death

What to Do About the World’s Suffering

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In all the emails I receive from readers, perhaps the most common theme is a question in this vein: how can a person be at peace with the world when there is so much suffering going on?

I don’t think I need to start rattling off specifics here — virtually every story in every newspaper is a tiny, nominal record of horrendous suffering for someone somewhere. Crimes. Deaths. Famines. Wars. Fires. Floods.

How do we live with so much suffering going on? How can I do so much as enjoy a bagel with a clear conscience while so many people are enduring unspeakable suffering?

I never really had a satisfying answer for that question most of my life, and so my only strategy was distraction. Get into something more immediate, more consuming, and those thoughts go away.

But it never really sat right with me until I began to question the usefulness of those thoughts. I think the key lies in understanding the difference between two oft-misunderstood responses to suffering.

Sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, and though they are definitely not the same thing, I can’t really say my definitions are the right ones. But I think if you read on, you’ll understand why it’s so important to make a distinction.

Both are related to feeling the suffering of others. The more common reaction is sympathy, which is essentially feeling bad because someone else feels bad. It doesn’t require an understanding of the nature of the other person’s suffering, only a mental acknowledgment that they are suffering. When you react to the suffering of another with sympathy, it means you are suffering over their suffering. However, as we suffer we become less conscious. In a state of suffering, wisdom disappears, reactivity takes over, and you begin to feel helpless.

Empathy is more subtle. It is not a reaction, but rather a capacity to be aware of the suffering of another. In sympathy we can be aware that another person is suffering, though we remain preoccupied with emotions and thoughts about the suffering, making it impossible to stay keenly aware of it.

To cultivate empathy requires that you remain receptive and stable — able to listen without judgment, to stay aware without getting indignant. Above all, it requires that you do not make their suffering yours. Read More

by David on December 2, 2010
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You Must Go Do the Next Thing

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I had the privilege of being present at my father’s death. It was not like I expected.

With illness you see the person — the personality — fade over time, and you come to expect that death will simply be what you call it when there’s nothing left. In light of this it’s easy to imagine that a life can taper down to nothing without any hard edges. But death itself does come down to a single moment. He was breathing, and a moment later he was not.

Having been aware of his prognosis for five years or so, I had already envisioned the moment many times, but I had it all wrong. I expected it to trigger intense grief, hysterics.

Instead, I found I felt intensely happy for him. He had arrived the finish line, and I was there to witness it. It struck me, with all the suddenness of a lightning flash, that he was the only one in the room with no problems at all. Not a trace. All his uncertainties, needs and worries evaporated, while ours still filled the room. I watched intently as he was freed from the enormous weight of simply being alive, an unbelievably heavy thing which I’d somehow lost track of until that moment.

That heaviness is something whose density I had never fully appreciated until I saw somebody being liberated from it. The four of us at his bedside very clearly still carried it. It hung in the room like wet laundry. It was in the hallway too — in the nurse’s faces, in the other patients, in their weary families. And we were grieving for… who? The man with no more troubles.

I do forget it sometimes — that life is a constant, forceful mixture of push and pull, a ceaseless assault of needs and hopes. As pervasive as it is, we appreciate the weight of this tumult about as often as a goldfish thinks about water. Life’s current is heavy and unpredictable and bigger than us, and as long as we’re alive we are at its mercy.

Altogether I do think it’s worthwhile to be in it, for most of us, most of the time. Not that we asked for it, but our fate is to dance with this immense force until it lets us go. So we better learn to dance.  Read More

by David on November 10, 2010
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A Shocking Revelation About Human Nature

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The results were horrifying. Nobody suspected it could be that bad, not even close.

In 1961 a controversial experiment was carried out that made some chilling discoveries about human nature. Psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know how it was possible that so many people co-operated to commit the atrocities of the Second World War. They couldn’t all have been sociopaths, yet thousands and thousands of people did unspeakable things to innocent people, and millions more looked the other way.

Is it really that hard to stand up to authority?

Milgram devised an experiment that went like this:

Forty subjects were recruited to participate in an experiment “on learning and memory”, having answered a newspaper ad offering a modest payment for an hour of their time. Each of the subjects were informed that they would be compensated fully as long as they showed up, regardless of their performance in the experiment.

Upon arrival, each subject met with two people. The first was a man in a white labcoat purported to be the scientist conducting the experiment. The second was another person who was supposed to be a fellow subject, but whom was actually an actor. The two subjects drew slips of paper to see who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner” in the experiment.

It was rigged: both slips said “teacher,” so the real subject was always given the role of teacher, though he was under the impression that he’d had an equal chance of being the learner. The actor always played the learner.

The experimenter then announced that the learning was to be reinforced by electric shocks, which would be administered by the teacher on the learner whenever the learner gave an incorrect response to a simple memory test. Each teacher was given a 45-volt sample shock to get an idea of the shocks they would be giving.

The teacher was intentionally allowed to witness the learner being strapped to a chair, with electrodes fixed to him, before being ushered into the adjacent room, where he would be stationed in front of an electric shock generator. The experimenter sat behind the teacher, holding a clipboard. Read More

by David on October 27, 2010
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This is Your Life’s Work

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blocks

Picture a big steel box. Strewn about the box are some child’s blocks, the kind with letters on the sides. We place a rat in the box, to do as it pleases. It has enough food and water to live out a normal rat lifespan.

Then we let nature takes its course. Suspend any ethical reservations you have about putting a rat in a box like that — assume it is perfectly happy with this scenario, and even signed a release form.

The rat will live its whole life in that box, eating, exploring, poking at the blocks, maybe knocking some of them over and pushing them around. Eventually it will die of old age. Its corpse withers away or is removed by the night janitor.

