But, what do you want to do with your life?

This week a student asked me what I planned to do with my life. That’s a question that makes a lot of sense to ask your peers and yourself when you're nineteen. But being asked when you're forty-one can be jarring. When you ask it of yourself, it’s likely to push you down the path towards mid-life crisis.

Roughly, my answer was that this—teaching—was what I was doing with my life, that it was going to be what I was doing with my life as long as I can find people willing to pay me to do it. My impact on the world comes through whatever effect I have on students. I suspect my answer wasn't satisfying. The spark in his eyes when he asked was dimmed a click or two.

It was an unsatisfying answer for good reason. At nineteen, you are looking for something you are going to do in the world that will have world-historical impact. In youth, you want to change the world; your heroes are those who lead movements and revolutions, who organize their communities, who found religions, who bring down governments and empires, who build them. You have a hard time imagining life-goals that aren't transformative. There seems something a little sad about a life that isn't directed toward such a goal.

At some point for many people, if not for all, there’s a recognition that they aren't going to change everything the world has ever thought, that they aren't going to find the lever that moves the world, that they aren't going to be great figures remembered through all of history. (How long will I be remembered? Not much more than a decade or two.) Many of us come to believe that the hunger for immortality Socrates claimed to be present in all of us will have to be sated not with great deeds but through children or—for those of us who lack even those—through the small effects we can have on others than just might ramify even if our names are destined to be blotted out of both history and memory. 

To think this at nineteen would be almost tragically sad—it is a wisdom best left unshared until the time is (past) ripe—but in middle age (unless this is the prime), it is only sometimes sad. for instance when you reflect on what you might have wanted at nineteen. At other times, it is reassuring. That I am not Napoleon or Gandhi or King or Romero or Mann or Musil or Borges or Aristotle or Kant or Wittgenstein or … is not such a bad thing. I am having an effect; it’s small. But that is usually the way and better than no effect at all. 

It might just be enough to have tried to be a good man and gotten sort of close, once in a while. 

What lessons poverty?

San Miguel Escobar

I'm in my second of three weeks traveling with and teaching a group of undergraduates from the University. We've taken a number of trips and done some service work. Unsurprisingly, we've seen a lot of poverty here. And, though what we have seen does not approach the poorest of the poor, we have seen and talked to and spent time with people whose lives are vastly different to our own.

We see poverty in the street, in the central park of the city, on the porches of the churches—especially, La Merced. We saw it in Guatemala City, in San Juan del Obispo, in San Miguel Escobar, at Pacaya volcano, on the "chicken bus."

And, one of the striking things is that there is so much happiness in the midst of such poverty. It's not hard to seem or be happier than I do or am, but there is little question that so many—obviously not all—people who have so much less than I do, or than any of us do, are so much happier than the average person you are likely to see on the street at home. 

Of course, it is possible that they only seem to be happier; we can never really know another's internal states. Or, they might just be acting; they could be putting on a show for the American tourists. Either of these is a possibility, but I doubt that either is the case. A principle of charity demands that I take people to be showing their real states. 

Assuming that people are nearly as happy as they seem, there are at least two lessons the mildly reflective tourist can draw. One is conducive to a more virtuous life, the other a vicious one. 

First, something good: Our material possessions don't guarantee happiness. It is possible to have much more and not to have captured happiness. This calls for a reflection on our own values. What am I pursuing? Why do I need a bigger house? A newer car? Another watch or pen? The latest phone? Here are people with none of those things and they are happy. Have I merely been convinced by capitalism, or by the comparison and competition Rousseau identifies as endemic to our property-based social contract, that I need these things or that in gaining them I will gain or get closer to happiness? This lesson, this reflection, can help me refocus and perhaps get closer to happiness, to flourishing, to eudaimonia.

