David Brooks often exasperates me, I think because he is such a mixture of who he used to be with who he is now -- or thinks he is, or tries to be. This time he made remarks about suicide based on what a woman said to him. A mother was mourning her teen son's suicide and she recovered her own balance by going to "love" and "community" which are two of Brooks' gold standards to measure value. That is, the mother said she realized her love for her son persisted beyond his death and was woven into the love in her community.
"The suicide rate in the United States is the highest it’s been since World War II, according to the latest CDC research." I harp on my age (b. 1939) because WWII is my measure of the world, so no wonder I'm not surprised by fascists and holocausts. There were many stories about suicide as an honorable choice. Some were more convincing than others. But maybe it is related that I've always thought of suicide as a reasonable choice, though I don't talk about it because it makes people think they have an excuse to grab you and force you into being like them.
The main thing about suicide, it seems to me, is to do a good job of it. This comes partly from being a ward clerk not far from here in a care center. Two teenaged boys shared a back room that I was discouraged from visiting. One boy had been in a car accident that didn't quite kill him and the other boy had tried to kill himself but didn't get the angle of the revolver under his chin quite right and only shot his face off.
During WWII there were no bread wrappers to pull over your head -- only cellophane, which I don't think works. I suppose there was access to poison or even heroin. Methods are plot devices on TV. I've always been of the opinion that if a person were willing to die, it should be of some use to someone. What to die for? Make the bastards kill you. But that's hard to manage. Still, brave individual soldiers threw themselves on top of grenades to save the rest of the community clustered there. That's love, right? You can die for love as well as live for love.
NYTimes is behind a paywall for me, so I didn't read this article -- just the responses. I gather that Brooks was making a pitch for Artificial Intelligence. A machine that knows better than humans who is likely to attempt suicide. But it only knows what the humans put into the algorithm and, as Facebook knows, it doesn't always turn out the way you expect. Unintended consequences apply to algorithms and in our searches for certainty and total control, we confuse machines with superior human beings. It's part of that maniacal worship of cold reason that brought us holocausts. Many other holocausts than WWII were triggered by other manias, like the deep raging reflexes over turf and status and imaginary gods. It's been suggested that suicide/murder are two sides of the same coin -- murdering the world by refused to be part of it.
New Thought is sweeping along quietly everywhere, fueled by new science and new emotional connection, as well as the realization that we really MIGHT murder the world, which will take us with it. I accept Porges translation of emotion from a kind of plasma invading people into the trajectory of evolution which, given time, can gift us all with enough empathy to give us the love and community we pretend we can survive without. He is especially interested in the vagus nerve and its enabling of the transition from reptile to mammal which deeply, essentially, depends upon enough attachment emotion at a molecular level to allow a woman's body to hold and nourish a new life, to be an eggshell, instead of just ejecting the foreign DNA, and to stay attached to the born baby for years.
In the course of the attachment, she and the infant make a cat's cradle with the exchange of beams between their eyes, creating the liminal exchange between person and environment that weaves culture. Sounds fancy. It's something that mammals can do but reptiles cannot, even the ones who guard a nest and bring food. (Dinosaurs are not quite reptiles.)
It's hard to understand that some people never become mammals -- they remain reptiles and like Black Holes, all love and community is trapped. It can't reach out beyond maybe immediate family. I need to think about reptiles and suicide some more. Maybe only mammals can kill themselves. Maybe that's just how essential their love and community are to them.
It's the ability to give L and C, even if you didn't get any in infancy or childhood, that shows it is molecular, interactions within the body as one grows and moves in the world, that can call out that magical ground of being. Except sometimes it just doesn't. Still, people who were not well-mothered can have babies and attach to them.
In the Seventies, earnest and willing to mess with people's lives, I sat across a church potluck table from the mother of a teenaged boy who had committed suicide, a college boy full of promise and intelligence but fragile. The parents couldn't understand it -- I guess they didn't grasp how risky life is for boys -- and they were going to plant a tree in his honor. Of course, some day that tree would die, but they couldn't think about that.
So what do you say? I said, "Your boy's life was a symphony and his body was a violin. The music is still there and always will be." She was comforted by this. I was comforted by the feeling that I had helped.
My dentist greeted me a few days ago by asking how I was. "Nearly overwhelmed, but not quite," I said. He has four little boys, one recent, two of them twins. Overwhelming. But he didn't want any more detail and we got to work on my most hopeless tooth, which will eventually have to be pulled anyway. He was very kind and careful and so was his helper. I wouldn't call it love and we are not from the same villages. But there was awareness of each other that one could call empathy. I explained that it was almost unbearable to hear the pitiless reptilian news every day. I think we all felt the same way.
But I'm not sure they saw the news the night a man set himself on fire as a suicidal protest. People tried not to know about it, the same as they warn people not to look at the photos of drowned toddlers trying to get to a safe place. The news of suffering children in cages. We really are close to overwhelmed.
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