Chilly is a Nervous Stuffed Snowman

My wife Jen has a friend who explained that should a nuclear attack ever come, and should she happen to survive the initial onslaught, she would immediately take to the outdoors and, along with her spouse and children, breathe in the radioactive fumes as deeply as possible, the better to assure a speedy and timely demise designed to preempt any prolonged exposure to the rigors of post-apocalyptic earth. My wife, on the other hand, is such a force of nature that it is all too easy to imagine her as the matriarch of Thunderdome, taking Tina Turner’s ruthless Aunty Entity in a kinder, gentler, and even sexier direction. All too easy but for, to borrow a line from Miss Piggy, moi.

Behavioral scientists have deduced that there are essentially two kinds of people: dandelions, who will thrive at the same basic rate no matter where you put them, and orchids, who are quite lovely under ideal conditions given their finely tuned sensitivity, but whose sensitivity turns out to be very much like Damocles’ Sword, placing the orchid at the mercy of social and material conditions which have proven rather less than ideal for the “unwashed masses” who make up the great majority of earthlings, past and present. Just try growing an orchid in your living room, much less planting one in a crack in a sidewalk where it can be trampled by people and peed on by dogs, and you will get a sense of the gulf between the world’s orchids and dandelions, a divide which, in comparison, makes the gap between the sexes about as consequential as mods vs. rockers.

Jen is the quintessential dandelion for whom radioactive sludge makes like Miracle-Gro. If anything, she would react to radiation like the X-Men, and develop even greater powers; her finger and toenails are already nearly as strong and sharp as Wolverine’s, and we don’t even have a microwave oven. But, as a card carrying orchid, I am as unfit for the post-apocalyptic landscape as Princess Diana, Emily Dickinson, or Vincent Van Gogh, three famous people on the list of Highly Sensitive People, i.e. orchids (http://www.genconnect.com/health/albert-einstein-nicole-kidman-jim-hallowes-list-of-famous-highly-sensitive-people/), and a trio whose respective biographies make life as a famous orchid sound only slightly more attractive than the post-apocalypse. (Here’s to obscure blogging!) So, if the nukes come, Jen and the kids will be joining me on the surface breathing in the fumes, Jen breathing the deepest , because if you keep spraying a plant with Miracle-Gro its gotta croak eventually. Unless she wants to have a go at single parenting while running Thunderdome, which possibility I refuse to contemplate, preferring to think of her as Juliet to my Romeo, our lives without one another unthinkable. (The Shakespearean fantasy, of course, is much easier to indulge for the orchid, who is almost certain to die first; would-be dandelion Juliets should think twice before marrying their orchid Romeos.)

The trouble with the orchid’s sensitivity is that we are sensitive to everything. Unlike Wolverine’s claws, which can be retracted, the orchid’s radar can never be turned off; we are, always and everywhere, taking it all in, which is why this orchid is always nagging his dandelion wife to leave parties once we have stayed long enough such that leaving wouldn’t be impolite, so that I can go home and recover in a dark, quiet room. My nagging is as ineffectual as everyone else’s (nagging is, by definition, barking up the wrong tree), and my darling dandelion has invariably sunk her roots deep into the party by the time I begin to give her my pathetic looks from the other side of the cheese platter, at which point I cope by retreating to a far corner of the inevitable toy-strewn playroom under the auspices of “minding the children,” none of whom are ever bothered by my self-sufficient parallel play.

One of the things to which orchids are exquisitely sensitive is the constant potential for disaster. At least, I hope other orchids share in this and it’s not just me constantly echoing C-3PO’s “We’re doomed.” This tendency of mine is exemplified by the role I played in a college party planning ritual. Prior to each party we hosted, my friends and I sat down to draft the official “Party Scorecard,” on which potential points were allotted for various celebratory hijinks. Maximum points were typically assigned to behaviors involving the various group totem objects, e.g. if, at the party’s climax, someone became so enthused that they spiked the oversized can of Bruce’s Yams (Bruce being the name of both the yam canning company and our group’s Gladwellian Connector) in the manner of a fullback spiking the football after a touchdown , or if the number of people we convinced to drink National Beer communally out of the National Bear was greater than 7 (in his first life the National Bear was a clear plastic cookie container in the shape of a teddy bear). My main contribution to the scorecard, beyond once suggesting that we see how many total ex-girlfriends we could convince to attend the party, a number I could barely influence given that there was at the time but one such extant ex-girlfriend (as a monogamist I don’t even rate the prefix “serial”), was in always insisting that the first item on the scorecard was “No tragedy.” On my watch there were to be no deaths by alcohol poisoning, gunfight, or drunk driving, nor any unwanted pregnancies. I can’t remember how many points we allotted for “No tragedy,” probably because it was, in truth, a placeholder for “Tragedy,” for which we would never have been able to accurately estimate the negative points. “No Tragedy” was the dot of yin in the party scorecard’s predominate yang.

It’s going on twenty years now since we held the last of our parties at the double-wide Baltimore row house we rented senior year, parties from which, tragedy-wise, we got away scot-free. But the potential for disaster still looms. Each time I leave my house I head back in for a quick check that the oven is well and truly off, lest my house literally explode in my absence. And each time my wife tarries at one of her evening social engagements without texting, I am convinced that she is dead. By the time she arrives home I have made my first pass through the five stages of grief and begun the contingency planning for single parenting. It is tempting to paint my ongoing fear of disaster as life’s constant background noise: death terror. About which death terror, more in a moment. But the interesting thing is that my fear of disaster isn’t limited to the fear that, in the words of Jim Morrison, “This is the end.” See above re: unwanted pregnancies, which are, of course, a beginning. See also my meltdown earlier this week, staged in the presence of all three of my children just to remove any lingering doubts they may have had that Daddy is wound a little tight, when the bag of Chipotle foodstuffs began leaking its juices on the interior of Jen’s brand new Toyota Highlander, a vehicle in which she has outlawed food consumption for just this very reason, leaving me if not in violation of the letter of the law, at least in violation of its spirit. The communicative intent of my meltdown boiled down, of course, to “We’re doomed.” Leaving me wondering whether I am actually afraid of death or, in punishment for violating the law, afraid of being cut off from love. Or, quite possibly, that the two are one and the same thing.

It was with the first of these possibilities, death terror proper, in mind that I recently encountered my cartoon double, and the implicit suggestion of a Buddhist solution to my hypervigilant death watch. Chilly is the stuffed toy snowman magically brought to life by Doc McStuffins, the lead character on the eponymously titled Disney cartoon. Chilly is described thusly on the inside flap of each Doc McStuffins book: “Chilly is a nervous stuffed snowman. He’s constantly worried that he will melt. But Doc always reminds him that he’s not a real snowman.” This is easily translatable into the following: “Chris is a nervous human being. He’s constantly worried that he will die. But Thich Nhat Hanh always reminds him that he’s not a real self.”

Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hahn’s No Death, No Fear, is one of the most important books I’ve ever read in that it simply and straightforwardly outlines how the Buddhist experience of no-self means that the concepts of birth and death are just that, mere concepts, leaving death terror to dissipate like so much steam. Given that my death terror remains intact, my grasp of the book’s message clearly hasn’t translated into any meaningful progress on the actual eight-fold path, but Thich Nhat Hahn’s explication of the Buddhist encounter with death remains the most seductive of the approaches to death and its aftermath on offer in the three religions I know absolutely anything about. Full disclosure: I am not sure my wife would agree that I know absolutely anything about Judaism but for a few vocabulary words, and I’m not sure I would disagree with her, which we are attempting to remedy with reading assignments, an approach that, thankfully, spares me from actually having to talk with anyone other than my better half. That said, take anything I say below about Judaism with a grain of salt.

So in reviewing my affinity for each of these three religions’ potential as therapy for death terror, I may as well start with Judaism’s take on what happens after death, which, as best I can tell, is to not have a take on what happens after death. Judaism’s approach to the big questions about death’s end result appears synchronous with Wittgenstein’s “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” a synchronicity amplified by Wittgentstein’s “pass over” and Judaism’s Passover, as well as the fact that Wittgenstein was of ¾ Jewish descent. Judaism’s silence on questions of life after death has one significant advantage over that of Christianity and Buddhism, in that it is far and away the most intellectually honest of the three, Buddhism’s claims to direct experiential knowledge of no-self notwithstanding, because unless one has awakened to the insight of no-self for one’s self (Ha-ha!), no-self must be taken on faith every bit as much as Christianity’s promise of eternal life. Reading between the lines of Judaism’s silence on the matter, Judaism’s commentary about life after death appears to echo Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing.” As such it is not only honest, but accurate, and of little obvious value in the face of death terror. Because if there is anything we fear, it is the unknown. Judaism’s silence is, if anything, a call for courage. Meaning I’ll come back to that if I can’t find anything easier.

At first blush, Christianity appears to speak about what Judaism has passed over in silence, with its promise of eternal life. The first step of understanding eternal life is to set aside the idea of an eventual bodily resurrection for all true believers, marking it off as inaccessible, at least to those of us disinclined to fundamentalist readings of scripture. ( In the words of Jon Stewart, “That’s Episcopalian for ‘Shut the fuck up,’” i.e. a literal interpretation of the Rapture, with its bodily resurrection of those saved by Christ, necessarily also involves the Great Tribulation’s “worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) for the billions who don’t happen to be Christian, making the celebration of such a Rapture indecipherable from celebrating Hiroshima or Auschwitz.) Thusly understood, eternal life has as little to do with the Rapture as it does with the fantastic old Woody Allen line that “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” We can only define eternal life by what it is not, which is anything but immortality through not dying. Even God, it seems, can’t undo death and taxes. So eternal life involves death. After that, it’s pure mystery. So, is the difference between Christianity’s de facto definition of eternal life as mystery and Judaism’s silence in the face of life after death, at the last, stylistic?

If, then, death is a problem for which Judaism offers no solution, and for which Christianity offers no solution in the packaging of a solution, then perhaps neither is really all that different from Buddhism, which responds with something of an Alfred E. Newman’s “What, me worry?” in its assertion that there is, per Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Death, No Fear, no problem to solve. Which religion you prefer, at least as far as death goes, becomes a matter of taste: do you like your lack of information straight up (Judaism’s “Socratic” silence), on the rocks (St. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus built his church, is also the one who meets you at the pearly gates, which legend is another fancy way for Christians to say they have no idea about what happens after death), or with a twist (the Buddhist twist, of course, is that you can’t say anything about nothing). But whichever of the three you choose, if you want answers you still have to wait until you die. Which leaves me and Chilly still feeling a little unsettled.

My first reading assignment to expand my general fund of Jewish knowledge beyond its current meager mish-mosh is James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a history of “the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism.” In his reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust and its implications for Christianity, Carroll writes the following about death:

“The alternative to thinking of God as a ‘cosmic sadist…an eternal vivisector,’ … is to stand before the unfathomable mystery of death- the death of Jesus, the death of one’s own son, the deaths of the six million- without attempting to understand it, and also without attempting to deny its character as a terrible outbreak of evil. It is here that these questions break out of any narrow reference to religion, Christian or Jewish, to press against the awful anxiety that every human must feel in the face of death.”

Carroll clearly hasn’t been reading his Thich Nhat Hanh. But if we momentarily set aside the possibility that one can overcome death terror via awakening (making enlightenment something of an Odd Couple with the previously tabled Rapture; I see Jerry Falwell as Felix Unger and Thich Nhat Hanh in the role of Oscar Madison), then we can locate my constant Chilly-an fear of death in the understanding of death as “a terrible outbreak of evil.”

Humans seem incapable of perceiving the presence of evil as anything other than the absence of God; see the failure of every attempted theodicy as well as Jesus’ own “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Death as understood by Carroll, death as evil, then, is death as abandonment. Bringing us right back to my earlier question of whether the fear of death and the fear of being cut off from love are the very same thing.

Wait for it…wait for it… Enter, stage left, Sigmund Freud, by way of his signature “Tell me about your childhood.” Because it is in early childhood and its inevitable encounter with all too human parenting that we first experience the withholding of love, that we get our very first taste of death. Becky Bailey, in her brilliant manual for managing children’s difficult behaviors, Conscious Discipline, captures this process succinctly (just substitute “parent” for “teacher”):

“Most teachers accept the premise that when a child makes a decision an adult likes, the child has earned encouragement. This is demonstrated by teachers praising children for ‘good’ behavior. The underlying message is, ‘When you do what I want, you earn my love. When you ignore what I want you to do, I will withhold my love.’ Many adults have internalized this kind of thinking. Many of us desperately seek approval and try so hard to please for this reason. We act appropriately not because we love others, but because we fear they won’t love us.”

By this same logic, I would argue that we desperately seek God’s approval in the hopes that we will never die, even as we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that abandonment, and the concurrent outbreak of unfathomable evil, is inevitable. Even as we earn God’s love, “We’re doomed.”

Which combination of aspirational worthiness and inevitable abandonment is perhaps an even deeper source of Chilly-an anxiety in its collision with an obscenely reliable God. David Foster Wallace describes the latter in his novel, The Pale King, problematizing “the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God- as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with you, so it’s hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God.” It would seem that you can either have a personal relationship with a God whose love must be earned before She inevitably abandons you, or receive unconditional love from a God who doesn’t love you in particular, or even enough to abandon you. The latter God, whose unconditional love has nothing to do with you, may even explain the popularity of Western Buddhism; how can God have nothing to do with a self that isn’t even there. Seen from this angle, Western Buddhism can be defined as “You can’t fire me, I already quit!”

If it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all, then I would argue that it is better to have been a self and died than never to have been a self at all. This may just be my way of saying I prefer my religion on the rocks, and not with a twist. Given my particular bias, the best antidote I’ve yet encountered for death terror may at first seem exceedingly facile. It is the observation that if we are terrified by the prospect of death, why aren’t we equally horrified by the retroactive annihilation of our absence from the universe prior to our birth? Hidden in this question is the insight that death itself is the much lauded “ground of all being,” is, therefore, hardly evil, and, assuredly, nothing new; if we fear the unknown then death is nothing to fear. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return.” Moby, of all people, implies the very same thing: “We are all made of stars.”

