Critical, Thinking

Home to War

I sometimes get the feeling that Americans are most at home in the war over culture. It usefully distracts from talking about books.

A Letter to a Friend

A letter to a friend.

Dear -----,

So in the past year, your uncle died and a friend from school committed suicide. I am guessing that your uncle was of our parents' generation, and either slightly older or younger, but in poor health. Your friend from school was most likely clinically depressed and in an emotionally-cognitively extreme state. You have your parents' mortality on your mind, too, you've said. I'm guessing that is weighing very hard on you. You have mentioned many times that you want to be back near them--and I also suspect that you have some very mixed feelings about them, too, like any kid. You love them and you also wonder how your life will be different if you don't have to worry about disappointing them. I suspect you were also very afraid of what they thought about the problems you've had in recent years. You also said that you were, at times, afraid of death. You've certainly had a lot of time to think about death, and I can't imagine that your depression helped any.

I think, on the whole, death sucks. That said, I'm not afraid of it. It makes me deeply, horribly sad when someone I love dies. I don't think much about my own death any more, except that I don't want to burden those who love me or who might be forced to take care of me if I'm incapacitated for a long time. I've taken out enough insurance to dispose of my body and to pay my bills. I've also got insurance to give a bit of money to my kids for college and to get them started out on life.

Given my background, it's not surprising that I used to be terrified of death. I had only vague intimations of the punishments or pains that awaited me, and I very early on rejected a traditional notion of hell, but I did fear a type of eternal isolation and longing for God or happiness. It all seems very silly to me now--at least to think of it in strict terms rather than projecting my fears about my immediate family and my long-term life on an abstraction called "Eternity."

What changed my mind and assuaged my emotions about death was some good old philosophizing. I read Epicurus. The Greek philosopher had much to say about many topics, and he was a genius about living in a material world. He was among the first to think of the world in terms of atoms, and that upon death we would dissolve into our material substrate. He wasn't an atheist, but he did think that the Gods lived lives above and beyond humans and took no notice of our affairs.

I encountered my first Epicurean argument about Death in the guise of a William Hazlitt essay. Hazlitt was an 18th and early 19th century essayist who wrote prolifically and beautifully. He has a short essay entitled "Death" that rehearses one of Epicurus's main tenants. I can't tell you how influential the essay was on me. It struck me like lightening. He asked his reader to imagine the eternity of the universe up until his birth. Now he asked, do you worry about the time before you were born? That you didn't exist and never had existed? Now imagine the time after your death you won't exist and you will only have existed. It should hold as much fear and as much worry as the time before your birth. This is to say, none. Philosophers call this the "symmetry" argument about death.

The second argument against the harms of death is a particular one. It says the following. For death to be a harm, such as being cut or burned or robbed, it needs a subject to harm. Of course, no one wants a painful death, but pain is transitory, so should be endured knowing that it will pass. When one is alive, however, is death there? No, by definition. When one is dead, is there harm? No, because there is no one to harm. The subject is already dead. Thus, death harms no subject. There is a sadness about a too short life or the loss of someone you love, but for the one who has died there is no harm at all since there is no one to be harmed.

Death is a harm only for those who love the one who has died and regret or miss his presence. We need not fear death because where death is, we are not. Where we are, there is no death.

There are a lot of implications of that argument, both the symmetry side and the argument about subjectivity and harm, but I'll leave it at that.

I don't fear death because there will be no "I" when death has happened. I do want my dissolution to be quick, painless, and in a way that will allow me to survey my life, remember my friends and lovers, my children and family, and send my love to each and all.

The pain of your uncle's loss is real; the pain of your friend's suicide is sharp and marks a tragic event. They do not suffer because they do not exist to suffer. You are left with the real weight of their memories and, perhaps, a charge. The charge is how best to commemorate their lives, however small that commemoration. You are also left with a burden. How best do you live your life to leave happiness and justice when you pass?

love,

Tyler

PC Police? PC-ulease.

