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On Death and Loss

My dad died, and that has led me to the grand insights that death is weird, and losing a loved one is hard. I know: not exactly insightful. But I’ve been trying to think about why death is weird and loss is hard. I’ve been thinking about Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time focuses in part on mortality as the foundation of human experience, and why I find his analysis unhelpful in dealing with my own dad’s death. And why I find Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality more helpful. Why does thinking about birth help me process death? I want to start by considering Heidegger’s notion of human beings as being-toward-death, what I find helpful about it, and what I find lacking.

For Heidegger, death is an individualizing experience, in part because he is focused on someone confronting their own death as a real possibility in the world rather than the vague notion that we will all die some day. He argues that we tend to flee death—we find ways to distance ourselves from the inevitable by speaking in abstractions—everyone dies—or by projecting our death into the future—we acknowledge that we will one day die, but we assume it won’t happen for a long time. Our culture encourages this fleeing. Consider the ways in which tragic deaths are reported: we are given statistics and numbers, as with catastrophic weather events (3 killed in a tornado in the south) or with war dead (some news agencies report over 20,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza since the war began). These numbers allow us to distance ourselves from our own mortality, positioning death as something that happens to other people or in distant places. Even when we are given profiles of the victims of tragedy, they are not meant to remind us that we, too, will die; rather, they serve to put death “over there,” a tragedy to be sure, but not one that touches us personally. We might feel a vague sadness but nothing more. These ways of thinking and talking about death make us feel safe, removed from our mortality.

If I do confront my own death as a here-and-now possibility, Heidegger says, I am ripped out of these everyday ways of thinking and talking about death. Without the safety of common notions of death, everyday understandings of all kinds of things—what I should believe or value, how I should behave, etc.—fall away; I no longer rely on others to tell me how to live. I see myself as the only real foundation of my life. This experience, should I have it, enables true freedom, Heidegger believes, allowing me to make my own choices for my life rather than allowing others to dictate those choices to me.

Now Heidegger’s analysis seems right as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes very far. It can help explain the stereotypical mid-life crisis, perhaps: someone hits middle age and gets the sense that they won’t live forever, so they make some changes to how they live. They might get a divorce and marry someone younger or buy a sports car; these changes perpetuate the fleeing of death, where you try to convince yourself that you really aren’t getting older. Or someone might make a big change in career, giving up making lots of money in order to help others; these changes require stepping back from the values and beliefs of those around you so you can redefine yourself on your own terms. That’s more in line with what Heidegger means by freedom.

So Heidegger’s analysis can help me understand what it means to truly embrace my own mortality to an extent. But his analysis doesn’t help much in understanding or coping with the death of a loved one, with the need to live with loss. This is so, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, he doesn’t see that the death of a loved one can have a similar disorienting effect as confronting my own: the foundation of my life is gone here, too, and I can respond to that experience by rethinking my entire life. Losing a parent can certainly have that kind of an effect—our parents are often considered the foundation of our lives, even when we no longer live with them. Losing a parent thus means losing a central part of oneself. But second, the death of loved one is hard, and I don’t think Heidegger’s focus on individuality can explain that fact. To exaggerate my point: if I am the foundation of my own life, why would the death of another person gut me? Wouldn’t it be easy to just “get over it”? It is here that Hannah Arendt’s analysis of natality is helpful.

In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that natality is important for at least two reasons: birth brings something new into the world, and that new person interacts with others in a way that has the potential to disrupt and alter existing relationships. How does birth bring something new into the world? Because each individual is unique; though we human beings have things in common by virtue of being human—the kinds of bodies we have, for instance, or the fact that we all need sleep—we are each different from each other in ways that are often difficult to explain. Since my dad’s obituary was published, some people have responded by noting what a great teacher he was. Being a teacher wasn’t unique to him, but how he taught, his presence in the classroom, etc., did distinguish him from all other teachers, and it can’t really be described—it had to be witnessed. Losing a loved one is hard, then, because of their uniqueness. We aren’t just losing an abstract individual; we are losing that specific other person, in all their particularity, which can include goofiness, seriousness, being principled or annoying, or all of the above. I don’t miss a dad; I miss my dad—the one who inspired me to start running, who went to all my track meets, who encouraged me in getting my Ph.D., who read my dissertation, and my book, who loved language and word play and puns, who made apple pies, who took me and my siblings to the theater and to Vermont for a picnic on a beautiful autumn day, etc. I miss his goofiness and his commitment to justice.

