Whether death is final or whether, as Socrates said, it may be the greatest of all human blessings—I have no idea. But I am relatively sure that we are all irretrievably diminished by the deaths around us from the current pandemic. I am equally sure that to make light of suffering and death by claiming that they are the inevitable outcome of economic or other forces that lie beyond human control, as apologists for capitalist excess have always done, is not only wrong headed but sinful as well.
And no sooner had I recommended a pause in open criticism of the president when he, with his characteristic blend of narcissism and arrogance, telegraphed to New York Governor Cuomo that the governor didn’t need the respirators he has asked for, downplaying the already numerous deaths from COVID-19 in New York and claiming that projections of future deaths in that state have been overblown; and besides the mess in New York is all Cuomo’s fault anyway. Future deaths will be on him and not on the president. This strategy, consisting partly of spreading the falsely reassuring notion that not everybody will be affected by the pandemic, is finding resonance with some, as indicated by the uptick in the president’s poll numbers. The Charles Koch network has been emboldened to echo the president’s claim that social distancing is a cure that’s worse than the disease it attempts to mitigate, and some of the president’s supporters among the God fearing are defying statewide distancing orders to hold massive church services. One evangelical pastor has gone so far as to refuse to accept responsibility for risking the lives of those who attend his services.
People are still going to work, still going to the mall. I encountered more people in Target today then I did during my service last night,” he said. “It’s persecution of the faith for me not to have my worship service and yet I am allowed to go out in public and shop. Why is there one standard for commerce and another for religion? . . .”
Why indeed? the good pastor’s duplicity echoes that of the president. Behind it is an admonition towards a species of moral quietism in the face of public calamity, of which more later. ‘All is well in the best of all possible worlds,’ says the president, perhaps echoing his grounding in the pop theology of Norman Vincent Peale. ‘Be happy—go back to work when I say it is time. Meanwhile, I guess we should all shelter in place, but don’t believe what the doomsayers tell you. This will all be over soon.’ If that sounds like stoicism, perhaps it should; it is at least a debased form of stoicism.
Stoicism is enjoying a revival these days, with at least a couple of pretty good books, a spate of articles, blogs, internet communities, meet-ups in various places around the world, and the like. Here’s a fairly recent article that reviews most of of these things and will put you on to other resources. Apparently the movement began in the self-help culture as an offshoot of interest in mindfulness, but it is now gathering serious philosophical underpinnings as well as some sectarian rivalry among practitioners. At my age I’m disinclined to join movements, but if I were I think I might join this one. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to support the president. But at best, in the United States in contrast to the president’s screed, the stoic revival seems to be attempting to restore the ideal of civic virtue without its sometimes poisonous grounding in Christianity.
In keeping with this new interest, I am reading around, have ordered some new books, and have just now ordered a couple of stoic medallions so that I can look forward to their arrival and carry them about me during my present isolation and perhaps afterwards. There was a time in my life when I studied the art forms generated by medieval and renaissance preoccupation with death. A gentleman of John Donne’s time, for instance, might carry on his person a medallion such as the ones I have ordered to remind himself that the funeral bell, which tolled often in those times of frequent epidemics, could toll for him just as it could for anyone else. Donne was recovering from a serious illness at the time he wrote the famous seventeenth Meditation, and he alluded to his recovery in its opening sentence:
PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
2019 was my year of near death. I have had three strokes. I am left with the knowledge that I can have another stroke at any time. I have stopped driving, though I intend to keep my license current in case of emergency. As I think about my new knowledge and what it means to me personally (I stress personally), I am remembering sitting in his office years ago with a priest friend who had had three heart attacks. He spoke of how he knew that the fourth coronary would likely kill him but reflected that there seemed some serenity associated with knowing how one will die.
I have been diagnosed with a species of heart failure known as diastolic dysfunction, which sometimes affects my breathing. I am a lifelong asthmatic and as an ex-smoker I have a bit of COPD. I use oxygen at night. I take blood thinners and a statin and medicine for hypertension, though not so much of that as in former times. I am also well over eighty. But my heart condition and other factors aside from age are under control. My only radical uncertainty is the tiny aneurysm in my brain and the too-small artery that branches off from it. While I am less certain that I will die of a stroke than my priest friend was of his potential death by heart attack (and by the way he did die of the fourth coronary), it seems a fairly good bet that a stroke will kill me.
