I suppose it is hardly a mystery to anyone with a working brain that so much of life consists of smug, witless philistinism in pursuit of money, but I just recently listened to an astonishing example of it uncovered by Daniel Barenboim and delivered to the world in the second of his BBC Reith Lectures, first delivered to the world on April 14, 2006.

I can’t quite do justice to Barenboim’s remarks with a transcription, so I urge you instead to listen to the critical excerpt by clicking on the player below:

Comment is superfluous, unless burying my head in my hands counts as comment.

You can download the entire lecture by right-clicking and doing “save as” here or see all the lectures by visiting the BBC Reith Lectures archive page.

I diverted myself with the latest edition of Reap Paden’s Angry Atheist podcast (he’s acutally the opposite of angry) in which he chatted at length with Maria Maltseva, who blogs at Musings from the Skeptical Left.  The conversation was sort of all over the place, but one bit of the exchange (at about 1:02 in the podcast) stuck in my memory.

Maria:  The thought of death, you know, the end result of death is comforting to you, right?

Reap:  Um, no, not really [laughs nervously]

Maria:  Huh.  Because I was wondering if that has to do with my atheism, because my own death is something that I see as the most peaceful sleep I will ever have.

Reap: I suppose, but I’ll miss this world too much at the end, you know, when I know the end is coming, I’ll miss the…I enjoy my life, I enjoy my time on this planet, even with the jerkoffs, I have a good time.  I’ll miss that.

I am pleased to know that Reap is enjoying himself in spite of the jerkoffs. I’m a bit more with Maria with respect to death. News elsewhere on the Internet suggests that many others might not share his sanguine view. Via a post at the blog Crooks and Liars comes a depressing but hardly surprising report.

More Americans now commit suicide than die in car crashes, making suicide the leading cause of injury deaths, according to a new study.

In addition, over the last 10 years, while the number of deaths from car crashes has declined, deaths from poisoning and falls increased significantly, the researchers report.

“Suicides are terribly undercounted; I think the problem is much worse than official data would lead us to believe,” said study author Ian Rockett, a professor of epidemiology at West Virginia University.

There may be 20 percent or more unrecognized suicides, he said.

Many of the poisoning deaths may actually be intended, he added. A lot of these deaths are due from overdoses of prescription drugs, Rockett noted.

“We have a situation that has gotten out of hand,” he said. “I would like to see the same attention paid to other injuries as has been paid to traffic injuries.”

In political science it’s common to say that individuals can exert influence over institutions either through voice or exit, that is, they can either participate in processes designed to weigh competing interests (like voting or lobbying) or they can withdraw their support from those institutions (for example, by moving away or emigrating).

Life has no voice, if you find it intolerable, you can speak, but the world itself does not hear.

You can, however, exit in hopes of finding that most restful sleep. What a damning verdict on the world that more people are now choosing to do so.

Many of you readers have already heard of a technology of speculative utility called cryonics, but for those of you who haven’t, here’s the deal in brief.  For forking over some sum between $10,000 and $250,000 U.S., technicians will preserve either just your brain (at the low end) or whole body at very low temperatures as shortly as possilbe after your death.  The rationale for this queer practice is the in-itself-plausible thought that who you are — your thoughts, personality, memories, preferences, personal identity in sum — is encoded somehow into the structure of your cells, and so that if this structure is preserved shortly after death, some future civilization with super technology will be able to somehow revive you, fix whatever it was you died of, and give you a new life in the future.  Neat, huh?

Bracketing for the sake of this post the question of whether these procedures will ever actually work, I’d have to say I wouldn’t find cryonics a particularly good deal if my future existence were to consist of an extended period of what I have now.  After all, I’m a guy who thinks it would have been great if he had never been born in the first place, so I’d sure be a damn fool if I were to plunk down thousands of dollars in hopes of being re-born into an extended period of more of the same.   And what’s more, something I’m keenly aware of that cryonics enthusiasts seldom address is the possibiilty that the future into which one might be revived would be even worse in significant ways than the world we live in today.  Call such futures Malign Reviver Futures.  Examples of such possible futures include.

