third was the outbreak of COVID-19, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fourth. All of these events have undermined the self-certainty of my inner optimistic American. All have made me question whether a good life in a time of peace and plenty was really my birthright as an American of my era. 

None, though, have probably shaken me as much as an article by an American philosopher a friend sent me over a year ago. The philosopher is Adrian Vermeule, and the article is about skepticism in the effectiveness of free markets. That doesn't sound frightening, I know, but the article is about more than just economic markets. It's about how the entire liberal world order has been built on a faith in free markets of various types, including the economic ones, but also the much bigger "marketplace of ideas." 

Vermeule argues, very effectively from my point of view, that the marketplace of ideas does not seem to lead to the best possible idea very often. This is because idea marketplaces suffer from the same weaknesses economic ones do: they are never really as free as we'd like them to be, and they require all kinds of intervention to work as intended. Markets as described by liberal apologists are always ideal markets, Vermeule posits, and no market is ever anything like ideal. 

Perhaps his most damning argument is when he draws on the idea of free competition in courts. We believe not in a judge trying to be impartial and come to the best decision, but in lawyers slugging it out in an anything-goes-if-it's-for-the-good-of-their-client competition. A defense lawyer doesn't care if her client is guilty. She cares what the prosecution can prove. She doesn't care if the sentence for her client is best for society. That's up to society to argue for, in the form of the attorney for the state. 

Some people really believe this is the best system, but it's hard to call our system of justice highly fair or equitable or, well, just. Rich people get better lawyers with more resources, and that helps them get better outcomes. 

What reading Vermeule made me think about wasn't so much that our system of justice is unfair, but that we have extrapolated the system of everyone advocating with maximum effort for their own position to nearly everything in the rest of society. Our political system is an extension of our justice system. Nobody is capable of giving an inch of their own personal interests for the good of majority. That's not our job. It's society's job to make us give an inch. It's why every interview is so partisan. We no longer expect our politicians to demonstrate broad-mindedness. We want them to "fight for us."

It's evident now in the middle of the kind of foreign crisis that ought to make our country come together. Even Republicans who are supporting the effort to put pressure on Putin are still using the opportunity to point out that Biden is terrible at everything. Either sanctions aren't hard enough or Putin is only there because Biden isn't a macho man like Trump was. Then there's the whole insane faction that thinks whatever it is Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene believe. 

This isn't new. Almost as soon as World War II ended, the consensus in Washington broke down. James Brady explains in The Coldest War how Korea became an opportunity for Republicans to hit Democrats for being weak, a strategy it hasn't let up on since. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest examines how Democrats were so sensitive to appearing weak they violated their own sense of what was right to carry out war in Vietnam. Our own fractiousness, a product of our free market system of ideas, has led us to carry out bad foreign policy decisions in order to satisfy domestic political demands. It's why we came in with such half-hearted sanctions. Biden can't open himself up to more criticism if gas prices go much higher. 

If our system really is good, shouldn't that give it an advantage in world competition? Shouldn't leaders in the rest of the world be able to see that our way of life is, if not the best, at least the least bad, and want to make theirs more like it? But the last 25 years have been the story of the West, led by the United States, making decisions that have tended to make our way of life less prevalent rather than more. Depending on your political perspective, there are reasons to think that democracy is even under assault within the United States, let alone abroad. 

There are really only two choices here. First is that we are mistaken and our way of life really isn't the "good" one. The other is that we are good, but good is dumb. 

I think it's the second, but as for recommendations for how to make good smarten up, that's a little difficult. As much as I agree with Vermeule's diagnosis of the maladies of liberal democracy, I don't believe I can get on board as much with his recommended cures. As one Catholic friend of mine put it, "Vermeule would be fine with a dictator as long as the dictator was Catholic." I don't think the solution is to try to force some kind of idealistic consensus to once-more-prevalent ideals that many (including me) now find themselves not only unwilling but unable to believe. 

America has gotten far by figuring it out as we go along. We didn't need some hard set of idealistic principles. We're pragmatic. We're rough-and-ready. Or at least that's sort of how events have transpired to make us see ourselves. But perhaps we really do need some core set of principles we can mostly all agree on. Perhaps we do need some shared sense of identity. These are oft-quoted conservative principles, and I agree with them, although I disagree with almost every actual principle conservatives float as one we should all agree on. But it does seem that for good to survive, good is going to have to be able to at least understand what it is that makes it good. 

To do this, we need the input of both our pessimistic and our optimistic halves. We need the buzz-kill to come ruin the party for us by reminding us of the peril we are in while questions of who we are remain unanswered. We also need the optimist who believes, maybe against reason, that it can be done. As the better writer in my family, tired of hearing the military maxim that "hope is not a strategy" put it, hope is not only a strategy, it is, in fact, the only strategy. 

Whoopi Goldberg and fractured feelings about Black History Month

I swear I have never watched even ten seconds of The View on purpose. I've been exposed to it now and again in situations where I couldn't control my environment, like waiting for my car to be fixed while a TV is blaring in the waiting room. The general tone of the show falls about eleven levels below what my snobbery will allow. I'd have been totally unaware Whoopie Goldberg ever said anything about the Holocaust if Adam Serwer hadn't written about it in The Atlantic. (The Atlantic passes my snobbery test.)   

Serwer's basic argument matches the view of race I thought was the consensus among intellectuals at one point: that race isn't real, but rather a social construct people in power have invented for their own purposes, with different versions of what race means depending on the needs of people in power. 

Serwer makes his point by showing how racial stereotypes we now associate with Black people were once applied to Jews. He shows that although "Jew" doesn't make sense as a "race" according to how Americans now think of it, past dogmas of the powerful treated it and other distinctions between groups of mostly white people as real and important. We Americans tend to think of our notions of race as realer, perhaps, because they are based on visible characteristics. Yet the borders of those characteristics are not fixed, and the fact that "blackness" is so difficult to define is a good indication that it's probably not a real thing:

Black Americans are not really a “race” either, and the borders of Black American identity can also be difficult to define or agree upon. To some extent, shared history, culture, and ancestry exist, but as the scholars Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft, the very concept of race implies a material reality where none exists. Most American descendants of the emancipated have white ancestry, and millions of white Americans with African ancestry have no knowledge of it. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.”

Serwer alluded to an old article from CNN about President Obama that discussed disagreement about whether Obama was "black" or "biracial." 

Serwer might have simplified the differences between American ideas about race and past ideas, such as anti-Semitism. While "black" doesn't have defined edges, that doesn't mean the term means nothing. Africa is a huge continent, and a Dinka might not have much in common physically with an Amhara or a Yoruba, to say nothing of their distant diaspora descendants, but the term "black" at least refers to some characteristics with a scientific basis, some "material reality," like relatively more abundant melanin. There are other material traits that, at least on average, are more true about Black people than White people, such as greater bone density among Black people. While "black" and "white" are mutable terms, there is more difference physically between them than there is between Jews and "Aryans" or whatever it was the Nazis would have been comparing them to. So while the term "black" isn't perhaps a useful term, it's not quite meaningless. It bears a casual relationship to DNA.  

Nonetheless, I take Serwer's point for the most part. Race is a social construct more than it is a biological reality, and to the extent it is a biological reality, our current human social constructs bear little resemblance to that reality.  

What, then, is Black History Month about? 

Once upon a time, say, circa 1998, I felt relatively safe and secure with the understanding that race was made-up. I knew that because it had been treated as a real thing for so long, there was work to do do fix the world for people who had been harmed by old racial ideas, but I expected that one day, perhaps in my lifetime, we'd be done talking about race except as an idea people used to believe in. 

