My Problem, or Society's Problem?

There are lots of situations where the members of some very small set of people would like or need something, and there is a basic choice to make: Does society deal with it, or does the individual deal with it? If it costs the majority little or nothing, then the solution is obvious. The potential problems arise when there is some sort of cost to people in general of the accommodation for the few.

One example is the sheet of paper in many official mailings giving in a wide variety of different languages the basic message, 'This is important. Don't ignore it." That seems reasonable. People who speak a wide variety of languages get a mix of important mail and junk mail, and this seems like a reasonable way to distinguish the two. It's easy enough for English speakers to ignore. I wonder if there is a legal penalty for including such a piece of paper in marketing mail -- or maybe it just wouldn't be very effective advertising. I'm also thinking that these ubiquitous pieces of paper cry out for some slang term, but I haven't heard it yet. 

Phone  trees only came into widespread use after I was an adult. But initially there was never a "To continue in Spanish, press 2" message. Now there is. This is I trust a cost/benefit tradeoff. Someone judged that there were enough Spanish speakers that it was worth it. Or perhaps it came out of an activist demand, and including it earned points with activists for the Spanish-speaking community. But it costs everyone a few seconds on every phone call. In contrast, something like Braille instructions on ATMs have no cost. Perhaps a half-second version, like "Espanol, dos" would be obvious enough to Spanish speakers and save us all a second or so on every call.

Some people are sensitive to fragrances. Some people like to wear fragrances. Do the sensitive ones have the right to determine that others can't wear fragrances? Or is it the responsibility of those truly sensitive to fragrances to plan to be elsewhere?

I was a partaicipant in a series of pot luck dinners starting ten years ago, at which people were required to provide a label with each dish listing the ingredients. This is significant work to prepare this list and display it. The solution I would favor is that those very few with serious food allergies should bring a bag supper and let the cooks prepare their dishes without having to document them.

I have heard about serious peanut allergies, based on which any traces of peanuts are banned in an entire classroom -- maybe an entire school? Might it make more sense to designate a few schools or classrooms as peanut-free and let the peanuts crunch freely elsewhere? 

On the whole the Americans with Disabilities Act was a good thing, giving access (notably for people in wheelchairs) to places they couldn't access before. But when I look at specific examples I often wonder if 90% of the benefit might have been achieved for far less money. Elevators are very expensive. If the ADA requires that a renovation include an elevator, that's money that could have been spent on other things. Alternatively, simple renovations that would improve most people's lives are foregone because the required elevator makes them too expensive.

I save for the end two examples that seem to be controversies with political overtones: trigger warnings and pronouns.

The "trigger warning" is given in advance when some sort of content contains things some groups of people might find upsetting. It might be, "this show depicts graphic violence". I don't object too much if it's voluntary, though I tend to think it's a waste of people's time. As I see it, life in general comes pre-marked with one big, implicit trigger warning: You might see upsetting things. I am more passionately against trigger warning scolding, where the content maker is castigated for not having included one. Implicitly there is a competition here among various sensitivites people might have, whereby some are more important than others. A trigger warning might be demanded on behalf of some group by sympathizers who wish to show their support, whether or not the group itself feels the need for a trigger warning.

Some poll showed that 90% of Native Americans had no problem with a football team named the Washington Redskins. Whether the poll result was valid or not, it raised a few key questions... Had people thought about identifying the offended group and asking their opinions? Or was the real objection that the rest of the population thought it wasn't suitable, independent of actual effects on an actual minority. That might itself be a valid reason, but if so it's best to be clear about it.

I enjoyed the Harry Potter books, but got only partway through one movie before deciding it was too violent for my tastes. But I never expected anyone to put a trigger warning on the movie.

Pronouns. 'What are your pronouns?' you may be asked. Perhaps they are to be filled in on name tags, or included in online signatures.