It is easy enough to drag out the PC punching bag to make a point about those too-sensitive Europeans whose mis-guided sensibilities will only harm themselves. Another (and to my mind equally compelling) reading of the phrase "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam" is that it is strategic: it creates another Islam, a Reformationist Islam, that rejects murder and terror as an arm of religious identity. The phrase isolates the actors, the terrorists, and what they want the most, to speak for Islam itself. "Terrorists who abusively invoke Islam" highlights what they are: thugs and murderers. It makes explicit what they do to justify their thuggery: abusively invoke Islam. It is a phrase that looks forward to a time where the Islamic Enlightenment has taken hold and a moderate Muslim would bristle at an Islam of terror. The phrase isn't PC. The phrase describes a world that I hope we all want to see come into being.

And, by the way, that is true of Christianity in the West and US Christianity in particular. If only it were the case that the US public understood that "Christian opposition to gay marriage" wasn't at core Christian. If only we lived in a world where the marriage rights for US citizens who are lesbian and gay could be debated in a way that the opposition was understood to be abusively invoking Christianity--not to mention a routine abuse of the document that should guide every citizen's life. And it's not the Bible. It's the Constitution.

Persia, Iran

Long-time readers of bentkid will remember that I have a particular interest in the democracy movements of Iran. A new book on Iran and the Western left looks promising, and I hope it draws attention to a widely-ignored subject.

I believe that US progressives must be clear in their commitment to secular governments and the need for guarantees for civil, legal, social, and cultural liberties, equality, and citizenship.

Yes, I believe in the Enlightenment.

Sliced tongue

I love the counter-cultural tone of John McWhorter's short musing on how linguists deal with the topic of the disappearence of languages. (I don't know enough about the New York Sun to speculate on why it would appear in that rag.) The assumption that the great die-off will lead to something like a utopian sharing of one great, global language seems to do two things at once. It introduces (and is based on) a deep misunderstanding of the dynamic nature of language adoption and language change within human populations across many generations; and it imagines that because of the historical accident of English's dominance that English (rather than, say, Chinese or Spanish) will be the mythical lingua franca.

Those things aside, it's a lovely fairy tale, and one that strikes a bright note among the doom-and-gloom, Chicken Little crowd that loves nothing so much as a gruesome tale about a language murdered by Capital, Globalism, and English.

Lorax Lore

'Rackham talks often about “storm effects”, and in particular about the ecological benefits of the 1987 hurricane, in its disordering of bland and uniform forestry lots. But I sense a metaphor here, too. A kind of storminess is what real woods and trees live with. They are not human pets or manservants. They are dynamic, autonomous, resilient, different. If there is little in the book about conservation policy, it is because this kind of respect for trees as living individuals is a necessary prelude to conservation. And if Rackham is a little dismissive of current enthusiasms for allowing wrecked farmland to evolve into wild “self-willed” woods, it is because he believes that intricate and irreplaceable systems of ancient woods are that bit more important.'

Lying liars and the lies they tell

If you are looking for a rich text to document both the coherence and incoherence of a scientific concept look no further than this NYT article on evolution and lying. A few quick points: I do love how intentional behavior is attributed by both scientists and the journalist to creatures that too many humans would call, at best, "dumb." (Note here that I think that animal communication is "intentional" in ways that cover lies and other deceptions by humans.) A cybernetic account of the emergence and persistence of an attribute within an ecology would help side-step many of the philosophical problems with the words "lying" and "deception." I would be curious to follow the subsequent amplification of this account of "deception" as the underlying ideas leach into our culture.

Dismal thinking

I recommend this very entertaining article about happiness and economic theory. Fascinating stuff.

Fire and Ice

I woke up this morning, thinking of a Charles Bukowski title.

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

and I want to think that that is true.

Criticism in these Times

This is "Critical, Thinking," a catch-all blog for, well, just about any topic, though shot through the lense of philosophy, cultural criticism, and literary theory. My name is Tyler Curtain. I teach theory in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I'll start posting in the next couple of days and we'll go from there. Welcome.