Daily thoughts 1: I read a lot of Clayton Atreus' book Two Arms and a Head over
the past few days. It's a tragic story of a man who became paralyzed
from the waist down in a motorcycle accident, fell into a depression,
and took his life something like 20 months after the accident. The book
is a diary of sorts, explaining what it's like to be paralyzed and why
he decided to end his life. It's painful to read and I skipped or
skimmed many parts, looking for the more philosophically substantive
bits. Some curious takeaways:
1)
The author himself somewhat hated the book. It seems that he knew on
some level that the bitterness and ugliness contained in the book was a
bad thing. But maybe he felt, or should have felt, that the ugliness of
the book appropriately reflected the ugliness of being paralyzed, and
the ugliness of the lies that disabled and non-disabled people tell
about disability, lies that serve to comfort both the disabled (because
the alternative, suicide, is unbearable) and to comfort the non-disabled
(because seeing miserable people makes us miserable, so we're biased to
delude ourselves into thinking that someone's miserable circumstances
aren't all that bad after all).
2)
I agree with many of the frustrations of the author as it pertains to
all the stupid platitudes folks say when it comes to the evils of the
world. The simple fact is this: Basically no one wants to think about
bad things, like death, old age, disease, the misery of others, etc.,
because thinking about such things makes us miserable and we really
don't like being miserable. So of course people are naturally going to
be quite thoughtless when it comes to issues surrounding evil, misery,
and disability. So naturally that thoughtlessness is going to translate
into stupid cliches and false beliefs when it comes to these things.
I very much understand and relate to frustrations in the vein of:
a) People around me have many, many false beliefs about something.
b) I'm certain these beliefs are false. It's actually quite easy to prove that these beliefs are false.
c)
And yet, even if you set the record straight, it's probably not going
to change any of these people's minds. They will probably just go on
believing their false beliefs. Or, these folks would have changed their minds had they heard my words, but they will simply never hear my words.
3)
The book is not sophisticated or well-researched, often making claims without much if any defense. Though the book appears to
have been written in a short time span and by an author who is in as poor a mental state as one can be in. And the book is basically a suicide note, not exactly a proper research project. I have full confidence that the author could have
written something sophisticated and well-researched had their
circumstances hadn't been so unlucky. As it stands, the book has a
ranting, venting tone about it, a tone the author himself acknowledges
and explains.
4)
With that said, I appreciate some features of the book: The author
demonstrates intellectual virtue and engages in that kind of pleading
when someone is desperate for others to see what they see. I very much
understand and relate to that pleading.
5)
If I were in the author's shoes, I probably too would end my life, and I
agree with the author that probably 99% of people would, or at least
would say they would, want to end their life too in similar
circumstances, and yet this means there is a very strange kind of
hypocrisy taking place when it comes to disability.
It
is completely hypocritical for everyone to silently think to themselves
"Of course I would take myself out in those horrible circumstances"
while publicly saying "Of course disabled people should continue
to live and take perspective and have a good and admirable attitude
about the whole thing."
When
someone other than me is disabled, I am tempted to say "Chin up! Get
over it! Stop wailing and whining and wallowing in self-pity. Show some
strength and bravery and get on with your life and do the right thing!"
But
if I were in that position, I would absolutely be wailing and whining
and wallowing in self-pity, and I too would think (as Atreus seems to)
that "strength" and "bravery" are stupid and meaningless if all they do
is trick you into prolonging your torture. And I too would think (as
Atreus seems to) that the real strength and bravery is in facing reality
head-on, and facing death head-on, instead of burying your head in the
sand and ignoring reality because you are too weak to face the truth,
and ignoring death because you are too cowardly. So I very much
appreciate the author discussing the relationship between virtue and
suicide, because that really is, it seems to me, where the rubber meets
the road. Everyone is certain that suicide and virtue come apart, but
that's not necessarily true.
It
seems that the default mentality of people is to say "Huh, that sucks
for you. Anyway, for dinner today I think I'm gonna have..."
