Perceptions of loss

There was an entertaining article in the New York Times on Monday about a recent Russian submarine disaster.  17 sailors lost their lives but no one, except of course the crew and the Russian chain of command, really knows why or how.  The submarine was designed to dive much deeper than any other manned navy submersible ever built, and had skids designed to allow it to creep along the muddy bottoms of the world’s seafloors where it would… do the kinds of nefarious stuff one might do on the bottom of the world’s seafloors.  Experts believe it most likely was designed to search for, and in times of war or tension, cut the cables on the seabed which link continents and countries to one another, or which link the deep sea listening devices across the North Atlantic with NATO designed to listen for other kinds of submarines, or, even in peacetime, simply test the West and its willingness to develop countermeasures.

Two quotes got my attention though:

“The Russian understanding is that the level of unacceptable damage is much lower in Europe and the West than during the Cold War,” she said. “So you might not have to do too much.”

and:

Because the internet can reroute data when cables are damaged, Western analysts have often dismissed the dangers of sabotage. But considering the vital role of data in Western institutions of all kinds, Professor Zysk said, simply applying pressure by degrading the network could be enough.

“When people lose Facebook and Twitter — oh, my God!” she said, not entirely facetiously.

In other words, we in the West have, in the thirty years since the end of the Cold War, effectively lowered the threshold for the moment at which we panic.  During the Cold War, many of our countries endured long periods of actual violent civil conflict: the race riots and antiwar protests and counter protests of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States; the various red front terrorist campaigns throughout Europe; the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the IRA terror campaigns throughout Britain; the FLQ bombings and the Quebec government and federal crackdowns in response in Canada.  These represented fundamental threats to life, property, the fabric of society, and yet as they occurred, GDP growth in these countries comfortably averaged in the mid- to high-single digits, productivity growth and innovation continued, and that fabric, otherwise so fragile, of a society engaged in a constant intellectual and moral struggle with another half of humanity stayed together.

I’ve been watching Mad Men for a couple hours every night, after I put the boy to bed and as the dog sleeps off her deer chasing adventures next to me, and it relives – in fictional form, to be sure – the extraordinary disruption that took place in American society during the 1960s.  It’s about advertising, its propaganda elements and its elements of fantasy and also the extraordinary ability that words and images have to capture our imaginations, for good and for ill.  But the overarching theme of the roughly 80 episodes taken as a whole is about ten years which destroyed one image of America and began to replace it with another.  It’s a good antidote to watching the news these days, where daily headlines remind one of the speakers placed in apartment buildings in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign in order to broadcast official messages of, on the one hand, fear, and on the other, of the glorious achievements of the regime.  These times, in other words, these times of disruption and fear and mistrust and collective effort, have happened before.

Today, we’re facing a pretty nasty pandemic: coronavirus seems to kill about two to four percent of the people who exhibit symptoms, but epidemiologists have no real clue how many people may carry the virus or what drives the virus to exhibit symptoms.  In the face of that, governments and we as society members have collectively agreed to shut down our economic and, in some cases, political activities, eliminate travel and other forms of social engagement, and self-isolate.  No explosions, no violence, just the small silent creep of a biological threat which – to the best of our knowledge – came from out of nowhere.  In the past, the human threats – with real bombs, and guns, and the demonstrated willingness to use them – meant we moved forward and, effectively, put regular people in harm’s way.  Today, with a viral threat, we have shut down our system – our entire developed world capitalist system – pumping only magical fiat money to keep a bare modicum of activity afloat.

The challenge we have – as moral philosophers, as historians, as individuals who each contribute to the social fabric in our tiny but nonetheless essential ways – is to understand what has changed.  And I think the Russians, as described in the Times article, have gotten it right.  As the West has become accustomed to abundance – indeed, as abundance ceases to even describe what we have, in our almost baroque ability to deliver cheap, plentiful goods of a complexity and desirability completely unknown to prior generations, even to our worst off – our resilience to real want, to real suffering, has eroded to almost nothing.