1. Slaveowners.  You are revived by people who think it might be fun to have you as a plaything or a pet.  Not likely to be that much fun.
2. Mad Scientists.  You are revived by people who want to use you as some sort of laboratory rat.
3. Religious Fanatics.  The future is dominated by a religious cult who want more converts, and you are about to become one of them, whether you want to or not.
4. Historical Re-enactors.  Our distant descendants are building ancestor simulations as a way of gratifying their curiosity about history, and you are about to become raw material to be fed into a simulation are part of one (or perhaps many) of them.  What is more, you are about to find out, human history is not very nice.  Among other things, it is full of victims of war, famine, pestilance, natural disasters, crime, genocide, economic exploiation, etc.  Have fun learning!

But okay, maybe none of this is wrong (although I have yet to hear a compelling argument that it isnecessarily wrong).  People who are going in for cryonics are apparently betting that the future into which they might be revived will be at least as good as lives worth living now.

Might I be so bold as to suggest that the future is likely to be bimodal?  Suppose it is not a world of one of the Malign Revivers but of Benign Revivers.  The people who are ultimately going to pull you out of your tube of liquid nitrogen ar geniunely kind and want the best for you.  I suppose that could be a genuinely bright future.  After all, if they have technology so sophisticated that they can turn all your life-ravaged, freezing-damaged cells back into a functioning individual, then it seems highly unlikely that they are afflicted by the sort of garden-variety evils of disease and aging that afflict us still in the twenty-first century.  At the very least, your potential life in the future will be long and healthy.  You can finally catch up on all those books that sat on the shelf in your life.  You will finally have the time to learn The Well-Tempered Clavier beyond the C-major prelude.  An interesting variety of highly attractive sex-partners might be on offer (a though that I am positive must lurk at the back of the minds of most if not all cryonics enthusiasts).

That the future is glorious compared with the crappy present is something I think most cryonics folks believe.  One of thier early proponents, Robert Ettinger, opens one of his books with this confident declaration:  “By working hard and saving my money, I intend to become an immortal superman.”    Ettinger’s apotheosis hasn’t yet arrived, but I’m certainly not going to declare than it can’t arrive.  In his prediction that it would arrive, Ettinger pretty much set the tone for the movement that followed him.

But if the future is glorious, then one wonders why cryonicists aren’t more eager to get their preservations underway.  A lot of awful things can happen to you in the course of life that will screw up the entire cryonics project:

1. You could die in such a way that makes it impossible to preserve your information.  Your body (or brain) might never be recovered by a cryonics preservation team, or when it is recovered, it might be too decayed or damaged for anything to be recovered.  You could be flying on an airplane that crashes into the sea, or into an accessible mountain range.   You might be crushed to fragments in a collapsing office tower, as many of the World Trade Center victims were.  You might in an automobile accident on a remote highway and die in an emergency room in some podunk town somewhere.  They busy attending physician might not bother to call the cryonics people (or might disdainfully think cryonics is bullshit and not worth his time).  By the time of your “recovery,” days later, your corpse has been at the mercy of small-town morticians.
2. Even if you don’t die in a way envisioned in (1), your life might be destructive of who you are.  You might develop of and then die of Alzheimer’s Disease or some other form of dementia.  Even if you’re preserved immediately after death, there’s really very little or nothing of “you” left in what ends up preserved.
3. Even if you live a long lfe and die unmarked by the illnesses envisioned in (2), the person who dies might not really be “you,” in an important sense, but will be a cranky old person, someone who, as a consequence of a lifetime of experience (mostly unpleasant, probably, because that’s how human life is) has really rather different beliefs and values from what you have now.  Is that what you want to preserve?

Happily there is an answer to all these worries, a very simple solution.  It is as follows:  get the cryonics team over to where you are now, and get yourself frozen right away.  That way, none of these things can happen.  The person brought back by the Benign Revivers will be guaranteed to be you.  You and living in the glorious future with your thoughts, your memories, your beliefs and values.  The only technical problem here is that the procedure might be against the law (against assisting “suicide” or something) but I’m sure this problem can be worked around by finding a jurisdiction sufficiently respectful of individual liberty to allow the procedure to be done.