Perhaps there is a significant population out there that is traumatized when people meeting them for the first time don't use the pronouns they would like, but I don't believe it. I can see they might find it a bit tedious, but not especially upsetting. The old, tried-and-true method we had was to look somebody over, and with 99.5% accuracy determine from their appearance what pronouns are appropriate. A few people whose appearance didn't match their gender were stuck correcting people. The same rule should continue to serve us well today. If you want to use something that doesn't match, it's up to you to tell people. (After they tell you, it's polite to try to use the ones they request.)

Consider for comparison people who are deaf or who don't speak English. As they move through American society, they will constantly have to set people straight by conveying their language situation. If they wish, they could wear a nametag alerting people to this situation, but it's up to them. The same goes for people whose pronouns do not match their appearance. But they're the ones who wear the tag. Our mental space should be freed from worrying about pronouns of the people we meet. It's only when someone alerts us to the fact that they prefer other pronouns -- or are deaf, or don't speak English -- that we need to deal with that. But to follow the analogy, we do not need to put "I am hearing" and "I speak English" on our nametags!

One reason some people might oppose everyone specifying preferred pronouns is a hostility to gender identification that does not follow biological sex. I'm sure this is true, but the issues I raise are a sufficient reason to oppose the practice, and I myself am supportive of individually chosen gender identification.

On the whole I think our society has gone too far in the direction of accommodating the needs of very small groups of people who have special needs when they meet one particular condition: They occupy everyone's mental energy and attention even in the vast majority of circumstances where no such very rare people are present.

I Never Found Unconditional Love

My 50th high school reunion just happened on Saturday. I included a link to this blog in my "bio" that was mailed out to classmates in advance of the reunion. I wondered if perhaps I would get canceled for some of my less popular views, but I didn't (and perhaps no one read a word).

I have no reason to think my life is nearly over, but the idea of living as if each day was your last is good in some respects. And so I choose today to offer (to those who really want to know) the most important element of my own emotional truth, as best I understand it.

When growing up, there was no one who said or conveyed "I love you no matter what." I could get approval for being good, but never unconditional love. A great many people don't have that, but perhaps I felt its lack more than some others, and in any case this is about me. Surely the best way to get it is to have it just handed to you along with your childhood.

Popular songs told of the power of romantic love, and how the right girl or woman could fix everything. In particular, the right girl would offer unconditional love. I believed it. This is very destructive if taken as actual advice. When was I supposed to have learned not to take it literally?

Well up into my 50s, far past when I should have known better, whenever I started a relationship, I would feel this strong tendency to melt into the joy of unconditional acceptance. This sort of weakness was a turn-off to partners. Part of me knew that I had to be reasonably strong as a condition for the relationship, but this other tendency dominated too often. If I had to be strong, then it wasn't unconditional love, was it? The one relationship that really worked was my marriage to Sarah, and a key reason was that I didn't love her with the passion I had the others. It was a compromise. "I really have to marry someone if I want to have a family, and who's the best?" There were many considerations.All candidates were former girlfriends, but all the others had rejected me at some point, and Sarah never had. I wonder in retrospect if that was important.

I gave up on receiving unconditional acceptance 16 years ago from my then-girlfriend, but realized I had already given it up in any other friendships, and knew there would be no future relationships. It was a major life goal, and not one I achieved. My wariness in trusting that any sort of affection is profoundly "true" has carried over to friendships, including family.

Short of acceptance that is unconditional is the variety that is at least warmly felt and genuine. I have struggled with that too.

In high school and before I had many fine qualities, made people laugh, and got considerable approval. I think I have always genuinely cared about people I consider my friends. But I was also not "with it" in many ways, and was always worried (with some justice I think) that there were important emotional realities that other people understood that I didn't. I was accepted into one key group in high school (known as "the clique") but felt that with one misstep I could be instantly dropped. In high school I was surrounded by a great many attractive girls, a few of whom I even knew were interested in me. But the wrong choice could surely lead to derision and loss of all my friends. This criterion allowed me to feel interest in only the most popular girls. I also had no idea how to relate to a girl in that sort of situation -- no adult men in my life modeled this for me. My long-time therapist seemed stumped on that question too -- where do men learn this?

