amor fati

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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.

Next year’s politics, continued

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So, the Senate has passed a stimulus bill. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a start. As the enormity of this crisis develops, and we really have no idea what the extent of it will be, congress and the president will have to take further action. We’ll see what happens with this present bill in the House. This postcard arrived in yesterday’s mail.
Apparently, cooler heads are prevailing in our nation’s capital. If you click on the image you will see the postcard’s back side, filled with reasonable guidelines. I ask you to notice the reference there to the CDC and note as well, an editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post.

I watched with interest yesterday morning as Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York appeared to dial back his criticism of the White House (he even praised Jared Kushner), and spoke for all the world like a teacher attempting to instruct the President of the United States in how to lead the nation in the crisis brought on by our unfolding chapter of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

In doing this, Cuomo was of course trying to shame the White House into sending him some ventilators and also perhaps invoking the Defense Procurement Act, but he also followed in the footsteps of Anthony Fauci and other public health officials who have steered clear of at least some public criticism of the president in an effort not to undermine whatever efforts his administration may be willing to take to combat the pandemic. Joe Biden is doing the same, I think, or at least I hope he is. I take his recent statement to the press that he doesn’t want to get into a contest of recrimination with the president to mean that he is keeping his powder dry and studying how to continue his campaign without exacerbating the present crisis.

For better or worse Donald Trump is the president we have, for at least another nine to ten months. He has returned to candidate-mode behavior in his daily press conferences and continued to pursue his favorite course of dividing the country, as Republicans in the congress have seemed to do as well with their first stimulus bill that attempted to please most industry lobbyists, and in comments by some Republican lawmakers including the President, suggesting that some lives should be prioritized over others as hospitals gear up to deal with inevitable surges in demand for emergency medical care. Then of course there is the ever-present spate of conspiracy theories about the virus that are being spread by trump supporters.

But the Coronavirus is no respecter of persons. Young or old, Republican or Democrat, it attacks any and all persons regardless of race or sexual orientation or religion. And on that note it’s good to see that Liberty University is not following the example of Hobby Lobby and continuing instruction as usual in order to proclaim its president’s fear of God. I think we have reached a point of crisis at which all news-makers and all reporting should avoid sensationalism. All political campaigning should do the same and cease the opponent bashing and excessive negativity that have come to characterize American life in this age of political violence that pushes us constantly towards rhetorical excess.

Senator Sanders should be commended for re-purposing his campaign towards fundraising to assist the effort to arrest the pandemic. The “Where is Joe Biden?” campaign by contrast seems cynical. Sanders’ supporters should stop it. Biden, on the other hand, should embark on a campaign to show the public what a Biden presidency would look like, as recommended in a recent Washington Post piece by Paul Waldman.

[W]hy not put together a series of presentations in which Biden and well chosen experts and communicators explore policy challenges and consider solutions he would pursue? You could do them on health care, economic growth, labor rights, civil rights, voting rights, climate change, immigration and any number of other issues.

This will have the virtue of displaying the kind of conciliar presidency I expect Biden to institute, and to recommend enlightened federalism to whatever Trump (and Sanders) supporters might be inclined to listen. It would also fulfill the need I think Biden’s present silence indicates not to exacerbate panic about the pandemic.

If anything good comes out of this crisis for Americans, perhaps it may be a widespread realization that we are in a radically new time in our history. The world has shifted beneath our feet. The Coronavirus has been characterized as a novel virus, meaning that it produces infections against which we humans have no natural immunity since we have never before encountered it. What further novel viruses might we encounter in the future, and what worldwide imperatives do we face if we are to combat them? This fact, and our lack of preparedness here in the United States lay an additional question on our plate that only adds to the chaos we are already experiencing from the combination of climate crisis and the debasement of our politics. But it isn’t just politics any more. In the words of that sage, James Carville, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’

We are now encountering the wholesale failure of our health care system. It isn’t failing because the president fired public health officials wholesale with no thought towards the future, though that is a contributing factor. Our health care system is failing because it is doing what it was designed to do. Our entire approach to health care in this country has been determined by our American commitment to the idea that economic entities compete. In a time like the present that calls for widespread cooperation, competition for funds and resources between state and federal agencies and hospital systems is self-defeating and destructive. It is why we have fallen behind the rest of the world in health care and why we are not coping with the challenge of present stresses. From the simplest to the most complex of stresses, from my lying on a gurney for eighteen hours in the hallway at SLU hospital waiting to be admitted recently (that is, competing for space) to the complex stresses we face nationwide as we rely on competition to distribute ventilators to hospitals, we are dealing with the breakdown of American health care. We have fallen behind the rest of the contemporary world because we are the world’s chief practitioner of late capitalism.

