I read a lot as a kid, although I may not have always read the best the world had to offer. My mom, something of an expert in early literacy, believed it was important for young people to read what they liked to read, rather than for parents to obsess over whether their children picked entirely edifying material. Therefore, I was given a relatively long leash with my reading choices, as long as I was reading something. For a few years, one of the chief sources of reading material for my brothers and me were the slightly dated copies of Sports Illustrated my grandfather brought us. I don't know where he got them, but they were free, and we all liked reading the same articles and then going over favorite lines with each other afterwards.
When I got older, I started to get into fantasy novels a little bit. Not obsessively--sports-based reading was still my favorite--but enough that I would mix it up here and there. One series I picked up from my dad was Piers Anthony's Xanth series. It was set in a magical world with a geography very similar to Anthony's native Florida. It was also full of puns, something I found funny enough to read maybe the first dozen or so novels in the series, but eventually tiring enough I never read the many he's written since then.
I might have begun to catch on even as a young reader that Anthony isn't a virtuoso as a writer. If I didn't then, I definitely realized it when I read of few of his novels to my son several years ago. Even my son seemed to realize something was amiss. He kind of liked the first novel, but by the end of the second, he was ready to move on to something new.
Still, I wouldn't say that Anthony is a bad writer. He's an example of a kind of writing I have a greater tolerance for than many people in literary fiction seem to have, one with some great ideas but who is a little bumpy getting those ideas across. (One of the things that perhaps delayed my ability to get stories published was my level of tolerance in my own work for less than stellar presentation as long as the idea underlying it seemed sound to me.) In particular, I was fond of the thought experiments that appeared in his work.
Probably the most notable thought experiments in Xanth are the meetings various mortals have with the demon who created the world. This demon is apparently locked in some kind of supernatural game with other demons, and he twice (that I read) asked mortals for help in winning his game. (If I recall correctly, Anthony admitted to borrowing some ideas for these scenes from articles he read about game theory.)
(Aside: I won't delve into the alleged misogyny in his works. I'm sure it's there, but for me to deal with it, I'd have to go back and read him seriously, something I just don't have time to do right now. It's got nothing to do with what made me remember Xanth recently.)
Yeah, like, a whole lot of puns
Reading about "realist" political philosophy brought another Xanth scene to mind
There's another, less pronounced thought experiment from Xanth that came to mind for me the other day. I was thinking about the nature of "America first" arguments, and, more broadly, about "realist" philosophies of how a government should behave in international geopolitics. It started when I read about John Mearsheimer's belief that Western bad behavior was primarily to blame for Russian aggression in Ukraine. It echoed comments I've heard from other quarters, always coming from people who identify themselves as proponents of "realist" political philosophies.
According to this line of thinking, the West has made a mistake trying to promote the growth of liberal democracies friendly to the West in places like Georgia and Ukraine. Expansion of the EU and NATO were needlessly poking the Russian bear, which nobody thought of as a threat prior to 2014. These analysts claim the US should have allowed Russia to maintain enough hegemony over its near neighbors for its own comfort, even if this meant letting those countries fester in a quasi-vassal state status. Even if it meant their citizens had to live under autocracy.
Realists would argue that the reason we should have allowed this to happen, rather than attempting to bring these countries more closely into a Western orbit, was for one simple reason: it would have been in our self-interest to do so. In "great powers" politics, the U.S. should no more think of fostering friendly democracies on Moscow's doorstep than Moscow should think of placing a missile base in the Yucatan Peninsula. This just foments conflict, and conflict is bad for U.S. interests, measured--I suppose--in things like stock values and gas prices and GDP and whether people have the emotional energy to spend on some dumb event that happened at the Oscars.
Trump was apparently influenced by this kind of thinking. His "America first" concept (I won't call it a political philosophy, because I don't think Trump is capable of sustaining any line of thinking deeply enough that it could rightly be called a "philosophy") seemed to involve a fairly straightforward, transactional calculation of debits and credits of any possible move in international politics. If something was "good" for America (according to whatever measuring stick he used for "good"), then we did it. If it was bad for America, we didn't.