Less than three hundred years ago, smallpox was a common affliction throughout the Western and colonialized non-Western world.  It wiped out, it is believed, nearly 90% of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere that didn’t succumb to actual murder.  It annually culled the children and non-immune adults in all the parts of the world it afflicted – and those who had acquired immunity only did so through prior infection, often scarring them for life – with a death rate after infection of 30%.  It ensured that early childhood death was a part of nearly every family’s history.  I read colonial and 19th century American history in university; any social history describes most families as having five, eight, or more children, but almost never fails to point out that two, three, or five or more of them died before the age of five.  That meant that children knew death first hand.  Everyone wrestled with the ready presence of death as part of the daily experience of life.

Less than a hundred and fifty years ago, before the widespread rollout of modern septic systems and sewage treatment infrastructure, cholera and dysentery were regular feature of urban life.  My country’s barely literate president has spoken regularly of his expectation that the summer will bring an end to viral breakouts, just like what happens with the flu and common cold; yet in the 1830s or 1880s, most city residents dreaded the approach of summer because it was the end of simply getting the ague and the beginning of getting the really, truly deadly diseases that came with reduced river flows, greater airborne insect populations, and the resulting collapse of their gastro-intestinal systems and likely risk of death.  Washington and other low-lying cities in the eastern United States closed schools in the summer not because of the need to care for crops, but because of the need to socially distance among the rich and middle class by leaving the city for healthier – literally – climes.  But inevitably some would die.  Again, nearly every family, and certainly every town or city, knew waves of disease and death.

And within the past sixty years, many of our cities and towns and all of our countries have known the kind of civil strife that today would result not in lockdown, but in martial law.  Nearly annual riots in many industrial cities between blacks and whites but also between empty-headed young utopians and authoritarian-inclined young quasi-brownshirts in the United States are a staple of every season of Mad Men, either in person or as a white-noise like background of news reports on televisions in living rooms and offices.  But then again, that generation had direct experience of mass death in war, in various genocides, and was only just getting used to the idea that you’d live long enough to smoke enough cigarettes to die of lung disease instead of smallpox, or cholera, or yellow fever, or simply by medical quackery in childbirth.

Our society, though, has forgotten all of this.  We live not only in a culture of abundance, but in a culture of the denial of death as a part of life.  None of us really face the risk of death – coronavirus excepted, but I’ll get back to that in a bit.  The panoply of disease that ensured that the Game of Life in 1750 was truly a kind of scratch ticket affair has been more or less eliminated; the big ones, the ones that infected most who came in contact and claimed 30% of those who got it have been cured by vaccine elimination or by antibiotics which we reengineer ever decade or by a sanitary built environment that shunts the nasties into holding tanks where we can chemically destroy them.  Add to that the elimination of famine (except by conscious human actions: ask the people of South Sudan about that), and we now live in a society to which death is an irrelevancy, one that we can force into the purely intimate sphere of family or individual and then ask them to deal with it on their own in eldercare facilities and, please, behind closed doors.

In all of this we have lost our ability to comprehend death.  I mentioned the Game of Life in the last paragraph: it’s a classic Milton Bradley game which has gone through many iterations, and my son now (annoyingly, because of its game-show background music) loves to play it online.  My family played it in its 1978 version, but even in its first 1960 version, no one ever dies in it.  I think partially that’s a board game choice; obviously you don’t want to bring death into a family after-dinner diversion.  But if you think about it, a version of the Game of Life designed even as late as 1900 would be viewed as haplessly unrealistic unless you had a few spaces on the board where at least a child died.  A version in 1860 would have had to have had a couple of spaces where your wife died (obviously you’d have been playing a male character in the 1860s, duh), and probably at least one space where you died and it was, ahem, game over.