Something bad, and just as common: If people can be happy in such circumstances, things should be left as they are. What we see is a golden age, a window onto a simpler time and simpler lifestyle. And, it's good enough for them. (Though, this is always colored with a touch of Voltaire's Brahmin: it might make them happy, but it could no longer satisfy me; I've gone too far in another direction.) If these people can be be happy as they take their laundry to the local fountain as their children play in the dirt; if they can be happy with minimal or no plumbing; if they can be happy with homes roofed in tin held down by rocks in the corners; if they can be happy when their mules are stabled and chickens and ducks penned next to the porch on which they eat their meager meals; if they can be happy though they are broken and bent by lives spent working a little bit of land to produce coffee and get a little bit of the profit the vast majority of which goes to a large corporation, well, who am I to worry about this? In fact, in their golden, more perfect state, I ought almost to envy them. (This is the romanticism of the rural and the lumberjack and the primitive that permeates so much of our late capitalist society; witness the hipster and the pickup truck and the Presidential aspirants in cowboy boots.)

It might seem this second lesson I have drawn is one that no one could possibly draw. But I think it is as common to see poverty as picturesque as it is to see it as so abject that nothing can be done about it. Both are recipes for doing nothing, for not really caring, and—though the directions are different—for dehumanizing.

There's got to be a way to take the first lesson and still think that we have an obligation to make the lives of others better in material ways that they themselves wish for. 

Notes toward a mid-life crisis

When I was a boy, I knew about men who left their wives and families, gave up their responsibilities, and began new lives, usually with much younger women (or a string of them). Somewhere in the mix there was usually a sportscar or a motorcycle and the adoption of hobbies, habits, and styles appropriate to the much younger. To be fair, it wasn't always men; my godmother did much the same thing in her middle years.

Whatever the specifics, the judgment was always the same. I was taught that this was the sloughing off of a person’s commitments and, not only wrong, but beyond understanding. To the young legalist, surrounded by his Stoic elders, this judgment felt exactly right.

As I got older, I saw the same thing happen to people I knew, people I worked with, people I socialized with. Boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, partners, long-term companions would be abandoned for a new life and—usually—a new younger, fresher, fitter, hotter, partner. Where once there had been a couple, now there was one irresponsible and slightly ridiculous person with a new life and one needlessly suffering and trying to pick up the shards of a once-shared life. 

I may have gotten older and more experienced—not wiser—in the ways of the world, but the judgment and lack of understanding remained. How could anyone do this? What is this beast, the mid-life crisis. Like so much of human life and interaction, it was something I couldn't quite grasp.

But, as I drift into—and through—my forties, the phenomenon begins to look differently to me. It becomes clearer. What I used to see merely as the shedding of an old life with all of its commitments and responsibilities (i.e., those things that define an adult life, it still seems), I now see as more truly a crisis, even if the nature of the crisis—it’s existential—isn’t always obvious to the person whose crisis it is.

It’s hard to approach the middle of life without beginning to question whether any of the first half of that life has meant anything. You don’t have to be Camus to ask yourself whether your  life is simply a Sisyphean task leading to nothing but being forgotten a few years after your ever-closer death.

Until middle age so much of life is consumed with preparation, with education, with finding a career and making something of it, with finding a partner or spouse and making a life, with having and beginning to raise children, with making a home. And then, when all the preparation is done, you can find yourself, like Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty (or Annette Bening’s), standing in the shower or in front of a bathroom mirror in someone else’s house asking: Is this what I was preparing for? Is this what I have worked for?

In the words of the great Leiber/Stoller song: “Is that all there is?”

This is akin to staring into the Abyss until, as Nietzsche warns, the Abyss begins to stare back. Seeing that emptiness and meaninglessness—and it’s enough that it appears to be empty and meaningless—is terrifying. (I’m reminded of what the Tenth Doctor says, in “The Sound of Drums,” about looking into the Untempered Schism: Some go crazy and some run away. Such it is with the perception of meaninglessness in a human life. Of course, there are other options.)

There are different ways to react to this. One can, of course, decide that absolute or objective meaning isn’t needed anyway. (Go, Existentialism!) One can decide that there is actually objective meaning here. (Is this a delusion?) One can lose oneself in a larger purpose. (Dedication to nation or church or party, perhaps.) One can embrace what is here and now with a delighted or ironic resignation. (Both the absurdists and, I think, some types of conservatives take this option.) And, there are others.

