“Having a bad day”

What does it mean?

By Victor L. Midyett

We visited with some friends a couple of weeks ago who have a 15-year-old daughter (named Charlotte) who is very astute and questioning of everything. Charlotte announced at the lunch table that a teacher had told her class that “having a bad day means you are experiencing depression.”

Tuesday Voice: Feel

Others can’t make us do it

By Vic Midyett

Others cannot make us feel – we allow that to happen to ourselves. This is a very difficult subject, but I am going to try to write about it simply.
    I just said it was a very difficult subject, but I wonder? Is it difficult because we make or assume it so? We even seem to be in the habit of looking to schools, authorities, and governments to fix our reaction/feeling issues for us. Surely the solution must be rooted in individual families – I suspect that good, solid parenting is the foundation.

It depends (and so do I)

Click to read the Carl Sagan
quotation (photo source)

For 47 years, I've known that I didn't create myself and do not have the power to sustain my existence for a single moment. I know it has been forty-seven years because I was twenty-two years old when I had a dream that seemed to confirm the dependence, and I'm sixty-nine now. (I described the dream a few years ago, in a post titled "Creatures.")

Sam Harris, in his latest book, Free Will,¹ describes a similar situation with respect to what he argues is the illusion of free will:

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? [p. 40]

Why does Harris argue that free will is an illusion? The main reason (aside from considerations like those above) seems to be that brain activity that signals awareness and initiation of action precedes our conscious awareness of it. When we become aware of an intention, for example, the intention has already happened, and we had nothing consciously to do with it.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?...People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about. [p. 31]
    ...From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. [p. 36]
    If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process....
    You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts. You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. [p. 38]

Even before reading Harris's book, I had written here about watching myself to see what I would do next, and writing to find out what I thought about something. I had already discovered, from my own personal experience, that what I did and what I thought were things that happened. Harris's book not only serves to confirm this, but also explores some of the implications of it, such as its effect on morality and criminal justice.
    What about its effect on me—or on you if you choose to adopt this way of thinking (or even just experiment with it)?
    I'm still observing its effect(s) on myself. On the one hand, they are, ironically, liberating. I am more accepting of other people (and of myself) the way they are, the way I am.
     But on the other hand, I wonder at times whether I'm missing out on something by giving up the option I thought I had of "using my will power." So far, at least, I haven't missed a day of blogging since my retirement began (one month ago today).
     The jury (the various parts that constitute "me") are still out.

This morning I observed a young woman who lives down the street walking her dogs and letting them defecate in someone else's front yard—fairly near the front door. She didn't pick up the poop, but blithely turned around and led the dogs back home.
     Blithely, did I say? Well, I'm not sure. I think she has to know that not scooping her dogs' poop is unneighborly (and expressly prohibited by the neighborhood covenants), for this has been discussed at some length on our private social network (on the web), of which she and her husband are members. But this is what she does (my wife and I have observed her doing it on a number of other occasions).
    Could I have gone out and let her know that I'd observed her, and reminded her that what she had just done (and had done many times) was wrong? Could I have? I did consider it.
    Some reasons why I think I didn't do it are, first, the prevalent reluctance to "confront" a neighbor, which the people who live in our neighborhood very rarely do. (I'm sure that the vast majority of them have never confronted one of their neighbors—judging by numerous discussions on the neighborhood network. I'm very reluctant to do it myself.)
    Second, I supposed that the young woman has her own reasons for what she did, and that they probably aren't trivial or negligible—doing that seems to be her routine.²
    Third, I was ambivalent about what my motives would have been. If they would have been to "make" her stop leaving the poop (or to stop letting her dogs go in other people's yards), I had little confidence that that would have been the result. She could as easily have become defensive and tried to justify her behavior [see Wednesday's post]. If my motives would have been to demonstrate my "superior neighborliness," what would have been the point of that?
    These considerations passed through my mind. According to Harris, I didn't choose for them to do so; they just did. And I didn't choose not to go confront her; I just didn't.
     It all depended on so many things, one of which apparently wasn't my free will (or hers).
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1. Free Will (2011: Sam Harris) [A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.
        [In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. (–The Free Press)]
2. What if someone had observed Jeffrey Dahmer luring a boy home and gone over to confront him? "That's wrong what you're doing, Jeffrey—you shouldn't kill people or eat their flesh." Might the young neighbor woman have been as unlikely to mend her ways as Jeffrey Dahmer his? Or you or I ours, whatever they are?
        Maybe the answer is "no," but how sure are we?

Worms’ meat...or more?

Does the reality of the food chain undermine the possibility of transcendence, which we self-conscious creatures long for in our quieter, emptier moments? Consciousness tells us there’s more, and of course we want it. Modern advertising depends on it. Wanting more might be humankind’s signal identifying trait: the lust for transcendence.

But man doesn’t sit atop the food chain as he likes to think. He too can be eaten.
Shakespeare of course knew this. His Mercutio, wounded by Tybalt’s sword thrust in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, says, “ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man”; he has been “made worms’ meat of” [III.i.96,111]. And his Rosalind in As You Like It: “Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love” [IV.i.105-106].
And John Donne knew it: “When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me...” [XXVI Sermons, no. 26].
And Benjamin Frankin: “The body of Benjamin Frankin, Printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding), lies here, food for worms...” [Epitaph on Himself].
Branches of forensic science rest on the fact that corpses are eaten by maggots and even by the microorganisms that in life inhabited their intestines [Jessica Snyder Sachs’s Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death].