The healing spring and the complexities of self-interest
While thinking about this whole realist idea of how the world works lately, some neuron in my brain harkened back to something from Xanth. I had to get onto Reddit, find an Anthony community, ask a question, and wait a few days to fully remember what it was, but eventually, I found it.
In the first novel in the Xanth series, A Spell for Chameleon, the main character Bink comes across a wounded soldier. He is directed by a dryad to a nearby magical spring that brings healing to those who touch or drink its waters. While Bink is investigating the spring, a finger he lost as a child is restored. However, the spring stirs to life and warns him that. "Who drinks of me and acts against my interest will lose all that I bring him."
Seems legit.
Bink immediately sees complications in this condition placed by the spring, because he wonders how the spring will judge actions for their effect relative to its interests. He assumes that there could be no logging or mining near the spring, because these would harm it in an immediate and tangible way. But what if a king levied a tax on lumber, and because of that tax, lumberjacks cut more wood in order to make up for lost revenue? Would the spring cause all those who had been helped by the spring to fight against the king? In fact, "...any action had widening results, like the ripples of a stone dropped in a pool. In time such ripples could cover the whole ocean. Or the whole of Xanth." Bink wonders if, should the spring's magic become strong enough, the spring might become the real ruler of Xanth.
Bink realizes, though, that the interests of one spring are not the interests of all springs, nor of Xanth. He rejects the spring's terms and tells the spring to take its healing back.
Bink was smart enough to realize something advocates of a narrowly defined self-interest fail to point out: that self-interest is complicated. Of course we all want what's good for us. Idealists want that, too. But what's ultimately good for us depends, often, on the unintended consequences of millions of decisions, none of which can be accurately guessed ahead of time, because the entire system is irreducibly complex.
We have, of course, a great deal of responsibility to try to read the realities of the present, break down that which is complex, and make our best effort to calculate the effects of certain actions versus others. I myself mostly objected to the war in Iraq because of pragmatic, rather than idealistic reasons; that is, I thought the stated goals were unachievable, not necessarily immoral if they had been achieved. Right now, I'm more than half convinced the United States should get over the idealistic opposition to proliferation and accept North Korea as a nuclear state, mostly because the practical reality is that we've failed to prevent them from becoming one, so we might as well try to live with that reality.
We have an obligation to reduce the complexity as much as we can, but at some point, we are making best guesses. A commitment to always keep recalculating for self-interest, based on new information, is a formula for being in a constant cycle of reassessment and reapplication of new strategies. That's great if you work for a think tank and you want to be producing a new calculation every few weeks, but it's bad for formulating a predictable and consistent policy.
Much more to the point than that, though, if we are humble enough to assume that we're going to miscalculate now and again and end up harming our interest in ways we didn't intend, shouldn't we do so for reasons we believe in, reasons we accept as worthy of suffering for? Rather than decide, case-by-case, whether supporting one would-be democracy or another is more trouble than it's worth, isn't it better to say that we believe, in the long run, that democracies (assuming they're organic and not something we're foisting on other countries) are worth supporting, even if there are costs? To say that in the long run, we believe that the costs of not supporting a democracy are worse?
Mearsheimer stated that there are always practical and moral elements to politics. He said it would be great if the two always aligned, but that sometimes, a country has to accept an immoral policy because the costs of the moral policy are too great. I wonder, though, if in an irreducibly complex game, it isn't ultimately safer sometimes to take the moral route simply because it's the moral route. This is what Bink elected to do when he gave up his own physical wellbeing in order to keep from putting himself in a compromising position. (In the story, there is a twist when he makes this decision, but the point is that he was willing to make this decision.) Sometimes, the very complexity and danger of the game might make a certain moral naivete more, rather than less, safe.