College was where I had my first five romantic relationships, none of which lasted more than a couple months but which were at least real and not just possibilities to dream about with intense anxiety. I had many individual friendships and even was accepted into a group of friends. But even among them, I recall feeling I lacked the "standing" in the group to try to invite anyone else in, for instance.

With my wife Sarah we had the sort of relationship that grows from affection, common activities and mutual respect, and those years 1981 to 1986 were the happiest of my life. Unfortunately other stresses were unleashed in by the birth of our children, and ultimately the marriage ended in 1998. Sarah in retrospect labels her difficulties starting in that period as "mental illness", and I surely contributed my part as well.

Parenting was an entirely different sort of activity. I tried to love my daughters unconditionally. I felt I did, but they were "good" kids and did nothing to seriously test the truth of such a commitment. But still I wondered if I really could deliver the genuine article, since I had lacked that in my own childhood.

After college, friendships were more difficult to maintain and more varied. I recognized and "owned" my strong introvert tendencies, and felt at peace having just a few friends.

The theory as I understand it for those lacking unconditional love is to provide it yourself. You love yourself as you would have wanted to be loved. It remains somewhat mysterious to me. Perhaps there is bootstrapping, or connecting different aspects of life in new ways, or "faking it until you make it" or taking a leap of faith. I can't say I have felt like I had much success. Perhaps the way my cards were dealt it was always out of reach.

There are of course a great many other ways to build a worthwhile and interesting life, and I feel I have done well with those for the most part. I am proud of what I have done, in fatherhood, friendship, service to community, and the life of the mind. I succeeded in a career of which a few jobs were arguably advancing human welfare in modest fashion. But today I have admitted to this other piece of life that I wanted and never got.

The Big, Big Picture

Maybe my upcoming 50th high school reunion inspires me to step back (not for the first time) and look at the big picture of the world as I see it. Yes, (a) the world is an interesting place, (b) there is no inherent meaning or right or wrong, only the essentially arbitrary things we choose, and (c) we're all going to die. But those will never change. As for the more newsworthy:

1. Climate change and mass species extinction are mostly unavoidable, and will have consequences lasting millions of years. But there still may be significant differences between the worst case and better cases, so working for lower emissions is worthwhile. I find it psychologically hard to connect with an issue that honesty requires us to frame as, "We've already lost, but let's work very, very hard so we don't lose quite so badly!" but logically that seems best to me. The prospect of getting large portions of the earth's people to take this issue seriously seems quite dim.

2. American democracy is under serious attack. Revelations from the January 6 hearings make clear how hard Trump tried, after one term in office, to stay in power after losing the vote. If he is elected in 2024, we are in much graver danger. The Constitution prohibits him from seeking a third term, but he could put forth Donald Trump Junior in 2028, making it clear that the latter will rule in name only, as long as Trump Senior lives. His control over the Republican Party will only become stronger. If his supporters shrug at the idea of blatant and repeated lies, that is most worrisome. If state legislatures controlled by Republicans can be convinced to certify a slate of Republican electors even if the people of the state's people voted Democratic, that's a huge blow to democracy. (What about falsely blocking certification of the election of Democratic state legislators, if people are so uppity as to elect them?)

With a 6-3 Supreme Court majority, and the "rotten boroughs" of the US Senate structurally favoring Republicans, the Presidency is in the short term the key office. I am adamant that every person who disagrees with Joe Biden and agrees with Donald Trump on every policy issue of the day must nonetheless vote for Joe Biden. That is if they value democracy, and that is more important than anything else. If there is no functioning democracy, and Donald Trump Jr. does something that is unpopular with a large majority of the people, there is no way to get rid of him. I don't see how people with the most rudimentary knowledge of history can miss that crucial point. One unpopular decision can be followed by a series of others, leading to a government more and more out of line with the will of the people.

Disenfranchising voters that tend to vote against the preferences of local government officials is also a serious problem. Primarily we think of disenfranching black voters, but it is not limited to that. That effort pre-dates Trump.

