I’m Going to Die

(A version of this appeared on the Albany Times-Union’s “Faith & Values” page, June 21)

America’s deaths are projected to rise (baby boomers being mortal) from 2.59 million in 2010 to 4.25 million in 2050. That could include you (or, worse, me). And while best-selling books claim to prove Heaven’s reality, even most believers aren’t eager to depart.

I heard a philosopher on the radio recently calling fear of death irrational. Human brains have no way to mentally model nonexistence; and he analogized one’s life to what’s between the covers of a book, saying that Long John Silver doesn’t fear what happens when Treasure Island reaches its final page.

“That makes no sense,” my wife remarked.

Marcus Aurelius

I agreed. Philosophers going back to Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius (whom I’ve written about) have similarly struggled to persuade us – or, really, themselves – that death is nothing, basically because one won’t be around to experience being dead. But we understand what ending a life means. The radio philosopher’s analogy was silly because Long John Silver is a fictional construct with no consciousness.

Death is loss – complete and total. That one won’t suffer afterwards – as one grieves the loss of a dollar, or a beloved – may be a small comfort, but very small. Indeed, I think most of us would prefer if posthumousness could somehow be suffered. At least that would be something. Better than nothingness.

My cat, not knowing he’ll die, is unafraid.  My knowledge is both a blessing and a curse, but surely more of a blessing. Ignorance may be a sort of bliss, but I prefer an authentic life, grounded in reality. That includes the reality of death. Accepting this is  painful, yes, but it’s part of being alive in the fullest sense; looking life squarely in the eye.

Fear is healthy insofar as it alerts us to dangers and motivates preparation and avoidance. But while of course it makes sense to act to postpone death, in the end it comes, and fearing the inevitable is useless.  However, our thinking about mortality includes more than simple fear. While the radio philosopher was right at least that we can’t wrap our heads around the concept of nonexistence, what one does fully understand the loss of everything one values. That anticipatory regret is not at all irrational.

We must figure out how to live with it. And it does have one beneficial aspect, of putting other anxieties in perspective.  The same radio program also featured a man with acute stage fright, a folk singer. But why obsess about appearing in public (what’s the worst that could happen?) when Death is on your dance card? If you can live with that, no lesser fear should terrify you.

Moreover, its being limited makes life all the more precious. And I don’t allow knowing it will end subvert my pleasure in living it.  Rather than morbid contemplation of what being dead will be like, I prefer to focus instead on what being alive is like (that itself being enough of a puzzle, as I’ve written). Rather than seeing death as a theft, I see my life as a gift. I don’t take my existence for granted; au contraire, there was no cosmic necessity for it, and I consider it almost miraculous.

To crave more of it may be natural, yet foolish if that corrodes what one does have. As Richard Dawkins has said, let go the impossible wish for another life, and live the one you’ve got.

Why Both Left and Right Are Wrong

The Left’s calling itself “progressive,” while in some ways annoying, isn’t entirely wrong. A key element is caring about other people, including those outside the traditional ambit of human concern (our own families and tribes), and even sometimes including non-people. This is indeed progressive; this widening of human concern, working toward a better, fairer world, with lessening conflict and violence, compared to the past, reflects very real progress. It’s ironic that another typical attribute of the “progressive” temperament is denial of such progress.

It’s because being critical and cynical flatters the Left’s intellectual vanity. Indignation is a satisfying emotion. To be an optimist, on the other hand, to believe well of others, and that we’re making progress, seems just too sappy. It isn’t hip.

The Left views market capitalism with hostility, as though it’s some kind of perverted system artificially imposed by a conspiracy of a few to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest; which could be changed if we wanted to. Not a single element of that catechism reflects reality. A market economy is merely the natural, indeed inevitable, way that any bunch of humans interacts. Yes, with friends and family, we do a lot of sharing. But otherwise if you have something of value – be it an object, or your labor – you won’t give it without getting something in return, indeed the most you can get (bar fraud or cheating). That is in fact merely justice (a word the Left loves). Striving to do well for oneself isn’t wrong; mostly people do that by creating value for others who’ll pay them for it. And this is how we’ve made a better, richer world — by people putting in efforts in order to improve their own situation. Is this the “greed” we hear so much about?