But one reaction is to find all that has gone before meaningless, and because it is meaningless in the grand scheme of thing, to cast it away and try to start over, to buy that Mustang or Miata, get a personal trainer or sleep with one, divorce, break up, leave job or city. To go back to one of the last times when things made sense, when life seemed full of purpose and promise and pleasure. To recapture youth and see if you can’t get to meaning from there this time. To run away from the me I’ve become and try to find a different me. (And, I think it is always the self that’s being run away from; I cast aside others to cast aside the self my relationships make.)

That’s the path of the mid-life crisis. And, it looks like immaturity, like the unending American adolescence. Maybe it is, after all. But, in the middle of life, as I stare at my feet in the shower, the soap running down my body and into the drain, thinking of the years running out of my life, I can at least begin to understand how someone takes that path, how someone tries to regain youth. 

I don’t think it’s the right path. I don’t think running away from meaninglessness gives you meaning. I don’t think running away from life or yourself fixes the problems with your own life. After all, wherever you run, there you are going to be. But, I understand. 

My father, myself

"Estrangement" barely approaches the relationship between my father and me. My parents broke up when I was one. They divorced when I was two. He moved out of town and, when I was four, he moved from Indiana to Colorado. He was never much of a presence in my life. We saw each other every few years, sometimes at Christmas, sometimes in the summer.

I've lived a lot of my life resenting him and wondering what was so wrong with me that someone wouldn't want to know me. I mean, I know there are a lot of things wrong with me, but why would this non-stranger not be interested in me? 

Out of this mix grew a special kind of self-loathing: I came to dislike everything about myself that reminded me of him. Twenty-five years ago, I trained myself to speak more than a half-octave below my natural range to sound less like him.
This past weekend, I flew to Minnesota to see him for the first time in over twenty years.
It was uncomfortable in the way that all social interaction for me always is, intensified by it being social interaction with someone as uncomfortable with social interaction as I am. To put it another way, it was very much like interacting with someone almost exactly like myself, but twenty-three years older.
For all the ways I've tried not to be like him, I am very, very much like him. We share characteristics I dislike about myself. We share characteristics that other people think make me charming. And, honestly, I found some of those characteristics charming about him. There's an argument to be made here for the role of nature in our characters, but that's one for another day.
Importantly, I've realized at forty-one that, if I'm ever going to come to like myself, I have to be open to liking him. And, for all our history—or lack of it—there's a lot to like there.

Why I can't be trusted with a gun

When we were outside Friday evening, Mateo and I on the porch and Fernando watering a few of the plants in the front yard, a man started scavenging through our recycling. Fernando asked him to stop. He walked away, but from across the street—where we don't know, as we hadn't noticed him before—another man arrived. He began yelling, telling us everyone has a right to go through trash once it's on the street. He overturned a couple of the cans and then told us he was going to do the same thing to us, that he was going to lay us out and fuck us up and a few more things to that effect.

Since he had approached Fernando, I had gotten up. I wanted to get him to back up and back off. Rather than moving away, he rose to what he took to be a challenge. He approached me, started to walk into our yard—keeping himself just at the very edge—and increased the level and volume of his threats. He was clearly dangerous and certainly high (I know what meth looks like) or crazy. It was probably a mixture of the two. Neither one of us is small and I've appeared ominous to people I was trying to befriend. There was nothing rational in challenging us, especially when he hadn't apparently had anything to do with the original situation. I suppose it's possible that he saw himself as a Batman of the streets, but that's not a sign of good judgment, either, even if, as he so clearly discerned and announced, the men you are challenging are "fucking faggots."

So, I went in to get my phone and called the police. I explained what was going on—loudly, as my adrenaline levels were up—and he walked away, having heard me describe him to the dispatcher. As he walked away, yelling, he stripped off identifying clothing.