Right about the same time I had achieved this certainty was the first time I became aware of Black History Month. Although it has been celebrated since 1976, apparently, I am pretty sure the first time I took notice of it was when I was an undergrad at Walsh University in the late 90s. There was a reading at one point in the student center of great Black American writers. All the woke, liberal students were going, and since I was a woke, liberal student (although the term "woke" was still almost two decades in the future), I went, too. I remember walking away thinking that I had enjoyed hearing the words of writers like Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass, and Maya Angelou read out loud, but I also wondered if that was the main goal of Black History Month. Is it primarily an "appreciation" month, and does "appreciate" in that sense mean the same thing when we talk about "appreciating" art in a gallery? Is February about admiring people who fall into the (arbitrary and made-up) category of Black person? And how does that lead to improving the lives of the people whom society (wrongly) assigns to a (made-up) racial category? 

I've learned a great deal in more than twenty years of Black History Months since then that I've found enlightening, enriching, profitable or transformative to my thinking. I've read writers I hadn't known existed, learned of historical events I'd never read about, and been challenged in the way I think about America's past. If every White American has done the same with their Februaries, then the month has doubtlessly done some good, intangible and unmeasurable though it may be, for people America still assigns to an outdated system of racial division. As a time to re-inscribe upon history the accomplishments of people who were erased from history because of fallible racial logic, it has great value. 

Nonetheless, I can't help wondering every February if the month itself contributes to perpetuating the certainty that race exists. Because Black History isn't just about rediscovering lost black contributions to history. It's a full-scale celebration of blackness, or at least a favored definition of blackness. It seeks to shine a spotlight on Black culture. But in doing so, it (and by "it," I mean the disjointed and non-coordinated efforts of media, Black empowerment groups, corporate diversity officers, social media influencers, as well as corporations looking to monetize all of this) favors some forms of Black culture and ignores others. It changes the meaning of Blackness while seeking to celebrate it. Most significantly, it demonstrates an unmistakable certainty that blackness is a real thing, not something we should put in tenuous brackets and recognize with only a healthy amount of explanation. 

One consequence of this is that Black people who don't generally live within the confines of accepted Black culture (which is now defined partly by Black people, but also by corporate America that sells Black culture) find themselves feeling like outsiders within their own racial identity. I have a black poet friend who loves anime and comic books. He teaches a college course on Batman. There aren't many people who know Black history and literature as well as he does, but he also is sometimes challenged by other Black people for not being authentically black. That is, he's being accused of not "really" being something that isn't real. One of the more prominent threads in Black American culture is anxiety among Black people about whether they are authentically and truly black enough. There's a whole TV show whose very name--Blackish--refers in part to this anxiety. Celebrating is meant to improve the self-image of the people being celebrated, but when the celebration is about a made-up thing, it can't help but cause angst for some of those the celebration is meant to uplift. 

I hate sounding like a conservative

I realize everything I'm saying is pretty close to a conservative position. Maybe I'm saying it somewhat more circumspectly than a true conservative would, but it's still pretty close to what many conservatives would express. They believe that the focus on racial inequity itself is stoking racial division in America. At least some of them hope for a post-racial America (which is exactly what I was hoping for in 1998, and this very hope made me, I thought, very woke on the subject of race). I'm not claiming they are right or wrong, but that maybe they have a point. 

On the one hand, there's a practical issue of how to effectively fight racism. There's something about bringing up racism that activates self-defense mechanisms in people. That's why the prosecution in the Ahmaud Arbery case mostly avoided it, to great effect. So one has to acknowledge at least that confrontation isn't always the best strategy. 

Beyond the pragmatic issue of how to present the ruling class with the case for racism, though, there's the issue that efforts to eradicate racism often conflate (real) racism with (made-up) race. It's not just Black History Month. It's census data asking me my race, as though this was a question with an objective answer. It's my own woke use of capital-letter "B" in "Black people," which I follow because it's what the cool kids are doing, but have reservations about. 

A lot of ways to abuse race for power

As I write in this particular February, storm clouds of war are brewing on the border of Ukraine. The West, of which The United States is still somehow the distracted leader, has been pulled into a Second Cold War with a group of autocratic states. One of those autocratic nations feels confident enough for military adventurism in part because it knows the United States is too fractious and divided internally to long hold oppose it with unity. Corporate media interests on the right are already making inroads into turning support for Ukraine into just another partisan issue. 

Those corporate interests love to keep the idea of race alive, because it gives them something to make their audiences angry about. It's not just them, though. America's foreign enemies have been making use of racial inequality in America for decades to try to weaken the country. Russian information, influence and psychological operations campaigns have been using race as perhaps their easiest ingress into American discourse. 

I don't believe anyone thinks Russia is doing this because it genuinely cares about the souls of Black folk. Moreover, I don't believe the true interests of Black Americans are advanced when Russia makes America weaker. Yes, White America needs to get its act together in a hurry, in part for its own internal security, because racial inequality is a weapon in the hands of the enemy. But Black America--and the much larger group of people who identify as "allies"-- should also recognize that even if White America did get its act together, it would likely result in political action that was compromised and full of unintended consequences that might lead to new problems. Solving problems isn't easy even when we agree they're problems. They're much more difficult when we can't agree, and the conflation of racism with race is a small contributor to our inability to agree. It's also a weapon in the hands of the enemy. 

The point, finally

I've worked most of my life in environments that mandate putting the "bottom line up front" (BLUF). I hate writing like that. I think writing should at least occasionally be a process of discovering the bottom line, and it's okay for the final product to reflect that struggle. So I'm only now getting to my point. If I were to write an LSAT-type comprehension question based on this post, one that asks, "What is the author's main point," the answer would be this: Nothing comes without costs, even Black History Month. 

Society has to make positive efforts to undo the legacy of racism, even if race isn't real. As Serwer put it: "It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false—even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false." We cannot simply end racist laws and hope that in time things will work themselves out. We have to take action. But every action has unintended consequences. If race becomes a factor in hiring or school admission, it will lead to hurt feelings from those who feel that the made-up construct of race is now working against them--whether they are right or wrong to feel that way. The downsides are not enough of a reason not to try, but we do have to realize that downsides exist.

With Black History Month, we have to be aware of how our efforts to remove the effects of racism--which is real--unintentionally extend the lifespan of the belief in race--which is not. (There's your BLUF, you bureaucratic lumpen.) The upsides are absolutely worth the downsides, but only if we are aware of the downsides and work to mitigate them. Instead, I think the current politico-cultural divide in America demands that we either accept it as an unqualified good or a damned nuisance, depending on which tribe we belong to. Unless there are other options to quasi-religious wokeness and "How come there's no White History Month?" I think I know where I'll lay odds in the coming geopolitical conflict. 

Suicide isn't just a mental health problem. It's a philosophical problem.

A couple of times in the history of this blog, I've had a reader reach out to me because they were concerned about me. Concerned, that is, as in they were afraid I was thinking of ending my life, of "dying by suicide," as we now say, because to say one "commits" suicide is to imply one has done something criminal. Criminals "commit" acts, we feel, whereas suicide is carried out by people with mental health issues. We want to distinguish sickness from evil. We are a more understanding people than we once were. 

