Death Close Up

A person near and dear to me is deteriorating noticeably. I miss who this person once was, but I know this process is entirely expected and completely natural. Human life is not going to turn out well for any of us, at least to the extent that we strive for eternal life or that we hope that people will continue to think about us after we are dead.

The slow-motion death I am witnessing is causing me to meditate on the meaning of life on this rainy morning. At existential times like these, I have increasingly looked to the wisdom of the Stoics. I found this excellent collection or Stoic writings on death. Here are a few of my favorites:

No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers. —Seneca

“No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.” —Zeno of Citium

“Brief is man’s life and small the nook of the Earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.” —Marcus Aurelius

“I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.” —Epictetus

“It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” —Seneca

Choose to die well while you can; wait too long, and it might become impossible to do so. —Gaius Musonius Rufus

From this essay:

The Latin phrase memento mori literally means “remember that you have to die.” Over the centuries, scholars often would keep a symbolic memento mori image in their study, like a skull, as a reminder of their own mortality.

We are dying every day, in that there is less life in front of us and our accomplishments are increasingly behind us:

[W]e are, in fact, dying every day. This is not the body to which your mother gave birth, as the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius put it. The child dies to become the adolescent. The adolescent dies to become the man. The boy is father to the man but also predeceases him. We die every night when we go to sleep and awaken a different person, although we often barely notice what has been lost in the process.

I veer to the Woody Allen approach to death: "It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." This dovetails well with my assumption after death I will not exist that all forms of non-existence are the same. I've long assumed that after I die, it will be no different than the way things "were" before I was born, a thought expressed by the ancient Greek Sophist known as Prodicus of Ceos:

The state of nonexistence to which we permanently return after our death is no different than the one we were in, for countless aeons, before we were born
As Sigmund Freud suggested, as discussed here:

'It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death.' Because, as Freud goes on, '[...] whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators'. In fact, we could say that we assist at our own death, as if the one who dies in our imagination were a different person. We can't imagine how we would be like dead, without being able to think or see, for example. We can't accept our own death, 'at bottom no one believes in his own death'. As Freud claims, 'in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality'. There is no sense of the passage of time; time does not work chronologically in our unconscious.

This unconscious belief that nothing can happen to us may be seen as 'the secret of heroism'.

And it's a relief to me (based on my assumptions) that non-existence is nothing at all, which makes it a far superior option to some sort of post-death judgment, even where one has a 99% chance of ending up in "heaven" (whatever the hell "heaven" could possibly mean).

But now it is time for me to tend to my life, my remaining months of the 1,000 (or so) months I was bestowed at birth . . .. It's time for me to do my best to strut my remaining hours across the stage, as Shakespeare's MacBeth utters:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

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Gun Violence as “Unaddressed Moral Stain”

John McWhorter, writing at the NYT:

[C]onsider what Nicholas Kristof wrote for The Times in 2017: "In a typical year, more preschoolers are shot dead in America (about 75) than police officers are.” The carnage continues, and for the most part, Republican elected officials don’t appear to care, presumably because not enough of their constituents are willing to vote them out. As much as I value trying to see where the other side is coming from on a given issue, my curiosity and compassion have limits, and here I see true immorality — be it as a student of civics, language or just plain life — in the lack of interest some of our officials have in preventing the violence we routinely see.

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Kathleen Stock Dissects “The Family Sex Show” and its Enablers

Kathleen Stock does a deep dive here. What is driving this behavior? Fascinating and disturbing on many levels. And yes, I also wondered whether any of these people have children. An excerpt:

This week a story broke in the UK about a forthcoming theatre production, to be aimed at five-year-olds and older. The somewhat surprising title of this venture was The Family Sex Show. The theatre company responsible had impeccable-looking credentials, with breathless reviews and several awards for earlier productions. This new project, originally commissioned under the auspices of a Leverhulme Arts Scholarship, had been funded to the tune of £82,784 via two separate project grants from Arts Council England, and was developed in a number of prestigious venues including Battersea Arts Centre, the National Theatre, the Southbank Centre, and Theatre Royal Bath. The show’s mission, as described on the associated website, was to provide:
a fun and silly performance about the painfully AWKWARD subject of sex, exploring names and functions, boundaries, consent, pleasure, queerness, sex, gender and relationships.

. . .

Back in reality, there’s only so long that progressives can carry on pretending that the only possible objections to things like The Family Sex Show must come from prudes who don’t like sex, or bigots who don’t like queer people. Supercharged by the internet, contemporary sexual culture is spiralling off a cliff and taking a lot of young people with it, and increasingly large numbers of ordinary parents and teachers are finding this objectionable for very good reason. Some of these even vote Labour - or would do, if they could get a clear sign from their party that it’s prepared to make a distinction in public between its own position and “what Owen Jones thinks is OK”. If it can’t do this, it faces problems at the ballot box. Meanwhile, since nobody votes Arts Council members in or out, for theatre-goers there are still many long evenings ahead, sitting on uncomfortable chairs and watching white people with interesting haircuts talk earnestly about squirting.

Continue ReadingKathleen Stock Dissects “The Family Sex Show” and its Enablers

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 28: Morality and What to Do Next?

This is Chapter 28 of my advice to a hypothetical baby. I'm using this website to act out my time-travel fantasy of going back give myself pointers on how to avoid some of Life’s potholes. If I only knew what I now know . . . All of these chapters (soon to be 100) can be found here.

Why do people do the things they do? How can we make sense of all of this talk about what is "moral," and what is "right" and "wrong." These are an extremely difficult topics. As we already discussed, however, we need to beware systematizers who scold you to based on their mono-rules of morality. That was the main take-away from the previous chapter.