I wouldn’t miss my dad if he hadn’t been a central part of my life—there are plenty of people who are/were not close to their fathers or parents. But I was close to mine. This point gets to another aspect of natality: we are each born into what Arendt calls a web of relationships, a cluster of others with whom we live and share the world. My birth altered the existing family of my parents and older sister, which was then further altered by my two younger siblings’ births. We might say that birth is the opposite of an individualizing experience: it connects us to others in ways that ground our lives and who we become. And the web expands as we live and grow, including other family members, neighbors, classmates and teachers, members of whatever religious community our family may be associated with, workmates, etc. I think of the web of relations as like a spider web: the center is dense with those who are most important to us, less so the further from the center you get, where we find those who are less central to our lives but who are still connected to us in some way (sometimes in ways we can’t see). Who we find in the center will differ from person to person and change across our lives. I count my nuclear family, some cousins and close friends as part of the center; others have severed family ties and have close friends or alternative communities at their centers. Those further out could include a vast array of other people, from those we encounter at the grocery store to the people who grow our food, build our houses, and make our clothes—they are very important to our lives, even if we never meet or interact with them in any meaningful way.

We human beings are thus fundamentally interconnected rather than isolated individuals. When someone in our web of relationships dies, a connection is severed, the web breaks. The break is more acute the closer to the inner circle the person is, which is one way we can distance ourselves from death. I don’t experience the uniqueness of the those on the periphery of my web, so the loss is less important to me, the break less disruptive. I can acknowledge it without feeling it except in a general sense. The loss of those closest to me, though, breaks the web in irreparable ways, both because of my deep connection to a unique individual who is no longer in my life, and because of the ways the web structures my life and who I am. Figuring out how to continue living when my web of relationships has broken is hard, in part because the break can indeed never be repaired. I will always want to talk to my dad about the state of the world, and I will always want to hear his groan-worthy puns; I suspect I will expect those interactions less and less, but the desire for them will remain with me until the end of my days. I spent some time helping to care for him in his last weeks, and that care defined my daily routine; now that he is gone, I will need to restructure my days. Because I lived far away for many years, I have other routines I can fall back on. Doing so won’t alter the loss, but it will provide a different structure to my daily life so that I perhaps won’t feel it as acutely. My mom, though, will have a harder time, since caring for him was her norm throughout their 60+ years of marriage; adjusting to not caring for him will require a huge shift in her life. She will both miss him, and she will need to find ways to restructure her daily life without the alternatives I have. It’s hard, and it’s weird, to have to redefine your life and yourself in the face of loss. I remain convinced that such work can be done, and in a way that honors the loss. This work is best done, I think, not be turning to ourselves as the foundation of our life and away from the pain of loss, as Heidegger might suggest, but by turning toward others, not to repair the web of relationships but perhaps to expand it, allowing us to restructure our lives and redefine ourselves even in the midst of loss.

On Abortion and Biopolitics

Well, it’s happened: Roe V. Wade has been overturned. 15 states have abortion bans ready to go into effect, with many making no exception for rape or incest (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html ); others have enacted restrictions that in practice will pretty much ban the practice (many restrict abortion to before 6 weeks of pregnancy, when most people don’t yet know that they are pregnant). In response to Justice Alito’s leaked draft of this decision earlier in the year, many pointed out contradictions in the so-called pro-life position:

There is very little support for children and families once a child is actually born (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/09/republicans-scramble-pretend-they-care-women-children/).

Our childcare system is deeply broken. While Republicans have begun to acknowledge the problem, they have no concrete plans to fund any changes (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/upshot/child-care-republicans-democrats.html).

The US has woefully inadequate Family Leave policies compared to other countries (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/upshot/child-care-republicans-democrats.html).

