Blackest Despondency

In any case, the Davos desire to retrofit such blandishments into our current reality was nowhere so evident as in von der Leyen’s remarks about big tech. In her ‘Special Address’, the President of the EC said that Davos had warned about ‘the business models of big tech companies and the consequences for our democracy’. This year, believing that such extraordinary foresight had been vindicated, she said that the storming of the US Capitol last month was an example of ‘the darker sides of the digital world’. Inevitably she called on the new US President to join the EU in drawing up ‘a common rule book’ for the tech companies.Though it pains me to say it, von der Leyen is on to something. Big tech is one of the menaces of the age, with a power that exceeds anything in the history of information. It not only has the power to decide what we can hear, say and know but the ability to decide what the past, as well as the present and future, looks like. The most benevolent reading is that it wields a power that is beyond any individual company’s competency. A less benevolent reading is that it allows a small number of malign Silicon Valley lefties the power to impose their world view over every non-totalitarian-ruled population on the planet.

…and perception, my dear Faisal, is everything. All the rest is the prerogative of that monotony simpletons insist on calling “reality".

This may be mitigated, but not entirely avoided, if the pragmatic argument is employed in defense of a kind of compartmentalized optimism. The optimism might say: “I recognize the human predicament. It is horrible, but I want to adopt an optimistic view to help me cope. I shall continue, at the back of my mind, to be aware of the predicament, but I can compartmentalize those thoughts - or at last try to.” This is a less unreasonable position because it seeks to face reality by recognizing the predicament while also seeking some relief. We might call this response “pragmatic optimism”. The main concern with it is whether the compartmentalization can be effectively maintained. There are twin dangers. The one is that the recognition of the predicament will become so eclipsed by the optimism that the optimism will be unchecked and become more dangerous. If, for example, one loses sight of the human predicament, one might create more people. The contrasting danger is that if the pessimism is kept sufficiently in mind to avoid the risks of unchecked optimism, it will negate the positive effects of optimism. Some may be able to steer the path between these perils. However, for capable navigators, there is another, preferable option. Instead of steering between optimism and pessimism one can embrace the pessimistic view, but navigate its currents in one’s life. It is possible to be an unequivocal pessimist but not dwell on these thoughts all the time. They may surface regularly, but it is possible to busy oneself with projects that create terrestrial meaning, enhance the quality of life (for oneself, other humans, and other animals), and “save” lives (but not create them!). This strategy, which I call pragmatic pessimism, also enables one to cope. Like pragmatic optimism, it also attempts to mitigate rather than exacerbate the human predicament. However, it is preferable to pragmatic optimism because it retains an unequivocal recognition of the predicament by not compartmentalizing it to coexist along with optimism. It allows for distractions from reality but not deals of it. It makes one’s life less bad than it would be if one allowed the predicament to overwhelm one to the point where one was perpetually gloomy and dysfunctional, although it is also compatible with moments or periods of despair, protest, or rage about being forced to accept the unacceptable.

How should one respond to the human predicament? One obvious response is to desist from perpetuating it by creating new humans who will inevitably be in the same predicament. Every birth is a death in waiting. When one hears of a birth, one must know that it is but a matter of time before that new human dies. Sandwiched between birth and death is a struggle for meaning and a desperate attempt to ward off life’s sufferings. This is why a pessimistic view about human condition leads to the antinatalist conclusion that we ought not to procreate.

Most people resist pessimistic views even when such views are appropriate. This is especially true with reference to a primarily pessimistic view about the human condition. The truth is simply too much for many people to bear. Thus, we find various attempts to bolster optimism and undercut pessimism, some subtle and some explicit.

There are two important things to say about suicide. First, because one feature of the human predicament is that there are fates worse than death, suicide must be an option. It is unconscionable for a person upon whom existence was thrust not to have the option to exit if continued existence becomes unbearable. Second, because death is bad, not only for the person who dies but also for loved ones who survive him or her, it is glib and callous to respond to the pessimist about the human condition by saying: “If it is so bad, just kill yourself!” Such responses simply fail to appreciate the predicament. The human predicament is in fact an inhuman predicament because it is so appalling. It is inhuman primarily in a metaphorical sense because “inhuman” denotes cruelty, and cruelty presupposes agency. Yet the human predicament, writ large, is fundamentally and overwhelmingly not the product of any agent. It is the product of blind evolutionary forces that are indifferent to us.

All things considered, the quality of human lives is not only much poorer than most people recognize it to be; it is actually quite bad. Just how bad it is varies from person to person. Some are unluckier than others, but even the relatively fortunate do not fare well, at least not in the long run. The claim is not that life is terrible at every moment. Instead, the claim is that life contains many serious risks and harms that are routinely overlooked, and that sooner or later within a person’s life, the harms are likely to reach thoroughly indecent proportions.