But, what if I had had something else in my house? What if I could have gone in to get a gun rather than my phone? For me, fight-or-flight is more fight than flight. And, here was a person threatening me and my family and coming onto my property. 

I'm not interested in the legal question of gun control or the Constitutional question. I cannot understand the connection between a well-regulated militia and the right to carry a concealed weapon into a movie theater or onto a campus, but that's not my concern.

Instead, I'm worried about what the presence of a weapon can do. In the last few years, we have seen a number of situations in which the presence of a gun allowed situations to escalate to killings. And, there is something natural and understandable about this. When threatened, it is natural to defend oneself. And, when one wants to defend herself, she will want to do it in the surest way. When a gun is available, use of the gun will be the surest way. And, that will often mean that someone ends up dead. Tools have a way of demanding their use.

Absent a gun, something else has to be done. The situation cannot escalate in quite the same way. It will have to be defused or the police will have to be called or people will have to walk away. 

I understand that one natural response is to ask, "But what if he had a gun?" Of course, he didn't.  The vast majority of people who get in arguments or elicit fear in others doesn't. And, in many of the most highly publicized cases recently—Renisha McBride's case is particularly relevant—the person who ended up dead wasn't armed, but the killer claimed to be afraid and, having a gun, used deadly force to address that claimed fear.

I don't have a gun because I am afraid that I might use it and that I might use it when it wasn't warranted. It might be that I am particularly vicious and so cannot be trusted with weapons. Or, that I am peculiarly prone to anger. Both or either of those might be true. I think there is as much chance that I am a little more reflective on this question and my own proclivities than those who think that weapons don't increase the likelihood that they will be used.

Guns don't kill people, but their possession makes killing more likely. 

Works before faith: against orthodoxies

We seem to care much more about what people believe than what they do. Or, rather, we care more about what they affirm than what they do and what their actions show to be their real commitments.

Maybe this is the result of the Reformation with its talk of the Inner and Outer Man and salvation by Faith but not Works. Maybe it is an expression of the older mind/body dualism that those Reformers inherited from Augustine. Maybe it's just the result of reading a lot of Plato; here I jest. Most likely, it is at least partially a result of the fantasy that there is a real—more authentic, more virtuous, and fully private—me independent of my actions, a true and hidden character; the fantasy that let's people say things like, "I wasn't myself yesterday," and, "I'm sorry for what I said, that wasn't me." And, then we can be told, contrary to all behavioral evidence, what a person really believes or what her character really is.

Whatever the cause or causes, this emphasis on belief (as affirmed) over action feeds into real strife. At least in the United States, we prize orthodoxy. We judge one another based on our political and religious ideologies. And, we use these ideologies as epithets. Someone is just a stupid liberal or a heartless conservative, a godless atheist or a deluded believer. And, too often, when someone is on the other side of such a divide, we immediately dismiss them. Of course, this damages discourse, because we disengage, but it damages other kinds of human interaction even more deeply.
When someone disagrees with us we are quick, I think, to dismiss them as a cooperator. Because one of us is a liberal and the other a conservative, we are unwilling to work together, even when what we want is the same thing. Lots of people on the left and lots of people on parts of the right are very concerned about poverty and, believe it or not, mothers and children. Working together, though, is too often forestalled by ideological difference: I can't work with those socialists; I won't work with fascists.
I remember several years ago Hillary Clinton—I'm not generally a fan—calling for cooperation between the left and the right on abortion. Since she thought both sides had an interest in reducing the number of abortions, they should come together to discuss those things that they could both get behind to achieve a reduction. But orthodoxies and principle continue to keep anything like that from happening. As always, the perfect is made the enemy of the good.
One more personal reminiscence: The year between university and graduate school, I worked at a  Church-sponsored meal program and clinic for the homeless and near-homeless. As you might expect, most of the people involved were unreformed 60's-style liberals, with a fair smattering of Catholic Workers. But, there were also deeply conservative volunteers, including a far-right Republican police detective who washed dishes at the meal several days a week. Rather than seeing an ideological divide, he and the other volunteers worked together for something they both valued. The fact that they disagreed about sociopolitical causes and solutions to homelessness and poverty didn't matter at that moment. What mattered was the work. (And, the work they were doing probably said a lot more about what their real beliefs were than their stated ones.)
Now, I don't want to claim that beliefs as affirmed don't matter. Of course, the causes of poverty matter, but so does feeding the poor. And, as a philosopher, I care deeply about beliefs. But, in interpersonal relations, I care more about actions and the real beliefs they express.
It's all good to deride deluded Christians, but if they are fighting oppression and you are doing nothing, what does the right belief matter? It's wonderful to scream about godless atheists, but if they are fighting human rights abuses while you are reading a devotional, who cares? It's fun to talk about heartless conservatives, but if with their heartless beliefs they are also helping refugees, what is more important?
Only last week, I was told that I lacked principle—utterly true, if for different reasons—because I teach at a Catholic university, and no gay atheist should do that. Leaving aside the mischaracterization of my beliefs, I can only mourn a viewpoint that says I should have nothing to do with those whose orthodoxy or ideological purity is suspect, or that I cannot cooperate with them in a project that we both find worthwhile, e.g., education.
I have colleagues and students and friends who I think are utterly deluded about all sorts of things and I have pretty serious philosophical and political differences with my partner of 18 years, but at the end of the day, it is by their works that I judge them. As it should be.