And the cosmological parallel to this is the death of stars. Our own sun will someday die. If there is still life on Earth when that day arrives, what do we think will happen to it in the days following? And what other life on other planets has already perished in other cataclysisms of dying suns?

Does the reality of the food chain, of the birth and death of suns and planets, say no to the possibility of transcendence? We self-conscious creatures may long for it and our consciousness may tell us there’s more, and even that there’s God...But can we ever know it? Or is our only consolation to believe (conjure the faith) that the Being we prayed into Being really did make this world...and an afterworld¹?

We live in the moment, and the moment is brief. But the moment that we have can be for love and laughter...or for unspeakable alternatives. Within this bloody cycle of Nature and the Cosmos, we can choose to be, for however brief a moment...whatever we have the means to be. Nature’s means to create and destroy are awesome, but man’s are not negligible.
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1. My gratitude for Howard Nemerov's “Creation Myth on a Moebius Band” will not die willingly:

   The world's just mad enough to have been made
   By the Being his beings into Being prayed.

Freedom is not perfect

I speak of freedom in all its grand imperfection, constrained by many variables, including our genomic inheritance, our early environment, how we were indoctrinated, traumatic experiences we have suffered, the weight of our habits.

And we are hedged in by constraints of available means. We must exercise our freedom in the places we occupy (or in other places to which we have the means to move). A rich man in America (where rich men are becoming richer and poor men are becoming poorer) has more latitude to exercise his freedom than a poor man has.

Or he seems to. For when I speak of freedom, I am mindful of the context of the responsibility it entails. Another “actual constraint of means” is the array of consequences that may follow from our acts. Clearly, when we act consciously and with as much knowledge as we can bring to bear, we must take into account what is likely to flow from acting (or from not acting). And we are responsible for consequences. In fact, if we aren’t responsible for consequences, what could the “responsibility of freedom” even mean?

A rich man can cause a lot more havoc than a poor man can. (This is also true of rich nations in relation to poor. The United States and Western Europe contribute about two-thirds of the Earth’s greenhouse emissions. The poor people of Africa, who will be among those most affected by the disastrous results of atmospheric warming, contribute only about three percent.) The rich therefore have more responsibility for using their freedom wisely.

I do not mean this observation as an apologia for inequality of wealth in American (or in the world). I deplore the widening divide between the “haves” and the “have nots.” In fact, one reason the divide between rich and poor is widening seems to be that many of the rich, rather than live up to their responsibility, are instead greedily exploiting their economic advantage (for short-term gain and long-term catastrophe). And the rich includes us who choose to drive when we could walk or take a bus.

Nevertheless, I speak of freedom as a fact, however constrained it may be by means (including consequences) and the various contributing causes (congenital, environmental, educational, habitual). For if freedom isn’t even possible in this time/space continuum, then what are we even talking about here? And why are we talking at all? And how could you choose to walk today?

Morally superior to God?

The paradox of freedom at the core of Being (oh, so mysterious Being!) requires everything—that there be hunger as well as satiety, drought as well as rainfall, death as well as birth, deformity as well as perfection. The same paradox permits everything—that we murder as well as aid, rape as well as love, lie as well as say true, waste as well as conserve. Shall we, therefore, choose to do anything whatsoever? What is to stop us?

If indeed the world was "made by the Being his beings into Being prayed" (to quote Howard Nemerov's couplet on "The Myth of Creation on a Moebius Band"), perhaps His beings prayed Him into Being as much to protect them from themselves (and from others) as to be able to believe that they would live forever. Were they not sure enough of themselves to be good without the fear of punishment to keep them from being bad? (It's easy to see, certainly, that they might not have been sure enough of others if their choices weren't regulated by a fear of divine punishment.)

But since we are free to choose—at least to the extent that we are able to exercise the choice—I say let's choose to do good without being constrained to do it by fear of punishment. Why, just because everything is permitted, should we imitate God?

What is to be done?

Hearing an echo of "what is to be done?" in the chambers of my mind, I googled the phrase and was reminded that Vladimir Illych Lenin published a little book under that title in 1902. Not quite what I had in mind when I asked the other day:

What, if anything, are we to do in the face of the existence of God, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and God's message through Muhammad?

The first thing that now strikes me about my question is that it rarely gets asked. I mean, to hear other people talk about "the Lord" or "Our Savior" or "as Allah wills" you'd think that the existence of God, Jesus's having died for our sins, the Quran's telling us how to surrender to God, and so on all make it self-evident what we are to do, no questions asked.

But do they? And I'm not just thinking of intepretation, as in, "But, just what did Jesus mean when he said that we should love our neighbor as ourself?" or "What did Muhammad mean when he wrote that no responsible person can bear the burden of another?"

I had something more fundamental in mind, like first asking, "So what?" Not asking it dismissively, but as a prelude to considering what's really going on here. Considering why those things should matter, what our motives might be in doing one thing rather than another, whether it is possible that we really are free to choose, and what the significance of that might be.

I am of course still thinking on these things, and, in my own way, praying.