Death II: deal with it!

I've made some progress since my post about why I don't like death.

Every now and then I feel this glimmer of "It's not such a horrifying thing that I'll never see what becomes of the human race and that one day (and forever after that) my consciousness will cease to exist. That's life, and when I'm dead I won't know the difference."

I'm always really proud of myself when I think that way, but unfortunately those moments are few and far between. Most of the time it's more like a constant stream of (whenever I get a free moment) thinking "Now what was it that I'm not supposed to think about since it leaves me paralyzed with dread, yet there is absolutely nothing I can do about it? Oh yeah, death. D'oh!!!"

Maybe that's why I keep so busy?

I think I've pinpointed part of the problem, though. It upsets me to contemplate my "legacy" i.e. how I will be remembered after I'm dead. The Indigo Girls' song about Virginia Woolf illustrates what I'm talking about:

They published your diary and that's how I got to know you
key to the room of your own and a mind without end
here's a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time
the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend.

One of the main reasons I write is to make a connection with people. So in some ways this stanza represents a beautiful dream -- to continue to make new friends through my writings even after I'm no longer there to do it in person. The problem with this dream comes a little later in the song:

if you need to know that you weathered the storm of cruel mortality
a hundred years later I'm sitting here living proof.

See the problem?

As sweet as that sentiment is, Virginia Woolf did not "weather the storm of cruel mortality." She's dead. Completely dead. As dead as Charlemagne, as dead as Ozymandias, as dead as some random Mesopotamian peasant whose name has been forgotten for seven thousand years. (Actually maybe even more dead than Ozymandius since he's a fictional character.)

So the "telephone line through time" is a sad image because in reality it's a one-way communication. Virgina Woolf cannot meet her new friend or swap confidences with her or go out for tea with her or even know of her existence. It's almost a pretty picture except that a main protagonist is absent. So the ultimate fantasy happy ending -- being loved by future generations -- isn't a happy ending at all.

Again my Mormon formation shows up as a part of who I am today. All of the focus and value placed on family history has made it so that when I write, I think of my audience as "future generations." That's the wrong fantasy for an atheist to have. There's no reason to shoot for the "most influential people of all time" list because even if I were to make it, it's not as though I'll be there in heaven signing autographs for people. If I want to make a connection with people through writing, the time is now! (Through a blog, for example...)

I'm not saying one should forget about future generations -- far from it. You shouldn't forget about the needs of future generations any more than you should forget about people in need who are alive right now. But if you're a humanist, you work to leave the world a better place for their sake, not your own.

That said, if someone is reading my stuff after I'm dead, I'm not going to say "No! Put it down! Right now!!!" (How could I? ;^) )

I don't have a problem accepting a lot of the limitations of being human (see QZed's post on that), but I guess I'm still working on accepting the fact that my total experience is limited in time as well as space. Baby steps!!! :D

Do you want to live forever? or the many reasons why I don't like death...

When I was a kid, I kind of looked forward to the famed "Judgment Day." Not because I thought I'd score well or anything. ;-) Rather, I liked the idea that every moment -- every precious moment -- is being recorded.

Probably for some of you, the first thing that jumped into your minds reading the above was "Even when you're in the can? You want that recorded? Eeew!!!" But I was hoping to just fast-forward through those parts. What I liked was the idea that days I'd completely forgotten could be brought back and that I could even watch all of the dreams that were lost before morning.

Giving up belief in the afterlife means accepting the fact that past events that are forgotten are gone completely. You no longer get to look forward to one day learning the right answer to all of those historical questions that are in dispute. Like what was really in that lost Spalding manuscript and did it even exist? If the evidence has been destroyed, then the correct answer can never be known.

What's more, I liked the idea that other people's experiences wouldn't be lost either. Maybe this is weird of me, but when learning about ancient cultures and their customs, a lot of times I think about all of the people who lived, loved, and thought, who are today gone without a trace.

But all of that isn't really why I don't like the idea of death. More than anything else, I just don't like the idea that one day all of my thoughts will stop and I will simply cease to exist.

Part of the problem is that non-existence is inconceivable: I have to exist in order to contemplate anything at all. (We discussed this point in a related post over on The Fire Sermon.)