As for the fear of withheld love, I can only say, as I did when a then 2-year-old Jessie Pearl spilled root beer on herself in our booth at the deli, there’s nothing to be done. (There’s always something to be done- Bubby sorted Jessie Pearl out with a single, well placed paper napkin. It’s just that, in the case of fearing withheld love, I don’t know what’s to be done.) And as for God, I would argue that Her unconditional love is a lot like Meatloaf’s “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” “That,” of course, is allowing you to live on in your apartment.

Nothing's Shocking

Last night I had a nightmare in which my youngest daughter Yael was swept away by raging storm waters, much as tragically occurred in real life to a mother holding her two young sons during the recent Superstorm Sandy. Waking up to find my family still intact, I thought back to a passage in a work of non-fiction I was recently reading, in which a historical figure from the mid-19th century was the only one of eleven offspring in his family to make it out of childhood alive. While this may have been uncommon even by 19th century standards, it would not have been shocking to those who lived through it. Given the infant and child mortality rates of the time, it would have been more surprising if all eleven children had made it to the ripe old age of 21.

In the late 1980’s Jane’s Addiction released an album whose title, Nothing’s Shocking, more adequately describes the postmodern turn than all the learned tomes that have tried to capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive right now. As a creature born of the world described by Jane’s Addiction, the only event in my life that I ever found truly shocking was the death of my father. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War (that first hot American war of my lifetime), and the events of 9/11, to pick three turning points from my first 38 years, were each surprising. But none of them, and none of the surprises in my own little personal narrative, were shocking. The tumor in my father’s brain was the only fact that did not compute. And today, I would be less shocked by the arrival of extroverted extraterrestrial visitors or the lowering of the curtain of history according to the timelines established by the Mayan calendar, than I would by the death of my children. The difference between 1850 and 2012, between then and now, can be summed up thusly: everything was shocking then except death- nothing’s shocking now except death.

Perhaps (post) modern parenting, in which we give our children as much unconditional love as our neuroses will allow, is only possible under the terms of this now. Our love is unconditional, because there is nothing left that our children can do to shock us out of our love, e.g. I will be secretly disappointed if at least one of my daughters doesn’t turn out to be a happy, confident lesbian (how else will I know that my love was experienced as truly unconditional?). But the secret condition of this unconditional love (other than that at least some of our children end up in some category of “other” so that we can flaunt our unconditional love) is that our children outlive us. Violation of this condition is the only means left for children to shock their postmodern parents (children are still free to disappoint these parents, in the main by joining seemingly outmoded religious movements made relevant again as megaphones for the “up yours” that children will always need to signal to their parents, no matter how unconditionally loving they may be). Meaning that a postmodern parent will only ever disown a child they’ve already lost, only ever say “You’re dead to me,” when it is literally true.

In the past, when everything was shocking except death, any parent who could have waved a magic wand over their child to prevent them from being gay would have done so. This now sounds barbarian. It is only the vestiges of this past that prevent our current nothing’s-shocking-except-death conditions from giving way to the inevitable cloning of our children and a new barbarism. I know a woman in her sixties who explained that she had her tubes tied after her second child because she had always wanted two children, and the two that she had given birth to could never be replaced. In the (near) future, women will make the same choice for the opposite reason. Tubes will be tied and vas deferens clamped because the children we have will all be replaced on an as-needed basis, burying fear along with the irrelevant corpses.

Jane’s Addiction’s album title may actually be referring to this looming future, when nothing, not even the death of one’s child, is shocking. Nightmares like the one I had last night will then be anachronistic, and I will be able to devote myself full time to my recurring dream of showing up to school without any pants (or underpants) on. But the naked guy who attended all of his classes at Cal-Berkeley in the full Monty has already traipsed through reality, leaving me to come up with a new nocturnal transgression. Dostoyevsky’s old fear that "if there is no God, everything is permitted," has been replaced by the conditions on the ground: if there is no death, everything is permitted. The infamous death of God turned out to be the death of death. And it further turns out that the one thing you can’t clone is death, making unconditional love less a moral imperative and more of a defense mechanism: Enjoy your children! (It looks like they’ll be sticking around for a while.)

Big Mac, Large Fries, and an Extra Large Reincarnation


In his excellent Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor notes the ironic core of the increasing belief in reincarnation among Americans (25% of Americans now believe in reincarnation, per http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99945,00.html ). In traditional Indian culture reincarnation was viewed as a failure; each reincarnation signaled the individual’s failure to achieve the ultimate goal: liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This traditional understanding of reincarnation regards earthly existence as, at best, a great place to visit, but by no means the final destination. More to the point, it is a place to work out one’s karma, usually with a great deal of suffering. Earth as a place of suffering is at the heart of the traditional conception of reincarnation. In contrast, as Batchelor explains, contemporary Americans’ belief in reincarnation is fueled by a desire for more, not less, of earthly existence American style (not so sure they’re interested in reincarnating in what we used to call the Third World). Americans who believe in reincarnation want to come back. We are like the two year old for whom you just cranked the jack-in-the box the umpteenth time, only for us to shout “Again!” Reincarnation is the same in name only; somehow, for Americans who believe in reincarnation, the grass is no longer greener on the other side of death.

Before considering why America has reinvented reincarnation, it is important to note that traditional Indian culture is not alone in its stance towards life in this vale of tears. Christianity, natch, wants off the island, too: “Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven. (Matthew 5:12)” There are an infinite variety of takes on eternal life in the heavenly kingdom, but it is safe to say that everyday life in 2010 America is not a version. For Christians, the real world is but a prelude for what follows, which of course has implications for the reality we inhabit. Reality is never more than a first step, whether towards reward in heaven, or damnation in hell. This is a nice solution for the problems of evil and suffering, which, as in India, are the definitive aspects of this place we call home. A home from which Christians and Indians, whether by way of heaven or by exiting the cycle of rebirth stage right, just want out.

If the dominant spiritual tradition in America regards earthly incarnation in much the same fashion as the Indians traditionally have, then whence this mutant American strain of reincarnation? There is one seemingly reasonable explanation as to why Americans have transformed reincarnation from a necessary step towards departure into an infinite series of arrivals. The average American enjoys material improvements in living conditions undreamt of for nearly all of human history. The relative ease and comfort enjoyed by Americans has perhaps fundamentally altered the experience of life on Earth such that those who experience this Earth 2.0 are lining up to sign on for another tour of duty. In short, the presence of e.g. Dunkin’ Donuts in our lives empowers us all to echo Nietzsche and say “Yes to life!”