A couple of evenings ago, Ezra Klein declared the choice the president presented at that day’s press briefing between the piling up of deaths from COVID-19 and allowing the economy to function normally to be a false choice. But Klein said as well that he doesn’t disagree with the idea that the cost of economic suffering is a trade-up in life and “a harsh reality of simply being alive in any economy.” We “deal with this all the time in American politics,” he claimed. True perhaps, but economic suffering is only inevitable for some people in today’s world, and it is widespread in American life today. As this pandemic has progressed around the world, the story of economic inequality has been felt globally. Now, it will be felt acutely here in the United States, having already been built into the stimulus bill passed unanimously last night by the Senate. Perhaps this present bout of economic suffering will bring us closer to adopting Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or other progressive ideas that will require us to act collectively in restraint of private (and corporate) greed.

—One can only hope.

Next year’s politics

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Back in 2016 I initially thought Hillary Clinton was the wrong person for my party to have nominated for president. After the disaster of that election I continued to think so for a time. But as the significance of Clinton’s popular vote victory began to dawn, something else occurred to me. Clinton had actually won the election of 2016. Her loss in the electoral college was a fluke. This understanding of the 2016 election outcome has the advantage over other understandings in that it conforms to Occam’s razor, which tells me that the simplist explanation of a phenomenon is the best.

To those among my friends who would like to see the hand of God in the momentary triumph of Trumpism, I can only say that their belief involves a gratuitous assertion I deny gratuitously. As for reasonable explanations of the Trump victory (i. e. politics of resentment, misogyny, racism, etc.), all of which have some claim to being true, I’m thinking today that all of them have followed Lewis Carroll’s white rabbit in overthinking something we should rather understand to have proceeded from the flaw in our constitutional system that has left us vulnerable to oligarchy at a time when the economics of oligarchy are already in place.

Bernie Sanders and the movement he has assembled are both a consequence of and a possible solution to the many cultural, social and political problems that have arisen in the wake of our present slide into the abyss of inequality. But I am more attracted to some of Sanders’ younger supporters than I am to Sanders, himself. I believe the country’s future lies with Sanders supporters who, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, found themselves able to praise Elizabeth Warren after her withdrawal from the presidential race. I’m not so sure about Sanders supporters like one who tweeted this attack on Warren’s SNL performance: “I’m actually disgusted that while the people are fighting for the soul of this country she is dancing and rehearsing fodder for the masses, , , ,” I cast my vote in yesterday’s Missouri Primary without being able meaningfully to vote for Warren, the candidate of my choice, a choice I believe I am as qualified to have made as my disgusted fellow citizen who by extension stigmatizes me as a person who is not fighting for the soul of my country.

One of the things that seems to characterize the Sanders campaign is humorlessness. I’m constantly thinking, “Lighten up!” If we lose the ability to “dance and rehearse,” to laugh at ourselves, the wowser’s have won. And I’m thinking of Nafisi’s reading group in Lolita in Tehran, who come to Nafisi’s house in the hijabs they are forced to wear, but beneath them dress in vivid colors that match their independent spirits, the poetry of their inner lives, the beauty of their souls regardless of what grief and despair their lives entail. And I’m thinking that a certain joylessness is characteristic of authoritarian politics. To the extent that we on the left lose the ability to have a good time, to take pleasure in the world around us and in things that are lovely, we have become what we deplore in the politics of the right. We have conceded the whole territory of life and the world to the enemy, which is not “dancing and rehearsing” but the despair that would forbid it.

Still, it’s perhaps a sign of the times that the Sanders campaign has developed a degree of toxicity that can be observed in the tweetstorm occasioned by Sanders’ SNL appearance and Ocasio-Cortez’ praise of her. On another front, today I note a whole series of memes alleging that Joe Biden announced on the Lawrence O’Donnell show night before last he would veto a bill authorizing medicare for all if it came to his desk as president. That Biden did nothing of the sort can easily be displayed, but few I suspect, will take the trouble to review video of the show in question. Russian trolls aside, distortion by recontextualization, though hardly new to politics, has had a new birth in the Trump era. It’s even defended by its perpetrators, as in the case of a doctored video tweeted by White House director of social media, Dan Scavino, and retweeted by Trump, that purports to show Biden urging Americans to re-elect Trump.

I’m amused, too, by fact checkers’ use of epithets like “partly false” for distortions such as these. I’m used to old-fashioned distinctions between truth and falsehood (i. e. a statement cannot be true and false at the same time). There’s really no such animal as a “partly false” statement. The distinction between truth and falsehood admits no relativity. But lying by distortion is an equal opportunity occupation these days. Many of the attacks on Barack Obama that came to be associated with Republicans, for instance, were first introduced by the Clinton Campaign in the run-up to the Democratic Convention of 2008. Now, I’m hearing from CommonDreams that “progressives” (i. e. Sanders voters) are appalled at a list of potential Biden appointees published recently by Axios. One can discount consternation expressed over usual suspects, Bloomberg and Dimon, but more interesting is a comment by Sarah Jones to the effect that “the highest expectation anyone should have for a Biden presidency is that he’d be a caretaker president.”