But it's more than that. The main problem I have with death is that my mind and senses are my only window to observing and contemplating the universe. Sure the universe can get along just fine without me, but if I'm not there to observe it, then to me it's as if it doesn't exist. To me, once I'm dead, it's not just that there will be no me, it's that there will be nothing at all -- everything comes to an end.

I don't know if that makes any sense. Maybe someone will explain why that point makes no sense so I can stop worrying about it. ;-)

I have one other problem with death that probably makes even less sense than that one, but let me see if I can try to explain it:

Nine out of ten atheists agree that when you stop believing in the afterlife, then real life seems that much more precious. When this is all there is, you want to cherish every moment and live life to the fullest. You don't have the infinities for procrastinating your dreams -- anything you fail to do before death, you won't do it ever.

But then here's the problem: Suppose you live exactly the full life you set out to live and accomplish everything you ever wanted to accomplish. Who does that really matter to? It matters to you. But then after you're dead it doesn't matter to you anymore because nothing matters to you anymore -- you're dead. You could try living your life to make a positive impact on other people that will continue after your death. But someday they'll be dead too. Hmmm.

This is why I try not to think about this.

Weirdly, none of this nonsense seems to have any effect on my desire to live a full life and achieve my dreams and make a positive impact on the lives of others. I guess it's because my life matters to me as long as I'm alive, and I'm alive now (at the time of this writing anyway...).

It only bothers me when I think about it. Which is why it would be better if I could stop thinking about it. It seems like it would be nice to be able to contemplate life and death from the outside rather than being intimately and ultimately bound by it. I think that's the draw of a monastic life: you give up "worldly" things in hopes of opting out of the cycle of life by attempting to rise above it, and by trying to deny that you're a part of that cycle and that it's a part of you.

Unfortunately, fear of death seems like an obvious consequence of being human. As with all animals, natural selection has provided humans with a powerful will to survive. Yet the human trait of understanding that you're alive means realizing that one day you will die. And it's not just "if you're not careful, you'll die." It's you will die. period.

Sometimes religion seems like an obsessive-compulsive style strategy for dealing with this internal conflict: since there's nothing real that you can do to ward off death, performing rituals, prayers, and incantations seems better than nothing. This is why skepticism and atheism are scary: they lead you to the realization that ultimately the charms won't work.

I hope to make peace with the idea of death sometime before it happens, but in the end it doesn't really matter either way. Ready or not, it will come...

Fertility, Mortality or Sex vs. Death

One time I heard my sister commenting to my mom about how striking it was that the book she was reading – set around 150 years ago – was so full of death and so focused on death. My mom replied that back then the romantic ideal was a beautiful death scene.

“In those days,” she explained, “people were obsessed with death the way people today are obsessed with sex.”

I didn't say anything, but I was dying to point out how fortunate we are today. Which would you rather have: romantic sex or a romantic death?

I'm being completely serious when I say this. Increased life expectancy – combined with convenient, effective contraception – has dramatically transformed our whole society and outlook.

Today if you're in a loving marriage, you expect to be able to grow old together. Abusive or otherwise bad marriages are ended by choice, rather than having good and bad marriages alike cut short by untimely deaths.

And as a parent, rather than having more children than you can effectively handle – and then watching many of them die – you can typically choose to have no more kids than you think you can raise well, and more importantly, you can base this calculation on the expectation that you will most likely see them all live to adulthood.

This is no small matter. If I had to give up every single other advance of our miraculous modern era to keep this one, I would.

Our society has new attitudes and values that are the product of our current life-cycle. As Noëll was saying the other day on Agnostic Mom, ideas about child safety have changed.

I think the change boils down to the following calculation:

Imagine that your children have a one-in-ten chance of dying in childhood of disease or malnutrition and a one-in-five-hundred chance of dying in an accident. In that case, massive efforts to keep them safe from harm don't improve their chances of survival very much. You improve your family's overall survival rate by focusing on more productive tasks than babysitting and by leaving the kids to roam free and fend for themselves.

Now imagine that the disease and malnutrition death risk drops to one-in-five-thousand. Suddenly the one-in-five-hundred risk of accidental death is no longer a trivial side-note. It becomes worth your while to follow the kids closely to make sure nothing happens to them, even if it means a huge expenditure of time and energy.