My friends and other readers of this blog can be forgiven for their concern, although I wasn't really at any time seriously pondering suicide, at least not in an "I have a plan" way. I do talk about it every now and again, both on this blog and elsewhere. The reason it shows up on this blog is that writing is one of the reasons I have to go on living. It's not the only one, but it's an important one, and when I don't seem to be getting anywhere with writing, that removes one of the pillars of my "I want to live" building. This blog might be at times boring, self-indulgent, and unoriginal, but I've made a decision that at the very least it's going to be honest, as honest as I'm capable of being. That means not shirking from admitting that at times, setbacks of various sorts nudge me in the direction of thinking the struggle to find some meaning in it all isn't worth the effort. 

The most recent time a reader did a check-in on me was in September, after my "I don't think it's ever going to happen" post. It wasn't the only time, though. And this blog isn't the only occasion someone has had to wonder about me. In the Marine Corps, there was a suicide on base at one point, and everyone took the opportunity to talk to their charges about suicide. Most people assured their NCOs and officers that everything was fine and that they never considered suicide. I don't remember how the subject was presented to me, but at one point, someone said that anyone who even thought of suicide was weak. I gave the response that "I think about suicide every day." Unsurprisingly, I ended up in a counseling session with a bewildered second lieutenant who didn't know what to do with me. 

It's not as simple as saying "I'm thinking of killing myself"

Of course she was confounded by me. Given all the suicide awareness training the military has to do, she and everyone else was keenly aware that they were supposed to do something, but when she sat me down and talked to me more deeply, she wasn't sure what that something was. 

Lieutenant: I heard you said you think about suicide every day.

Sergeant Weber: That's true.

Lt: Are you thinking of killing yourself right now?

Sgt W: No, not particularly. I'm about to finally get out of the Marine Corps, so if there were ever a time I was going to, it probably wouldn't be now.

Lt: But you said you think about suicide every day.

Sgt W: That's true. 

Lt: But you're not thinking about it right now.

Sgt W: No, I am thinking of it right now.

Lt: But you just said you weren't thinking of killing yourself.

Sgt W: That's true. 

Lt: But how can both of those things be true?

Sgt W: I think about suicide every day. I think about whether life is worth living every day. I think about what reason I can give for why I don't end it all every day. I think about if it's possible life has any meaning, and if it doesn't why it's better to live than to die. But I don't specifically think actively about killing myself. Not every day, anyhow. And not today.

Suicide should be an acceptable topic of discussion 

That's the gist of what was said in that conversation, although I've made my part in it clearer than I'm sure I stated it then. There were probably also occasional "ma'ams" thrown in here and there on my part to show the required deference. 

The point I was trying to make is that it's possible to consider suicide in a philosophical way, one that includes me but isn't specifically about me, without necessarily being suicidal. I felt--and still feel--that one can consider suicide the way one considers a timeshare: Is this right for me? If not now, might it be right for me later? Anything else felt to me like an a priori judgment, and a priori judgments have never sat well with me. They tend to come--with exceptions--from people who are neither reflective nor thoughtful, the type of people whose opinions about religion and politics have not changed since late adolescence. 

My personal back-and-forth on the subject...it's pretty much Hamlet

Other than the seven years when I was an evangelical Christian, which provided an a priori reason not to "die by suicide," I've had something of of ongoing debate in my head about it. On the one hand, life seems to mostly consist, time-wise, of doing things I'd rather not be doing: work, maintenance of my belongings and my person, financial planning, paying bills, shopping, preparing food or cleaning up after having made it. It includes spending time and effort to master skills I have no interest in, like personal finance or how to spool a weed trimmer. Now that I'm older, that list includes visits to medical professionals. As I get older still, it's going to include a lot more of that. Life is mostly a shabby affair in which people scrabble to improve their lot by small degrees. We spend all of this time doing things we don't want to do in order to squeeze in the few things we actually enjoy, but in the end, life seems, by all the available evidence, to be a meaningless bother. Few of us achieve the dreams we want in life, and even if we do, we die anyway, and our achievements seldom survive a few years after we are gone. Given that, aren't most people making themselves suffer needlessly, all the while surviving on a thin, self-delusional hope?

On the other hand, though, the words of Gandalf often come to me when I start to think like this: "Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt." Yes, life seems shabby and seedy and pointless, but do I know for sure that it is? And if I'm not sure, isn't it unwise to make a decision that can't be undone? Uncertainty as a reason to forego suicide, if not outright condemn it, isn't a new idea with me, of course. In the most famous words in the world on suicide (indeed, perhaps the most famous words in the world, period), Hamlet cited uncertainty as the thing that kept him enduring the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.

Of course, it's one thing to decide not to kill yourself, and another entirely to endeavor to live happily and fully. "Life seems like a piece of shit, but there's a tiny sliver of a chance I'm wrong" might keep someone from ending their life, at least for a while, but it's hardly enough to make anyone bear fardels with a willing heart. It's not enough to inspire anyone to live selflessly or to strive for greatness or to do much except strive to maximize pleasure at all times. (This is what many Americans do, which leads me to believe that, whatever they may say, many Americans are, at heart, nihilists.) 

Yet, I do try to live a life of some value to others, or at least a life I judge has value. I don't call myself a nihilist, although my best guess is that either nobody is running the universe or the universe is run by a lunatic. So why do I bother to try? 

My best answer to this is something of a modified version of the point of Albert Camus' 1942 essay "The Myth of Sisyphus." I read this essay for the first time soon after I had stopped being a Christian. As one friend noted back then, even after I'd left Christianity, the Christians still had their hooks pretty deep into me, because I still sort of accepted their assertion that without God, nothing means anything. I'm still not sure I've ever abandoned this idea, but at least Camus' essay offered a third option, when considering the absurdity of the universe, between escaping it through belief in God and suicide. 

I don't exactly follow his ideal, but I drew this much out of it: I should live selflessly and nobly not because God wants me to, but because the universe is a cruel place that places people who long for nobility and kindness in a world inimical to these things, and so fuck you, universe. I act like life has meaning not because I am deluded enough to think it really does, but because I long for meaning, and so to act like what I do matters is a means of fulfilling my sense of anger that the universe isn't what I wish it were. I strive for connection and to help others precisely because the universe places me in an eternal conundrum of wishing for true connection and community while at the same time making those things impossible. I strive to act like what I do matters precisely because it doesn't, and that makes me angry. I love partly out of rage. I love and care and generally try at life as an act of defiance. 

A digression not strictly necessary

I know a lot of people who don't believe in any type of religion or fixed ideology, but who claim their happiness in life stems from something called "cheerful nihilism" or "optimistic nihilism" or something like that. You can find a lot of good essays or videos online by Googling cheerful nihilism, but here, I'll just say that the short version can be found in Monty Python's closing song from the movie Life of Brian, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." 

I know some people draw real consolation from the notion that if nothing means anything, that means we're as free to be happy as we are to be despondent, but this seems to me to be exactly the kind of "philosophy" Leonato spoke of in Much Ado About Nothing when he said there was "never yet philosopher that could bear the toothache patiently." Cheerful nihilism seems to belong to the wealthy western world, to people who generally are well fed, well liquored, and have enough hedonistic gratification to forget, temporarily, about the absurdity of existence. But actually crucify those same people, and not in the highly sanitized and comic way Life of Brian does, and see how long their nihilism remains cheerful.

Cheerful nihilism comes off to me as nothing more than the agnostic's version of Pascal's wager. In this case, instead of saying that you don't gain anything from not believing in God and might gain a lot from believing, it's saying that given the absence of God or some other ultimate meaning in the universe, you can either be happy about that or sad, and so you might as well be happy, because it doesn't help anything to be sad. I feel this has similar faults to the actual Pascal's wager argument. For the original argument, I've always felt that it doesn't matter if I can see that it's a good bargain to believe in God, because if I know I actually don't believe, then I can't make myself believe because I think it might make me feel better. Similarly, for cheerful nihilism, I can't force myself to adopt a sanguine attitude about the absurd just because it might make my time in the absurd less painful. 