The problem with this explanation is that the joys of shopping at Walmart and/or Saks Fifth Avenue only run so deep; scratch the surface and you will find as much misery in America today as you’d likely find in any other time and place. If suicide is any indicator of net misery then the following from Wikipedia kills the joyful reincarnation theory: “According to 2005 data, suicides in the U.S. outnumber homicides by nearly 2 to 1 and ranks as the 11th leading cause of death in the country, ahead of liver disease and Parkinson's. Worldwide suicide rates have increased by 60% in the past 50 years, mainly in the developing countries.” Material wealth, if anything, seems to have made us more miserable, which makes American reincarnation even stranger. We don’t seem to be jumping for joy, in contrast to what our version of belief in reincarnation would lead one to believe. We just watch TV, surf the web, go shopping, and slurp corn syrup to get through the day (the average American spends 151 hours per month watching TV, or 5 hours per day, 68 hours per month on the internet, just over 2 hours per day, and consumes 37.8 pounds of corn syrup annually; the average American woman takes 301 shopping trips for a total of 399 hours annually). And most of us get to do this a few years longer than our ancestors suffered through e.g. life before corrective eyewear. But we’ve always had wine, women, and song, and not a one of our manufactured consolations can top that. Not to mention that our material wealth giveth and taketh away in equal portions: there is a traffic jam for every luxury car, a sexually transmitted disease for every birth control pill, to mention but two of my favorite inventions.

We are as miserable as ever; you could make a case that we have gotten better at distracting ourselves from the misery, but these distractions weave their own unique web of desolation. And still, Americans want more, as if life were like the bottomless fries at Red Robin. Our many versions of bottomless fries are a good place to start if we wish to understand what may be at the heart of American reincarnation. Americans treat the world like a bottomless basket of fries, when there are only so many spuds to go around. According to a fun game on the web at http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/, if everyone in the world consumed as much as I do, it would take 4.1 Earths to provide the necessary resources. I am an American, I am eating the world, and I too have been increasingly looking forward to some reincarnation. This is all connected.

To understand why, let’s revisit Freud’s theory of the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud explains “that all instincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things.” Following this logic, “inanimate things existed before living ones,” so “the aim of all life is death.” Ergo, the death instinct. Almost no one takes the death instinct seriously, which of course reflects the fact that almost no one takes his or her inevitable deaths seriously. But Freud’s greatest psychoanalytic successor, Jacques Lacan, did, and it is to his understanding of the death instinct and its role in human enjoyment that we must turn to fathom American reincarnation. To understand how Lacan can help us tease out the meaning of American reincarnation we must first introduce his concept of jouissance. Per Wikipedia, jouissance is a form of pleasure that is in opposition to our normal understanding of the term: “The pleasure principle, according to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to 'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering.” (for this quote see http://www.answers.com/topic/jouissance ) The precise connection between the death instinct and Lacan’s theory of jouissance is too abstruse for consideration here (for a concise description see http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos ), but the key insight is that, due to the death instinct, we experience jouissance, that insatiable urge to overdo it. Thus, the bottomless fries.

If we take the death instinct seriously, as I believe we must, then we must be prepared, as Freud was, to follow the logic to its necessary conclusion and see if that conclusion matches the reality we see before us. So, here goes. If Freud is correct and there is “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things,” by “becom(ing) inorganic once again”, then I see no more efficient means for the Earth as an interconnected organism to achieve this goal then by way of its human components’ consumption of mass quantities. The death instinct is driving us to literally eat the Earth back to an inorganic state. Does this seemingly bizarre formulation agree with the facts on the ground? I would suggest that the potential for an environmental apocalypse of human origins argues in its favor.

From this perspective, reincarnation American style is an expression of jouissance. Not content with doing our part to enjoy the pain of Earth’s annihilation just once, we shout “again!” Americans believe in reincarnation because of the instinctual drive for excess, and what is more excessive than using up four planets’ worth of resources not once, but until the job of killing this one planet is done? America is the ultimate “expression of the conservative nature of living substance,” (emphasis Freud’s) in the sense that we are at the vanguard of achieving the “final goal of all organic striving,” i.e. death. American reincarnation, then, is just reenlisting in the decisive march.

Perhaps the Indians and Christians are onto something when they consider the earth a place of suffering. Treating the earth as a place of excessive pleasure turns out to be in service of a death instinct that is leading us ever closer to the abyss; jouissance makes us lemmings, only we’re taking everybody and everything with us over the cliff. A return to suffering may just save us all. It may seem crazy to suggest that exercising a modicum of restraint at life’s various buffet tables would equate to suffering, but things have gotten so out of whack in late consumerist culture that for us Yanks the suggestion that we curtail our gorging is oddly anathema. But I’d like my children’s children to enjoy some French fries too, so one serving of fries will have to do. Okay, two servings.

Worms, Cells, and the Meaning of Death

There are two prevailing and contrasting theories of how cells die. The first, more comforting theory is that cells simply wear out from the rigors of life, and as wear and tear mounts become less able to fight off predators such as free radicals. Death appears here as an enemy at the gate, to be fought off in valorous combat until achieving the most honorable death possible for the Samurai, death in battle. The second, more troubling theory contends that aging and death are in fact preprogrammed into the cell’s DNA. This perspective essentially states “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

A 2008 Stanford research study, published in the 7/24/08 edition of the journal Cell, lends its weight to the latter perspective. The study looked at the impact of genetic programming in nematode worms, and found that the process of natural selection had resulted in genetic programming that predestined the worms to aging, and, by extension, death. A web article about the research, found at www.supercentarian.com/archive/genetic.html, explains the study’s key insight thusly: “key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake.” In essence, death becomes an existential dilemma for us precisely because it is in no way a dilemma for the process of natural selection. It is perhaps the greatest of ironies that our ultimate destiny is the result of nothing but an afterthought. (I have, of course, here made the leap from the death of cells to the death of cell based organisms; with the caveat that I am layman and not a cell biologist, we would appear to be on safe ground in asserting that the death of an individual human is intertwined with the death of his or her cells to a degree that makes this leap meaningful.)

We may proceed, with due caution but also with some degree of confidence based in scientific findings such as the Stanford worm study, in further exploration of the implications of our “planned demise from day one,” as one website’s description of preprogrammed cell death puts it (http://www.howstuffworks.com/). And if we are to proceed in such a fashion, then our first stop might very well be, yet again, at the doorstep of one Sigmund Freud. Because what the Stanford scientists and other theorists of preprogrammed cell death are telling us sounds remarkably like Freud’s most controversial theory, with apologies to penis envy, the death instinct.

Before discussing the particulars of Freud’s death instinct, it is important to pause for a moment in consideration of its singular lack of popularity. For really existing psychoanalysis, the worms at Stanford may be the bearers of bad news. Psychoanalysis would prefer to go about its business as if Freud had never postulated the death instinct. Psychoanlysis, like all the rest of us, is in flight from the specter of death; as David Loy explains, “our primary repression is not sexual desire but death, and that denial returns to consciousness in distorted, symbolic ways which haunt us individually and collectively.” (for this quote and a review of Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, see http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/padmas.htm) Psychoanalysis has repressed Freud’s death instinct, but, of course, the first commandment of psychoanalysis is the return of the repressed; those worms out at Stanford signal an opportunity for that return to emerge into consciousness from its current status as the unconscious urge towards compulsive repetition found in every form of death terror. Confronted with the science of preprogrammed cell death, psychoanalysis has no choice but to own the half of its legacy it has disowned, and the first murmurings of this reawakening to the death instinct can now be heard. (For an example, see http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=NP.006.0063A)