And the Left’s conception of justice tends to omit what ought to be its principal component: deservingness. While they do insist no one deserves to be poor, they meantime seem to deny that anyone deserves to be rich. At least they don’t see any entitlement to keep riches one has earned.

The right is less confused about the economics, but frankly tends to be grinch-hearted. Its conception of justice is flawed in mirror-image of the Left’s – believing that when people don’t succeed it’s because they didn’t deserve to. That the less successful are basically slackers and moochers (this is why Romney’s infamous “47%” comment was so resonant). The right doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge how much luck determines one’s situation. And if the Left is overly obsessed with inequality, the right is too complacent about it.

Even cave people were humane enough to take care of the sick, infirm, or injured. Today’s right no longer seems to regard this as a fundamental societal obligation. Part of the problem is that the whole issue of helping the needy is crapped up by the fact that the great bulk of “help” goes to people who aren’t needy at all (look at the farm program, for example, most of whose subsidies go to millionaires). This blatant milking of the government teat tends to taint all such spending.

But we are a very rich society that can easily afford to take care of those less fortunate – if only we focused on just that.

Lawn Fetishism Revisited – “I See Nothing”

Behind my property is a small tract stranded between houses, apparently unsuitable for siting another. So, unattended, it grows into a mini-jungle. Behind that is a patch of grass invisible from any house. I didn’t even know it was there until one recent morning when I spotted my neighbor mowing it.

Why mow grass no one can see? I’m not sure whether this is crazy or weirdly admirable. I’m reminded of Steve Jobs fussing over the aesthetics of computer insides. “Nobody will even know about it,” his minions objected. “But I will,” Jobs said.

I wrote a few years ago about “Lawn Fetishism.” My neighbor actually seems to enjoy mowing. Now my wife seems to have the bug. I used to hire a mower, but lately she insists on doing it herself. (Maybe she didn’t think I was having it done often enough.)

Now, Therese is a poet, so of course she has her own poetic approach to landscaping.

She explained to me that the front “is for show,” so she mows it in the conventional way. But the back is her playground, with several rectangular patches allowed to grow wild, among the mowed areas. In addition, in between our lawn and the mini-jungle, she has created a –well, I don’t know what to call it. (See picture) Nor, quite what to make of all this. It’s not anything I’d ever have thought of doing. But grass is not one of my preoccupations. And she likes it.

When I was a kid there was a TV comedy, “Hogan’s Heroes,” about Americans in a German POW camp, always into shenanigans. A fat middle-aged Sergeant Schultz was supposed to be guarding them. But Schultz wanted life easy. So when shenanigans were going down, he’d raise his eyes skyward saying, “I see nothing. I see nothing.”

I find this phrase very useful in my marriage.

Superbugs and Evolution: Losing the War on Germs

A recent PBS Frontline documentary spotlighted “Superbugs” – bacteria resistant to antibiotics, a growing menace.  Despite some great victories in our war against germs, the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. We could still lose in the end.

Why? Both this hour-long documentary, and a recent Daily Show segment on the same topic, said the problem is over-use of antibiotics. It sounded as though the drugs are just wearing out, like an old pair of shoes. But I was struck by the fact that in both shows, one word – the true explanation – was never uttered.

That word is  E V O L U T I O N.

Bacteria are evolving, exactly as Darwinian “survival of the fittest” natural selection predicts. Normally evolution is fairly slow. But antibiotics have introduced an element of extreme selective pressure. An antibiotic might kill 99.9% of an infection – with that one bug in a thousand surviving because it has some unique genetic feature making it resistant. And that one, with all the other bugs gone, will reproduce merrily to replace them. Soon that genetic feature will be found in more than one in a thousand bugs. Much more.*

That’s why over-use of antibiotics is such a problem; every time we kill 99.9% of a bacterial population, we create a great opportunity for the 0.1% survivors (much harder to kill) to proliferate.

Why did both TV shows studiously avoid this clear, fundamental evolutionary explanation of the very problem being discussed? I am no conspiracy theorist; but I can’t help thinking it was a conscious decision, because half the American public disbelieves evolution, and would shut their ears if it’s mentioned.**

Shutting of ears is almost non-metaphoric here. I’ve been reading Peter Watson’s The Age of Atheism, an intellectual history of the past century-plus. Naturally Darwin comes up a lot. While many people had great difficulty accommodating Darwinism in their belief systems, that was something most recognized they had to do. They couldn’t close their ears to Darwin. Even religionists who gave it any serious thought could see that evolution was obviously true.