The Sound of Silence: the most terrifying sound of all

We live in a more constantly cacophonous world than humans probably ever have, both literally and metaphorically. Any store or mall or office or elevator is likely to have music playing. We are talked to and sung at even when waiting to talk to someone on the phone. We wear headphones or earbuds while walking the dog or working out or even when sitting at our desks. I have to fight with students to take their earbuds out—both of them—when they are in lecture; some of them request that they be allowed to use them when they are taking exams. We chatter at one another about the most meaningless of things all the time: reality television, sporting events that we aren't even interested in, the details of celebrities' lives, what we've purchased or intend to purchase, the weather or lack of it. We turn on the television to give us background noise, we set our radios to sleep so that we have noise with which to fall asleep, as much to cover the quiet as to block out any noises. It is almost as if we cannot stand silence. Rather, it is quite literally that we cannot stand silence. By way of illustration, the gym I go to most days plays no music; it is maddening.

We cannot even stand the figurative silence of not being distracted. Left without anything to entertain us, we log onto Facebook or Twitter or Google-+ (well, not that), to engage in virtual conversation. But, again, these aren't conversations about anything, unless 17 things that will change the way you think about cruciferous vegetables is really a topic any more interesting than the gastrointestinal health of your great aunt. And, yet, try to go a day without engaging in them. Try to get students to go fifty-five minutes without checking Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or Tinder or their text messages. Or watch as parents put an iPad in front of their child at a restaurant. 

(Another day, I will have to think about why we prefer these virtual conversations to ones with the real people around us.)

In moments of silence, we are left with nothing more than ourselves and our own thoughts. We are left in a certain kind of solitude. Historically, this was often thought a good thing. Aristotle in the Ethics could think of nothing better than to be allowed just to think, self-sufficiently. Nietzsche in the Genealogy said that ascetics fled to the desert so that they could avoid being distracted and be left alone with their own thoughts, the things they really loved, as an expectant mother loves the child growing in her. But both of these stances require that we like our own thoughts, that we find something interesting and fruitful in them, that we find them to be of value. They require that when we look inside we find something there, and that we are not ashamed of what we find. 

If we dread silence, what does this say about our own relationship to ourselves and our thoughts? I fear it means either that we find nothing inside ourselves—that we are the Abyss to ourselves—or that we cannot bear what we do find and so need constantly to be distracted from it. As Simon says in Lord of the Flies, we discover that we are the Beast and we don't want to be left alone with it. Whether we find ourselves boring or terrifying, it cannot be a good sign. And, what else can our dread of silence mean?