While psychoanalysis as a whole has repressed the theory of the death instinct, it is striking that the two most important psychoanalysts since Freud, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein (Jung’s and Adler’s respective breaks with Freud led them to found significant branches of psychology, but neither can properly be referred to as psychoanalysts), both embraced the death instinct. In an article on the web about the death instinct (http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos), Pierre Delion explains that “For Melanie Klein, a firm advocate of the existence of the death drive, psychic conflict is never a conflict between the ego and the drives but always between the life drive and the death drive. Anxiety is the immediate response to the endopsychic perception of the death drive. For Jacques Lacan, the death drive as something beyond the pleasure principle forms the best starting-point for introducing his concept of the ‘Real,’ in connection with the Imaginary and the Symbolic. He links to this the lethal dimension inherent in desire and jouissance.” It is my contention that Klein and Lacan achieved their theoretical insights precisely because they owned all of psychoanalysis, including the death instinct. It is my further contention that psychoanalysis has become marginalized as both a therapeutic practice and as a philosophical construct because it has only ever been, Lacan and Klein notwithstanding, half of psychoanalysis. As a mental health professional a week does not pass in which I do not hear psychoanalysis mocked by the phrase “So, tell me about your mother.” And rightly so, because psychoanalysis without the death instinct is a joke. Forget about your mother; tell me about your life in the context of your inevitable death.

To survive in any meaningful way, psychoanalysis must get real. Freud is, as ever, ready at hand with his reality principle, but we must be sure that our understanding of reality is shaped not only by our appreciation of life instincts such as libido, nor only by the demands of civilization as enforced by the superego, but also by their equal partner, the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud notes that “two kinds of pressures are constantly at work in living substance, operating in contrary directions, one constructive or assimilatory and the other destructive or dissimilatory.” For Freud, these dual processes are less than harmonious, as he sees “an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses.” Our neurotic inability to reconcile what Freud calls the “Vacillating rhythm” of life and death instincts is inscribed in the worst of human history, especially war. In a letter to Freud on the origins of war, Albert Einstein described our inability to cope with the death instinct succinctly: “Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.” (for the full text of the letter, see http://www.braungardt.com/Physics/Einstein-Freud.htm)

Zeroing in on exactly what Freud meant by the death instinct helps us see to exactly what degree the theory of the death instinct foreshadowed the theory of preprogrammed cell death. Per Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons- becomes inorganic once again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death.’” (emphasis is Freud’s) Freud’s assertion here that death occurs due to “internal reasons” is shocking in its prescience in relation to theories of preprogrammed cell death. However, his assertion that “the aim of all life is death” contrasts with the discovery that death is a mere afterthought to processes of natural selection. We are stuck with death not because it is the aim of all life, but because life only cares for the life of the species and cares nothing for the death of the individual. To correct Freud, the aim of all individuals is death, but, inevitably, life goes on.

But if we recall that the life instinct protects the cell up until the point that it has performed natural selection’s task, only then to succumb to the death instinct preprogrammed into its DNA , then the following passage just a few paragraphs later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, indicates that Freud’s death instinct may account for natural selection after all: “The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organic shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to organic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” In short, Freud’s insight here is that the life instinct and natural selection are ultimately subservient to the death instinct’s agenda, in that a healthy organism will ward off external dangers in the name of natural selection, but ultimately in the service of allowing the death preprogrammed into the organism’s DNA to obtain. The death instinct has but one card to play; it must play it last and if it does it trumps all.

We continue to repress the death instinct at our collective peril. In the most literal sense possible, the only way forward for each and every one of us is though death. As Pema Chodron writes in her commentary on the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong slogans, “ Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.” And if Freud and the scientists at Stanford are right, it not only comes for us at the end, but is there with us every step of the journey; death is a part of who we are. In the same commentary, Pema Chodron counsels us to become familiar with death throughout life: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.” It is only by doing so that the death instinct can emerge from repression. It is only by doing so that we can remain sane in the face of our preprogrammed eath. The leap of faith here, to be watered by practice, is that underneath all that death terror is what Pema Chodron calls “the innate ability to let go and feel compassion for others.” I’d like to die trying.

OH DARLING, I’VE INVITED MR. & MRS. DEATH FOR CHRISTMAS

There comes a point in every smoker’s career where the only reasonable approach is to say to one’s self “I am a smoker”, accept all that this entails, and get on with one’s life. These individuals either can not or will not quit, it does not matter which, just that they are smokers to the end. My life is at just such a defining moment. I do not floss. I have tried and failed to floss throughout my adult life with nothing more to show for it than the toothbrush-like flossing device that hit the market last year now sitting on my sink as a reminder of yet another failed stab at acquiring the habit. The face that stares back at me in the mirror above the sink is that of a non-flosser, and always will be.

Non-flossing is the new smoking. How this came to pass is the story of how death died in America. Except, of course, unlike God or the author you can’t kill death because it is already, need we say it, dead. Death has just decamped from our lungs and set up shop between our teeth. Which crevices provide an ideal milieu for death, as demonstrated by the inordinate number of dentist suicides.

But before illuminating the great American lost cause of killing death, and death’s subsequent journey up the esophagus, I need to clarify my non-flosser credentials. Just as smoker’s vary from the two-pack-a-dayer to the I-only-smoke-when-I’m drunk, non-flosser’s come in many stripes. As a non-flosser who religiously brushes three times a day on weekdays, and twice a day on weekends, I am the cousin of the most curious of all smokers, the health-conscious vegetarian or, these days, vegan smoker. We have all met them, and been preached to about the hot dog meat rotting in the folds of our colons, and they keep mentioning something about free radicals (a confusing term that should reference black-clad anarchists but is instead intended to scare me away from my delicious processed cheese; I enjoy all cheeses but my relationship to American cheese, like a healthy marriage, is only deepening as the years pass). Because they are more often than not puffing on cancer sticks while preaching, it is tempting to bite them. Instead, I settle for biting my cheek until it bleeds. This allows the smoking vegan to get on with the process of killing themselves while simultaneously trying to live to one hundred and ten.

The smoking vegan may at first seem to madden the onlooker with her hypocrisy. But the tension induced by witnessing the preaching smoking vegan’s irrational praxis is rooted much deeper than annoyance at hypocrisy. The vast bulk of us are hypocrites 90% of the time, but the fact that I speak highly of tolerance and equality while residing in a de facto racially and class-bound neighborhood does not annoy people anywhere near as much as the guy swilling wheat grass between puffs on his American Spirit hand-roll. Most of us wear the mask of hypocrisy to pass as decent, good-hearted folks as long as it does not interfere with getting on with the business of our perceived self-interest. Vegan smokers are unpopular, then, not for your garden variety hypocrisy, but because they bring to a conscious stage the single most important and almost always unconscious psychic conflict, a conflict upon which rests the fate of our very souls. Which explains the near biting.