In short, I don't follow cheerful nihilism, but angry nihilism, and part of that anger is to deny letting myself act like an actual nihilist. Of course, rage is only useful as long as you can keep yourself angry. The older I get, the more the fire goes out of me. It's not that I think the universe isn't a shitty deal as much as I ever did; it's just that I can't keep working myself into a fit as much as I used to. It ain't a perfect system, but it's the only system I've got. 

But my personal response to the problem of suicide isn't the point of this post

You can agree, disagree, or be indifferent to my own personal resolution of the suicide question. My point isn't that I have the right solution, but that suicide is actually a real question the absurdity of the universe places on each of us. That means that each of us has to deal with it like a real question, and if it's a real question, then it's possible the answer might be that suicide makes sense. If we enter the debate with an answer already in mind, we haven't thought about it honestly. 

If you listen to mental health professionals, though--and this is the real point of this post--to merely ask the question in an open way already means you have a problem. Because to health professionals, suicide is always the result of a mental health condition. They can't look at it any other way, because mental health care professionals enter the discussion with the strongest of a priori commitments. Their professional ethics require them to assume that suicide is always the wrong decision, no matter what the circumstances of the person in question may be. Furthermore, because suicide is always the wrong decision, it follows that only people with mental health conditions would opt for it. 

One can see this in the way suicide prevention training is carried out in large organizations. Many people--well meaning people, many of whom have been personally affected by the suicide of a loved on, and against whom I mean no disrespect--urge us to "look for the signs" and to always be checking on those around us. Whenever I read the proclamations of a suicide awareness campaign, I think about how such a campaign would have sounded like to ancient practitioners of seppuku. Or, for that matter, how it would have sounded to Shakespeare when he was writing one of his many, many meditations on the subject in different plays. You don't have to agree with how past societies have viewed suicide, but you do have to at least acknowledge that societal views on suicide have a long history, and that this history includes a lot of views that are far from our view that suicide is always a tragedy and always to be avoided at all costs. 

I don't have any problem with mental health professionals. Many people I know have used their services and felt themselves helped thereby. Some claim mental health services have saved their lives. I don't doubt that's true. However, I do think that on the subject of suicide, mental health professionals might tend to think they have the final and most authoritative word, when in fact, for someone like me, they might have nothing to say that's of any particular interest to me. To be helped by mental health services, one has to first buy into the notion that life is worth living. If you don't accept that, there's not much they can do for you, unless one counts putting chemicals in you that convince your brain you think life is worth living. Therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists can do a lot to help you cope with struggles in life, but as for believing that struggles in life are worth overcoming, they don't have anything to say, qua their profession, that's any more insightful or authoritative than anyone else. 

Because so many modern writers seem to have used therapy, the language of therapy has entered into the discourse on suicide and the absurd in literature, an intrusion I somewhat resent. For centuries, the central issue in English literature was man's striving with a universe that was either indifferent to or antithetical to human desires. The paradox of humanity both fearing and longing for death was everywhere. At least, in any literature I find worth reading. My views on this subject are influenced by Shakespeare, by Moby Dick, by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, by Milton's Paradise Lost, and by countless other works in which much of the external conflict is a result of an internal conflict against a fate or a creator that has let down its creation. Hell, if you read the Bible in a non-pious way, you'll quickly see that it's as full of humans complaining about their creator at least as much as they are praising him. 

This focus on humanity set adrift in a sea of the absurd peaked after World War Two, when it became impossible to ignore the fact that humans are without adult supervision, and that if allowed to, the strong will annihilate the weak. But the last twenty to thirty years have seen a turn away from this focus. It's almost as if, after acknowledging the unspeakable heart of darkness of the universe for so long, the human race has collectively given up and decided it's better not to worry about such matters. We haven't so much decided that the universe isn't absurd as we have decided to make a big joke out of the fact that it is. So life is pointless, big deal. Enjoy your streaming videos and your meal delivery service. Go to therapy and take drugs if you need to. It won't make the universe any different, but it'll change how you feel about it. The cultural artifacts of such are society are shows like Ted Lasso, which narrows the failings of the cosmic father down to the banal, forgivable weaknesses of the terrestrial father, and then tells us that a good enough therapist can fix that. Of course we don't say "commit" suicide anymore; our society isn't serious enough to commit to anything.  

To the extent there is still a struggle and a will to rebel in literature, it's mostly of a purely secular and political nature, not a cosmic and existential rebellion. The antidote to suicide isn't coming to hard-won terms with the absurd, it's a bigger social safety net to ensure mental health services for everyone. We rebel against the political opinion we disagree with, not the fate which presents politics with problems to solve in the first place. 

Thinking about suicide on my terms and making room for the terms others need

It may seem like I'm disparaging mental health services, but I'm not. Although I don't think the mental health profession can tell me why I ought to strive to work through the absurd, only give me practical tips to cope with its more obnoxious aspects, that's still a considerable contribution. More importantly, I do think that of the people who actually do die by suicide, the vast majority probably really suffer from some diagnosed or diagnosable mental health malady. As much as I am arguing here for space to weigh suicide as a neutral decision without automatically being lumped into mental health discussions, I doubt if many people argue themselves philosophically into killing themselves. Usually, there is actual suffering, rather than abstract suffering, involved in a suicide, and the worst of that suffering tends to happen between the ears, rather than elsewhere in the body. 

I was reminded of this recently when a friend sent me a couple of messages that sounded desperate. I was gone for the weekend when she sent them, which means I didn't see them until a few days after they'd been sent. (I keep social media off my phone.) The messages were urgent pleas for encouragement. This isn't a normal thing from her, and the fact that I hadn't answered her messages for a few days made me nervous. My friend has told me before about her mental health struggles, which are mild but still a thing. I regard it as a very special trust that she has shared this with me, but I felt like I had failed that trust by not being there when she asked for something. When I finally did respond, she didn't answer right away, which made me feel more worried. It wasn't just general concern, although there was plenty of that. There was also a specific feeling of responsibility. She occasionally reads this blog, and I'm sure at some point, we must have talked about my thoughts on suicide. What if my casual talk about suicide had had some influence on a person who didn't really need my influence? 

Later, I realized she was fine and that my concern about my influence on her was misplaced. My concern about influencing anyone is probably misplaced; that's one of the reasons I feel so dispirited about my progress as a writer. But in this case, my lack of influence was probably a good thing. 

Mental health professionals tend to get anxious whenever anyone except a mental health professional talks about suicide publicly. When there is a suicide in a school, they mobilize to stem the tide, because suicides can be contagious. When Robin Williams died by suicide, they scolded those who shared a "Be free, Genie" meme because it violated the standards for how we should talk about suicide. In general, there is a censorship of suicide like scarcely any topic. It might be easier to find pornography on the Internet than it is to find real information about suicide. I've been afraid to Google on it for years, because Google immediately freaks out and tries to get anyone who puts certain phrases in to call helplines and go to the hospital. 

To someone like me, who is fascinated by suicide and whether it's a good solution to the problem the absurdity of life presents us with, I've always found it interesting that we have to take such care to prevent copycat suicides. To me, that suggests that a lot of people are always thinking about it, although we are shushed and shamed when we speak those thoughts out loud, even more than for other subjects we are told to eschew in polite society. Which leads me to conclude that I'm right to suspect that suicide has always been a just-barely unspoken thought on the minds of most of humanity for as long as humans have been around. 