This indicates clearly that we have compartmentalized death out of our living perception, but more than that, I think it indicates that we have actually lost our appreciation of life.  That isn’t to say that we don’t value it, but without an understanding of mortality, we don’t have a true sense of what life is.  Life is precious but fragile – but our society doesn’t appreciate the fragility any more, it expects life to be durable and permanent (until it isn’t, and again, society tells us to shove it behind a closed door and not talk about it).  Death proves to us that life is fragile, and humanity until the last sixty years or so has lived with that reality as a central experience at every stage of human existence.  It could have been bubonic plague, it could have been childbirth issues, it could have been cholera or dysentery or smallpox or syphilis or trichinosis or just simply the unregulated violence that arose out of an awareness of that fragility – but it was there.  Not only the elderly knew it – and they are the only ones today who have to confront it daily – but the middle aged, certainly the child-bearing aged men and women, and definitely the children who were most at risk – everyone knew that death was real, death was a daily combatant, that they were life, that they were at risk.  Everyone, everywhere, was engaged in a struggle.

But not today.  In the developed world – West and East – almost all of us do not struggle at all.  From birth – assuming we aren’t aborted – we move forward coddled in the assumption that death only exists if we (a) personally make bad decisions around drugs, alcohol, sexual relations, or recreational activities, or (b) get really old, or (c) kill ourselves for some intellectual reason or die of violence.  For all of (a), structures exist to get us out of “trouble” and to help steer ourselves to good decisions around drugs, alcohol, sex, and recreation, and for (b), we’re given enclosures in which to die away from the rest of us.  We struggle with (c) but that leads, of course, to (d), cancer and chronic wasting illnesses and accidents and mental illness (which we out of desperation drop (c) into), but our fear of (d) inspires us to dump almost limitless amounts of lucre to ensuring that they go away and give us back the more palatable options of the blameworthy deaths of (a) or the silent deaths of (b) or the incomprehensible but let’s just not talk about it deaths of (c).  This gives modern society a kind of cop out: if you are born, you should live until you get old enough to go behind the hedge and die.  Life is a moral imperative, not a kind of lucky accident.  Until you get old enough, and then your moral responsibility is to go away without bothering the rest of us.

This strange social regime of death would be incomprehensible to the past generations, for whom death came as (a) random, unknowable, chronic or acute suffering leading directly to death; (b) starvation; (c) suicide or violence (at least we have that in common with our forebears); (d) accident, which was far more common and far more colorful in its many forms; and only (e) old age, which was viewed a kind of “winning the lottery” if you could make it to the point where you were so old you died of simple cellular collapse, and by that point you were being honored with excess rum and laudanum in order to kind of nudge you into an unintentional version of our modern category (a).  In any event, they had to deal with death across the entire spectrum of a potential human life, and therefore they had to build means of justifying why life was able to exist in a given individual at each point of the lifetime spectrum while also justifying why death also existed.

Is one regime better than the other?  Well, from a moral philosophical perspective, I think actually yes: the older regime was better than the current one.  The older regime dealt with a huge region of uncertainty and ignorance – ie., why is it that people die?  They answered that with a range of responses, but a reference to an incomprehensible Other was usually at the center of all of them.  Our regime is actually far more judgmental, even compared to the religiously powered engines of blame that came out of reference to that all-powerful Other: if you die before you’re old and you’re supposed to go away, it’s your fault.  How awful is that?  Not just for the spirit of the one who has gone away, but also as a statement about those who continue on.  Those who aren’t close to the one who passes away in situations like bad choices around drugs and sex, effectively pass judgment; those who are, have to carry a trauma that those in the past didn’t really have to bear.  Death was not random in the past – it was inevitable and a constant haunting presence – and therefore society had mechanisms for embracing those who were effected by it and socialized the pain and moved on together to deal with, as everyone knew, the next inevitable death.

Our modern system, then, which imagines some control over the mechanisms of death – through immunization, through sanitation, through social control – also imposes a burden on those who die not through an obvious bad decision or old age which doesn’t, really, exist.  Don’t get me wrong: those who make obvious bad decisions still probably force society to look itself in the mirror and to judge the circumstances that allowed that person to make a bad decision.  But those who don’t are caught in a quandary, and even those who make neither a bad decision nor grow too old are stuck in a no-mans land of judgment.  While our technological prowess has narrowed down the potential areas of truly incomprehensible death, it still exists – death is still inevitable – and nature is still capable of evolving separately from our own technological evolution to create new sources of death.  That, actually, is exactly what coronavirus is.  And, really, that’s what the Russian submarine Losharik is as well: an evolved response to hit what is now our most sensitive point.

