All We Can Ask from Death

Unless you’ve been living in a cave mansion outside of Islamabad hiding from the US government, you’ve probably heard that Osama bin Laden was killed last night in a firefight. For many, the most appropriate response was obvious: unadulterated joy with a robust helping of national unity and patriotism on top. And who can blame them? Osama bin Laden was a hateful, opportunistic murderer, a terrorist mastermind who took advantage of anti-American sentiment in Saudi Arabia and whipped it into a lethal boil. He is personally responsible for the death of thousands of Arabs, Americans, Muslims, atheists...people. If anyone deserved to die, he did.

Even so, there were those of us who did not have quite that reaction, for whom bloodlust and triumph did not immediately course through our veins. Some of us were quiet, thinking of the significance of the event. Some of us were grim, feeling vindicated in that there was one fewer murderer on earth, but not feeling exactly exultant, either. My response was some mix of these, but it was altered because I heard the news during a House Meeting, in a room full of people, many of whom took the first tack. Instead of having the time to sit and think and digest, I was immediately thrust into a party-like atmosphere in which Team America had won once again, and all would be right in the world if only our testosterone-soaked heroes could be allowed free reign. Good news had come at last from the unending wars! Let us rally around it in an orgy of patriotism and victory.

At least, that’s how it felt to me. In contrast, I felt hesitant, that something was not quite right about the reveling in death that was going on. I expressed these sentiments on facebook and twitter, letting it be known that I felt there was much more to Osama’s death than a simple check for America’s win column. To start, the death was more symbolic than anything else. It’s possible that his death will weaken the various Al-Qaeda affiliates, hamper their ability to communicate, and undermine their capacity to recruit. It’s also possible that they will become highly angered and the Middle East will be less safe for a while. Either way, Osama had been doing very little of the on-the-ground planning of late, and it seemed frankly silly to count such a psychologically significant yet geopolitically unsubstantive victory as meaningful.

It also seemed to disrespect the vast complexities of which Osama was a symbol: the two unending wars, the changes wrought in the American psyche, the culture of fear created, here and abroad, increases in Islamophobia and hate-crimes, the still unfinished Ground Zero Monument, anti-American sentiment the world over, the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq and Afganistan, the controversial drone attacks. But for the night, none of it seemed to matter. In a way, it was a tacit acknowledgement. Americans were so hungry for a victory that they leaped on the action-movie-like story of a Special Ops force, a firefight, a mansion, an exotic South Asian country and dead target. When I expressed this idea, I was told in no uncertain terms that “Its not anymore complex than 3000 innocent Americans, your fellow countrymen.” But there was still something farcical about letting the droplet of success wash over us as the waves of the uncertain path forward continued to churn. That’s why, I suppose, I was so bothered by Obama calling for national unity because we’d killed Osama bin Laden. It’s not that there’s so much wrong with that on its own, but rather that Osama is part of something so much larger, and the call for national unity just serves as a veneer. I wish so deeply, I suppose, that there had been a call for national unity when the Iraqis had their first election, or on the day Obama announced we were exiting Iraq. There wasn’t, because those were not unequivocally good happenings, and there were a lot of mixed feelings. People may have been upset if it were implied that those were things everyone had a duty to support. That’s how I feel about this, because bin Laden himself was just a man, and the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Then there’s how we react to the death itself. Frankly, I was a little disgusted by the streamers and the celebration. I understood it, certainly, and how profoundly human of a response that was, but I wish we’d had the wherewithal to overcome those particular instincts and instead acknowledge the importance and significance of the death, to reflect on his life and the destruction he cause, to think of the 9/11 victims and their families, to ponder the aftermath of 9/11 and how the world was forever changed, and not, perhaps, to throw America-themed frat parties, sing Queen’s We Are the Champions and begin dancing in the streets. Americans celebrated death last night. 

I know there was a lot going on, I’ve had the conversations, and I know there were legitimate causes for celebration. But there was a blatant current of outright self-satisfied, self-aggrandized, smug gratification in our accomplishment. And it just seems like death, especially one I felt wasn’t quite as important as everyone was making it out to be, isn’t something we ought to glorify. It’s a tad unseemly, yes, a tad grotesque, yes, but more importantly, it runs counter to very important values.