I don't mean to suggest that individuals are consciously making this mental calculation. But society makes it unconsciously and our customs change accordingly. That's why there's been such a dramatic increase in child-safety practices within this generation (car-seats and other safety paraphernalia, attitudes about how much supervision children require), even though our current fertility/mortality situation essentially goes back another full generation or more. It takes about a generation for a culture to learn something – in this case for people to notice the disproportionately high rate of preventable accidental childhood deaths compared to total childhood deaths – and for attitudes and practices to change.

Contraception and working women enter into this same calculation. The long and short of it is that if Mom's salary is essential to the family budget, then every single additional baby is dauntingly costly. So if you are convinced that the ones you have will live and you have a simple means of not having any more, then just focusing on your current brood becomes a very attractive option.

That's essentially how it has gone is our house. When my second was a baby, I was sure I wanted a third kid. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I mostly wanted a third as a back-up to soften the devastating blow if something happened to one of my other two. It wasn't so much that I wanted three kids as it was that I didn't want less than these two, and I've kind of decided that that's a bad reason to have another kid. I figure it would be better just to be extra careful with the two I've got.

(For simplicity I haven't mentioned my husband here, but he's on the same page.)

The other half of the calculation is that we can just barely afford to have a nanny come in and take care of them while I'm at work, and we can't keep it up indefinitely. I assume a lot of families end up doing some sort of equivalent time-and-money calculation about kids at some point. In our modern value system, the strategy is to have only as many kids as your abilities and finances will allow you to raise correctly, and make every one of them count.

I'm not saying that people in the past loved their children less. But even if you have an unlimited amount of love (which is not a guarantee), you have only a finite amount of time, energy, and resources. So it's no accident that nuggets of Victorian wisdom such as “spare the rod and spoil the child” or “children should be seen and not heard” are shocking to modern ears. Today it is seen as irresponsible to have children you don't want, and criminal to abuse or neglect them. Not so many generations ago, having more children than you want was standard operating procedure, so society was a little more lenient on the whole abuse-and-neglect thing.

Additionally, as painful as losing a child obviously was in generations past, I suspect that it is more devastating today if only because today's parents are totally unprepared for it. A few hundred years ago, you expected to see some of your children die. It was a fact of life that you learned to accept by seeing it happen to so many others. A modern parent is also less likely to have a natural support system of people who will say “I know exactly how you feel – I remember when that happened to me,” and instead may be isolated as friends have no idea how to deal with the situation or what to say.

I've heard people argue that the hard-headed, cruel-but-realistic solution to world overpopulation is just to stand by and let children in poorer countries die. For those who are heartless enough not to be offended by the cruelty of this solution, I contend that it is also wrong in practical terms, and in fact is dangerously counterproductive. The thing is that it is very difficult to persuade people that it's a good idea to have only two or three kids if the kids have a one-in-ten chance of dying of disease, malnutrition, stepping on a land mine, etc. So if you take a poor country where people are having seven to ten kids – to maximize the survival rate – you end up with quite a lot more kids total than if families there were having two kids each and every single one of them lived.

The darker calculation is that where children are likely to die senselessly of diphtheria or malaria, it's human nature for their parents to prefer to see them die honorably fighting whatever enemy they imagine caused their family's hardships...

For their own safety if nothing else, the people of the wealthier countries need to make it a priority to help the rest of the world get to a state where (1) people have access to basic health care, especially contraception and prenatal, neonatal, and pediatric care, (2) children are unlikely to die of disease, malnutrition, and violence, and (3) the mother's economic contribution is vital to the family's finances, giving her more footing to decide in family planning issues and making each additional baby more costly and hence more valuable.

These goals are far from easy. However, nothing else has been shown to reverse the trend of overpopulation and its accompanying ills.

I'm sorry this essay isn't very amusing. I just wanted to post all of my crazy theories on this subject in one coherent article to make it easier to refer to them later.

And in case this post isn't already sufficiently long, boring, and controversial, I'd like to add one last point about my generation's obsession with sex:

It's only reasonable to expect that healthy, well-fed adults who aren't busily raising more kids than they can handle would have an overactive libido. Natural selection wouldn't have it any other way.

What a miraculous age we live in!!!

So many possibilities, so many responsibilities...