The Web Across the Void

This Essay had been floating around my hard drive for a while, looking for an appropriate home.  Short of starting a third blog (thanks, no) I've decided to put it here.  Any concept or unifying theme for this blog is now officially dead.

Warning: kinda heavy in places.  By which I mean, like, really heavy.



Just about everyone who cares enough to read this knows my wife is a doctor. In September of 2010 she did a residency rotation in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). During that thirty day month, she was personally involved in withdrawing care from 13 terminal patients. The oldest was eleven. She came home every night in a daze, barely able to focus on anything. She told me stories about these patients, their parents, their siblings. She said: "I have seen things that no one should have to see."

I tried to sympathize, I tried to support her. But, not being a doctor, having never seen a war, or the moment of passing of anything larger than a mouse, it was difficult for me. My efforts to understand and empathize led me to dig into some of the darkest moments of human history. The Columbine Massacre, the Killing Fields, the Holocaust. It was the latter that did it. I was seeking a kind of sympathetic traumitization, and I found it. A picture, black and white of course, of a group of Soviet Jews being shot by Einsatzkommandos. Most are already on the ground, the lone standing victim is a woman, her back to her murderers, clutching a child, five or six years old, trying to shield her (I assume it is a daughter because I have a daughter, but it is difficult to tell) from the gunfire. The only reasonable assumption is that she failed.

I had, of course, encountered the Shoah before. I'd visited the museum in Washington DC, seen Schindler's List. I'd probably seen this photo before. But I was much younger. A teenager, full of the feeling of narcissistic immortality that is the teenager's prerogative, I shrugged it off. I didn't think I'd shrugged it off at the time, but I did. I went on with my life, essentially unchanged and unchallenged.

The much larger original is here

My rediscovery came at the same time my daughter was beginning to discover her voice, her personhood. She turned two that summer, and spoke (and speaks) in the guileless, direct way that two year olds speak. She is full of joy when there is cause to be joyful and full of rage when she feels she has been slighted. When I told her she was "two and a quarter" she corrected me, saying, indignantly, that she was "two and a girl". She is, I know, not very different from any other girl her age. It is only by an accident that she was born in the United States in 2008 and not in the Ukraine in 1938. Had she been, I do not believe she would be much different. And so, when I once again encountered that photograph, I was immediately gripped by the vision of my wife clutching my little one to her chest, her back to her murderers.

I nearly threw up.

It threatened to become an obsessive thought. Then it broadened, and I came to think seriously about death for the very first time. My father's, eighteen years ago, my grandfather's, eleven years ago, my daughter's, hopefully far in the future, and my own. Perhaps this thought came late. I am, after all, thirty years old. But then I look around at so many other people, of any age, and wonder whether the thought has occurred to them at all. It was a transformative moment of realization, from which a number of other epiphanies have flowed. And, counter-intuitively, I believe it has made me happier. I'd like to share this chain of realizations.

We must start with first principles, as Marcus Aurelius wrote. The one and only certain thing is that we will eventually die. It is almost equally certain that we cannot know when or how this will happen. Statistically, given my family history, I am most likely to die of heart disease in my late seventies, but I could just as easily blow a tire on the freeway tomorrow.

Secondly, we have no way of knowing what happens after we die. Not really. Anyone who says they know with 100% certainty hasn't thought about it hard enough, and is hiding behind a thought terminating cliche. Science cannot tell us, because science cannot yet adequately explain consciousness. Religion can offer a guess, but the more detailed those guesses become, the more they strain credulity.

From those two basic principles, we have a few choices in how we view the world in which we live. We can choose to accept one of the models of afterlife that requires a certain mode of behavior, and live our life for the next life (I refer to this as the chthonic approach). We can choose to believe that nothing in this life means anything and live without regard to consequences (the nihilist approach). Or we can choose a third way, which, interestingly, results in the enumeration of an ethical code not so different from the core principles espoused my most religious traditions without depending on a personal deity.

The third way requires two more base assumptions; first, that the world we live in is material and real and subject to the laws of cause and effect. Second, our personalities are ongoing effects, influenced by our environments, genetics, and experiences. While counterarguments against both these assumptions can and have been constructed, for the purposes of this essay, I'm going to take them as given.