The capstone to Freud’s towering career was his recognition of this psychic conflict, the conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct. Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex is generally regarded as the centerpiece of his understanding of the human psyche. But it is his later work on the death instinct, and its tension with the life instinct, that stands as his greatest contribution to the understanding of human psychology. Much more than a successful resolution of the Oedipus complex, the quality of an individual’s internal relationship between life and death instincts is the foundation upon which the individual’s benign or malignant psychic life rests. The vegan smoker is a living allegory of the malignant relationship between life and death instinct that dominates the American psychic landscape. This relationship is almost always tucked away in the unconscious, but the vegan smoker rubs your face in it with the breath of her noxious preaching mixed with dissonant carcinogenic fumes.

The vegan smoker provides a pictogram of life and death instinct in conflict, allowing us to witness firsthand the tension that Freud uncovered in this dynamic interplay. Freud’s probing of the psyche revealed a human instinct to "re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life" ("Ego and the Id" 709), which he termed the death instinct. What was disturbed by the emergence of life was the peaceful slumber of death, an eternal, unbroken quiet darkness. From the cacophony of the womb (which I learned during my wife’s pregnancy is louder than a vacuum cleaner, and is why turning on the vacuum cleaner was the only thing that would put my daughter to sleep for her first three months) to the instant, reassuring wails of the newborn in the shiny delivery room, life is from the first a barrage of noise and, soon thereafter, light. But amidst the swirl of noise and light, there is more to life than life. It is this surplus to life that Freud termed the death instinct. This instinct to return to nothingness, which Americans regard as the negation of life, is, in truth, the very stuff of life.

It is the belief in death as negation, bound up with the denial of death as surplus, which fuels America’s mass repression of the death instinct. Americans insist on life to the exclusion of death. Whether this insistence informs the extremist style of capitalism we practice, or if it flows out of that extremism, is a chicken-and-egg question we can not answer. But the connection is symbiotic and spiraling upwards. The marketplace of American capitalism is the noise of our overdeveloped life instinct. To make money in America is to make noise. We continue to make a great deal of money, and we have never been louder. Silence, reflection, solitude, these are the enemies of the marketplace, and the marketplace is gaining ground in banishing them with each passing day. Perhaps the marketplace’s fiercest weapon in this battle is the cell phone and its increasingly adept progeny . To carry a cell phone is to never be alone (my wife and I just gave each other matching cell phones for Christmas/Hanukah, and in order to make up for this I may have to spend a lot more time secluded in the basement).

As it attempts to banish solitude, the marketplace, of course, does not work alone. It supplies the noise of the life instinct, but science provides the light. Science, autistic in its inability to relate to matters that do not respond to the Scientific Method, aims its high beams in all directions at once in a single-minded pursuit of knowledge, leaving no space for shadows, let alone the darkness of night that is safe cover for the healthy expression of the death instinct. With the death instinct so well repressed, science has its sites set on biological death itself. The most optimistic of scientific futurists (i.e. Raymond Kurzweil; see Gone Today, Hair Tomorrow below for more on Kurzweil’s future for America) foresee the death of biological death within the next generation.

As the death instinct has been buried ever deeper in the American unconscious, the life instinct has been given free rein, resulting in a near unanimous effort by Americans, hand in glove with science and the marketplace, to live forever but to never be alone. Yet even if science negates the (supposed) negation of biological death, and even if no one ever spends a moment alone ever again, the death instinct will live on as life’s surplus. But the repression of life’s surplus, our potentially healthy death instinct, boomerangs back to take our heads off with the return of the repressed. When the death instinct returns it does so in distorted form, as must all material returning from repression. The violence now endemic to America is the mutant return of the repressed death instinct. From the jaw-dropping sum of homicides to the drug trade’s low-grade war in urban America, from the violence dripping from our pop songs, TV, movies, and video games to the war in Iraq, violence permeates the American landscape. Addressing each symptom is futile, like the carnival game played by Venus Williams in a recent TV ad where she hammers down one plastic groundhog after another, only to see another one pop up in its place. Only in America today the groundhogs pack sawed-off shotguns and nine-millimeters.

There are many forms of violence, including slow suicide. The vegan’s cigarette, a slo-mo AK-47, is the twisted death instinct returned from and pointed at the head it was buried in. The smoking vegan has one of the most severely repressed death instincts of all. Not only does the smoking vegan want to live forever, she wants all the animals to join her in earthly eternity. Unsatisfied by the negation of her own mortality, the smoking vegan wishes to strip her four-legged friends of their right to die as well. The smoking vegan is afraid that if she lives forever she might be all by herself, which actually might not be that bad if only she can bring her pet dog with her. The smoking vegan’s genuine feelings towards animals are revealed when she smacks a mosquito into the beyond, as she certainly does not want her and Fido’s eternal earthly bliss disturbed by those little bastards. Only it is hard to make it to eternity with a two-pack-a-day habit. In a world where you can never be too thin, at least the smoking vegan’s diet of field greens and bark plus the always thinning smoking gives her a good shot at a runway model’s physique until she croaks. But God help the fat smoking vegan.

Nevertheless, the smoking vegan has a leg up on my crowd, the non-flossers. There is a certain sexy neurotic flavor to the vegan smoker, at least until they start preaching. I am all for brooding vegan smoking. Anyone who would put that much effort into a holistic, sacred approach to eating while sucking on carbon monoxide is, at the very least, interesting. Vegan smokers are a holdover from a time when the death instinct was not quite so repressed. Death’s return from the repressed could still take an overt form. Say what you will about vegan smokers, but they are unabashedly out in the open. Today, the death instinct has been repressed so far, stuffed ever deeper by the ballooning expansion of science and market, that the arena for its distorted return from the repressed is limited to the negative space of passivity. In the future, and the future is already now, death will erupt and take root wherever we don’t do something. I may brush my teeth two to three times a day so that my teeth will last forever, but death is so far repressed in me that I can’t even actively smoke to yellow those brushed pearly whites. Instead, I passively non-floss my way to destroying the teeth my parents paid a small fortune to straighten.

The non-flosser is not alone, just better camouflaged than their passive self-destructing brethren. It is hard to miss the three hundred-plus pounders who don’t watch their calories as science and the market demand. I may have just taken a shot at fat vegan smokers, but as active gives way to passive, fat will become the new skinny. To all the brooding-skinny-smoking-vegans out there, prepare to give way to sulking-fat-non-flossers. Death is about to put the Rueben sandwich back into Rubenesque.

But there is a way out of this American mess. The way out resides in the central story of human existence that Freud uncovered with the death instinct. Boiled down, there is one script that all human lives follow. The script comes in two versions, each with unique plots and contrasting endings. Despite these differences, the two versions are telling the same story, that of the marriage of life and death instincts. The first version, the romance, has three acts: Life, Death, and Rebirth. The second version, the tragedy, also in three acts: Life, Repression of Death, Return of the Repressed. Central narratives from both western and eastern religions point to this basic structure of human existence. The Christian story of Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and resurrection is a template for the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that humans repeatedly cycle through between the moments of biological birth and death. The eastern tradition of reincarnation is another writ large version of the story of birth, death, and rebirth that humans live day-by-day. Both eastern and western religions have animated the everyday cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through stories and traditions that stretch beyond the barriers of biological birth and death. But the utility of these religious stories, and their truth, is found in their relationship to birth, death, and rebirth as it occurs within the boundaries of a human lifetime.