Display in Kentucky’s Creation Museum

But then, in America, something bizarre happened. A substantial societal segment decided they could simply close their ears to it. A whole industry rose up, catering to them, supplying pseudo-scientific cover. They even built a museum, in Kentucky, a monument to ignorance. And ignorance it is, willful ignorance – a will not to know.

For me, it’s enough work striving to know what is true. I can’t imagine how much work it would take to refuse to know something that’s true. But I guess it can be done if you set your mind to it. Or close your mind.

While evolution (and climate) denial are mostly right-wing things, the left is not free of equivalent scientific denialism. That defines opposition to genetic modification, a myopic and harmful stance. Likewise very harmful to public health is the anti-immunization madness, another mainly lefty fetish. I feel beset by irrationality from all directions.

A final point:

I am a strong advocate for free market economics. Critics mock and caricature this as holding markets should be trusted to do everything, and governments nothing. That’s ridiculous.

Now, part of the superbug problem is that pharmaceutical companies are not developing new drugs to fight them. It’s economics – it costs a huge amount of money to research, develop, test, and bring to market any new drug. And it makes much more economic sense to put that investment into a medicine that people will take for the rest of their lives, for a chronic condition, than a one-time-only drug for what is still a rather rare illness.

Drug companies aren’t charities, and that doesn’t make them villains. They serve a function, with products vastly improving life quality for millions; but they cannot serve every function you (or I) might like.

But that leaves us with a problem not just for the (still rare) victims of drug-resistant infections, but for society as a whole, because this could potentially explode to epidemic proportions. Maybe a charity like the Gates foundation could tackle it. But it seems to me uniquely the kind of thing government should do. That’s our vehicle for doing things, on behalf of society as a whole, that no individual or private entity can be expected to do.

As Ronald Reagan said, government’s first duty (the reason it was invented) is to protect us. Mainly from each other. But drug resistant germs could be a bigger threat.

* Frontline noted that, even more dangerously, such anti-drug genes can also be swapped among living bacteria.

** My wife says she searched their website and Frontline does seem to have tabooed the word “evolution.”

Iraq’s Tragedy: “Nothing Is Written”

Iraq’s civil war is a metastasizing of a 7^th century religious dispute over whether Ali was the first caliph or the fourth.

Now, obviously, the “firsters” are blessed by Allah, while the “fourthers” are accursed and deserve ignominious death. There’s no atrocity too far in pursuing this vendetta.

Rodney King said, “Can’t we all just get along?” Iraqis say, “Fuck that.”

This Ali business is in fact the root of the Sunni-Shiite schism. Some insist we have no dog in this fight. And it’s true that Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki has fueled the conflict by stupidly conducting himself as Shiite leader rather than leader of the whole nation.

Nouri Al-Maliki

However, bad as he is, he’s a lot less bad than those bloodthirsty ISIS/ISIL creeps (Zarqawi’s old gang), whose triumph would be ghastly. And while they probably can’t take over the country, they could effectively break off a piece of it.

I weep at this sorry denouement to the Iraq War; while its critics will again crow, “nyah, nyah, nyah.” From the narrow standpoint of America’s interests, Iraq might now be worse than we started with. But Tony Blair says today’s mess is less a consequence of Bush’s Iraq policy than of Obama’s Syria non-policy. Certainly true insofar as ISIS/ISIL grew into a monster only in consequence of Syrian developments. And how might things be today if we hadn’t invaded in 2003 and Saddam were still in power? Counterfactual history is a difficult discipline.

But it’s almost conventional wisdom that attempting to remake Iraq for the better in 2003 was foolhardy from the get-go. This is the Andrew Bacevich “Limits of Power” school that says don’t even try. (They love the word hubris.) Yet human beings were not put on this planet to leave well enough alone and fatalistically accept the status quo. If so, we’d still be living in caves. Robert Kennedy liked to quote George Bernard Shaw: “Some see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”

The fatalistic Bacevichian sees a society like Iraq’s as immutable, with any effort at change bound to fail. That used to be said of America’s south and its racial culture, integral to that society’s very fabric. Yet optimists were undeterred in trying to change it – and it did dramatically change. (Today, the state with the most black elected officials is Mississippi.) And in 1945, two of the world’s worst miscreants were Germany and Japan. They too were totally changed. Nothing in human affairs is immutable.