3. Everything else in my mind fits into a miscellaneous category.

Russian aggression in Ukraine is terrible, though it seems the country will survive, and steps are in place to deter any such attacks in the future. But I wonder about credibility of deterrents. If Russia attacks the NATO member Latvia with conventional forces and seems poised to win, just what is NATO going to do? Use nuclear weapons? Seems unlikely. Would Russia try to call NATO's bluff? Perhaps NATO can defend Latvia with conventional forces.

The Left has committed itself to the idea that the US was founded on slavery and displacement (or worse) of Native Americans, and is thus rotten to the core. White Americans should recognize that they have White Privilege, and while technically they are not instructed to feel guilty about that, in practice that's what happens if they take it seriously. This view might be true in some sense, but it is just not a workable position. A more reasonable approach is to recognize serious problems in our past, but to recognize that all modern nations have huge problems in their past, and the best ones struggle to be the best nations they can be now. It's also a political disaster of the highest order. The policy prescription for white voters who are struggling? Recognize that you are guilty and unduly privileged, and deserve less than Those Other People. I can't think of a better way to get people to vote Republican even if it means giving up democracy.

Sexual minorities, blacks, women -- the pendulum is swinging far to the right, and they will suffer. Overturning Roe v Wade is recent and looms large.

Fundamental to my view is that the government has to engage in a certain amount of income redistribution. The economy, following its own internal logic, has evolved to a place where a few highly skilled workers earn a great deal, and lesser skilled workers who work just as hard have trouble maintaining a decent lifestyle. It's the government's job to ease that... take more from the rich (but also leaving them plenty) to support the poor. This view is not popular with Republicans these days, and thus even the elements of it that we have (like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) are under attack.

Covid is with us, and a worse virus might be on the way. Lack of trust in government on this issue is a serious problem. More competent and efficient government agencies would also be great.

I am not going to try to make an exhaustive list of all the big issues in the world today. Those are the ones that came to me while writing this on a hot Sunday afternoon in June. But that's the end of category 3, "Miscellaneous".

Impressionistically, in the background of our modern commerce I see a gigantic container ship on the high seas, its engines spewing a huge blast of carbon dioxide into the air with every nautical mile they travel. That's the climate price of just about everything we do.

And democracy... remember democracy? "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others," said Churchill. I fear we're going to be reminded of just why he said that.

Skip the Airplane Safety Videos

 I have enjoyed the YouTube channel of Mentour Pilot (https://www.youtube.com/c/MentourPilotaviation), in particular the series of videos on airline accidents and his very careful look at what happened and various methods that could be taken to reduce such accidents in the future. Concerning Sully's famous ditching into the Hudson... a great job with a wonderful outcome, but still look for potential improvement. Example: They should have switched from an "engine failure" checklist to a "ditching" checklist as they approached the Hudson. Terrrain proximity warnings were not helpful.

But he recently did a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzTs6T4ZTu4&t=1452s) that troubled me. It was a reaction video to an irreverent video of the "real airline safety video" that had been making the rounds of the internet, and I found much to object to in both the original and his reaction to it.

The basic point: The chances of dying in a commercial air crash are 1 in 11,000,000 per year. That is so small that it is not worth people's time to invest mental energy in preparing for such an event.

So you could argue that simply doing away with the entire concept of a safety video would be best. But suppose "we all" decide they should be made. The vast majority of flyers have flown many times, and their time is wasted listening to safety videos. Why not have safety videos optionally available in online reservation systems, kiosks in passenger terminals, a channel on the airplane's entertainment system? Maybe detect based on the wealth of data online if someone might be a a new flyer, and print something prominent on their boarding pass reminding them of how they in particular should look at the safety card in the seat pocket or the one on an entertainment channel. Save everyone the couple minutes of annoying yammering on every flight.