I submit the same had best be true of a Sanders presidency. Both Biden and Sanders are old, as I am now, Sanders the elder of the two. “There is a fundamental instability in a gerontocracy,” writes Sarah Kendzior in her most recent piece for the Globe and Mail. “November will bring a reckoning” she says. It’s inconceivable to me that the first stages of that reckoning involve any other than a rebuilding of the country’s distressed institutions. I am convinced that reform must wait upon that rebuilding. Still, rebuilding will require that Sanders or Biden form “a broad coalition of younger colleagues” in order to confront “the structural rot that allowed Mr. Trump to triumph in the first place,” as Kendzior puts it. “Mr. Biden is better at coalition-building and Mr. Sanders is better at identifying root problems,” she says further. “They will both need to embrace each other’s skills to move forward.” Kendzior’s remarks avoid ageism, though just barely. Her final sentence sets one generation against the other in a manner that is becoming typical.

One cannot blame young people for being disillusioned about the future in this era of climate catastrophe and ceaseless corruption. To capture their votes, Democrats must make a compelling case about how they will protect that future – even though their presidential nominee will not live to see it.

Today I am reading comments on Facebook to the effect that Biden is a ‘poor, demented, old man.’

That being said, neither Sanders nor Biden should aim to serve more than one term. Beyond rebuilding, the fundamental task of that term should be to groom a cadre of successors. It is perhaps just to claim that Biden’s resurgence as a candidate means that a substantial number of Americans think of him as safe. I think, given the fact that both Sanders and Biden are soon to be eighty, as I am now plus a couple of years, their ideological differences should be viewed as matters of political style as much as reflections of the views of their respective supporters. The great need for structural reform will not go away if Biden is elected, and American style capitalism will not go away if Sanders is elected. This country is inconceivable without the wealth-generating engine at its heart, as problematic as that has been for America’s past, as problematic as it will be for the future of our planet. Today, as I watch more election returns, it seems evident the electorate all around the country are turning out in record numbers to vote for Joe Biden. I very much hope this presages a blue wave that will sweep Trump and the Republicans out of office in November. It will be tempting for the pundit class to overthink a Biden victory, if it occurs. What I think is that the electorate could just as easily have coalesced around Sanders.

Assuming that a Democrat president is elected in the fall and is given a Democrat congress to work with, the job of government next year will be the same whether the president is Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. It is a pure accident that Biden is emerging as the victor, just as it was a fluke that gave us Donald Trump and robbed us of our first female president. Next year’s president, assuming it is not Donald Trump, must assemble a brain trust like the one assembled by Franklin Roosevelt and begin the hard work of rebuilding what Trump and the Republicans have destroyed. The Sanders movement has done the country the great service of moving our political discourse to the left. We can now talk about health care as a human right. We can now consider reigning in the multinational corporations, the big banks and hedge funds, the telecom giants, big data, big pharma, etc. We can at the very least return to the Kyoto accords. Beyond these things it will be the task of next year’s politics, as Sarah Kendzior says, to empower a new generation of Americans to lead our nation. They are already there in the persons of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Pete Butttigieg, etc. It isn’t necessary that they agree, but it will be their task to determine whether humanity and the planet survive.

I’ve just read “To Live and Love with a Dying World: A conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Wendell Berry” in the current issue of Orion. DeChristopher is a West Virginian and Berry is a Kentuckian. Both are keenly opposed to mountaintop removal, which is more or less where they begin to talk. But the subject of their talk soon turns out to be that despair that comes from conviction that it is too late to save our planet, or human life as we know it: that is, the despair that seems to follow upon thoughtful approaches to the Anthropocene. The difference between the two men is only partly a difference between youth and age, and it almost parallels that between Sanders and Biden: Sanders being like DeChristopher, seeking a movement, working out his dreams on the unfolding canvas of American vista; Biden, the specialist in retail politics, seeking always the smile, the handshake, working the ropelines, a bit like Berry, a specialist in localism and economies of scale.

Their disagreements are sharp, but they find at least partial agreement as they come to the end of their talk. DeChristopher can’t quite sign on to Berry’s thought that the world is still a good world, but he does find it in him to say:

That’s why the despair is not paralyzing. Knowing that it’s too late to prevent collapse, knowing that we’re not going to stop the catastrophic end, knowing that we’re going to die—it doesn’t mean that we stop. It means that we live in this moment as fully as we can.

Berry, typically, goes further:

That’s my argument in favor of this world, against the determinists. I depend on what I know of human goodness, but also on the flowers and the butterflies and the birds. The otters and the swallows—a lot of their life is just spent having a hell of a good time. The animals, so far as I can understand them, have a great deal to say in favor of life. It’s a good world, still.

I smile a bit at this and think of Elizabeth Warren dancing on SNL a few nights ago and making ‘pinkie promises’ with little girls as she bravely ran for president, because “that’s what girls do.”