The good life, the long life
In yesterday’s thread about eating beef, commenter “SteveH” asks:
Where does this obsession with quanity of life come from? I could understand it if we lost years on the average lifespan over the past 100 years. But we’ve gained tremendously.
Surely this must be some sort of artifact of a people with a declining faith in what will happen to them when they die.
I think he’s onto something. But there’s another factor at work, as well: the phenomenon is a paradoxical result of the gains in lifespan.
Long ago—actually, not so very long ago—child mortality was great. Visit any old cemetery and you’ll see the evidence in the tiny headstones for the dead babies, and the short lifespans of so many women dead in childbirth. Then there is the evidence of epidemics, which could sweep through a family and kill all the members (or nearly all) in a couple of days or weeks, leaving family plots whose headstones have death dates that cluster around each other.
The possibilities were nearly endless: infectious diseases of all types, both endemic and epidemic, familiar and strange; accidents that would not be fatal nowadays but which back then caused rampant infection and death; and even the diseases that still plague us such as cancer and heart disease, but always incurable then and almost invariably fatal.
Doctors made house calls. But their most common function was to diagnose and predict the course of an illness: this one is likely to die, that one will reach a crisis in a few days but will probably live if he/she can get past that. They dispensed nostrums and potions, but everybody pretty much knew they were more for show than anything else.
People didn’t need any special memento mori; the intimate knowledge of death was with them all the time. In the fourteenth century, during and after the plague known as the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe’s population, art became laden with the image of the Danse Macabre, a skeleton cavorting in glee as it leads people of all ages and ranks to their demise:
The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death increased the religious desire for penitence, but it also evoked a hysterical desire for amusement while still possible; a last dance as cold comfort. The danse macabre combines both desires: in many ways similar to the mediaeval mystery plays, the dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death.
So it could go either (or both) ways: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die; and get your moral and spiritual house in order, for the same reason.
We have conquered neither disease nor death, nor is it at all likely we ever will. But we have pushed back their borders. Death still comes to infants and to women in childbirth, but it’s a rarity, at least in the developed world and even to a certain extent beyond. Infectious disease certainly exists, but actual plagues have been replaced by fear of plagues (bird flu, etc.) that haven’t quite materialized, although they always could. Now most of our diseases are either those that kill us in old age or are chronic and cause discomfort and inconvenience but with which we live for long periods and whose effects medicine can usually at least help us control.
But death still comes to all. And even if it comes in very old age, most of are fortunate enough to have lived healthy and pleasant enough lives to want to extend them still further—at least, when we contemplate the prospect from the perspective of youth or middle age or even early old age. Our relative lack of familiarity with death makes us less accepting of it, I think, not more. Almost all death—except, perhaps, for the deaths of the centenarians among us—has begun to seem premature and unusual.
And as science and medicine have progressed, our faith in their abilities, and our expectations of those abilities, have grown. If science can conquer smallpox, why not heart disease and cancer? Well, there are lots of reasons why, including the fact that many infectious diseases tend to have a more simple cause and therefore usually have been more easily preventable. But that doesn’t stop us from demanding and wanting to have control over what heretofore seemed chaotic, random, and devastating, and to ask medicine to do even more to discover the secrets that the ancient alchemists pursued: the elixir of eternal (or as close to eternal as possible) life and youth.
We are simultaneously living longer and remaining more immature and selfish. Talk about a danse macabre!
What intimation of mortality touches Americans raised in suburban comfort and the entitlement/self-esteem mentality, in atomized families with little contact with elders?
There is in the back of one’s mind an elusive thought that there ought to be more time; that life is too short: my ninety-six y.o. mother is trying to find the right vitamin and the right natural medicine to add just another year or two to her life span.
What is never mentioned yet is presented to anyone who opens a bible and reads the first five books: man once lived for hundred of years; Abraham complained that his years – to his bitterness – were shorter than his fathers’; and Moses died at age one hundred and twenty years of age: ” his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated….” The pharaoh which pursued Moses died at age eighty still strong.