So how do I balance my responsibility to not trigger those with genuine mental health concerns with my own need to talk about suicide without judgment? While I may not be giving out practical advice on how to kill oneself, like one website parents are trying to get taken down, I should also consider my words as if my own son were reading them. (I've always been careful to avoid talking about suicide around my son, but I've noticed, as he gets further into his teen years, that he's a lot like me. I think he's going to get there quite on his own, and when he does, I hope he doesn't read the wrong thing or watch the wrong video before he has a chance to grow up a bit more and balance more ideas against each other.) 

There are two things I believe about suicide that mental health professionals would object to. First is that suicide is not automatic evidence of a mental health condition. Given that this is a world in which genocide can happen and no cosmic adult intervenes, I believe it is quite possible for a sane person to conclude that checking out is the best option. At the very least, it's not an insane choice. Secondly, I think that it's important to consider suicide as a real option without judgment, and that if and only if you do that, are you truly choosing to live. Early in Camus' essay, he posits that most people do not end their own lives because of a conscious choice, but the absence of one: "You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit." I believe it's important to truly choose to live, which means first to think about negating life. 

I might say that my own willingness to think so much about suicide might have saved me from it so far. One conclusion I've reached from thinking about it nearly every day is that it's something I can always put off until tomorrow. By procrastinating in this manner, I've managed to live until nearly fifty, long enough at least, that if I died tomorrow, it would be sad but by no means the greatest of tragedies. And I still have a number of reasons to go on for at least a while longer: a desire not to die before my parents, because as a parent, I know what that would feel like; a feeling that I have to continue to model perseverance and resilience to my children; the knowledge that I do not yet "see the end beyond all doubt." 

I don't know if I will continue to procrastinate forever, though. Maybe when I am very old and looking a nursing home in the eyes, facing a future of consuming more and more drugs and medical plastics and other consumables to stay alive without being able to contribute to society in return or even much enjoy the life I still have, I will finally decide the balance has shifted. Or, maybe, I'll find that I'm so terrified of death I want to run from it until I absolutely cannot run anymore. I don't know. I know I'm not made of tough enough stuff to perform something like seppuku. I can't take pain, which is one of the reasons I have not yet truly thought too seriously about suicide. All the options sound like they hurt a lot. So might as well keep putting it off, just like I will probably keep putting off the colonoscopy my health provider now wants me to go get. 

While I think it's important to confront humanity's innate and complex longing for death head-on, I think that at the very least, for the time being, I will avoid casual mentions of the subject when I write. A piece like this one where I am dealing with the subject in sufficient complexity is one thing, but brief and unexplained references are probably irresponsible. While I don't think therapists or psychiatrists really have the answers to the questions I pose any more than auto mechanics or insurance claims representatives do, all of these people can be very useful when you need one, and I have no desire to interfere with the practical help they are trying to provide. 

In closing, I want to make clear, if this post hasn't already done it, that this isn't a cry for help. I'm as close to happy right now as I get. It was a year of a lot of changes for me, changes that ended up being a lot more difficult than I anticipated, but I rode them out, and now maybe the worst is behind me. I probably won't ever find meaning through writing in the way I hoped for, but there are other avenues of meaning still open to me. This post isn't about me being at the end of my rope. It's about how I've tried for over thirty years to find a way to keep climbing. 

In defense of those who claim to have "done their own research"

For a brief time in the late nineties, I wanted to be a scientist. I'd never liked science in high school, and had been ignorant of many basic science facts into my mid-twenties, enough that I was probably borderline science illiterate. In the last of my six years in the Marine Corps, though, someone left a Carl Sagan book lying around somewhere, and for some reason, I picked it up and read it. That led to me reading another Sagan book, and then another, and then I started picking up science textbooks from used bookstores and reading those. I also started self-teaching myself the algebra I hadn't done well in in high school. After about a year of this, I got discharged and was ready to start college. For my first semester, I was a chemistry major. 

I did well in my biology and chemistry 101 courses, but I realized that I was behind in math. I'd caught up in algebra, but there was a still a chasm of geometry and calculus I needed to leap over before I'd be really ready to study science seriously. I was already in my mid-twenties, and I felt some pressure to get a degree in a hurry and get on with life. Most of the people I'd gone to high school with were starting real jobs, and I felt a little ashamed that I was only just starting college. Rather than spend the time to catch up in math, I switched to liberal arts, eventually settling on English. 

For a long time after I gave up the dream of studying in the natural sciences, though, I still wanted to feel like I belonged among scientists. Since I didn't have the chops to actually be one, I did what most wannabes do: I aped the language. I tried to talk like I thought a scientist would. 

One instance of this sticks out in memory. Many people from anti-GMO, pro-holistic/herbal/non-Western medicine, or anti-vax camps would rail against putting "chemicals" in their bodies. Scientists would often snigger at this (and I would snigger along with them), pointing out that all matter is made up of chemicals, so it's impossible to avoid consuming chemicals. They'd say water is a chemical compound, so to be anti-consumption of chemicals meant to be anti-consumption of water. 

Over time, though, I came to feel like this was an overly fastidious definition, one held to only for the sake of belittling and discrediting those whom the majority of scientists disagreed with by making them out to be so little versed in science, they didn't even know how to use basic terms correctly. While I agree that most of the people who rail against consumption of chemicals--say, Gwyneth Paltrow--are likely to be completely wrong about nearly everything, I think this game of definitional gerrymandering is dishonest. 

Many terms have more than one meaning, depending on the social context, and the fitness of one of the meanings of a term shouldn't be determined by whether it is the preferred meaning of a certain group, but on whether those who share the context can reliably interpret what the term means. So when my Net+ course tells me that "ethernet cable" isn't really a correct term, I'm fine with that statement insofar as it's a statement within the context of a class on Ethernet. However, when normal people use the term, we know exactly what they mean be it. If I went into a Best Buy and asked where the ethernet cables were, the clerk would know where to point me. There is a specialist meaning of the term "ethernet," and there is a lay person's meaning of the term, and both can be correct, as long as they are used in the right context. 

For the term "chemical," it can have one meaning within the context of a science class (anything that has a chemical structure, which is to say, all matter), and there is a more general use of the term (a thing made by a chemist, i.e. something artificial). To attack a position for using the lay meaning of the term in a context where it's understood the lay meaning is intended is a disingenuous method of argument. 

"I did my own research"

I've been witnessing what seems like another instance of this form of a discredit-through-definition attack lately against those who are resistant to getting COVID-19 vaccinations. The argument goes something like this: "Research" means original research, performed in a laboratory, by specialists using expensive equipment who produce technical conclusions that will then be peer-reviewed. Therefore, when people say they "did their own research," but mean that they read articles or watched videos about COVID-19 and vaccinations, they do not even understand what "research" means, and everything they say should automatically be rejected. 

Much like when I object to an overly narrow definition of "chemical," it feels a little bit strange to me to be defending the side I mostly disagree with. I got vaccinated as soon at it was available to me. To some extent, I also "did my own research," but for the most part, I got vaccinated because that seemed to be the prevailing recommendation. I did enough "research" to determine what experts were recommending, and I did that. None of us can research every subject under the sun, and I didn't feel compelled to put in a lot of time on this one. 