Suicides tend to shock. This is not merely because the deaths they bring about are often unexpected by those who hear of them. It is also because they run counter to the deep-seated, natural instinct for self-preservation. Humans, like other animals, will go to great lengths to delay their own deaths. They are usually willing to incur considerable hardship if that is the only alternative to death, even though, once dead, that hardship will be over and one will no longer exist to regret the loss of the extra life one would otherwise have had. How else can we explain the cancer patient who endures the harrowing effects of treatment for the extra months of life it affords her, or the concentration camp inmate who endures “excremental assault” - the complete defilement and degradation, by means of excrement and other bodily effluvia - in order to survive the Holocaust? Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patience or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but in the sense of being defective, either morally or psychologically. I have argued that this response is inappropriate. Suicide is sometimes morally wrong, and it is sometimes the consequence of psychological problems. However, it is not always susceptible to such criticism. If we step back from our powerful survival instinct and our optimism bias, ending one’s life may seem much wiser than continuing to live, particularly when the burdens of life are considerable. Moreover, it would be indecent to condemn those who, having deliberated carefully about the matter, decide that they no longer wish to endure the burdens of a life to which they never consented. They ought to take the interests of others, especially family and friends, into account. This is particularly true of those (such as  spouses and children) to whom obligations have been voluntarily undertaken. The presence of such connections and obligations will trump lesser burdens, morally speaking. However, once the burdens of life reach a certain level of severity (determined, in part, by the relevant person’s own assessment of his life’s value and quality), it becomes indecent to expect him to remain alive for the benefit of others.

There is a tendency to attach immense value to life itself and thus to favor it heavily in tradeoffs between death and continued life with an unfortunate condition. However, those who attach relatively less positive weight to life and relatively more negative weight to reductions in quality of life are not obviously unreasonable. Indeed, some might argue that this is more reasonable. They might say that it is very likely that the high value we attach to life is at least significantly influenced by a brute biological life drive, a strong instinct for self-preservation that is pre-rational, shared with other animals, and then, in the case of humans, rationalized. These biological origins of our valuing of life by no means show that life is not valuable, but recognizing the evolutionarily ancient, pre-rational grounds of the life drive does call into question any illusions we might have that the degree of value attached to life is exclusively the product of careful, rational deliberation. There is nothing unreasonable about the person who says that though he would rather continue living, the preference is not so strong that he would rather continue living in an unpleasant condition. Those with a lower tolerance for the burdens of life may thing it would be stupid for them to preserve when the end of those burdens is achievable. Thus, it might be the case that we should be less averse to suicide (and death more generally) not because the Epicureans are correct that death is not bad, but rather because life is much worse than we think.

In coming into existence, we are guaranteed to suffer harms. The nature and magnitude of those harms vary from person to person. However, it is more common than not for these harms to include formidable ones: grinding poverty (and it associated costs), chronic pain, disability, disease, trauma, shame, loneliness, unhappiness, frailty, and decrepitude. Sometimes, these mark an entire life. Other times, they begin to intrude into a life that was previously devoid of them. For example, no matter how youthfully robust one may be now, a time will come when one will become enfeebled, unless something else gets one first. Although there are some things we can do to prevent or delay some of these harms, our fate, to a considerable extent, is out of our control. We may attempt to preserve our health, but all we can do thereby is reduce, not eliminate, the risks. Therefor, we have some, but relatively little, control over whether these harms will befall us. The degree to which we have control over whether our lives have terrestrial meaning varies, depending on whether the terrestrial meaning is more or less expansive. The more expansive the meaning, the less control we have. We have absolutely no control over the fact of our cosmic insignificance. The only actions that could have guaranteed that we not suffer these fates are actions over which we had no control, namely, the actions that would have prevented us from coming into existence. These actions were within the control of our parents (and sometimes others), but never within out control. Thus, we are involuntary brought into a cosmically insignificant existence that bears considerable risk of serious harm. We did not and could not consent to our coming into existence. Nor can we ever wrest this control from those who exercised it. However, it is still possible to decide whether to terminate one’s existence. That, of course, is a quite different sort of decision from a decision to bring somebody into being. When a person is not brought into existence, there is no cost for that person, for she never exists. Those who do not exist have no interest in coming into existence. By contrast, once one has come into existence, one typically has an interest in continuing to exist.

Those who accuse suicide of cowardice fail to see just how demanding the task of killing oneself can be. Suicide is difficult because of the formidable life drive that animates most people, even most of those who eventually take their own lives. Even if some people lose all will to live, many others who kill themselves would like to continue living if it were not so burdensome. They have to overcome their will to live in order to take their lives. This is not easy at all. It is thus unsurprising that more people contemplate suicide then attempt it, and there are more attempted suicides than successful ones. Given the resolve that some people have to muster in order to take their own lives, combined with the futility or severity of their circumstances, it may well be that suicide is - at least sometimes - the more courageous option than remaining alive.

It is possible that we are damned if we die and damned if we don't. Some predicaments are that intractable. Perhaps it would have been best, as I believe, never to have been at all. After all, those who never exist are in no condition, let alone any predicament. They are not doomed to die. And if one thinks that an eternal life under the best conditions constitutes a kind of doom, they are also not doomed to live for eternity.