Religion’s raison d’etre, then, is to serve as the fulcrum point on which the delicate balance between life and death instincts rests. The death instinct is life’s surplus, because without the addition of death, human life can not obtain the liberating, spiritual form of rebirth. Science and market, which have outstretched their real but limited usefulness by replacing religion in America, are ignorant of the sacred role of death as life’s surplus. Science and market regard death as life’s negation, dooming death instinct to repression, and guaranteeing the return of the repressed death instinct in the form of violence and passive self destruction.

The imbalance of what is left of religion in America, and its perversion at the hands of science and market, is on full display every December. It is no coincidence that Christmas, the celebration of Christ’s birth, has taken on such outsized proportions in America. The ballooning of Christmas symbolizes the American obsession with birth and life. The hijacking of Christmas by consumerism, witnessed in the battle royale of shopping that ensues early in the AM on the day after Thanksgiving, reveals the link between the holiday that celebrates life with the consumer culture that recognizes only life. And as Christmas has waxed, Easter (remember Easter?), the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, has waned to the point where it ranks a notch or two below Ground Hog’s Day. Ironically, Christmas Day itself has become something of a symbol of death, as it is the only day of the year where capitalism, barring the odd Chinese food joint, rests.

Functional religion mediates its flock’s relationship to death through meaningful spiritual practices. The most important spiritual practices for developing openness to death involve silence, which clears an inner open space for the encounter between life and death. This open space slowly emerges in those who cultivate silence, lapping like gentle waves at the tumult until a sufficient calm settles. Only in this sturdy, quiet inner space can life and death merge and in their union beget a rebirth that pours outward to all those fortunate enough to encounter the shining yet weathered new-old soul. “Born again” is a term misapplied to religious initiates; the new life of a spiritual rebirth, the only genuine meaning of eternal life, is the result of a humble lifetime’s (or many lifetimes) devotion to silence.

I have not yet cleared much inner space for death. My mind and spirit clatter with the noise of life, and this is perhaps appropriate to my age and station in life. But I am not quite comfortable with this rationalization. Death happens all of the time, not just when we are old and wizened. I have certainly repressed death with life, and flossing is hardly the only thing I can not do as a result. My maternal grandmother died sometime within the past five to seven years. That is as specific as I can get. Her death literally did not register, as a few years ago I found myself unable to recall whether my grandmother had actually died or whether she was still slowly dying in Ithaca, New York. I could try to blame it on the fact that I did not attend the funeral, and thus was denied “closure”. But my failure to attend her funeral, and my prior failure to attend my grandfather’s funeral, are symptoms and not the cause of my alienation from dying and death. By repressing death, I have lost the ability to grieve. I must ask myself, if life can not be grieved, what value life?

I can tell you that my father died in the weeks after September 11, 2001. I was present for much of his rapid decline from a malignant brain tumor. I offered and received comfort from my family and friends throughout the four months from diagnosis to death. I attended the funeral. I wept. I supported my mother as best I could through her overwhelming grief. I prayed. Looking back, I can think of no way I could have been more present for the death of my father. And yet, my father never died. He got sick, but he never died. I see him periodically in my dreams, and he is invariably sick. I can conceive of illness, but I am not yet whole enough to contain death. Until I am able to grieve, until death becomes real, my father will never die for me. But I have not kept my father alive by failing to grieve. All I have done is made my image of him into a ghost.

I used to love the opening credits of the X-Files. The spooky music and the UFO-sighting clips were spot-on, but what I really loved was the closing sequence of the credits when the words “The truth is out there” briefly graced the bottom of the screen before fading to commercial. Nothing thrills me more than the belief that there is truth and that it is obtainable. The Bible has the exact same line just with different words: “ask and it shall be granted unto you, seek and you shall find.” Translate this into 2006 American (there is such a language) and you get “There must be more to life than this.” The truth is out there, and it is that we are individually and collectively out of touch with this more to life. Life’s more, life’s surplus is death. It will most assuredly be granted unto us. The question for the twenty-first century is whether we shall seek to find death, or whether death will continue to haunt us.

GONE TODAY, HAIR TOMORROW

I heard a fascinating interview on Diane Rehm’s chat show this week. Diane was interviewing Ray Kurzweil, who was publicizing his new book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”. Based on the interview alone (plus the dust jacket, which I read at Barnes &Noble today) I can say that Kurzweil is one of the great optimists I have ever encountered. Among other pending exploits, he expects modern science to cure cancer, arrest and reverse the aging process, and empower the elimination of poverty. Big deal, right? To some degree we all expect science to work some miracle cures in the future, just as it cured polio and landed us on the moon in the past. What makes Kurzweil’s optimism so breathtaking is that he says these changes will occur in the next 15 to 20 years.

All of these developments are part of what Kurzweil refers to as “the singularity”. If Kurzweil fails at everything else he can always sell that term, “the singularity”, to Hollywood; I can already see Keanu Reeves co-starring with Jodie Foster in shiny silver singlets in “Singularity: the Major Motion Picture”. But for now Kurzweil’s singularity is a non-fiction term, albeit a sexy one, in that branch of thought known loosely as futurism. While the term singularity evokes the mystical-alien/human-union-sex scene in the pool in Cocoon, if I am interpreting it correctly it is another word for cyborg, among whose ranks numbers the decidedly less sexy Robocop (although we are left to wonder if Robocop’s, ahem, masculinity is intact). Whatever term you choose, Kurzweil is talking about the merger of human and machine. And Kurzweil’s merger is not metaphor, he’s not talking about the ubiquitous strolling teenager with cell phone cupped to ear. In Kurzweil’s vision we will have the mystical-union-sex from Cocoon, but instead of having it with aliens we’ll be having it with our laptops. The singular in singularity means that my Toshiba and I will be one Singular entity.

Kurzweil’s optimism regarding humanity’s future relationship with machines is in stark contrast to the script adhered to strictly by Hollywood. Both the original Terminator and Matrix films portray human and machine’s future as adversarial, with humanity in a war for its very survival. Hollywood makes billions playing off of our fears and anxieties, and the Terminator and Matrix films are no exception in their respective riffs on our growing reliance upon and vulnerability to our machines. But Kurzweil’s task as a futurist is not to scare the pants off us, but to predict the future as accurately as possible. Kurzweil’s outrageous optimism is singularly American; Only an American could have written this book, and that fact is ultimately more reliable than anything Kurzweil has predicted for the future. Kurzweil’s vision of the future may or may not come to pass, but the fact that he has such a vision, and that his vision is broadcast unabashedly through our mainstream media, is exactly why Lance Armstrong is the most important American alive today.