Prior to two years ago, would anyone have objected to my use of "research" in that last paragraph to describe my attempt as a layperson to determine what the prevailing wisdom on a subject was? Don't we use the word in this sense all the time, in a way that more or less means "to read up on something"? When a high schooler goes to the library to gather materials for a paper on gene therapy, we aren't saying that high schooler is an expert on the subject, but we still call this phase in the process of writing a paper "research." When my mother uses online resources to trace her ancestry, nobody pretends that means she is an expert in genealogy, nor a historian. Prior to 2020, though, if she'd said, "I did a bunch of research and found a few more headstones to go visit," nobody would have objected to that use of the term. To a scientist who does research for a living, the word means one thing, and to a person who does something else for a living, it generally means another. People aren't wrong for using the term in the more general sense.

Why would I worry about playing fair with people like Chipper Jones, whose claim to have "done his own research" far exceeded his antagonists in terms of arrogance and dismissiveness of those who disagreed with him? Maybe because there's a precedent here that I don't want to see set. All of us have to make hundreds of decisions on matters in which we are not experts. For some of these decisions, the stakes are low enough we can go along with the crowd, but for some, we are going to have to decide for ourselves, which means wading in and making the best decision we can on a topic where we lack expertise in key areas relevant to the question at hand. 

For example, how should you pick a political candidate to vote for? Nobody is an expert in everything relevant to picking a candidate: public policy, geopolitical affairs, economics, etc. Should we simply rely on experts in these fields to tell us what to do? Which fields are the most important? And what if the experts don't all agree? Should we try to determine what the majority opinion of experts is and go with that? None of this sounds like a good way to pick a candidate. In a democracy, we all have a moral responsibility to develop our own beliefs (through what you might call research) and to pick candidates we think (based on more research) best align with those beliefs. We can't pass the buck on something like our votes by relying on expertise.

What about religious beliefs? Should we poll all the people with Ph.D.s in the world, see what the majority religious belief is, and go with that? Of course not. For one thing, not all doctoral degrees would be equally relevant to questions about religion. The sciences or philosophy or history might be more relevant than public policy or educational theory. We will of course want to read the works of great minds to determine our own beliefs, but it's up to each of us to determine what weight to give those we read. If one scientist says cosmology supports belief in the existence of God and another scientist says the opposite, I need, to some extent, to judge between them myself, even though I have only the most basic grasp of concepts in cosmology. We all have to make important decisions all the time through research on topics we are not experts in.

Fine, you may say. Those are broad abstract topics, but COVID-19 vaccinations are a subject of limited breadth and a very practical application. Surely on this, we should trust the experts? But there are practical issues all the time when people need to question experts. Do you trust the guy who might be giving you the runaround at the mechanic's, even though he knows more about cars than you, or do you trust your gut telling you he's trying to bilk you?  

At the moment, I'm dealing with an issue in my foot known as Morton's neuroma. I've been seeing a podiatrist for months, and nothing he's tried so far has worked. I might have to get surgery. But my podiatrist gave me a time period for recovery that is at odds with everything I've read on reputable websites. I'm talking vastly different, like four times as long. I don't claim to know as much about feet and neurons as my doctor, but I do think I've done enough "research" to question why he's telling me something like this. I think I should go ask another doctor before I get surgery, rather than trust this doctor's expertise. Would anyone argue I should ignore my instincts because my podiatrist is an expert and I'm not? 

The fact is that while we all have to rely on experts to tell us things they've spent their whole lives learning about, we also realize that those experts aren't infallible. Sometimes, we have reason to think we're seeing mistakes, but thinking this does not mean we think we could do the jobs of those experts ourselves. Personal flaws like inattentiveness, lack of effort, lack of empathy, and greed affect experts as much as the rest of us, and non-experts are capable, sometimes, of picking up on these things. Sometimes, experts make mistakes because they are tired, overworked, or forced to work in bad conditions. If there's anything I've learned about being an adult, it's that you don't become magic when you grow up the way I thought would happen when I was a kid. If I still make mistakes all the time in the profession where I am an expert, it's reasonable to think others will, too.  

In the case of COVID-19 vaccinations, recommendations to get vaccines, and the vaccine mandates that are based on those mandates, come from a body that is part of the federal government. While the goal is for bodies like the CDC to be independent of political considerations, I can tell you from personal experience that true political neutrality in government work is easier said than done. Beyond the political considerations, though, a citizen needs to bear in mind the inefficiencies of a bureaucracy. The CDC sometimes makes bad calls for no other reason than it's a government agency, and government tends to move slowly. That's why the CDC tends to lag behind what research is telling it. Remember how long it took for the CDC to recommend wearing masks at the beginning of the pandemic? It wasn't because wearing masks didn't make sense prior to that; it's because the CDC doesn't work perfectly. A citizen wearing a mask prior to CDC mandates, as several of my Korean friends did, would have been opposing CDC recommendations based on their "own research," but that citizen would have been right. While most people aren't better scientists than those employed by the CDC, that doesn't mean we are wrong to be skeptical of their proclamations, for reasons that sometimes have nothing to do with science. 

All of us have to make decisions every day on complicated questions outside our expertise. We do research--and it deserves to be called research--as best as we can, and we make the best decisions we are capable of. As a democracy, we ought to honor this effort, not belittle those who've come to different conclusions by mocking the entire notion of a citizen attempting to independently make sense of what she's being told.  

I realize that a lot of the research done by people opposing vaccinations isn't good research. Even by my expanded definition of research to mean any kind of "learning more about" something, that still should mean reading well-reasoned and reliable sources, not any crazy thing on the internet. If someone claims to have done their own research and believes the government is putting trackers in vaccines, the problem isn't that they didn't do original research in a lab, but that they didn't research good secondary sources. (For what it's worth, I have one friend who is a bona fide MENSA-level genius with a Ph.D in math and an excellent command of many topics in science who isn't a fan of COVID vaccinations. It's not all crazy people.) 

The fact that some people don't do good non-expert research in order sharpen their views isn't a knock against citizens verifying information as best as they can. Nor should it be used to undermine the idea that a minority may come to valid but differing conclusions. We all have a duty to perform the best research we can so we can have the best opinions we can. We all share in what Lionel Trilling called "the moral duty to be intelligent." Mocking those trying to do their own research by stating nobody who isn't an expert can do meaningful research is an argument against the critical work all of us need to be doing in a democracy. 

Submittable settings might make objectivity harder for editors

 I have a friend who is kind of obsessive about not wanting to talk about movies he hasn't seen yet. It's not just that he wants to avoid hearing spoilers; he wants to not even hear a very broad opinion, like, "I liked it." He feels that even hearing this generic endorsement will color how he watches the movie, and he'd prefer, when he watches, to be doing so completely free of outside influence. 

That's hard to do for movies or shows on streaming services where buzz makes opinions ubiquitous in everyone's social media timelines. To be sure you don't get contaminated, you'd have to avoid social media and continually remind your co-workers within earshot that you want to avoid hearing any mention of the show. That's a lot of work, and likely to make you an unpopular co-worker with some people who really like to talk about what they've seen. 

It shouldn't be that hard for editors of literary journals to do with stories submitted for consideration, though. After all, these are unpublished works they're dealing with. The only people who've seen them, maybe, are small workshop groups. There's no danger of having been contaminated by a public discourse on a story that's still seeking to enter public discourse. 

Except there is. The danger arises from the way Submittable presents work in progress to editors. In a typical set-up, stories sit in a queue, usually according to the date submitted (you can arrange them by other criteria, but this seems to be the fairest way to go through a queue, starting with what came in first and working to what came in last). There are a number of ways journals handle the first stages, depending on the preferences of the head editor and the staff on hand. 

One common method is for first-line editors to pick entries and vote on them. Once the first vote is made, subsequent readers can see that a vote has been made and, more importantly, which kind of vote. 