In fact, that’s in our biology. Our great evolutionary adaptation was our ability to change ourselves, when circumstances change.

So why not Iraq? You might say that’s different – a different kind of society, in a different historical situation. All true, but who could have predicted such vast change in Germany, Japan, or the U.S. South? The key difference, vis-à-vis Iraq, was vision, commitment, leadership, energy. I fault Bush not for aiming high in Iraq but for botching the shot. Iraq might have been transformed – but not by our half-assed effort. After all the human and moral capital expended in this venture, the fecklessness of the follow-through was criminal.

Of course Iraqis themselves bear prime responsibility. After all is said and done, we Americans did give them the opportunity for a better country, and they’ve muffed it. Because they’re not a nation of Rodney Kings. Yet still it didn’t have to be this way. Just as cultures are not immutable, nor is history an ineluctable force. Individuals matter; actions matter. It wasn’t inevitable that Iraq would get a Maliki. In fact, in the election that brought him to power, Maliki actually got fewer votes than Iyad Allawi – who might have been a different kind of visionary leader.

I’m reminded of a scene in Lawrence of Arabia. On the desert camel march, one man falls behind. Lawrence decides to go back for him. Another tries to stop him. “That man is finished,” he says. “It is written.”

Lawrence replies: “Nothing is written.”

Mind, Memory, and Movies

The human brain has about 85 billion neurons, most connected to thousands of others, making for trillions of connections – the most complex object known. I’ve written before about what wonders it performs.

Recently in a newspaper I came to a page full of text of no interest, and quickly turned the page. But I said to myself, “Did I see the word breasts?” With scientific curiosity, I went back and searched; sure enough, there it was, buried amid thousands of words. How could my brain have picked it out in that fraction of a second? Why? (Well, one can guess why.)

We imagine memory works like a video camera. Not so. The brain does hold such information, but only briefly, then discards it. What it retains is only a bare thematic outline. When you later “remember,” what the brain does is to refer to that outline and to fill in the details by, basically, making them up. Really! And those confabulations change over time. (This is why “eyewitness testimony” in courts is often specious.)

This was brought home to me when I wrote an autobiographical memoir. I thought my memories were fairly accurate. But checking against diaries written when events were fresh showed how differently I remembered them years later. And when, years later still, I re-read that autobiography, I was surprised yet again to find that my memories had further changed.

And yet the brain does have an uncanny ability to file away information. Recently my wife told me someone said she reminded him of Sheila Miles.

“Sara Miles?” I said.

“Maybe. Who’s that?”

“Actress; I think she was in a film – something about an Irish girl and a soldier? I can’t recall the title. Must’ve been 1970, since I do remember the girl I saw it with.” (And I could recall just one scene in that movie. Guess what? Breasts again.)

Next morning, while coming awake (a good time for this), the word “daughter” entered my mind. In another moment, I had it: Ryan’s Daughter.

Now, I’m no film buff, and had you asked me, “Who was in Ryan’s Daughter?” I doubt I could have answered. Yet given the name Miles – even with the wrong first name – my brain made the connection. The information was still there, buried, unthought of, for 44 years.

Then there was the time I greeted my wife with, “Good morning, old man.”

She gave me a quizzical look. “What made you call me that?”

“Why, I have no idea! It just popped out of my mouth.” I’d never said it before.

Well, that night we watched The Third Man, having ordered it from Netflix. I had a vague recollection of having seen it on TV as a kid, nearly half a century earlier. If asked, I couldn’t have told you a thing about that film. Maybe that Orson Welles was in it. Maybe. And seeing the movie again now, nothing seemed familiar.

So I was gobsmacked when the Welles character calls the Joseph Cotten character “old man!”

That tiny detail wasn’t even significant in the film, but somehow, my brain had squirreled it away, and half a century later, unconsciously prompted by our Netflix order, put the words into my mouth, without my even realizing why.