Another note was that most accidents occur during the first 3 minutes or last scheduled 8 minutes. The video suggests keeping your shoes on and your laptop stowed during those times. Why suffer discomfort and waste time during those minutes? They may be just 11 minutes, but your chances of dying are still in the 1 in 11,000,000 range.

Almost all accidents start with an emergency situation that is diagnosed many minutes before a crash -- ten, at least? That's plenty of time to stow your laptop, or put on your shoes, though I'm not sure how vital having shoes on is to your survivial. Plenty of time for people who are not frozen with panic to help out those who are or who don't know what to do by teaching them safety basics. Time to try out your seat belt buckle, making sure you know how to faste and unfasten it. Now you have a strong motivation to pay close attention!

"The frequency of occurrences necessitating the use of oxygen is approximately ten events per one billion flight hours." (https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-you-dont-know-about-airplane-oxygen-masks#:~:text=%22The%20frequency%20of%20occurrences%20necessitating,per%20one%20billion%20flight%20hours.%22) Once again, amazingly unlikely. If only (say) 1 in 4 people know what to do and don't panic, they have time to get their own mask on and help the other 3 in 4 to get their masks on. If planes really do almost always get down to a safe altitude before brain damage begins, there's an argument for omitting them entirely.

There is also plenty of time to look around for the nearest exit, and to learn how to put on a life vest if needed (though the original video suggests we would be just as safe without them).

These are extremely unlikely events, and for every issue (including the safety video itself) we are concerned with the marginal increase in safety achieved by including or omitting it.

Some safety measures are useful because of events that are far more common and not fatal. You often are best advised to put your seat belt when turbulence is expected. But the PA announcement should be enough, perhaps supplemented by the advice of experienced flyers to new ones as to what is meant.

But actual safety is not the only thing at work here. People like feeling they are safe, and perhaps having a safety video increases their sense that they are safe(r), however irrational. But it's basically a superstition. Civilization has overcome other superstitions; why not this one too?

Performance measured by streaks (bad) and percentages (good)

I don't follow sports much, but I remember often hearing things like, "He hasn't missed a single game in 4 years", or "He has had at least one hit in each of his last 19 games". Another is how many free throws a player made in a row without missing a single one.

I suspect the sports "quants" take a dim view of such records. A much more accurate measure of skill is in percentages. If some guy has missed only 2% of his games in the past four years, but they were in the middle of the four years, his streak would be way less than the guy who holds the record who maybe missed 4% of his games during that period -- it's just they were clustered at the beginning or end. But the first guy is more reliable to be available for the new game. I suppose part of the job of sports writers (or bloggers, or whatever) is to make stories interesting, and "streaks" are kind of interesting in a way that percentages are not.

Maybe I'm unusual in thinking about streaks and percentages in my own life too. But I bet some other people do. I recall trying to bounce a ping pong ball up in the air off a paddle 1,000 times without missing. I think I succeeded after very few attempts (it's not that hard). More recently I played some "Plants versus Zombies" (the original edition). The most difficult challenge is "survival, endless". I think you need to survive 20 levels of this to win the relevant "achievement" within the game context. Naturally, people on the web made posts about their favorite strategies. I developed a strategy I liked and made it through more than 900 levels before the computer crashed, for no apparent reason. Starting over again, I completed 200-odd levels before I died, but due to a clear error I myself had made. I then started again, and got up into around 1500 levels. I finally died when I had a failing hard drive on that computer replaced, but the new drive was not uniformly responsive, so I couldn't reliably make the mouse do what I wanted in a timely fashion. But I was relieved to lose. When working on a streak, every level of play is fraught with tension... If I'm not careful, I could lose now! When you're just working to win a game, you can feel good if you win it and bad if you don't, but a single loss doesn't mar the whole enterprise.

This same issue came up recently in the land of Wordle and Quordle. I guess I am still undefeated in Wordle after 89 games, but try not to think about that. And because of that, even if I'm tired or not feeling very competitive I will play anyway. In Quordle I had 91 wins in a row and hadn't lost a game -- but then I did lose one and once again felt that sense of relief. I've won another 8 since then, so my percentage remains high.