And just to add my two cents worth on diet: I began the paleo diet nearly a year ago and have more energy and have lost weight.
we were ‘made’ by evolution to push back..
now there is nothing to push back against, the system goes wacky..
this was the point of the use of such fractal ideas at the state level, not just the personal level.
at the personal level its why erin pizzey pointed out about women who are abused, coming back to their abusers as they have a masochistic nature… (and so get their fix)
at the state level, this crazyness was latched on by the frankfurt school and others, with its culmination of the reorganization of the soviets by suddenly removing the pressure…
in judo, the same thing allows one to off balance and throw someone else.
in biology, it is causing things like asthma as the parasites that are normal are not there any more… (while the greenies want to claim pollution)
if your adapted to something, your system WANTS that information to act normal… without that, things go askew
take a look at the eyeball cahnges in astronaughts… the lack of gravity causes the spinal fluid to distribute evenly in pressure, rather than a pressure gradient… and so it pushes on the back of the eyes, which no longer have the weight to push back, and so deform
this simple mechanical things is completely oblivious to nasa biologists who report (yesterday) they dont know why this is so,.
its so, because the pressure that was there is no longer there… and the data from that is no longer available..
by the way, the same thing is what will define an invasive species.. where the other pressure they are adapted to meet no longer caps the adaptation (showing that they dont adapt to maximal, but to just enough, or else they would maximize back whence they came)
the invading species finding the pressure of the missing information no longer there, is no longer restricted.
its given society a form of cabin fever when combined with God is dead nihilism, ignorance, lack of self control and direction, etc..
Twas Jacob, not Abraham:
http://bible.cc/genesis/47-9.htm
To really see the effect in full malignant flower, you have to visit the Bay Area, where (generalizing from my friends) people seem to think death is optional. If they just eat the right foods, do the right things, avoid the wrong things, why, they’ll live … indefinitely.
Conversely, on learning of someone’s death, they immediately look for a reason. “Ah, he ate a lot of red meat,” (or something), and nod knowingly. That’s why he died!
It’s a very peculiar atmosphere, and one highly prone to fads and fashions. I suspect that this Peter Pan syndrome is bound up with the dearth of children in the Bay Area (as exemplified by my friends, who are all childless heterosexual couples).
Occam’s Beard: it reminds me very much of a culture I once learned about in anthropology class. I wish I could remember which group it was, but the gist of it was that this tribe believed all death to be unnatural. In their case, they attributed all deaths to the workings of witchcraft. After a death, they would come up with an explanation involving a spell of some sort cast on the lately deceased.
They had a lot more of an excuse than the people you describe in the Bay area, because many of their deaths were of fairly young people, and of course their knowledge of science and modern medicine was very rudimentary.
Occam’s Berard – Have you read “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe? He spends a lot of time talking about that same mentality. The test pilots had the same, knowing nods when one of their colleagues crashed and burned. “They didn’t have ‘the right stuff’. We knew it all along. If I had been there, I could have pulled out of it.”
Waidmann
I suspect that today’s people, thinking so much of themselves, self-esteem all puffed in our schools–think that death is just “unfai,r” and should not come for such sterling examples of humanity as themselves.
Occam’s Beard…
that comes from the idea of science and the wrong biological model. this is something that took me a few years to convince a geneticist here (one of the top 20 research hospitals)…
its taken me a long time to show that the model they pretend is real is not.
one of the things from the new and cogent and predicitive (And software model able), is that old age is not what we commonly think it is.
ie. here is part of it..
the current model of old age is shortly put this way (i am always pressed for space). that we age till we reach this prime plateau… then after that, the slings and arrows fo life add up and we die…
however… that model sucks, and doesnt fit anything but hopeful thinking. it completely ignores the dominant thing in front of them.
what is that?
that if you look at life. it starts over at a point (not a reset point as mom can pass data too, and even tiny machines, which they are just discovering and trying to bend it to celebrate lysenko.. arrggh)..
it restarts at this point every time and so is refining the model from known points.