As Americans, we value, supposedly, due process, which Osama (for very good reason) never had. We do not relish the meting out of justice. As a humanist, I value life. I reject wholeheartedly these all-too-religious overtones of good and evil, black and white, that human lives are valuable until we deem them irredeemable, at which point they become worthless. Osama was evil, so the story goes, and so his life no longer mattered. He may have deserved to die, but I reject the narrative that says that there exist pure good and evil in the world, and that we eradicate evil by whatever means necessary, as if morality itself were not a natural phenomenon, and as if the cultivation of moral excellence were not the task of a lifetime. James Croft did an excellent job of pointing out the history of this line of thinking in the humanist movement:

Humanism and its Aspirations declares that “Humanists are concerned for the well being of all”, and makes no distinction between the wicked and the just, the good and the evil. The Humanist Manifesto II is abundantly clear: “The preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value.” So is the first Humanist Manifesto, saying “humanism will affirm life rather than deny it”.

The humanist perspective shows us that while we may have to kill, we simply do not have to revel in it. We should despair at every human life lost, to death, to destruction, to monstrous beliefs and behavior.

And if that plea to a shared humanity does not move you, a much more analytic approach exists. I subscribe to the ethical theory called desirism. If you don’t want to read about it, what you basically need to know is that it relies on desires as reasons for action, and modulation of those desires as ways of ensuring that more desires are fulfilled rather than thwarted. I find it clear, then, that we have many and strong reasons to condemn the desire to kill and be joyful in the killing, because humans are not so good at containing those emotions and applying them only in the appropriate circumstances. Humans are not so good at overcoming violent tribalist jingoistic instincts, and using patriotism to come together over shared values instead of policing self-identification boundaries by a country border. Humans are not so good at erring on the side of not killing rather than killing. Humans are not so good at affirming life, a value we have many and strong reasons to strengthen, as it is, and I will have nothing be a setback to reminding us everyday that the enemies we see around us are protagonists in their own narrative, are doing what they think best, are human just like us.

In my thinking about this issue, I’ve been taking inspiration from some interesting sources.

In Leviticus, 18:18, in the midst of many reactionary and troubling decrees, the Hebrew god tells the Israelites, that they must, 

“not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.”

Proverbs 24:17 says, 

“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.”

A more recent source gave us,

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, 
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.  
The deal is that this quote was said by MLK, except for the first line that was here previous, which goes something like: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." I think that's a beautiful sentiment too, but I don't know how to attribute it, so I'll just leave it here. 

On facebook, someone said, 

“See, regardless he was still a person. Start dehumanizing someone, even someone like him, and you forget your own values. We are better than that, or we hope to be.”

My friend Sandra wrote a beautiful piece on the same issue here.

The movies Munich and Inglorious Basterds stylized and hyperbolized our trusted protagonists, forcing the audience to be revolted at the bleak humanity present even in our heroes.

And Orson Scott Card, that brilliant author who has changed my life more than once, penned some incredibly beautiful thoughts that he threaded effortlessly into his narratives:

In Ender’s Game, Ender says to Valentine, the sister who cannot understand that he has become a killer, a monster in his own right, 

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

Bean learns this message, and many books later, has an encounter with an incredibly evil enemy, with a pathological disregard for human life. And this is what transpires:

Achilles laughed nervously. “Come on now, Bean. We’ve known each other a long time.” He had backed up against a wall. He tried to lean against it. But his legs were a little wobbly and he started to slide down the wall. “I know you, Bean,” he said. “You can’t just kill a man in cold blood, no matter how much you hate him. It’s not in you to do that.” 

“Yes it is,” said Bean. 

He aimed the pistol down at Achilles’s right eye and pulled the trigger. The eye snapped shut from the wind of the bullet passing between the eyelids and from the obliteration of the eye itself. His head rocked just a little from the force of the little bullet entering, but not leaving. Then he slumped over and sprawled out on the floor. Dead. 