The snip above is from my own Submittable work queue. I was the one who voted no on the three entries you see there. This means that everyone except the first reader (me) is going to already know what another reader (me) thought before starting in on reading. If that second reader has any particular feelings about me, those could end up influencing the next vote. It could be, "Jake's usually a good reader, so I'll probably agree with him," or it could be, "I hate Jake, so I'm going to vote the opposite of whatever he said," or it could be anything in between. The point is that my vote is likely to have at least some influence on the next votes, even if it's an unconscious influence. And that means objectivity, always difficult to achieve for judges, is going to be a little bit more tainted.

For many journals, the majority of readers doing the lion's share of the work are new. The work is unpaid and grueling, so it's understandable why journals would cycle through readers. When someone new comes on board, it's natural for them to feel their way out before they get comfortable. When I read for the Baltimore Review, I had two conflicting impulses: to vote with the majority so people didn't think I was a pain in the ass, and to vote against the majority so it appeared I had a unique take that made me valuable to have around. Both of these impulses were a distraction from what should have been my only desire, which was to vote the way I really thought. 

No matter which impulse I followed, the presence of other votes represented an influence on me. This was especially true because the Baltimore Review used a two-strikes-and-you're-out approach: the editor figured if two readers both didn't like something, it had too long of an uphill climb to make it, and she'd send a rejection notice. That means that once I saw something had a down vote, there was a motivation for me to go in and vote no, too, because then the story would be out of the queue, which felt like progress. 

A lot of journals use a blind reading to protect them from knowing who the writer is and being influenced by that. They do this in the interests of fairness. Journals should probably also consider protecting themselves from their own influence internally. It's possible there may be some way to configure Submittable settings so you can see that a vote has been made, but not know what the vote was or who made it. But if so, it's not the default setting, and I sure can't figure out how to apply it. A journal could instead have everyone send a private note to a central editor with votes and thoughts, so that only the central editor could see them. But that's a big burden on that one editor, and a system like this would mean Submittable wasn't much more efficient than a journal working entirely off of email. 

If a technical solution became available, making anonymous and masked voting possible, that doesn't mean votes shouldn't stay anonymous and hidden forever. Once enough are in, the blinders could come off, and if necessary, editors could have discussions among themselves and argue through points of disagreement. The idea isn't to avoid disagreement. Quite the opposite. It's to avoid agreement that comes too easily. Journals struggle to achieve diversity in their editorial staff in order to be fair in judging work. That diversity can be undone, though, by subtly encouraging groupthink through the voting process. A simple tweak to Submittable could probably do a surprising lot of good for encouraging diversity. It would certainly be an interesting experiment for journals to try and see if they get more disagreement than they've had before. 

Admitting to yourself it's never going to happen without sounding morose

Is hope a good thing? Saint Paul listed it, along with love and faith, among the three heavenly things that abide here among us. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has been one of the biggest influences in my life, seems to hold in low regard those who abandon hope, even when despair seems reasonable, as in the case of Denethor. That doesn't mean we must maintain an unrealistic view of our own hopes, only that we have to keep trying until the last possible ember of hope is extinguished. Gandalf is the architect of the plan that ultimately defeats the greatest evil of his day, in spite of his own admission that "there never was much hope....just a fool's hope." 

On a practical level, it's hard to imagine our society surviving long without it. While the engine of capitalism can run even if few people have a truly realistic chance at achieving their dreams, it can and will run as long as most people have just enough hope to believe they might achieve them if they only keep going a little further. Hope is so strongly grounded in Western culture and so necessary to maintaining our way of life, questioning its value might seem sometimes like questioning whether murder is bad. 

There is another tradition, though, one that views hope as ego getting in the way of our own growth. This is the tradition embraced by Canadian author Steven Heighton in his article "Hope is Good. Disappointment is Better."Heighton recalls how his own buoyant faith in his bright literary future retarded the very growth as a writer necessary to achieve that future. Heighton discusses the two terms "disillusion" and "disabuse," suggesting that the second is better, both because it lacks the confusing double-negative equaling a negative of "disillusion," and also because it suggests that sticking to hope involves abuse the way an addiction does. 

Heighton cites Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, who teaches that hope is harmful because it's based on an illusion. Although hope has a biological basis that is essential to survival, this biological urge can, over time, train us to avoid any type of discomfort. Most elite athletes, Heighton writes, learn to stop thinking in terms of hope, because hope is a distraction: 

As every athlete finds out, action contaminated by hope (If only I can nail this next serve . . . I’ll win if I nail this next serve!) usually fails. Hope is a fatal distraction. It creates a kind of skip, jitter, or satellite delay in the nerves. Where there’s hope, there’s fear, their relationship an alternating current. On the other hand, a play or movement executed in a fully present, fearless frame of mind—without hope—often succeeds.

Worst of all, hopefulness—that “if only!” state of mind—becomes a mental habit that does not just go away once things improve a little or a lot. The relief of every hope realized creates a new hope, new fears. So we go on, slinging ourselves ahead of ourselves toward death—in fact hastening its approach, our actual lives left uninhabited.

Easy for you to say

Heighton was discussing hope in terms of his own development as a writer, tracing how his early novel lacked necessary focus and refinement, because to have kept working on it then would have felt like admitting his own shortcomings, something that would have conflicted with his internal narrative of himself as a rising literary star. He argues that failure is often the only thing that will teach us, because we are so resistant to admitting we need to improve we will deny and deny our weaknesses until undeniable failure makes us unable to continue to live with our own illusions. 

My own experience from a life not quite as long as Heighton's is that he's right. My life has been a series of waves of unearned confidence that I would transfer my reasonable but not unprecedented talent into easy and unprecedented success. Those waves of confidence have been successively broken, which forced me to reevaluate. The greatest developments I've made, both personally and skill-development-wise, have almost invariably come at my moments of greatest humility. 

Yet there's a difference between what Heighton is writing about and what I'm facing as a writer. Heighton is looking at it from the perspective of someone who's published eighteen books. He may have had to grow as a writer, but that's just it--he's growing as a writer. People identify him as a writer, whereas most people--the few who are even aware of my existence--would identify me as something else. Writing is something I do on the side, but it isn't who I am. The difference between Heighton and me is that he's had enough signs in his life that writing is the thing he ought to be concerned about getting better at in order to know he's probably in the right place. When he's thinking of the balance between hope and disappointment, he at least has a reasonable certainty that writing is the place where he should be seeking that balance. 

I have no such reassurance. I've had about fifteen stories published, along with one book. I've won two awards. All of what I've done has been on a pretty small stage, within a field that is among the most glutted on Earth. When Heighton writes, hope is a threat that, left unchecked, could keep him from passing through the uncomfortable refinement needed to reach greater excellence. For me, hope is something without which I couldn't write a single word, because I have no reason to believe the odds are in my favor that more than a small handful of people will ever read anything I write. 

To return to the image of the athlete, if I discipline myself to focus on the present and not to lose myself in fantasy, but all it helps me accomplish is that I go from eighth place to fourth place in my local rec tennis league, does it even matter? Isn't this level of mental focus, this ruthless plucking out of hope, only for pros? For the rest of us, isn't it kind of harmless, or even necessary to get us through the day-to-day humdrum of our otherwise unremarkable lives? 

I don't want to play rec tennis

I write because I believe I have things to say worth saying that aren't being said by others. I write because I think those things I have to say are important. If I'm wrong--if all I am is really nothing more than one of the better players in my local league of writers, then I'd rather not be spending time on it at all. 