In this chapter, I’ll briefly discuss three approaches to morality that don’t rely on such simplistic rules. The first of these thinkers is Aristotle, who still has so very much to offer to us almost 2,500 years after he lived. His view of what it means to be virtuous is a holistic set of skills that requires lifelong practice. What a change of pace from the mono-rules of other philosophers. I’ll quote from Nancy Sherman’s book, Fabric of Character pp. 2 - 6:

As a whole, the Aristotelian virtues comprise just and decent ways of living as a social being. Included will be the generosity of benefactor, the bravery of citizen, the goodwill and attentiveness of friends, the temperance of a non-lascivious life. But human perfection, on this view, ranges further, to excellences whose objects are less clearly the weal and woe of others, such as a healthy sense of humor and a wit that bites without malice or anger. In the common vernacular nowadays, the excellences of character cover a gamut that is more than merely moral. Good character--literally, what pertains to ethics—is thus more robust than a notion of goodwill or benevolence, common to many moral theories. The full constellation will also include the excellence of a divine-like contemplative activity, and the best sort of happiness will find a place for the pursuit of pure leisure, whose aim and purpose has little to do with social improvement or welfare. Human perfection thus pushes outwards at both limits to include both the more earthly and the more divine.

But even when we restrict ourselves to the so-called ‘moral’ virtues (e.g. temperance, generosity, and courage), their ultimate basis is considerably broader than that of many alternative conceptions of moral virtue. Emotions as well as reason ground the moral response, and these emotions include the wide sentiments of altruism as much as particular attachments to specific others. . .  Pursuing the ends of virtue does not begin with making choices, but with recognizing the circumstances relevant to specific ends. In this sense, character is expressed in what one sees as much as what one does. Knowing how to discern the particulars, Aristotle stresses, is a mark of virtue.

It is not possible to be fully good without having practical wisdom , nor practically wise without having excellence of character  . . . Virtuous agents conceive of their well-being as including the well-being of others. It is not simply that they benefit each other, though to do so is both morally appropriate and especially fine. It is that, in addition, they design together a common good. This expands outwards to the polis and to its civic friendships and contracts inwards to the more intimate friendships of one or two. In both cases, the ends of the life become shared, and similarly the resources for promoting it. Horizons are expanded by the point of view of others, arid in the case of intimate relationships, motives are probed, assessed, and redefined.

Aristotle is talking to those of us who live in the real world, recognizing the complexity of the real world and helping us to navigate as best we can. Again, what a change from the mono-rules!  This real-world applicability and appreciation of nuance is something Aristotle has in common with the Stoics, which we discussed in Chapter 21. 

Here’s another approach, this one from modern times. For a long time, I've been almost obsessed that what we think of as moral is, in a real sense, beautiful and what we think of as immoral is ugly. Based on our reactions to situations that are "moral" and "immoral," there is no possible way that these things are not connected. Such an approach also recognizes that morality is not dictated by any static set of commandments or imperatives. Rather, both morality and art are, at least to some extent, in the eye of the beholder.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 28: Morality and What to Do Next?

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 27: The Exaggerated Benefits of Moral Rules

This is Chapter 27 of my advice to a hypothetical baby. I'm using this website to act out my time-travel fantasy of going back give myself pointers on how to avoid some of Life’s potholes. If I only knew what I now know . . . All of these chapters (soon to be 100) can be found here.

Today I’m here to warn you to watch out for those who cast about moral rules when they try to get you to obey them. Our most popular moral rules include these:

  • The Golden Rule
  • Utilitarianism
  • The Categorical Imperative

These rules do a very bad job of telling you what to do with your life. They don't even do a good job of telling you what to do next.

Let’s assume that you are Hitler trying tact in accordance with any of these rules. Imagine Hitler hearing about the Golden Rule of “Do Unto Others” at the peak of his tyrannical reign. Sure, he would think. “If I were any other intelligent person, then I would want me to run Germany exactly how I am running Germany!” If you think that Hitler would be applying the rule incorrectly, he would disagree. Further, there are no rules on how to apply the Golden Rule.

Utilitarianism has the same problem. It rule requires you to maximize well being by doing the thing that is the greatest good for the greatest number. Hitler would say: “I’m doing everything I can to bring the greatest good to the greatest number! You won’t believe how good this empire will be when I’m finished building it.” Again, you might disagree with Hitler here, but the way you apply utilitarianism depends on how you define “good,” and even reasonable people disagree intensely about what is “good.” Even massively dysfunctional and dangerous people like Hitler think they know what it means to be "good."

Kant’s Categorical Imperative demands that we take the maxim by which we propose to act and ask ourselves whether we could make that maxim a universally applicable maxim. Hitler would say that he was doing great things for Germany so, absolutely yes, everyone should act in accordance Hitler’s personal maxims of conduct. BTW, Kant famously declared that a proper maxim is to refrain from lying. He concluded that if a madman with a weapon asked you to tell him where your friend was (so he could kill him), you should not lie.

I'm not done kicking around our simplistic moral rules. People cavalierly state that we need to properly “apply” our moral rules as though “applying is a simple action akin to "applying" a band aid to a paper cut. It's clearly not that simple. There are many ways for people to consciously (and unconsciously) interpret our simple moral rules. They must:

• Decide what particular words of rule means.

• Distinguish the connotation from the denotation.

• Decide whether to read the rule narrowly or broadly.

• Decide whether the rule is persuasive and thus applicable in this particular case.

The bottom line is that our moral rules are hopelessly vague. They would never pass Constitutional muster. “Your Honor, we have alleged that the Defendant failed to act in such a way to result in the greatest good for the greatest number.” Although such a rule would tell us that we shouldn't set a forest on fire because we are bored and cold, we already knew that without the rule. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 27: The Exaggerated Benefits of Moral Rules