What?  You think that this would be killing yourself?  What’s the matter?  Don’t you have confidence that cryonics works?  It’s not killing yourself.  What you doing is just trading away whatever years there might happen to be at the end of your “natural” life — years that are nearly certain to be beset by aging and all its attendant miseries, I might add — as a way of being secure against the risk that you won’t be revived in the future.

Don’t you think the technology will work?  Don’t you want to be an immortal superman?

Cryonicist!  Get into that tube!

Attention all of you neopagans, ecologists deep or shallow, and anyone else who thinks that the nonhuman world is a beautiful place/nature has lessons for us/Mother Planet cares for us: a Mr. John Stuart Mill has a revelation for you.

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s every-day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and, in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospect of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature’s dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and Nature does this too on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has Noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of firedamp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison-cups of the Borgias. Even the love of “order,” which is thought to be a following of the ways of Nature, is in fact a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as “disorder ” and its consequences is precisely a counterpart of Nature’s ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death by a hurricane and a pestilence.

From Mill’s essay “On Nature,” originally published in 1874. You can read the full text of the essay here.

I note with sadness the death last week of Dr. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), a prominent critic of psychiatry.  Szasz was the first great defender of the notion that “mental illness” is a political and moral construction, a way of delegitimizing human difference and dissent by treating it as a “sickness” which it is the job of physicians, applying “science” to “cure.”  (By tortureherotic therapeutic measures and imprisonmentconfinement in a “hospital” if necessary.)  I’m not kidding; at the time Dr. Szasz wrote what was likely his most influential book, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960), even being gay or lesbian was enough to get you diagnosed as “mentally ill.”  I shudder to think what mid-century psychiatry would have made of someone like me.

As such, Dr. Szasz was a great defender of human liberty. Lowry Heussler, in a reminiscence published at The Reality Based Community, comments

Professor Szasz hated tyranny so much that it caused him to turn against his own expertise. He rejected the idea that a man marching to a different drummer was failing to keep step because of some hearing disability that need to be corrected. If the patient wanted to keep thinking that he was the King of Siam, Szasz would try to help him live as happy as possible a life– measured against the patient’s values, not Szasz’s– while holding onto that belief. If the patient found that the belief was making him unhappy and wanted to change it, Szasz would help the patient with that task.

To those among us who are different from others in ways that disturb said others, we owe to the influence of psychiatry the stigmatizing claim that we are “sick” and the half-advice/half-demand that “you need help.” For us, though Dr. Szasz’s life may have ended, his light has not gone out.

Requiescant in pace.

The lonely early morning hours when one is exercising are a good time to catch up on all the neat audio content available out there^*, and this morning was no exception as I was listening to Friday’s iteration of Tristan Taorimno‘s nifty new Internet radio show “Sex Out Loud.” Tristan plausibly identifies herself as an “…author, editor, columnist, sex educator, speaker, feminist filmmaker, and radio host,” and her guest this week was Reid Mihalko, famed in the sex-positive world as a guru to those who are or think they might want to be in polyamorous relationships. All interesting and good fun, though I was startled by this bit of advice (it appears at about 27:35 in the show; the transcription is my own and might not be perfectly accurate):

Reid: …You really have to start looking at what makes you happy.

Tristan: Uh huh.

Reid: What totally doesn’t work for you, like what are your bottom lines, and can you stick to them, even when you are starving for a relationship. What makes you happiest, where are your bottom lines, and then where is the wiggle room for you. Like where are the things where you go, eh, I don’t really need, I don’t really care what religion you are, I just care that you’re a decent human being. Like, I don’t care if you go to synagogue or church, it doesn’t matter to me. For some people, that’s a big fucking deal.

Tristan: Uh huh. That’s the top of the list.

Reid: And that’s a dealbreaker for you. If you really need someone to be the religion…

Tristan: …to share your spiritual…

Reid: …beliefs, yeah, and practices, you are a moron if you’re dating somebody who’s not excited about the same religious practices that you are, you’re going to totally make yourself unhappy, no matter how awesome they are in all these other areas.