People should set for themselves whatever goals they want, of course. I just think that going for streaks causes extra tension and when your streak ends could be dependent on nothing but bad luck. With percentages you can be a lot more relaxed. A loss is just a loss, and tally that determines your percentage keeps right on going.

What Shaped My Parents

 

My mother died in 2007 and my father in 2010. I had plenty of time to ask them questions. I did ask some, and got some answers. Perhaps some of the questions I consider now are ones they didn't even know the answers to themselves.

My father was born in 1920 and raised in a rather devout Northern Baptist family. They were not well off, and he attended Bates College on scholarship. He reports that at some point in college he realized God didn't exist; it just didn't make sense. He went into biology, following in his big brother's footsteps, and was working towards a PhD at Harvard in roughly 1942. My mother's story is that he avoided the draft because of either a physical deferment (flat feet?) or being in an essential occupation (teaching anatomy and physiology to medical students). Sometimes one, sometimes the other. There was a sense that he was too sensitive to have been suitable for the army, but I'm not sure I ever heard that idea really supported. It is a bit hard to picture him in basic training but I imagine this was true of a lot of draftees. I don't recall anyone saying he volunteered and was disappointed he couldn't serve his country in that way. I asked if he had made any sacrifices on account of the war, and he said he did teach some extra sections way beyond what would have been the usual load, I guess. I think his thesis work was on hormonal cycles of the frog. Getting jobs and getting tenure in the late 1940s was very easy due to the extreme shortage of professors to teach the many students who enrolled under the GI Bill.

At some point around 1961, as a tenured professor at University of New Hampshire, he noticed that the college students were woefully uninformed about the basic facts of human sexuality, and he started teaching the course Human Reproductive Biology. He was qualified to do this from a scientific perspective because of his work in endocrinology. This course became very popular, especially when it met a science distribution requirement. But it was also a subject that the students cared about a lot on a practical level. At one point three lecture halls were required to accommodate all his students -- he lectured live in one and the other two saw closed-circuit TV images of him. At its peak he enrolled 2,000 students a semester. New Hampshire was then a very conservative state, and there was a lot of backlash against teaching sex to college students -- that was up to parents! Yet this man who shied away from conflict in most aspects of life did not shy away here. He kept teaching the course despite the fierce criticism.

Later in his career some woman (foreign student, I think) was arrested for walking through Durham naked, to make some political point. Against the advice of his attorney, he testified for the defense, saying that especially as she had never bent over, she had not displayed any sex organs, so the law did not apply. Why did he volunteer? A sense that the local climate was too prudish about sexual matters?

A stor of a different kind:. Natural childbirth was not a common idea in the early 1960s, and some students showed him a film on the subject, hoping he would show it to his class. He declined, noting that the women in question were obviously in a lot of pain, and he was afraid that women who had that to look forward to would never want to become mothers.

But returning to the big picture, what inspired a retiring, conflict-avoidant professor who was deemed too sensitive for the army to start a course on sex education and keep at it in the face of intense criticism?

My mother was born in 1921 into a family that was prosperous due to ownership of a prestigious wholesale drug company (BO and GC Wilson). But when the depression hit it wiped out the company, so she too attended Bates College on scholarship. Her parents were Republicans. My grandfather in his diary underlined election day of 1932 with "Voted for HOOVER!" My grandmother was later very much on the Joe McCarthy bandwagon, genuinely concerned about the alleged armies of communists that had infiltrated the land. In the era of the Vietnam War, my mother was doing anything she could to help me and my two brothers avoid the draft, but my grandmother thought it was a cowardly dereliction of duty to country. From this conservative background my mother joined up in the human potential movement of the 1960s, including such things as Encounter Groups. What made her adopt values so different from her parents? For her it was less of a change, perhaps, as there was a movement arising that she could become part of.. Becoming atheist was a smaller step, because while her parents were heavily involved in the FUSN church as workers in the organization, neither was particularly devout.