It didn’t bring back Poke, or Sister Carlotta, or any of the other people he had killed. It didn’t change the nations of the world back to the way they were before Achilles started making them his building blocks, to break apart and put together however he wanted. It didn’t end the wars Achilles had started. It didn’t make Bean feel any better. There was no joy in vengeance, and precious little in justice, either. 

But there was this: Achilles would never kill again.  

That was all Bean could ask of a little .22.

That Osama bin Laden will never kill again may indeed be all we can ask. Not that the wars end, or that freedom triumphs, but that we have taken a small step in a protracted campaign, and that all we can do is hope, and keep trying.

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Updates from the blogosphere:

From HuffPost: The Psychology of Revenge

"A more appropriate response to his killing would be to mourn the many tragedies that led up to his violent death, as well as the violent deaths of thousands in the attempt to eliminate him from the face of the Earth; to feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play any role in killing another."

Also, Not Rejoicing in Death

From Good: Making American Unexceptional

""American citizens often like to think of themselves as good Christians—decent, kind God-fearing people who defend what's right even when that's difficult, just as Jesus would have. Last night was an opportunity to live up to that ideal, to let the world know that we are powerful but we're not drunk with power. Instead, we got wasted and said we wanted to rub our balls on Osama's dead face, belying American exceptionalism by not acting exceptional, but entirely common."

Subcultures and What It Means to be Human

The question of what it means to be human is a common one. One of my favorite vloggers, John Green, once said that humans were the only animal that didn’t know how to be itself. Dogs, he claimed, know how to be dogs; at the very least, they don’t seem to worry about it in any outwardly apparent way. Whether or not dogs know they know how to be dogs is another question entirely. Anyway, I obviously don’t have the answer, but I have some ideas.

My first thought is that the question is wrong. Admittedly, this is often my first thought when I don’t know the answer to a question. But it seems that the question of what it means to be human is often conflated with what makes humans unique, which is completely different. I’ll leave that one to the evolutionary psychologists, biologists, sociologists, anthropologists and all manner of other scientists, who come up with a new wrong idea every few years or so.

So one idea is that what it means to be human is tautological. We are human. By definition, we’re experts at it; certainly no one else does it better. So whatever it is we do with our lives is what makes us human. One might even argue that the sheer fact of living is so incredible that it doesn’t take much else to make living meaningful.

An easy way to understand what it means to be human is to find the very question meaningful. We can start with the fact that the sheer miracle of our existence is mindblowing. As Carl Sagan says, we are bits of star matter gone cold by accident. This planet, life, sentience, each individual human life – all of these are deeply, only barely calculably improbable events, and they’re fantastic. We can also use this reasoning to appreciate the multitudinous opportunities available to us, and perhaps begin to siphon through them to decide which of these should occupy our time.

If we allow, perhaps, that the goal is then to find those activities that give us happiness, that give us meaning, ignoring for now the possible differences between these goals and the difficult in achieving them, then we have found a possible purpose for human life, a goal of being human. And the best example I’ve ever found of people doing this, doing it passionately and well, is the preponderance of subcultures.

I’m a biker, and biking has played, in part, a political role in my life. When I lived in Miami full-time, my father and I would do critical mass the second Saturday of every month, and that was really fun. It was a group of socially minded people who live out their values and enjoy spending time with others who feel the same. They also just happened to be fun people. Anyway, so my dad and I decided to do a critical mass this last weekend, but it was on Friday. I thought maybe it was just a different version of the usual ride, which they sometimes do. Instead it was the actual Miami Critical Mass, whose formula is traditionally the last Friday of every month. And it was huge! There were at least 200 people there, maybe more.

I’ve been a part of a lot of groups, and sometimes it’s incredible to share a great deal of values and interests with the people around you, but in this case, we were all brought together by one thing: we were bikers. That was it. And seeing the diversity within that subculture was absolutely amazing. There were hipsters with their fixies, parents getting their kids into biking, tricksters doing wheelies, semi-professionals in all their gear, mountain bikes, hybrids, road bikes, people with and without helmets, in and out of athletic clothing. There was a teacher from my high school, and a guy playing the uke while biking. We were a real critical mass, blocking the roads, riding through red lights, and having a wonderful time being part of a grassroots, almost flash community. It got better, too, with the reactions we received. Some people were angry, obviously, as we were blocking the roads (or, one could claim, they were), but most people were shockingly supportive. They yelled, hollered, hooted, honked and generally showed their appreciation for the way we had decided to live, or just spend an evening.