Realism in political science doesn't mean "realistic," as opposed to someone who believes in fantasy. Realists emphasize the fundamentality of conflict or competition in world events, while idealists emphasize cooperation. It's not supposed to be a question of dreamers versus realists, but I think the cognate nature of the two words has led some to believe that political realists are more grounded in the real world. In fact, though, both realists and idealists care about self-interest and are looking at the real world for clues about how to achieve it. One might say the fundamental difference between them is more one of how both come to grips with irreducible complexity.
The most realistic, pragmatic, eyes-wide-open, non-dreamy belief might be that making hard political choices for moral reasons might sometimes be the most pragmatic solution. As I've suggested before, sometimes, when faced with a decision where it's impossible to predict all the bifurcating future time lines, it might be best to rely not on calculations, but on what I've called ontological ethics. That is, when in doubt, we make decisions guided by a sense of who we are.
We might still, of course, make wrong calls this way, but there are benefits that can accrue from making decisions out of a sense of who we are. It gives our allies reassurance that we will remain consistent even in the shifting face of events. It gives our adversaries security that they can predict our policies, making them less likely to miscalculate. It gives us an internal sense of purpose and mission. There are real, pragmatic values to these things. One could say that in the long run, moral decisions might be better for our self-interest.
Or not. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes is said to have noted, we're all dead. At some point, this experiment in democracy will fail or fade, or the multitudinous problems of the human race will doom us to extinction. If we have to go down, though, I'd rather go down for something I believe in than a wrong guess about what would have been good for us. I'd rather refuse the immediate good that seems to offer itself rather than be compromised by it. The only way to win a game of irreducible complexity, perhaps, is not to play it.
Since Russia first invaded Ukraine, I've been stuck on the same bad idea: that I should go to Ukraine to help fight against the invaders. This is an inherently stupid idea, for any number of reasons. I've been having foot pain for over a year, pain doctors can't quite figure out the source of and which makes it difficult for me to walk long distances or to run any distance. Now to add to that, I'm getting a test next week to see if I have a hernia. I'm kind of old, and have a lot of miles on me. Even though I was once a Marine, I was a linguist, and don't have any advanced combat training. Even if I did, I'd have forgotten it all by now. I'd likely be in the way. Then, there are all the practical reasons, like how I'm my family's main earner and it would cause hardship if I left. Still, in spite of how terrible I know the idea is, I can't put it out of my head. Russia has invaded a country without cause, and it's now hitting civilian targets without compunction. To act like the world is a normal place right now seems perverse.
Yet life around me does seem to be going on like normal. The weather turned warm in the last few days, and people were out biking and walking together. A few grills in the neighborhood reemerged, the scent of meat cooked outdoors mixing with the already-prevalent South Asian spices that typically fill the air in the streets around here, flooding my senses with the feeling of being surrounded by people alive and enjoying life.
And why shouldn't they be enjoying themselves? The United States government has decided it has limited means it can take to help Ukraine without making the situation much worse. If the government is already at the end of its resources, what can any of us do? It won't alleviate suffering if we suffer, too. It reminds me of what Thae Yong Ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to the UK who then defected to South Korea, concluded when his family decided to defect:
"I decided to claim my rights as a human being. I couldn't live as a slave any longer. Having lived my life that long as a slave was enough. I made up my mind to defect. If we defected, it would cause significant problems for our siblings and parents, but we chose to first seek freedom for ourselves. It would suffice if we lived our lives to the full for their sake" (translation mine).
Thae was lucky, because by extreme good fortune, he was able to defect along with his wife and two children, whereas most North Korean diplomats are not able to take their children abroad with them. Still, he knew he would be making life harder for family members not lucky enough to escape. He made the decision that rather than everyone living as a slave together in North Korea, he would find what happiness he could for himself and his family, and that happiness would justify his decision. It would have to.