Unless, of course, I should die of COVID-19.
Sheltering in place has been a pretty simple matter for me. I’ll not bore you with the details. It’s of some concern to me that as our hospitals are overwhelmed by the pandemic I might find it difficult to get emergency medical care if I should need it. I have already spent a night and the better part of the next day lying on a gurney in a hallway at SLU hospital the last time I was there because no rooms were available. We have 10,000 hospital beds in this city I’m told (I hope that means in the city proper outside Saint Louis County), but that’s not enough to meet the needs of our population in normal times. I find upon reflection I am troubled less on my own account than I am when I think of the potential needs of others. As I’ve said before I’ve had a good run at life, and though I certainly don’t like the Texas lieutenant governor’s idea that I should be willing to die for the sake of the economy, I’m philosophical, as the saying goes, about death.
Donne’s famous instruction in the seventeenth meditation echoes down the centuries in the oft-repeated admonition that we are all in this together in the present crisis. The president’s duplicitous appeals in today’s media both invoke and deny the admonition, gesturing first towards social distancing, which in seeming to deny Donne’s admonition actually affirms it, and then offering the empty reassurance that ‘this will all be over soon, and besides, not everybody will get the virus, not everybody will die.’ The moral vacuousness of this consolation ought to be obvious, but the politics of divisiveness is so powerful among us, that it may be useful to quote Donne here, as much for the venerability of the ideal as for its timeliness.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
For myself, today, this instruction provides a partly inexplicable serenity wrought of the knowledge that death (my own death) is an inescapable part of life that I am able to consider apart from Donne’s recourse to his home in heaven. I grew up in the church; indeed I startled my family by asking to ‘join the church’ (our Methodist confirmation) when I was nine years old. But it has been more years than I can count since I have believed that heaven and hell are places that lie beyond this world. These, I believe, are Christian metaphors for very human and worldly conditions. I think of myself most of the time as a Christian humanist, following more in the footsteps of Darwin and Whitehead than of Dante or Milton or Isaac Newton. I believe that the cosmos is rationally describable and that my inability to understand it proceeds from my human inability to see it whole; but I also believe that I can trust my partial understanding, and that my partial understanding is informed by the science of my time rather than that of ancient times.
So if I am a stoic, I am a very modern one, having discarded the science of classical stoicism just as I long ago discarded that of the Hebrew Bible. Like Montaigne, I have always been attracted to the skeptical strain of stoicism and the humility it teaches, which is why I have never felt any solidarity with the more extreme forms of postmodern thinking. These seem to me, especially when they make a leap from epistemology to ontology, not to embrace uncertainty but rather to require a certainty that borders upon hubris. I am still a Christian in that Christianity gives me the fundamental terms of what Richard Rorty has taught me to think of as my final vocabulary. I am a humanist in the classical sense of being open to the teaching of many books other than the Christian scripture and its various tropes and theologies. Humanism has taught me to regard the copious mind as a positive good, and to nourish it in others as a teacher. Now it is teaching me serenity at the prospect of my own death.
But the principal difficulty with the stoic worldview for me is not its source in outdated science. It is rather a susceptibility to conflation with naive theodicy. Leibtniz becomes Pangloss, one of whose spiritual descendants is Norman Vincent Peale. But Voltaire spoofs only the second worst outcome of Pangloss’s teaching that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The worst outcome is that to which Candide comes in the end, moral quietism, tending one’s garden as the world cries out for reform. Voltaire may or may not have approved. Certainly he had plenty of knocks to deal with in a life devoted to railing against various establishments, and certainly he retired from all of it for a time. I am presently retired as well, but I don’t plan to embrace quietism in my present flirtation with the stoic ideal.
My beloved is busy on the phone and online each day doing the various good works to which she is committed. Since I can no longer help her with much of that, I will continue to write and think. I have a good many projects saved up for a time like this one, another chapbook or two, a book of essays. By inheritance I have benefited from both my country’s disastrous adventures: slavery, and what we euphemistically call Indian removal. I have written a good deal about these things both here and elsewhere. I tried once to make sense of my story in an essay I wrote for Pembroke Magazine years ago. That essay was a failure, though I didn’t know it at the time, at least partly because the story needed more space to develop. I’m going to try again, using parts of that essay and some of the essays I have written for this blog. If I live, there will be a memoir. Beyond that, I leave to whatever gods there are.