We went through Viscaya, Allapattah, Midtown and Little Haiti, and everywhere, people came out on the streets to watch us go by, ask us what we were doing, and cheer us on. Kids bunched up and waved at us. I think my favorite part was a guy standing outside of his restaurant just holding up a thumbs up as we passed. But these weren’t one sided interactions, either. We all responded, certainly, and the people who were blocking the cars were talking to the drivers, explaining what we were all about.

That connection with people, the bikers, the people of the community, the people who I share this earth with, has always been the most meaningful experience I’ve ever found, and I was so glad to have it on the Friday. It reminded me that subcultures are a way of immersing yourself fully in some of the beautiful things that life has to offer, with other people who feel similarly, and that they are conduits through which to connect to the rest of humanity.

There are lots of other reasons I like subcultures, but having them teach me about what it means to be human isn’t a bad start.

The Importance of Stories, Part I: The Individual

Disclaimer: This is somewhat incoherent. There is so much to say about this approach to humanity and knowledge, and this alternate approach to truth. The implications are wide-ranging and somewhat radical. It would take me years to fully flesh this out. But here’s the germ of an idea.

There’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s stories and how they relate to truth and understanding. Stories are everywhere. Everyone has one; they spend their entire lives living out stories, as a matter of fact. I would never claim that objective truth could be arrived at based on some kind of abstract averaging of all the different stories. But there’s a different kind of truth that is based on stories, that it based on looking at humans as inherently valuable and thus placing value in their stories. Those stories are vast – repositories of knowledge, memories, hopes, dreams, fantasies, delusions. About themselves, about other people, their families, their communities, their histories. They’re beautiful, too, and their individual beauty along with the diversity they exhibit, is reason enough to maintain them, pass them on. Which is why we protect ancient cultures and traditions, even as we march onward to a brighter future. Which is why we bother to listen to people without power, without elite intellectual or financial status. Because they have stories to tell. We are a community of learners, knowers and we communicate this by being also a community of story tellers. It would be a grave misfortune, a travesty, if that aspect of our humanity were to be lost.

The implications of this value are immense. It means that despite our own biases, prejudices, opinions, preferences and aesthetic desires, we simply cannot write off other people as useless or worthless. We don’t have to respect their ideas, or spend our time getting to know them, but we have to acknowledge their power as storytellers.

This has clear consequences for our systems of morality. For example, personhood might be defined as having a story. That’s not an entirely well-formed idea, but I kind of like it. Humanistic morality might benefit from approaching self-actualization in this new light. We help people live out the stories they would want to later tell, stories that are fulfilling, that can help and inform and inspire future generations of storytellers. We have no right to write the stories of others, or to tell them how to make their stories more like ours. Also, everyone should have the chance to tell their stories, both for their sake and the value that can be transferred to the community at large that can benefit from it. That allows us to pursue the value of tolerance without relinquishing our ability to note where harm is being done, stories and being censored and humanity is being lost.

If one prefers, they might reconceptualize this idea as placing the value of knowledge above all else. I’ve already discussed here and elsewhere that the stories people tell are extremely valuable sources of knowledge. This could inform our views on language extinction (see here and here) and biological diversity (over here and yonder). There’s no need to posit objective values when we understand that valuing knowledge and understanding is a human value we can all support, and we can achieve those through a variety of methods. Some are biological, scientific, what have you. But some are stories, those sets of experiences that seem so meaningless on an individual scale. Why bother listening to what people have already done when there is so much more to do? I counter that not only do those stories provide a treasure trove of knowledge relating to history, politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and more, but they also help us see what the future holds. Most importantly, they help connect us to our fellow humans, in a way that can only be mutually and communally beneficial.