Tristan: Right.

The sex experts have spoken. And personal experience suggests that they are right — I’ve seen quite a few relationships of my own dissolve over differences in beliefs and practices.

Self-assessment time. What am I? An atheist, a moral error theorist, an antinatalist, a pervert and a pornographer. I’m pretty excited about all that. Of course, most of that all runs quite contrary to what other people find it acceptable to be excited about. Any one of these categories puts me into a small minority of the population all by itself. Jointly, they’re a tiny number and perhaps even a minority of one. So it’s all narrowed down for me, just like that notorious Internet fellow (curiously enough, also named Tristan) who once did an analysis figuring out why he’ll never have a girlfriend.

There are monogamous folks who figure they’re better off having a relationship with one person, and polyamorous people who think they’re best off with many. What the word for someone who thinks ve might be best off with zero? There’s “celibate,” of course, but that to me suggests someone who refrains from relationships because ve has spiritual or institutional reasons for so doing that trump what would otherwise be in ver best interest. So what’s the word? How about something like “oudegamous?” which we can make out of a perfectly respectable Greek root.

We should. After all, the experts have spoken.

—

^*I am especially fond of the archived Reith Lectures available for free download from the BBC. The first of these given by John Keegan (may he rest in peace) in 1998 is almost unbearably poignant. Those given by V.S. Ramachandran in 2004 remain deeply provocative and informative. And even those given at the very start by Bertrand Russell way back in 1948-9 seem to hold up remarkably well.

That’s what’s on the radio across the pond, apparently. Over here, we have Rush Limbaugh. It’s enough to make one think that America is a mistake, somehow. Back to main text.

Anyone with a shred of decenty would like to see suffering prevented if ve could.  At the same time, many people  think suicide is wrong.

Cirsad^* reaches the age of twenty-one and discovers that he is strongly sexually attracted to children. After a good round of cursing God for how he is made, he sits down to think through his life.  He considers (briefly) the possibility of entering therapy for his condition, but a little research quickly shows that “treatment” for his condition really doesn’t work very much an is rather appaling besides.  Also, being no fool, Cirsad is aware that claims of “successful” treatment need to be view skeptically, given psychiatry’s institutional self interest in promoting itself.  (After all, it’s a fine path to wealth and status if you can turn stigmatized variants on being human into “diseases” for which you can claim to have a “cure.”)

Cirsad is not a monster and he is not a saint.  He neither wants to cause suffering to innocent others nor does he have an unlijited capacity for absorbing suffering himself.  But he knows that his future contains great suffering for either other or himself or both.  If he resists his desires, he will spend his life being tormented by them.  If he acts on them, he will ruin other lives.   Even if he never gives in to his desires, Cirsad knows he will be hated by most of humanity just for what he is, and so he will have to spend his entire life behind a mask.  And if he does give in,  there is a great likelihood he will be caught in time, undergo social death and spend most or all of the rest of his wretched life in prison.  All futures are bleak.  There is no escape.

Except one.  Ater some reflection, Cirsad concludes that there is really only one thing he wants, which is a prescription for nine grams of Nembutal.

Moral conservatives, who presumably believe in the moral unacceptability of suicide, please explain why it is so much better for Cirsad to be denied his prescription and be forced to live.  In you answer, please be adults and leave off the God-talk.  That shit has long since passed its sell-by date.

Everyone else think hard on this:  aren’t we all just a bit like Cirsad?

—

^*Given the sensitivity of the issue I am deliberately using a silly-sounding, made-up name that to the best of my knowledge and belief isn’t actually anyone’s name. If I’m wrong, please keep in mind that Cirsad is a fictional character. Return to main text.

I was pleased to get the intelligence via his blog that a draft of one of Brian Leiter’s recent Nietzsche papers, “The Truth is Terrible” is now available for download.  As it is marked as a draft Professor Leiter requests that we not cite or quote without permission and I shall of course honor that, but I don’t think I am giving away too much if I note that the first few pages provide a clear and succicnt statement of the awfulness of what we all face, pretty much just by being alive.