however, if you compare the number of lifetimes that existed for 10 years with the number of lifetimes that existed for 50, its clear that the years of life for 1 to 10 are more refined than the years around 50.
so if you imagine that life is like a book telling a story, and you have to start the story over again each time its interupted… dont be surprised that your story in the early years is well refined and later is a mess.
the prime comes from a long period where we could not get older. so we refined the story up to that dominant point until the block was removed (modern medicine)
so we live in this idea that if we can hold back the slings, and arrows of outrageous fortune, we would not age and can live 300 years.
but that is easily shown not to be so, if you want to see it…
not only that. but i have a mathematical cogent simultion of how new things can be incorporated and discorporated, and move to the proper place in time to function. it even explains why you have things like gene dominance, and so on.
took 5 years for a top geneticist to say i am right and that this is now obvious, the problem is that its interpretation of old data. like rearanging elements i see the periodic chart… there is no way to prove as the same information organized better is what it is.
sad, but i have made multicellular programs that work… and since has yet to do that… i solved the addressing problem, the incorporation discorporation problem, and even can explain why and how beneficence sorting works..
we have no forum for it, and since his expertise is genetics… he does not know expert systems, and artificial life programs and that stuff..
so we are stuck…
and i am about to be more than stuck and be erased…
if the model was different… then the public would not latch onto such a false one and act on it.
but right now, the model implies that if you do things right, you can exceed your potential.
now, if you understand what words mean, then you know you cant exceed your potential… can you?
neo –
Sounds like you may have been discussing Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Azande people in Central Africa. Just a guess; could be wrong.
kolnai: could be. I certainly remember reading a lot of Evans-Pritchard.
kolnai: I think you’re right. Here it is:
to confirm occam 🙂
Always in the fridge: Rice-bran complex; organic vegetables; fruit; chlorophyll; wheat-free and yeast-free bread; goat cheese; goat yogurt; flaxseed and hempseed oils; hempseed butter; almondseed butter; organic eggs; black cherry concentrate; and herbs. Anything that goes wrong with the body I can fix with herbs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/magazine/18domains.html?_r=1
whose fridge? Bill Maher…
Waidmann, nope, I haven’t read [i]The Right Stuff[/i], but I could imagine test pilots having that attitude as a psychological defense (kind of a rabbit’s foot, or St. Christopher medal) against the enormous risks they routinely took.
Wolla Dalbo, I agree about the “unfairness” angle, which is at core a childlike perspective on life. Childlike because it presupposes that some omnipotent uber-authority (Daddy, later to be replaced by the government, and/or physicians) has the power to put everything to rights, to undo all mistakes, to right all wrongs.
Adults accept that sometimes bad things happen, for whatever reason, and cannot be undone or put to rights, and that’s just how it is, always has been, and always will be. Try to minimize their occurrence, of course, but accept those instances when they nevertheless occur.
Anything that goes wrong with the body I can fix with herbs.
I love that one. Bay Area types often sanctimoniously tout something as good for you/them because it’s “organic” or “natural.” They don’t take kindly to someone pointing out that saxitoxin, aflatoxin, ricin, and botulinum toxin are also “organic” and “natural.”
in truth, neo could be talking about a lot of tribes.. and even some modern places…
ever hang out with nigerian immigrants?
Indonesians live in a odd mixed up religious milieu of Islam, Buddhism, Hindi, and animism… so you can see animistic statuary all over, and offerings at the same time you see Buddhist stuff, at the same time you see Hindi, and now you can also see christian..
(though don’t ask what happens to the man who became a militant atheist with a big mouth to say it… believe what you want, just dont spread it to others to poison theirs. he lost all his property, his job, and is in jail)
there is still a big and contradictory mix of this in which spells and curses, and so on still play a role
and even as late as world war II and the gypsy roma such things were and are still beleived..
so such is not all that uncommon..
all it does is presuppose that some people have more command of reality than othrs, and so can direct it to their will against others.
Theirs we call magic cause it mostly don’t work and requires belief…
We call ours technology cause it works and don’t care what you think.