The World and Humanity: A Fangirl's Approach

This post sort of came out of nowhere. I was writing about something completely different and then realized I was describing more of my worldview, so I guess I ought to post it as is.

I’m a humanist. I place my trust and value in the ability of rational persons to achieve great things. I happen to believe that people have more similarities than differences, and as such that those similarities can and should be taken advantage of. I also respect people’s differences and may even seek to maintain them in order to avoid losing vast repositories of human knowledge and experience. I do, however, maintain the right to employ my own powers of reason and my own experiences to make judgments, moral and factual, among others, and to declare others mistaken if I feel that their ideas are a detriment to the advancement of human expression. Knowing when I have enough evidence to take this kind of position is a difficult balancing act, and all of my judgments remain mutable. They are not, however, any weaker for this. In fact, because I know that despite the fact that they could be changed at any moment and yet, these are the ones that have withstood the onslaught of critical thought, makes me trust more in my opinions.

This understanding of humanity, combined with my knowledge-based worldview means that I have a fairly broad definition of human knowledge and expression. As such, I have a deep respect for a wide variety of human activities, and multifarious interests corresponding to those activities I would like to make contributions to. This gets very intimidating. I can study hyperbolic geometry, twentieth century feminism and sociobiology all I want, but I’ll never know everything, or even close, within those fields. I might have an interest in something as broad as physics or as specific as scav (Go SCAV!!) but I’ll never learn enough. And that’s what’s so great about living in a time when the vast magnitude of past human achievement can be really appreciated and brought to bear on future endeavors. Big things, like the Human Genome Project. Medium things like being a famous videoblogger. Small things, like geochacheing. Did you know what that was? I only recently found out. Small things that become big, like community organizing.

It’s all so fantastically cool I really just can’t get a handle on it. I’ve had at least three existential crises relating to times I realized I’d never know anything/everything. It makes me anxious, nervous and scared. But it also makes me excited, proud and optimistic. It’s this sense of the world I call humanism, and this willingness to learn I call being an intellectual. I wrote a whole college essay fangirling out on the meaning of mind-boggling. Because that’s what this world is, and it’s pretty excellent.

So what to do if I can’t learn everything? First, learn to respect this fact, because in and of itself, it’s very important. Secondly, talk to people. People know things, and you can learn from them like you’d never believe. My version of humanism supports this in multiple ways. Firstly, people are all due a measure of dignity and respect, by being people. Secondly, one type of knowledge is knowledge about one’s self, and it can be unbelievably mind expanding to try to get into someone’s head, see what they see, feel what they feel. Thirdly, another type of knowledge I try to acquire is about people in general, and that sort of thing is pretty much impossible to access a priori. If you want to learn about people, and come to conclusions about their differences and similarities, you should probably go talk to them. It has helped me both achieve more confidence in my ideas - because I know that they survive in my head not only because I believe them to make sense but also because the knowledge and ideas of others has added to them and made them stronger – and also more flexibility in my point of view – because it has become commonplace for my essential notions about humanity and the universe to be changed or monumentally reshaped by a single conversation. Finally, a reverence for human achievement is incomplete without an equal amount of respect for the importance of collaboration, for all that humans have done together, in groups, to reach higher and higher goals than any alone. Human community is an invaluable resource, not to be squandered, and fostering such communities through your own actions tends to be deeply meaningful.

Caveats: To be perfectly honest, I’m not actually sure that this is what humanism means to me. It’s really difficult to put a handle on. Respect for human achievement certainly is humanistic, but I haven’t yet touched on the political, global, moral, justice-oriented or religious sides of humanism. And the aspects that deal with learning and ambition are in some ways what it means to be an intellectual, or a nerd, or something else. And the appreciation for the passion and excitement that goes into the most niche of activities might define being a geek. The vast reverence I have for it all I might call, if I were an entirely different sort of person, a kind of spirituality. So I’m not really sure what to call this sort of thing. I’m sure I’ll expand on it another time.

For other humanist ideas, check out these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism#Tenets

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=main&page=declaration

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=main&page=affirmations