I don’t want to write about coronavirus in these troubled days; anything one writes will be inevitably dated.  But the Russians have identified the equivalent of respiratory illness vectors in Western society.  Our system is enormously resilient to traditional threats.  A quite deadly virus has hit society, most of the developed world has locked down, and not only are food and other essential supplies not threatened but they have become super-abundant because our normal consumption curve has dropped as we’ve locked down.  We consume less food, less petroleum, less finished goods, and since we are used to disposing of finished goods long before their useful life, our use of them in quarantine ensures all of us are doing just fine.  If anything, our environment is doing better, we’re learning better reuse and recycling techniques, and our forward economic productivity will have a step-function increase.  Traditional threats, in other words, are not effective.

But new threats are far more terrifying because our spiritual and emotional resiliency has been eroded to the point of breaking.  The idea that we can’t use Facebook or Instagram or Vimeo or Netflix now brings us to a point of mortal terror.  The concept of a world without instantaneous arbitrage-free exchange rates makes our financial system freeze up and implode.  The idea that we may face a disease that simply kills a more-than-de-minimus percent of us every year causes us to panic, and buy several gross rolls of toilet paper and a lot of flour, even though the vast majority of developed world households haven’t baked a loaf of bread since the end of World War Two.  We – and I do mean we, because I’ve had too many conference calls in the last six weeks which start and end with a description and then summary of our panics – have grown accustomed to a set of circumstances which were always illusory, and we self-destruct when confronted with anything else.  We have lost the emotional and spiritual memory of how to deal with loss.

And in that light, I’m optimistic for the future.  This is not actually a terrifyingly bad disease, compared to what we’ve dealt with in the past – again, ask a First Nations member about their societal memory of smallpox.  And the idea that the Russians implicitly identified this as a weakness actually gives me a kind of positive pause: Putin is smart, but if you read the NYT article, you’ll see that the worldview that competes with the liberal, democratic, open, and insanely innovative modern world is almost certain to fail, because they’re forced to rely on old thinking, tinkering with old ideas, and their submarines burn, kill sailors, and fail.  We’ll get through this.  But we won’t survive in the long run without gaining back some of the insights of those who saw death as a reality.  Driving into a world of blame, or a separate realm where the elderly are left to deal with death alone, is not the way forward.

I talk with my son every day about the deaths due to what he refers to as “the whole coronavirus thing”.  I’ve explained (and re-explained) to him the reason why we’re on Lake Lanier in Georgia in the middle of nowhere, instead of staying close to his mom, who’s working in a grocery store and thus facing everyone in Seattle who may or may not be infected with the virus, and why we’re not in Maine, where his grandparents wouldn’t be able to resist seeing him and thus might be infected and they are, well, susceptible.  He’ll see death here, and I don’t want to shield him.  But he’ll also witness life, with its sacrifices, and its risks.  His perception of what it is to possess life, to possess this magical thing as a human being, will hopefully be given a greater and better potential by this experience.

And in the meantime – all of you, my friends, the people I love, I hope you all stay safe.  I look forward to celebrating our life and joy more completely when we get through this.  And I know we’ll all mourn the lives that pass because of the virus.  And to be clear: we will mourn.  Some of us will die soon, even if most of us live to die another day.  But the potential of loss and the potential of life was always present, whether we were aware of it or not.  I’m grateful for the chance to focus on both the potential of life, but also to be reminded of the constant – and not age- or blame-appropriate – presence of death.  We can live in a world where unnecessary death is made rare, through technology and social structure, without ignoring or forgetting the fact that death is both inevitable and unpredictable.  Our perception of not just the joy of life, but of the loss inherent in death, is critical to our presence in this very fragile, and very wonderful world.