Each of us affects our environment as we pass through it. As someone once said, "we smash a little of the world beneath our feet" as we move through it. This is unavoidable. We influence others, in great and in subtle ways. Often we remain oblivious to our own influence on others, and on the influence of others on us. In the absence of certainty of an afterlife, our only assurance of immortality lies in this exerted influence.

If I, for example, plant a tree, which my daughter plays beneath, climbs, and grows to love, I have altered the world. I have given her a subtle sign that she is valued and part of a loving home. I've provided a tree with a place to live and grow, along with all the birds and mammals that come with it. The tree, presumably, will outlive me, as will the influence my action exerts. It may be forgotten that I was the one who planted the tree, but my intention will be carried forward (Roger Ebert has a lovely piece here about death and memory which touches a bit on this same subject).

If I have the power to influence others, it naturally follows that others have the power to influence me. One of the most important parts of growing up is learning to recognize one's own influences and make conscious choices about which ones will be allowed to direct one's actions. Many never learn this lesson, and allow themselves to be buffeted about like rudderless ships. Note that I am not suggesting that we must be above all influence, simply that we should take an active role in evaluating those influences as they appear. When I was elementary school, they called this "critical thinking", but failed miserably in explaining what it was all about.

If we accept only the first two principles; the inevitability of death and the uncertainty of an afterlife, then the nihilistic position may seem attractive. After all, it would allow absolute freedom to act on one's impulses without fear of later divine retribution. However, adding in the notion of the ongoing effect of our actions, effects that can be carried far past our own deaths, then we must reject the idea that our actions are without consequences. The nihilist would argue that even if actions have consequences, there is little reason to care what those consequences may be, as our influence is over others and not over ourselves. This is, of course, short sighted, since all of our relationships are a collection of multi-polar chains of influence, and the way we affect others is, one way or another, reflected back on ourselves. Also, leaving that aside, as a sociopath might, there is still the question of immortality. I know that not all are like me, but for me, the idea of the void is terrifying to the point of unacceptability. In the absence of any reliable knowledge of what lies beyond, we must content ourselves to leave some mark on the world, if only on the immediate circle of friends and family, to have any hope of existence in any form beyond our deaths.

I recognize, of course, that this chain - or, more accurately, web - of influences is profoundly unpredictable, as each action is working simultaneously with billions of other factors. It is impossible to account for all the influences, past and present, that go into creating a particular reaction, decision, or thought. Many great works of fiction, both modern and classic, tragic and comic, deal with this problem.  Our best hope then is to act in good faith, taking those actions which we believe to be most likely to positively impact our environment for the longest time. It behooves us to be good parents, in spite of demonstrable evidence that sometimes children grow up to disappoint. It behooves us to be good caretakers of our parents, regardless of how they have treated us in our childhoods. It behooves us to be polite, pleasant, and compassionate, for in so doing we increase the number of positive threads of influence in the global web, increase the likelihood that we will be treated with pleasantness and compassion, and further the hope that our influence will be felt after our conscious minds flicker out.

You will note that I have arrived at the golden rule, often repeated, and often ignored: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." From this font, rules of ethical behavior can be derived for almost every situation.

Having attempted to put this into practice, I can report that it leads to a happier existence. On the one hand, the recognition of my own mortality provides context for the small irritations of life - being cut off on the highway, for instance, or the failure of a website to load properly. These are not influences I wish to carry forward, and I can choose to stop them. On the other hand, it forces me to be more mindful of my effect on the world, especially around my daughter. The question, "Should this be what is carried on?" can stop you in your tracks. The little one helps as well, as she deep into the voice-recorder stage of toddlerhood; everything I say, I can be sure I will hear again. This twin epiphany has made me a better husband, a better father, a better son, grandson, and neighbor. It required no grand divine revelation, but rather a quiet stirring at the base of my brain, that "still, small voice", mentioned in the book of Elijah. Whether it is
God's voice or not, I don't know, nor can I know. It is, I suppose, possible.

In the end, it turns out, what happens after we have shuffled off the mortal coil is quite irrelevant. It is this world that matters. This world is what is given to us. It is this world that we must decide what to do with. We may fill it with hatred, bringing suffering down mindlessly, as the riflemen in that old photograph did. (What was his life like after the war, I wonder?) Or we may fill it with love and baseless hope for the future, as that mother, clutching to a tiny shred of hope that her child might survive by her loving sacrifice, did. It is a choice each of us must make.

I choose love.