crossword puzzle
with a fountain
pen.”
Death
Find something positive to say about death – there’s a challenge for any optimist. What else can we do but square up to the inevitable: it’s coming, so you may as well prepare yourself and handle it as well as you can (known as “having a good death”). You could even arrange for it to happen at the time of your own choosing (don’t say suicide, say voluntary euthanasia). If you’re lucky it will spring at you unawares and you’ll never know anything about it.
If you wonder why we die at all (see ‘Immortality’) you should reflect for a moment on what would happen if the earth simply accumulated individual human beings without letting them go. You should also consider what it would do to our psychology if death were removed from the world. Knowing that we are not here forever gives an impulse to our actions and a poignancy to our lives, from which derives our sense of beauty and wonder in the deepest sense.
If what keeps you awake at night is not how you are going to die but what happens afterwards, you’ve got nothing to worry about either. The empirical evidence is – to put it crudely – that consciousness shuts down
“I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had
been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born,
and had not suffered the
slightest inconvenience
from it.”
like a computer when the power cord is yanked from the wall, leaving only a big bag of useless cells which barely wait for you to vacate the premises before they pack and go their separate ways, the servants dismissed after a lifetime’s service in the big house. That, at least, is how it looks from the outside.
From the inside we simply don’t know what happens and that should be a source of reassurance. Whatever science says, it is hard to believe that we are no more than the sum of our tangible components; that this sensation of ‘I- ness’ which we ascribe to the mind simply fades to nought. Supposedly, 22 grams of us evaporate at the moment of death and this is said to be the weight of the soul but you’d have to have some religious faith to derive any hope from this.
Even if something survives – the soul, the mind – it’s almost certain that you will leave behind your personality and memory which can be assumed to be formed by the interaction of your genes with the environment over the course of your lifetime and stored in your biodegradable brain.
It could be that consciousness is recycled when the body and the personality die. The philosopher and interpreter of eastern thought Alan Watts gave an elegant explanation of this:
“When I am dead I will be in the same state I was before I was born, and it will be as if I never had been born. Before I was born there was a world, there were things going on. If I go back when I’m dead to the state I was in before I was born,
couldn’t I happen again? The body comes out of the universe. It is the universe which is living in the same way a tree produces apples. It seems absolutely reasonable to assume that when I die and this physical body evaporates and the whole memory system with it, then the awareness that I had before will begin all over once again.”
You might reoccur as a fruit fly or worm, of course, but you can worry about that when the time comes. The important thing is to live now without fearing death.
“There’s nothing in that nothing to be afraid of. With that sense you can come on like the rest of your life is gravy because you’re already dead: You know you are going to die. Regard yourself as dead already so that you have nothing to lose. A Turkish proverb says, ‘he who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed.’”
“The more you know you are nothing the more you will amount to something.”
Whatever happens afterwards, you can be sure that you’ll only have to live death once and it will immediately cancel out all the pain of living and the pain of dying.
Sources
Death, by Alan Watts (1975)
Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country,
Democracy
Democracy is a simple but strange idea which is difficult to put into practice in anything but an imperfect form. It was first applied in 5th century BC Greece by a politician named Cleisthenes, although a more colourful theory says that it began as a system of decision making among trireme oarsmen who used it to agree their objectives and conditions of service.
Either way, it’s a big leap from 60 men engaged in life or death naval manoeuvres, or 6,000 citizens (excluding women and slaves) attending an open-air assembly in Athens, to a modern country of 60 million (or even 1 billion) people organised into a fully-functioning state. It’s a mad, bold notion that everyone over 18, absolutely everyone, should be consulted about the composition of the government and we’re still trying to figure out how to determine the will of the majority accurately. With so many people and such varieties of education, living standards and political awareness, how can you determine the majority view on anything minor let alone everything major that must be done? All our democracies are really democracies in evolution and we should quietly admit that democracy is really only a fancy name for responsible oligarchy, rule by an appointed elite.
However, the essential two differences between dictatorship and democracy are that governments can and do change and that the clunking, bureaucratic machinery of the system is, as far as possible, exposed to press and public scrutiny.
Fundamentally, the really great advantage of living in a democracy is not having the right to vote but knowing that you are subject to a rule of law which rests on the assumption of every citizen being equal in power to every other, however inarticulate or vulnerable. This principle grants freedom of action and speech to all, freedoms which are enforced by the judiciary and the police.
That such ideas are still revolutionary in many parts of the world is a good reason for us to peddle democracy as the best political system we can think of for now, but we should be wary of trying to impose our variation of it on anyone else.
Sources
The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson (1980) In Defence of Politics, by Bernard Crick (1962)
Dentists
Even if your mother couldn’t make you brush your teeth regularly with her bribes and threats, when your molars start to work loose, or crack from decades of neglect, you will be able to sit in a modern dental surgery where you will be treated by a competent professional to whom hygiene and customer satisfaction are priorities, and who is highly motivated by the thought of his/her next skiing holiday.
Look at any museum of dental implements – and which of us doesn’t head straight for the nearest whenever we’re visiting a new town? – and you will remind yourself that the angst of modern living is more than compensated for by not having to ask the local barber to deal with your toothache.
D E N T I S T S