We who are, for the moment, spared from warfare in our streets could choose to suffer in order to honor the suffering of others, but that would only ensure that there is only ever suffering in the world. Moreover, this isn't just something that started a few weeks ago; there was more than enough suffering long before Ukraine that anyone who was paying attention could have felt guilt over enjoying life. As you drink your coffee perusing the internet (I assume for hours and hours, because you've finally ended up bored enough to visit this blog), a child is being abused by her parents. Many children are dying of preventable diseases and malnutrition. Someone was killed by a drunk driver. Somebody who supports a family living paycheck to paycheck just lost their job. Before Ukraine, there was already Yemen.
There is, in fact, so much suffering going on in the world at any moment, that the quest for those who are temporarily spared from suffering to enjoy themselves on behalf of those who cannot is far too much to take. None of us can possibly love life enough to somehow balance out all that suffering and make life on Earth appear to make sense somehow.
Some people assert that the suffering of others should make me all the more grateful for what I have. On the one hand, I understand this sentiment. Knowing that innocent people are dying in Yemen or fighting for their lives in Kyiv should provide me with enough sense of proportion to be kind to the server who is running late with my order or to suffer Beltway traffic with grace. In another, deeper sense, though, the notion that because terrible things have happened to others but I personally have been spared I should therefore be grateful is perverse.
Thankful to whom? To God? I don't have one specific reason why I'm an agnostic now. There are a whole host of reasons. If I had to pick just one, though, I think the existence of suffering might be the one I'd pick. Not just suffering, but suffering that is both broad (abundant and ubiquitous) and deep (profound and acute). Does anyone really believe in thanking God that a meteor struck the house next door and spared you? What kind of capricious lunatic runs creation like that? Not one I'd ever express gratefulness toward.
There is a difference between acknowledging I live better than ninety percent of the globe and being thankful that ninety percent of humanity doesn't have it very good. The knowledge that human life is such a shabby affair for so many makes it much harder, rather than easier, to enjoy my relative good fortune. Certainly, it makes it hard for me to live life to the fullest on behalf of those who are barely living.
All writers have had to deal with the question of how to support themselves so they can focus on writing. The top four solutions in history have been:
1) Succeeding commercially enough to be able to support oneself. This is nice work if you can get it, but most writers, even the ones we remember through the ages, have not.
2) Marry well. Also nice work if you can get it, and a few writers, both male and female, have, living of the fortunes of their spouses while turning their attention to writing. Most people don't manage to do this, though, so they have to rely on either option three or option four.
3) Accept a life of penury. Much like those called to religious professions might take vows of poverty, some view writing as a pursuit so serious, it requires limiting the demands of the flesh to the bare minimum.
4) Take on all the normal responsibilities the majority of humans do, and do the best you can to write with the time and energy you have left over after all of that.
As I've mentioned many times on here before, there was a time in my life when I really thought I was going to choose option number three. I wrote a whole personal manifesto in which I determined that lots of people can have kids, but only a few can create lasting art. Based, I guess, on the notion of scarcity, I felt like it was therefore important enough for me to devote myself to writing that it would be okay if I never had kids or found a serious job.
I'm not sure what changed my mind. It might have been going to graduate school and realizing how few people who "did art for a living" I liked. It might have been that I got tired of leaning on family and friends who had real jobs to help me survive. Maybe it was a biological impulse to reproduce reasserting itself after lying dormant. It could have been all of these things. In any event, I quit graduate school with only a Master's and got what for lack of a better term we'll call a "real job." I've been in the "real" economy since. Mrs. Heretic and I had one biological child and adopted another. It's been rewarding in all the ways living a normal life can be. No, I wouldn't trade my kids for a novel people will still be reading a thousand years from now.
Not for lack of trying, but I could never quite shake the need to write. I tried to become a normal person who worried about normal things, but there were two hard facts I couldn't escape: the world didn't make sense, and I felt a need to try to make sense of it. Writing was how I tried. It still is.