My mother was a valued counselor to high school students (more or less a therapist), and a few of them became friends in her personal life. This would be strongly discouraged today but was not considered a problem back then. One "Curt" visited at our house frequently on weekends. They developed such a rapport that they traveled around New England together showing a human potential slideshow they had devised, "Child of Clay". He also traveled with our family to Europe a couple times. My father had no use for human potential issues, and Curt was a companion to help my mother accommodate those interests.

I did not know at that time that he was gay -- I only figured that out in college. Suddenly (roughly 1974) it all made sense -- they could have this close relationship emotionally, but there would be no sexual tension to tempt her to be untrue to my father. Except then it suddenly didn't make sense, because I discovered (around 2009, I think) she was in fact having sex with Curt at that time. It was a common view at that time that homosexuality could be cured by heterosexual experience, and she wanted to help cure her friend. My father was fully aware of this. However, surely most women did not choose to have sex with gay men unless they themselves felt considerable desire in that direction. It all stopped when Curt decided to embrace his gay identity and started having sex with men.

It was an interesting situation regarding the secrecy involved. It was not an illicit affair in that my father knew (though I do not think he was at all happy about it). But we boys were not informed, which was a sensible choice because of the extreme stigma Curt would have faced had it been known he was gay. To her credit, my mother was largely consistent and adopted a liberal attitude towards sexuality with us boys. Sex was OK as long as both partners were willing and there was the use of reliable contraception. She also adopted the view that statutory rape shouldn't be a crime when girls were willing participants, and definitely felt it was at an entirely different level of offense from "ordinary" rape.

She had definitely non-liberal views on some key questions. She agreed with many thinkers of the time that overpopulation was a catastrophic problem, but laid the blame squarely at the feet of ill-disiplined poor people who did not limit their family sizes, and I think also feared that the higher reproduction rate of these same poor people would weaken the gene pool. Shadows of eugenics.

My mother was widely agreed to be self-centered, and her parents and husband cooperated in having her emotional needs and moods be at the center of life of the extended family. But one incident stuck with me. She was trying to earn her PhD at Boston University in psychology. She wanted to study homosexuality in men. Confidants at the department told her privately that she shouldn't do that, because the senior faculty just couldn't deal with that topic. She felt it was her right to do her thesis on the topic she chose anyway, and the lesson imparted to me was how terribly unfair it was of the BU department to put obstacles in her way (she never got the PhD). I accepted her version of events. In more recent years I parse it differently -- often you have to compromise to get what you want in life. She was unwilling to compromise, and just felt wronged when she was stopped. My father also later confided that he thought she rather panicked at the prospect of doing a PhD thesis, so perhaps that muddies the lesson somewhat.

Conservative grandparents, and quite liberal parents at a time (on issues of sexuality, largely?) when they were rare... What caused the shift?

Societal Incoherence About Death

Here I go writing about death again. I guess I have written about taxes, but that's not on the docket for today. However inevitable taxes may be, they really aren't quite as profound an issue.

I'll start with capital punishment. I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I don't have the sort of emotional revulsion against it that characterizes a lot of death penalty opponents. The government decides someone has done something so horrible that they deserve to die, and the government sees to it that they do. Why the strong reaction?

I think it is because whatever they might believe intellectually if pressed, emotionally the opponents feel life goes on indefinitely (emotional reading: forever) so the government has cut short an emotionally infinite life by ending it. (Quite likely death penalty proponents have the same view but feel good about that aspect instead of bad about it.) As far as I can tell, questions about whether the execution method meant a person died in pain are basically a manufactured concern. If there is any truth to the idea that an execution victim died in pain, it is only because the medical establishment refuses to cooperate -- there are ample ways that medicine can help someone die without pain if that is their goal. I don't mind their decision, but it would seem more honest if they said so plainly.