Now if only I could remember where I left those keys . . . .

Journalist Ethics: An Oxymoron?

 

I heard a talk by Rosemary Armao, a journalism professor at SUNY Albany, investigative editor in Eastern Europe and other foreign locales, and a regular WAMC radio panelist.

She began by posing the question, can one be both a good journalist and a good human being? To explore this, she discussed the case of Oliver Sipple, who became an instant hero in 1975 by shoving a woman trying to shoot at President Ford, deflecting her aim. Sipple was a gay rights activist but not wholly “out of the closet.” News stories revealing such personal details had an apparent role in his eventual suicide.

Armao asked audience members whether they would have published Sipple’s gay background. A large majority said no. But her own answer (and mine) was a definite yes, because Sipple’s act made him a public figure, and journalism’s responsibility is to inform the public. She said a journalist’s job is to get the truth out, and he or she cannot control the consequences.

Armao posited international standards for journalism: accuracy, fairness, a right to reply, and minimizing any harm. However, she cited some examples wherein she felt that journalists did not properly fulfill their role. One was the Iraq War, where reporters “embedded” with military units got caught up in the testosterone-soaked environment. She also faulted the media for failing to press, over the years, the issue of gun control, prior to the Newtown shootings — whereas many citizens wrongly criticized publication of shooter Adam Lanza’s name, as supposedly “glorifying” his crime.

More generally, Armao saw a big problem in the decline of professional journalism, undermined by a plethora of competing sources, many of them “citizen journalists.” Economics has been driving out reporting in the field as just too costly. The result is rushed and sloppy stories plagued by errors; justification of anything if it makes money; a loss of decorum and professionalism; and blandness, with a fear of offending anyone or taking a controversial stand. (Pertinent here was the case of Schenectady Gazette columnist Carl Strock, forced out due to pressures from advertisers over his critical scrutiny of religion and, especially, Israel. I’ve reviewed his excellent book.)

Also relevant, I think, is the subsequent CNN Malaysian airplane coverage. Did CNN believe viewers were interested in only that one story, to the virtual exclusion of other news, for weeks on end? Surely symptomatic of something gone awry.

Pointing a finger of blame for what she decried, Armao said the culprit is the public, often denigrating the media for the wrong things while oblivious to really valid criticisms. Many people think the press makes too much information public (as in the mentioned Lanza and Sipple cases). Indeed, half of Americans tell pollsters the First Amendment goes too far and there is too much press freedom. (Maybe they’d prefer living in, say, Iran.) Meantime there are silly calls for “balanced” (or happy) news. As a result of all this, people don’t actually support good journalism. While the media is often criticized for favoring trash news over substantive issue coverage, in fact there is plenty of the latter, but it’s the trash that gets the most eyeballs. And too many young people ignore news media altogether, getting their “news” through social media.

Finally, as to her initial question — can one be both a good journalist and a good human being? — Armao answered No! News is inherently about bad stuff, and the very nature of journalism is to be rude and intrusive, to get the story. But one audience member suggested that if a journalist is true to the profession’s standards, in giving the public truth, that’s being a good person.

 

 

The Two Americas: Which is Exceptional?

“The Two Americas” was the refrain of a past presidential candidate, contrasting U.S. affluence with its lack; certainly a familiar theme lately. But I have a different point, prompted by something in a recent issue of The Economist that I felt hit the bullseye.

It was in a review of The Triple Package: What Really Determines Success, by Amy Chua (of “Tiger Mother” fame) and Jed Rubenfeld. The “package,” they say, characterizes ethnic groups that excel in business: a sense of superiority, yet also insecurity, and a great capacity for impulse control, especially the ability to persevere in the face of obstacles.