And
I'm not sure what to make of this. On one hand this is, like the author
says, callous, unloving, anti-empathetic, anti-sympathetic, and
anti-compassionate. The moral failing is not at all on the disabled
person who commits suicide; the moral failing is on the disabled and
disabled "allies" who parrot shallow cliches and/or turn their faces
away, because that's the easy thing to do. And it's easy to place the
moral burden on the disabled person in despair ("Don't you know that
suicide is selfish?" or "Don't you know that despair is a sin?"),
because that distracts everyone from the fact that you are trying to
absolve yourself from any responsibility with respect to the hurting
person in front of you. Everyone tries to take the lazy way out; it's
our default setting. That's the easier thing to do, and so trivially it
will be the more common thing. The hard thing to do is to actually try
to place yourself in someone else's shoes, to actually sympathize with
them and feel their pain.
On
the other hand, I'm not sure exactly what the "outsiders", the living,
healthy, normal people with ordinary luck, are supposed to do. Are they
supposed to whine and wail and wallow in pity too alongside the
despairing person? One of the reasons why the "outsiders" behave in the
"callous" and "apathetic" way they do is because it's deeply painful to
feel powerless and weak, and when we see someone in dire circumstances
and there's nothing we can do, then all that's there for us is pain,
powerlessness, and so on. It's not exactly loving to expect people to
sit there with you and bask in their own powerlessness. And I'm not sure
disabled people at all want people to wail or whine or wallow in pity.
What good does that do? It's not like being pitied is a cure. On the contrary, pity adds insult to injury.
What
makes matters worse is that a lot of people basically believe in karma.
So if they see someone suffering, they jump to the conclusion that this
person did something to deserve it. This is another self-serving lie
that brings comfort to outsiders. If someone deserves their misery, then
you are excused from the responsibility of empathizing with this person
or caring about what they want.
I
think what Atreus wants is something like this: A culture that is far
more open to death as a solution to incurable misery. The author doesn't
want people to shower him with pity or to bask in their own
powerlessness for hours and hours. Instead, the author just wants to be
seen and heard and understood, empathized with and genuinely listened
to. That entails a culture that is more open to death as a solution to misery, because a culture that actually listens and actually cares, and throws out all the the hypocrisy, the lies, the cliches, the painfully obviously false beliefs, just would be
a culture that offers death as a commonsense end-of-life care solution
to miserable conditions. This is true both from the compassion angle and from the anti-hypocrisy angle. That is, if society were compassionate, loving, moral, understanding, empathetic, etc., then death would be offered as a commonsense solution, but even putting all of that aside, if society were just not completely hypocritical, then the same would be true.
6) However, the
experience of reading the book convinced me that if you're going to do
something like this, it's better to approach it in a different way. Like
I said, even the author saw the ugliness of his own book. It's better
to write something more beautiful; that's more likely to have an impact.
Beautiful things are more marketable, attractive and more likely to
spread by word of mouth. Again, I think there is value in letting the
ugliness of your words match the ugliness of a situation, and I don't
see how I can fault someone for having ugly thoughts about an ugly
situation. It's all too understandable from my point of view. (Not that I
believe in fault anyway.)
However...
I do think in those circumstances I would write quite differently.
And maybe I would write fiction that featured characters who could do
all the things I wanted to do, and maybe I would live vicariously
through those characters. But then again, maybe that kind of escapism is
exactly the kind of reality-denying that I would want to champion
against.
But
I certainly would write in a loving way, with the reader in mind,
wanting to give the reader something, if not entertaining or happy
exactly, at least that gives some sense of positivity, hope, triumph, satisfaction, or catharsis, and has some readability to it.
How
much better would it be to have written something beautiful for people
to enjoy and profit from at the same time? Sure, it's a creative and
intellectual puzzle to write something that accomplishes 1) Exposing the
stupidity and hypocrisy of the cliches and arguments surrounding
disability and suicide; 2) Shows what's actually true about disability
and suicide; and 3) Does so in a way that's winsome, engaging,
entertaining, beautiful, readable, well-reasoned, etc. That's a deeply
difficult puzzle to solve, but if the author is smart enough then he can
pull it off. The author comes off as arrogant; he
repeatedly boasts his intelligence, but the book isn't smart; beauty is smart, and the book, for the most part, is ugly.
Luke 6:45 (NRSVUE):
"The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil, for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks."
I
doubt hardly anyone would recommend this book, and it's hard for me to
recommend it to anyone except those who research suicide or the problem
of evil.
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