The time before an apparently unnecessary death can also count as pain and suffering. Notably, if someone is in an airplane that stops flying at a high altittude and descends in a free fall and crashes, the passengers might have a minute or more before they actually hit the ground and die. This entitles the survivors to more money in a financial settlement. When the space shuttles exploded, there was great interest in whether they died instantly or were conscious long enough to know they were dying.

The incoherence comes from the contrast with deaths that are unavoidable - an aged person has a terminal illness. In that case, the person dying is doing the right thing if they are peaceful and accepting. A death notice might say that someone died peacefully, surrounded by friends and family. The notice never says they died in great pain, or that up until the end they were angry and frantic that they were about to die, or that they were bitterly disappointed that their loved ones were not there. Why the difference? I submit that at that point people have discarded this emotional illusion that people might live forever if no one kills them.

I also have this hunch that great concern about a person's last days or hours or minutes rely on the notion of an afterlife -- even among those who would deny that they believe in an afterlife. If consciousness is forever extinguished at death, there is no special significance to the last bit. But in contrast, suppose we are dealing with a case where you are about to leave your homeland forever and go to a foreign land, in an era when there would be no further communication. In that case, you might care a lot what your last experiences of your homeland were. How the story in one land ended matters a lot if you are going to a new land where you can contemplate the old. If your best friend says they really hated you or your wife reveals that the children you thought were yours were fathered by somebody else, then those revelations will stick with you for the rest of your life in the new land -- and those who are left behind will know it. On the positive side, reconciliation with people you were on bad terms with will make your future life more peaceful. The people you left behind will be much happier if you leave seemingly content rather than perhaps totally distraught, as they will think (perhaps correctly) that that will influence your life in the new land -- that you did not leave gracefully.

Returning to the case of death rather than emigration, those who go on living who retain emotionally the idea of an afterlife (even if they don't believe it intellectually) will be happier if the person dies peaceful and accepting.

The alternative that the death penalty opponents want for the perpetrator of a heinous crime is a life sentence in a harsh prison environment. The quality of their life there is not of great concern -- at least they were not killed. Their distress, day to day, is finite, while if they were executed, the distress would be infinite.

If I remember correctly (I'm not going to look it up again), the guillotine did not get its name from the inventor, but from a French legislator of the time who argued for its use because a death sentence's purpose was to deprive someone of life, not to torture them. Apparently standard methods of execution before then included a variety of torture implicit in "breaking on the wheel". Burning at the stake also qualifies as torture. Apparently beheading with an axe wielded by hand is an iffy proposition, and if botched can amount to torture, while a guillotine was reliable in beheading without botching. So that was an issue being debated in the late 1700s, while at some point in the 1900s the terms of the debate shifted to no execution at all as opposed to no torture. I fully support an end to torture, whether at the end of life or any other time.

I don't know if death penalty opponents care greatly whether the victim was frantic and distraught just before the execution or peaceful and accepting, but they do care a great deal about this with regard to an unavoidable death. Sometimes I get the sense that joyous celebration of someone's life starts with the idea that they died peacefully and accepting. Survivors seem to be celebrating the death itself, since as we all really know, death is inevitable. I'm aware of this reaction in myself, though not proud of it. If some very old celebrity dies, I am often not aware of even one moment of grief, but with a sort of relief. They were bound to die, so now it's happened, and I can check off my list another of life's expected events that happened. If we actually actively mourned each death (say, if you read the obits regularly) you would rapidly be swamped by compassion fatigue.

But if you have a uniform sense that there is no afterlife -- no way, no how -- then someone dying early at someone else's hand isn't inherently a cause of more horror than the inevitability that they will die within a matter of decades in any event. If you're aware for a minute in a falling airplane that you're about to die, well, bummer! If they execute the wrong person, then... Oops! They still didn't end a life that was emotionally infinite -- they cut it short by at most a few decades.

I'm still staunchly opposed to the death penalty, but it doesn't make my top hundred list of things to be passionately concerned about. I suppose for me its importance derives from how important it is to other people. I also don't think that the mindset that leads to celebrating the execution of a hated person is a good thing, but exploring that would be another topic.