America, the reviewer said, “was once the quintessential triple package nation” – convinced of its exceptional destiny, yet prodded by insecurity (from Eurosnobbery), and with a strong work ethic. But lately, “insecurity and the will to work have all but vanished. What is left is essentially the swagger, complacency and entitlement of a perverted sense of exceptionalism.” (My emphasis)

So true! But not of America’s entirety; though a large part of America unfortunately fits that indictment. This “America 1” does thoughtlessly feel a sense of complacent exceptionalist entitlement: that our workers should earn pay much higher than Chinese or Indians, regardless of whether those can do the same work far more cheaply. Indeed, as though there’s something wrong about their doing it. As though we can somehow protect ourselves against this economic reality by stopping businesses from “shipping jobs overseas.” As though Americans do have some sort of God-bestowed entitlement to these jobs and their high pay, and Bangladeshis do not. As though raising minimum wages and decreeing other employee benefits can magically boost our incomes regardless of global market forces. As though we can moreover have an ever smaller percentage of people actually working and paying taxes while an ever larger contingent collects pensions, unemployment, Social Security, Disability, welfare, Medicare, etc. As though we can continue this while our educational attainment erodes, and our infrastructure degrades from underinvestment, relative to other nations. As though we can have our cake and eat it too.

It’s ironic that the right knocks President Obama for insufficient devotion to American exceptionalism, when he in fact epitomizes some of the wrong-headed exceptionalism I’ve described, so toxic for our future. America was not ordained by God to be the greatest of nations. What we achieved resulted from the kind of people we were, and the things we did. Fail to keep that up and we’ll suffer the consequences. America 1 is rushing obliviously down that path.

But there are still plenty of Americans who, though (like me) considering this a great (even exceptional) nation, don’t feel the world owes them a living in consequence. In this “America 2,” there is still plenty of go-get-’em industriousness, a willingness to take on great challenges, by one’s own mettle, undeterred by obstacles and setbacks.

This America 2 is the one I love. It’s a cliché that immigrants built this country. But in fact America 2 is heavily populated by recent immigrants. Anyone with the moxie to leave behind everything familiar and strike out for a new land, often at great physical risk, makes the best kind of American. It’s these people who can save America from the syndrome described in that Economist review.

But sadly, America 1, mired in complacency and entitlement, doesn’t see it. America 1 actually hates America 2 and literally wants to build a wall against America 2. I wish we could swap out a big chunk of America 1 for more of America 2.

 

 

 

 

June 6, 1944

On this day 70 years ago the greatest invasion force in the history of the world, led by the United States of America, set out to liberate Europe from barbarism.

My father, and my wife’s father, though they did not hit the Normandy beaches on D-Day, did sacrifice years of their lives and took part in the overall enterprise. I salute them, and all those like them who (unlike me) made such sacrifices, including the ultimate one. But if I had been one of those men jumping from landing craft at Normandy, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. In fact, many never even made it as far as the beach.

Bumper stickers saying, “War Is Not The Answer,” or “War Never Solves Anything” are puerile. War isn’t always the answer, and doesn’t solve everything – but sometimes it is, and does. Diplomacy could not have rescued Europe from the Nazis; nor freed America’s slaves (nor will it free Syria from Assad). Sometimes the reality of the human condition requires us to face up to hard choices, and not wish them away with shallow pieties. It isn’t noble to renounce violence and leave the world at the mercy of those who don’t.

In his March 28 West Point speech, President Obama (otherwise so fond of “false choice” rhetoric) drew a false choice between war and no war. Nobody is suggesting we rampage into, say, Syria, or Ukraine, with boots on the ground and guns blazing. Yet plenty could have been done*, short of “blundering into war,” to prevent or at least moderate the indisputable crumbling of international order and security that has occurred on Obama’s watch. His assertion of undiminished American global puissance was ludicrous empty swagger. The world knows that actions speak louder than words.

Obama also said terrorism is our biggest threat. How foolish. The threats that can really harm America include that mentioned crumbling, of the paradigm that has until lately kept peace among big powers; flagging support for economic openness and trade; rising authoritarianism; climate change; and humanity’s age-old nemeses of disease, ignorance, hunger, and intolerance. Meantime, at home, America’s political paralysis and failure to tackle fiscal imbalances presage economic ruin.

Terrorism? Its main threat is provoking yet more over-reaction, and distracting us from those other far more dangerous challenges.

We rose to the challenge on D-Day. Would we do it again today?

* We still have not answered Ukraine’s plea for military aid to suppress Russian-instigated thuggery; nor fulfilled Obama’s previous promise of aid to Syria’s rebels. His 3/28 speech re-promised it. Three years ago it might actually have made a difference and advanced our interests.

 

 

June 3-4, 1989