(yes thats my own comment. call it a play on asimovs sufficient technology is magic comment)
Wolla Dalbo, I agree about the “unfairness” angle, which is at core a childlike perspective on life.
well i dont think so. i think it comes from two places.. THAT… which is what we are focused on…
but it also has to do in me, that i appreciate myself and what i could do that is good in the world, and i mean not hoaky good, i mean talents good…
i believe the world is better for my being in it, and that reality/god… is unfair… but not because of what you said, but because i lament what i will miss and not see, and how beautiful god/reality is…
the left thinks God/reality is unfair precisely because it IS fair without exception!!!!!!!
the good die young as the evil live long
the evil that die young are assumed good
and the good that die old, we forget about
but mostly god is so fair it hurts..
no second chances… no one special, everyone dies.. and so on.
what they WANT is an unfair world that feels more fair to them because they win without trying.
by the way, what they want is a feminine definition of fair… 🙂
whats mine is mine and whats yours is mine.
How many feminists say that in terms of their mates?
ever play a game of pool with a woman who doesnt compete like a man? yes, atlantic city billiards competitions would be more fun if the lady pool players could flash their pudendas to scramble the men and consider it fair, no? or screwing up bad, they get to reset the balls where they want…
how about, can earn their own way, but still need alimony?
you see… its a redefinition of fair
like the tale of the restaurant and the friends of different means, where i redefine fair in more unfair ways, till the wealthy person pays their way and leaves.. (and is then courted by soros types on the way out)
you see.. witout god, fair has no measure
and so, fair is what you define it..
and how does social justice and bell and all those people redefine it?
easy… white people who did nothing, and are unrelated to the victims owe other people who were never hurt and are also unrelated to the victims recompense for actions neither took or received.
Occam.. you forgot the MOST FUNNY!!!!!!!!!!!!
here..
just put up a picture of a holier than though faux hippy type…
then label it thusly..
i am super careful about what i put in my body, only the most natural things and greenest stamped somethings…
but i will accept for free, any drug or chemical pronounced to foul my brain for fun, and do so indiscriminately
or, i will accept strangers to line up and inject into me stuff that could kill me, make me infertile, give me cancer, and requires i prepare for such, by taking a shot against STDs
such people don’t live longer…
they actually live shorter…
go take a look at the Darwin Awards….
here is another funny one about people who want to live longer…
US TROOPS DISARMED FOR PANETTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/world/asia/panetta-visits-afghanistan-following-massacre.html?hp
lets see..
you have alienated and demoralized and played with their heads so much, your now afraid to stand before those you lead..
funniest thing if the enemy broke in..
(funny cosmic, not funny ha ha)
then the people they fear would not defend them from the people they don’t fear that want to actually kill them…
once Hegel is in the room, twisting, inverting, and wackaloonyness runs rampant..
it also begs the question, whose military will they used if not their own? (maybe THATS Why all those trucks and things from another country are here…)
Art, back in the day in Berkeley various malodorous specimens (could’ve been the City Council) refused to have their dogs vaccinated against distemper, bordetella, or even rabies, saying that they “didn’t want a chemical dog.”
Meanwhile, of course, they dosed themselves with drugs brewed up by some stoner using a broom handle to stir the reagents in a garbage can. But their dogs were pristine.
Re: Lack of exposure to death.
I recall as a kid growing up in the south, of going to people’s houses and they’d have a casket in the living room with the newly deceased in it. I’m pretty sure it stayed there for a few days and nights too. Don’t see that anymore.
/long life to Dennis Miller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Qxni46x4Q&feature=related
funny not ha ha because it’s so damned serious and true; and funny ha ha because it’s Dennis Miller.
yes, Curtis, Dennis is brave. Breitbartian.
Tonight he kept saying: “Everyone knows this isn’t working, everyone knows it.”
Nice phrasing, Artldgr: “the left thinks God/reality is unfair precisely because it IS fair without exception!!!!!!! … god is so fair it hurts… no second chances… no one special, everyone dies.. and so on. …what they WANT is an unfair world that feels more fair to them because they win without trying.” thx for all you write here. it is read.