A funny thing happened on the way to taking door number four, though. I meant to get the kind of job that would pay the bills and enable me to take care of family but leave me free to reserve most of my mental and emotional energy for life outside of work. That didn't happen. Well, I mean, maybe it did. Some people in my profession do seem to do their nine-to-five and then leave it at the plant. They go home and coach little league or have bowling night or whatever it is normal people do, and they don't think about work when they're not there.
I've never been able to achieve true indifference to work. What I do has seemed important enough to me to deserve my best effort, or at least as close to my best effort as is possible to achieve at work. That's meant spending time on my own to improve my understanding of matters related to work. Mostly, it's meant trying to improve my skills in whatever language I've been translating from, because that was always the core ability I had that would make or break the quality of my output.
I've come home from work, then, and felt the urge to keep on working. But that's not the only impulse I've felt. I also feel the impulse to work on writing, because the universe ain't getting any more comprehensible. And I also feel guilty about not being involved enough in family matters, such as keeping on my son about getting ready for grownup life. Or maybe I feel guilty about how Mrs. Heretic sometimes wants a partner she can sit down and watch television with, but I'm always off trying to fit a full-day's effort on three different things into a single day.
Usually, this all manifests itself in one very mundane, but to me very important, question each day. What do I do with the little bit of time each day I get to call my own? Do I write? If I do, do I write fiction? Do I write for this blog? If not writing, then I should read? If so, what do I read? Should I read Korean news? A Korean fiction book? A Korean non-fiction book? What about some modern fiction in English, so I can learn from it to improve my own writing as well as better know the lay of the land in a world I want to inhabit? Or what about reading some non-fiction about a science or history or philosophy or religion topic, something to feed my soul as it grapples for answers about the world?
None of this makes me unique, of course. Everyone has limited time and more things they'd like to do than they have time available. Lately, I've come to a realization, though, about how badly I've managed my time in my life. Not that I haven't managed to buckle down and get productive. I've done that plenty. But I keep changing my mind about what I'd like to be productive about. One week I think I should put dreams away and focus on knowing everything about Korea I can. The next I tell myself what's life for if not to follow my dreams, so I chuck work and write. Or read something completely not work-related. At the moment, I'm trying to have it both ways and read a book on religion (God's Problem by Bart Ehrman), but the Korean translation of it.
All I've really managed to accomplish by ping-ponging back and forth between subjects in my life is that I'm okay at a few things but probably not great at any. I've suspected this for a long time, but every time I try to force myself to pick one thing to go all-in trying to master, I am wracked by self-doubt. What if I've picked the wrong thing? What if I'm putting all my effort into something I'll never be that good at? The result is that I start and stop efforts to keep moving in one direction over and over.
Lately, I've been doing something with my free time I've never done before: nothing. I'm so exasperated with myself and my inability to pick something, I just do nothing. I fritter my precious free time away, hate myself for having wasted it, then do it again the next day.
Essentially, I feel I've frittered so much time away that I'm now too old to become great at anything. At that point, I become momentarily frantic and start to work doubly hard to make up for lost time. Soon after that, I am overwhelmed by how hard it is to get better even when I'm trying my best, start thinking that all the effort is pointless, and I stare off at nothing for an hour until it's time to go to bed.
I usually return to the idea that what I ought to do is focus on work and other practical matters I all too often neglect. I should make money, save money, and use that money to help people who need it. It's what I settled on in my early thirties when I gave up on writing. And I succeeded for years at keeping my mind on secular matters. But I just couldn't keep that other person locked away for good.
Some intellectual-minded people tend to look down on those who live an unexamined life. I don't do that at all. The wise preacher in Ecclesiastes--possibly the book that has dealt with how little the universe makes sense better than any other--didn't come up with much better. "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart...Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days" (Ecc 9:7,9).
I probably still have a few more rounds of futilely cycling through trying to get better at things I think of as "important" in my life, but I'm starting to imagine the later acts of my life not involving much serious thought at all.
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.
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.
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.
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 ofseppuku. 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.
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.