A lot of people tell me that's the wrong approach, that I should write because I love it and only focus on being the best writer I can be and enjoying it and if I happen to also have success getting published and winning awards and being discussed seriously by serious people, to take that all as a bonus. They tell me I should write the same way some people play guitar or paint miniatures or participate in a tennis league or sing in the church choir--for the pure love of the thing. 

That's probably a healthy attitude if the goal is happiness. It's also something I'm unable to settle for. Anything other than "going pro"--being able to support myself as a writer, being known widely as a writer, having what I've written become part of public discourse--seems so unsatisfying to me, I'd rather not write at all. 

But it looks like I really am a rec player

Of course, the world doesn't care about what I wish were true. At this point, it looks like the level I'm at is the level I'm going to stay at. There have been a few thrilling moments when it looked like I might be able to break through, at least enough to be in the show if not to be one of the stars, but those never panned out. Assessing my prospects as a cold and impartial third-party observer, I'd say my chances of achieving what I want to achieve are maybe better than winning the lottery, but still so unrealistic that continuing to hope for it is almost a pathology. Reality is that I either need to become okay with writing at the rec league level or quit writing and find something else to do, maybe something I don't mind doing as a mere hobby. 

Of course, writing and tennis aren't perfect analogies

In tennis, the best players tend to win the most, because the winner of a tennis match is almost a perfectly objective matter. There can be some influence from judges (although instant replay has reduced that influence), and certainly bad luck can be involved. In any particular match, the lesser player might prevail. Over time, though, the best players tend to show themselves. Federer and Djokovic really are some of the best to ever play. 

Writing is much stranger. It isn't completely subjective, as some people rather recklessly claim, but it's not close to objective in the way that tennis is, either. Those considered our best writers today probably are in a meaningful sense worth reading more than many others who don't make it. There's a meaningful difference between a good writer and a bad one. That doesn't mean, though, that there is a meaningful distinction between one good writer and another. I know this not just as a writer, but as someone who's spent time as an editor whose job it was to pick the best writing to publish out of a huge pile of possibilities. I had some sense of what I considered good, and I could explain the contours of that aesthetic sensibility somewhat, but in the end, picking a winner always had a little bit of a darts-at-a-board feeling to it. Which means there is always some luck involved.

In an article about how Sally Rooney's success is a symbol of a new aesthetic of the "pose" over the "voice," Stephen March discussed how much the potential for success in writing has shrunk in the last fifty years. He compared it to a children's party game called "shark," similar to musical chairs, in which the space to land on keeps shrinking, until only one child can fit on the final spot. The only problem with that analogy as it relates to writing is that while the space available for writers to succeed in finding an audience, fame, relevance, and fortune is shrinking as print culture dies, the number of writers trying to cram into the few remaining spaces is actually increasing greatly. It's like if the PGA tour had cut its number of possible spots for golfers in every tournament by eighty percent since 1960, at the same time as the sport was undergoing a change from being primarily something wealthy white Western people did to something people of all kinds of backgrounds from all over the world do. 

Which means I'm in a game of musical chairs where there are eight chairs every time I play and six thousand people playing. To make it worse, the people who get the chairs aren't simply those who got there first, but those who got there with the most style, according to a style manual the judges can only partly explain. And for some reason, I'm not just playing for the love of musical chairs; I'm playing because getting a chair has somehow taken on life-or-death significance for me. 

Hope block

I've never struggled with writer's block. There's never a day when I woke up and didn't have things I wanted to say. It's been months, though, since I've really sat down to write those things, not because they aren't still queued up in my brain waiting to come out, but because every time I start to write something, I am overcome by a feeling that there's no point. Either I'm mistaken about the worth of what I want to say, or I'm just not one of the lucky elect. Either way, writing for me is, unless I'm holding dearly onto hope, an exercise in onanism. 

It's too much trouble to go back and count, but I've probably intimated on this blog a dozen times that I intended to quit writing, only to get back to it after a break. This is easily the longest break I've taken, so long that it no longer feels like a break. It feels like I'm really done, and in the end, I didn't even really decide to be done. The necessary impulse to write just sort of left me. 

It's possible to look upon this as a necessary, if painful, shattering of hope, of being, at last, disabused of my fantasy. It could be a good chance to go focus on something else. There are a couple of reasons, though, that I find it hard to just move on.

First, yes, it is possible I could live with the realization I'm not the writer I want to be. I'm also not the chess player I want to be, nor is my Korean as good as I'd like it to be, nor can I lift as much weight as I wish I could. None of those failures keeps me up at night or keeps me from doing the activity, so I should similarly learn to live with writing as another thing in which I wasn't born with the talent to match my ambitions. The only problem with that is that while I could live with being a less-than-stellar writer, I have absolute faith in my ability as a reader. If I'm wrong about my perceptiveness as a reader, then I literally know nothing. And the whole reason I've kept writing is because when I looked at my own writing as objectively as I could, it seemed to me to have worth. Failure as a writer, then, isn't just failure as a writer, but failure as a reader, which is a far more fundamental hit to my identity. 

Secondly, there's the question of what I do with the work I've done that never got published. I'm especially thinking here of the novel I wrote about the work I did for seventeen years, the novel I thought would help make sense of the otherwise senseless direction my life has taken. The novel I can't believe I couldn't find a publisher for, the novel whose failure to get published calls into question my soundness as a reader more than any other failure. Do I suffer the indignity of self-publishing, or do I keep my two unpublished novels and dozen unpublished short stories that comprise what I consider to be my best work in a drawer, to be brought out ceremonially to remind me of the perils of unmerited hope? 

Third, if I'm not a writer, what animates me? What gets me through the endless hours of my day job, a job which, while better than I deserve in life, is, as it is for almost everyone, not really what I set out to do in life? I've talked with more than one writer in similar circumstances to myself who has said he writes because if he didn't, he doesn't know what he'd do with himself and would probably just end it all. 

I know the title of this post has to do with confronting the end of your dreams without sounding morose, but it wouldn't be honest if I didn't at least admit that suicide is part of the equation for a lot of people when they hold onto the illusion of hope. The end of that illusion can be fatal, which is why many people continue holding onto the increasingly false hope their dreams will come true, or they keep themselves distracted with the endless noise and narrative that a connected age makes possible. 

Of all the illusions I've found it difficult to shake, the one I've had the hardest time overcoming is that I'd like for life to have a purpose. It would be best if it had a purpose generally, but failing that, I'd at least like for my life to have a purpose. I'd like for my own life to make sense in the way a satisfying narrative makes sense. Writing has always seemed like the way to make that happen, perhaps in too obvious a sense, which is maybe why it's such an illusion. 

Since I first abandoned religion about twenty-five years ago, I've always been struck by how much braver life without God requires one to be than even that required of a saint. When I read Sartre's Nausea, for example, I felt like nausea wasn't just a literary trope. It's how I really felt thinking about living a life without a higher power making sense of it for me. I felt rudderless and lost and a little bit terrified. I never really got over that feeling, even though it hasn't made me recant the "disabusing" of the notion of God. That feeling of being lost is a lot of what I've always wanted to express, the thing I thought made what I had to say worth reading. Not that it's a new concept, but that it's an idea that always needs to be made new, and I wanted to try.  

As brave as I've tried to be, I've never really gotten over thinking, without admitting it, that maybe life had some meaning I just couldn't see. I kept that feeling hidden away in a part of my brain somewhere, because I honestly needed the hope. If I'm now to finally be disabused of this last illusion, making me  fully live like a Sartrean Saint without hope, do I have it in me to do that? Do I have the strength to be definitively disillusioned?