Things are so warped, twisted, inside-out, perverse–it takes courage just to keep paying attention. All that is left is faith in and acting upon that kernel of freedom that is what we want to protect and that protects us because it is us. We are down to the nub. Having just re-read “The Phenomenon of Man” can I try to say something like … that since it is freedom — the “within” of things — that got the earth evolved to human consciousness, this anti-awareness movement simply cannot “win” because it is the antithesis of the cosmos’s path. Or something. Keep the faith.
“”this anti-awareness movement simply cannot “win” because it is the antithesis of the cosmos’s path””
M of Hollywood
Take a good look at the eugenics movement at the dawn of the last century. It’s striking in its similarity to todays global warmist/progressive mindset gone off the rails in a religious zeal to save the world.
When did you last hear or read someone who said
?????
SteveH oh yes. I know it is wishful thinking to engage in the belief there is divine order. I just do not know what else to do! Just give in to dispair?
@ Artfldgr:
“Theirs we call magic cause it mostly don’t work and requires belief…
We call ours technology cause it works and don’t care what you think.”
This is a version of the choice Francis Bacon made in regards to magic vs science.
I lived pretty close to death for the period I was a Naval aviator. I remember the “insurance lecture” when in training. The instructor informed us that in five years 50% of us would be dead. Those were the odds back in the fifties. Of course Korea added a lot to those numbers. The right stuff came from a faith in your own abillity and a lot of denial that you would be one of the unlucky bastards. Late in my training I witnessed a stall – spin accident that happned no more than 500 yards away. It was an SNJ with engine failure on takeoff. The proper procedure in this case was to maintain flying speed and fly straight ahed into whatever lay off the end of the runway. It gave you the best chance of surviving. This student pilot tried to turn back to the runway, stalled and spun straight in. As I looked at the smoking wreckage, my reaction was, “Stupid idiot! I wouldn’t make that mistake.” Then walked on to the BOQ and had lunch. Several years later when reading “The Right Stuff,” I realized that at that moment I had shown the right stuff.
In Vietnam it was expected we were going to lose pilots. And we did. We were all scared inside, but everybody had this kind of macho exterior. Lots of gallows humor. Lots of discussions about putting the hurt on the North Vietnamese. Short periods of not saying much when someone did get the chop. Some one had to clean out their gear and send it home, along with writing the letters to the next of kin. That was hard, but there was no time to grieve, just saddle up and go fly north again. The periods when the ship went into Cubi Point for a short stand down were characterized by the “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” philosophy. When we returned home there was a huge sense of relief. It was, however, accompanied by a vague inner sense of guilt that some other Air Group had taken your place and was now facing the triple A, SAMs, and small arms fire.
IMO, a goodly part of PTSD results from that vague feeling of survivor’s guilt. There is this sense of questioning why you made it when others, better men all, did not. I eventually learned to cope with it that by remembering faithfully those I knew who died and trying to live my life as fully as possible in their memory.
There are many fewer days ahead for me than behind. Luck or good karma or predestination or ??? has allowed me a long life. Do I want to live longer? Yep. Why do I try to eat right, keep my weight down, and exercise? At this time of life it isn’t because I want to go cruising chicks. The survival instinct is what I chalk it up to. We all have it. Those who go into battle have to have a strong sense of denial of it, but it’s there.
njartist49 , thanks…
thats something for me to look up and read.. 🙂
Thanks to all the JOKERS who never were appreciated!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🙂
I really enjoy your posts, JJ.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep and so dove into “How Civilizations Die,” by David P. Goldman. The book is on the same topic as this post. The book is so interesting that I could not read it diligently. But, that is the great fun of a great book. Going back over it and picking it clean, digesting it. In the first chapter, titled “The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse” Goldman cites Franz Rosenzweig’s “The Star of Redemption.” I’m not familiar with it but plan on getting so. Here’s the quote:
Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under hreaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.