Once the rat is dead and gone, we again have an empty box with blocks in it, same as at the start. It’s almost as if the rat’s life never happened — except there is one difference between the start of the experiment and the end: some of the blocks inside will now be in a different place.

The force that moved them was life itself. This new arrangement of the blocks — however random, pointless, meaningful or beautiful it ends up being — is the net effect of this rat’s life. The new landscape it left is the lasting impact it had on its world. It is evidence that says, “Ratty was here.” Read More

by David on March 29, 2010
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Being Alive Puts You at Serious Risk of Death

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Danger

I have always been a rather careful person when it comes to my physical safety. I suspect deep down some part of my psyche believes that if I just keep my nose clean and play my cards well, any freak mishaps, violent incidents or sudden illnesses that must happen will happen to people who are less careful than I. My shiny track record of no broken bones and no serious illnesses seems to suggest that it’s true, but I know it’s mostly luck.

It’s no fun to think about it, but fatalities without warning do happen, and not even the most asinine of worrywarts can “careful” their way around that possibility. There is an inescapable caveat attached to the gift of life: that it is only borrowed, and we never know when we have to give it back. Lightning strikes, it really does.

We live in a culture that wants us to believe we can circumvent any real possibility of an unfair and untimely demise if we just focus on security and minimize risk. Human beings have real trouble coming to terms with their temporary nature, because among the animals we have the unfortunate distinction of being the only one intelligent enough to be aware throughout our lives that we will die.

Particularly when we read about a fatality in the news, the frightening unforeseeability of death very often gets masked by blame. In most of these stories, the question of blame pops up like clockwork, as if an untimely death can only be the result of a preventable, punishable human error. It couldn’t happen just because — there’s always something that was overlooked, some warning that was ignored or unnecessary risk that was taken.

They should have put a handrail there.

The doctors downplayed his concerns.

She must have gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Excessive speed may have been a factor. Read More

by David on January 11, 2010
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Nature’s Dominant Creature

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A cross to bear

Though the hysteria surrounding the H1N1 flu has left the entirety of the news-watching world with the encouraging habit of frequent handwashing, it is hard to call it anything but an overreaction.

Not to dismiss the crushing impact of even one person’s death to their loved ones, but when we venture into the realm of cold numbers, H1N1 just doesn’t warrant this level of acute, global paranoia. Thus far, the worldwide toll is just short of eleven thousand. That’s equivalent to about a summer’s worth of highway deaths in the US alone, or about 18 hours’ worth of tobacco-related deaths. But that’s not news.

I won’t delve into the media’s reprehensible M.O. of manufacturing widespread panic in this article, though. The point I want to make has more to do with our place in the world. From our presumed throne at the top of the food chain, we often take it somewhat for granted that we’re a more advanced creature than any other, certainly better than anything with no brain and no face. Read More

by David on December 14, 2009
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Should We Have Compassion for Killers?

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jail cell

Last week, convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from prison by the Scottish government, on “compassionate grounds.” He is dying of cancer and has less than three months to live. Initial reactions were strong, but deeply divided. Here are just some of the millions of opinions that flew back and forth on Twitter, in the hours that followed:

I hope his plane falls from the sky like the 283 people 20 years ago.

~ Tony Callaghan

Lockerbie …. I hope everyone in SCOTLAND gets cancer.

~ John Wright

Lots of anger about Lockerbie bomber release. Worth noting that the case against al-Megrahi was always somewhat dubious.

~ Matthew Pallas

Why did they release that bloodthirsty killer MEGRAHI? COMPASSIONATE GROUNDS! What about compassion for the Lockerbie victims families!

~ Henry William Louis

So Megrahi is released. I am proud that we are capable of such humanity even as we still grieve for those lost at Lockerbie.

~ Clare Meikle

Oh Scotland, may I remind you that Muslims have no concept of compassion and mercy. Freeing Megrahi will be a show of weakness in their eyes.

~ Rachel Hunter

Mind is changed on Megrahi, [Scottish Justice secretary] MacAskill made good points…. Hopefully this will help build bridges with the East.

~ Thomas Scott

Totally and utterly shocking that #megrahi – mass murderer – is now FREE!! Where’s the justice??? I’m ashamed to be Scottish today!! >:-(

~ Colin Sales

“Where’s the justice” is a good question.

I contend that there is none to be found here. How do you make the deaths of 270 innocents just? What action could one possibly take at this point to create justice out of this, or this? Read More

by David on August 27, 2009
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The Unbearable Truth

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Death

It seems that we are members of the only animal species that lives most of its life knowing that it’s going to die. I sometimes wonder if life would be easier if we didn’t know it. It really is the worst of all spoilers. Happy Monday, by the way.

Now, there are other animals that do seem to realize when death is approaching; venerable elephants famously leave their pack to die in seclusion, and dogs and cats often run away from home or hide when their end is near.

But I suspect they don’t quite know why they’re inclined to do these things. It seems unlikely that they do it out of a rational understanding of their life cycle; I suspect that the urge just mysteriously comes over them along with the illness and weakness, and they take heed.

In any case, they don’t seem to know what’s coming until it’s on their doorstep.

Human beings, for better or worse, inevitably gather a more complete understanding of death, and very early on. We learn the concept of death as children. A person can’t live for more than four or five years without discovering the unpleasant fact that they are ultimately, well, doomed. Every child soon encounters a situation that someone else must help them understand by breaking this sad news, whether it’s when a pet disappears, when they ask where their grandma’s grandma is, or when they watch the Mr Hooper episode of Sesame Street.

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by David on August 17, 2009
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