Lance Armstrong is the past and he is the future, at least as we live them both in the present in America. Here is all you need to know about Lance Armstrong’s biography to know why he is such a potent figure on the American landscape: 1) He had testicular cancer, which almost claimed his life. 2) He recovered from that cancer to not only ride again professionally as a cyclist, but to become the greatest cyclist of all time, winning an unprecedented 7 consecutive Tour De France championships. 3) A cloud of suspicion hangs over his accomplishments, as seemingly the entire French media is out to prove that Lance Armstrong cheated, by way of performance enhancing doping, to win France’s beloved bike race over and over.
That he pissed off the French in winning all those races is an added bonus for Armstrong’s US popularity, but I maintain that the three elements listed above are what really account for Armstrong’s central place in the American psyche. For those three elements, conjoined in the body and triumph of Armstrong, inject Armstrong into the very space that Kurzweil clears with the ferocity of his optimism.
Armstrong’s well publicized battle with testicular cancer grounds him precisely in the past that Kurzweil sees for us. Per Kurzweil, cancer, along with myriad diseases and the aging process itself, will be erased by a stroke of technology’s delete key. The one certainty that grounds all of human existence, mortality, will be expunged from the human storyline. Armstrong’s victory over cancer, then, makes him a link to our pending human past. That he overcame testicular cancer, a disease which by attacking the reproductive organs strikes directly at humanity’s heretofore only concrete means of transcending mortality, makes Armstrong’s defeat of cancer weightier still. In American iconography, Armstrong faced down mortality’s henchman at high noon, and proved quicker on the draw.

To understand Armstrong’s connection with Kurzweil’s human future we must tread rockier, more controversial ground. I want to begin with the disclaimer that I do not pretend knowledge of Armstrong’s guilt or innocence regarding performance enhancing doping (my opinion, which of course is just that, an opinion, is that the controversy is too murky for me to have a strong opinion one way or another; Armstrong’s consistent dominant results after a bout of nearly fatal cancer do raise one’s eyebrows, but the overzealous pursuit of Armstrong by what feels like the majority of the French population, and their thus far piddling results, tip the scales slightly back in Armstrong’s favor-but then again, I too am an American). And like the ultimate validity of Kurzweil’s predictions, the truth about Armstrong’s doping innocence or guilt is beside the point I am making here. Whether the accusations against Armstrong are true or not, the cloud of suspicion that envelops Armstrong is real.

It is the vaporous nature of this cloud of suspicion that is the secret fuel for Armstrong’s overwhelming popularity in America. Remember, Armstrong plays a sport with a negligible following in America. For comparison’s sake, American Greg Lemond won three Tour De France crowns in the 1980’s, including an Armstrong-esque inspiring win after being accidentally shot in the back on a hunting trip by his brother-in-law (talk about living symbolism; NFL football games on Thanksgiving Day exist for the sole purpose of preventing in-law shootings, “accidental” or otherwise; retiring to game, couch, and six-pack has saved countless lives). And Greg Lemond’s name carries about as much cultural currency as Jan-Michael Vincent (he of “Airwolf” fame; oh how I love helicopters).

So there is more going on here than meets the eye with this Lance Armstrong & America lovefest thing. Armstrong overcame cancer and won a few bike races, but somehow he’s shagging Sheryl Crowe(can I still say shagging, or is that too Austin Powers?). Rockers date actors, not jocks. Just ask Michael Phelps, he won six gold medals, a number only one count less than Armstrong’s seven Tour wins, in a sport with at least some visibility in America, and who has he been seen snogging in public? Nobody you or I have ever heard of. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cancer. Remember Jon Kruk, the fat first baseman/outfielder for the Phillies ’93 pennant team? He overcame testicular cancer and I don’t see Nora Jones all hugged up on him. Sheryl Crowe should be dating the new Bond guy, not Lance Armstrong. But somehow, there Armstrong was at half-time in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day, watching his significant other Ms. Crowe do the half-time performance for all of us half passed out on our couches avoiding our in-laws, right where the camera could catch him.

Americans are too tactful to ever publicly proclaim that we love Lance Armstrong so much precisely because of, and absolutely not in spite of, the cloud of suspicion that hangs over his Tour victories. In our heart of hearts Americans have absolutely no problem with improved performance via science, be it on the sporting field or in the bedroom (which brings up another looming sporting figure, one Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive for performance improving steroids and appeared in advertisements for performance improving Viagra, but the task of unpacking all that is for another day). Clouds of suspicion are just fine by us, an ever more literal minded American public. Until we see some CSI-style, irrefutable DNA-based evidence, we are all more than happy to enjoy the show. For evidence of this one need look no further than the bloated home run sluggers of turn-of-the-millennium era baseball. The steroid abuse of that era was obvious to the naked eye. But that did not stop the ratings parade, and the ad nauseam lionization of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and company. America could not get enough, as long as it was just a cloud of suspicion hanging over baseball. Once the steroids testing program was implemented, and the courtroom-style evidence began to roll in, America was forced to turn off the show, like a husband re-stashing the porn when he hears his wife pull up in the driveway at the end of girls’ night out. We are a moral, upstanding people after all, and we in no way support cheating of any kind.

At least that’s what we have to say when called out on the carpet. But our actions prior to the public unveiling of the steroids scandal tell us more about what we actually think and feel about scientifically improving human performance. Lance Armstrong’s cloud of suspicion remains intact, at least until the day the French tag some uncontestable forensic data on him. Until then, America will continue to love Lance under the cover of his cloud of suspicion. Under that cover what we are really in love with is the idea of perfecting ourselves, an idea voiced under the guise of futurism by Kurzweil. Lance Armstrong, because we do not have certainty whether he used performance enhancing drugs or not, is the ideal container for America’s hopes for the future, for a time when we are liberated from our very mortality . Should it ever be proven that Armstrong was a doper, than his usefulness for the American psyche will have passed, and he will shrink from our consciousness as rapidly as Sammy Sosa’s power numbers in the era of steroids testing. If it is somehow conclusively shown that Armstrong never doped, his cultural importance will likewise fade, though not as drastically, as he will still be cast, only in the much smaller part of aging sports hero (cynically, I also believe that his ability to date A-List rockers rests on his current cultural cache-for his and Crowe’s sake I hope I am wrong about that).

Armstrong’s significance is time-limited nevertheless. For the game that America is currently playing, that of publicly decrying the use of performance enhancing drugs (a public cry voiced symbolically by the US Congress’ investigation into steroids in professional sports; There is still no better barometer of what we can get away with admitting in public as the American political system) while secretly pinning our hopes for immortality on the science that delivers those drugs, is one that can not last. Whether Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, pandora’s box is already open, and Americans will soon be able to pop a pill to hit a homerun in the ballpark with as much freedom as they now pop them to hit one in the bedroom. Our old ideas of cheating, along with the entire playbook of ethics that applied to a world bounded on all sides by human mortality, will soon be out of date, if they are not already. Mortality may never disappear, but whether it takes 20 years or 200, it will come to mean something altogether different and will need a new set of ethics to guide humanity as we navigate the changes. So at some point Lance Armstrong will probably get to go back to being a champion cyclist who overcame cancer, but maybe by then there won’t be any cancer. Somehow, I have my doubts, but I was born way back in 1974.

I will close with one final observation about the Lance Armstrong phenomenon. It struck me when I was trying to come up with something to say about the yellow “Live Strong” Armstrong armbands that were briefly all the rage. I remembered that the arm band fad that had preceded Armstrong’s was none other than the “WWJD” armband. The WWJD stands for What Would Jesus Do, as most of us all know by now. One figure famous for his relationship to mortality and immortality segued into another, right on our wrists. Interesting, don’t you think?