The Build Better Back bill that would have provided greater economic support for the poor failed miserably (https://www.vox.com/2022/3/16/22955410/build-back-better-scenarios).

All of these problems effect women of color and poor women most (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/05/09/the-war-on-abortion-drugs-will-be-just-as-racist-and-classist/).

Little attention is being paid to the health effects on pregnant people when abortion is not a legal option (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/abortion-restrictions-health-implications/).

These examples suggest that the “pro-life” movement is not so much focused on promoting life as such: the lives of pregnant people, of the poor, of women of color, and of children themselves seem to take a back seat to the lives of fetuses. (And that’s not to mention the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning New York’s gun restrictions, which would enable even more school shootings than we have seen recently.) How is it possible to pro-life and yet not? I want to suggest that Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower can help make sense of these seeming contradictions.

In Security, Territory, Population Foucault describes biopower as a form of power aimed at administering and managing “life.” Biopower is, he says, “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die,” which he distinguishes from the sovereign (monarchical) form of power that preceded it, the power of taking life or letting live. The goal of this form of power becomes managing the health, safety, and security of society overall, with a focus on the flourishing of the popular overall rather than on any individual member thereof. We became concerned with things like birth and death rates, birth control use, sexual behaviors and practices (teen pregnancy rates, for instance), public hygiene, disease rates, and trajectories, etc. The goal is to promote a flourishing, well-managed society that is efficient and productive through “state control of the biological.”

To promote health and safety requires managing and perhaps eliminating risks and threats to them, both internal and external; these threats, too, are understood in biological terms. Consider the rise of eugenics: if the population is to be healthy, then threats to its health must be identified and managed. Individuals who are considered mentally or physically “deficient” on this view pose a threat to the overall health of the population, because of their lack of contribution to society overall, their need to be cared for by others, and because they may perpetuate their deficiencies by passing them on to the next generation. Hence the move to regulate the reproductive capacity of different subpopulations: women of color, poor women, and women who were considered to be mentally disabled were subject to forced sterilization by the state until fairly recently; men convicted of sex crimes are still subject to forced castration in some states in the US. The justification of these practices is not that they benefit the recipients, but that society overall benefits from having fewer poor people and people with mental deficiencies or physical differences. Thus, preventing these individuals from reproducing benefits society overall, even if doing so tramples on their rights as citizens. The threat posed by these individuals is seen as biological, rather than, say, moral. If one is seen as morally deficient and hence as a certain threat to others—being a bad influence, etc.—then education may be the proper response. If one is seen as biologically deficient, however, then there is no possibility for redemption—one’s nature determines one’s lived possibilities. If one is incapable of being otherwise than a drain on the social body, then the only “solution” is containment or elimination. A healthy, secure population, then, requires monitoring and surveilling various subpopulations as internal threats to that health. This monitoring, containing, and in some cases killing, of subpopulations is what Foucault terms state racism:

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.

As the “wrong” people should not be allowed to reproduce lest they poison the genetic pool, so the “right” people should be encouraged (perhaps required?) to reproduce, which ensures that the gene pool remains robust, healthy, and, well, white.

It becomes difficult on this analysis not to see abortion bans as part of the reemergence of an unapologetic racism. Such racism requires white, middle-class women to make babies to save the nation from increasing racial and cultural diversity, even if it means giving up the hard-won gains of the past 50 years or so. The same system, on the other hand, punishes women of color and poor women for making babies, perpetuating cycles of poverty that maintain unjust social hierarchies by refusing state aid for poor families, by refusing to reform a broken health care system that makes giving birth unaffordable, by keeping childcare and education costs out of reach, all of which contributes to ongoing poverty. While abortion bans will not directly kill poor women and women of color, they will do so indirectly: the US has the highest maternal mortality rate among “developed” nations, with higher rates among women of color. (I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if arguments for forced sterilization were to rear their ugly heads on the back of this decision.)

It makes sense to see abortion bans not as being about saving the lives of “unborn babies,” but rather as mechanisms for managing women’s reproduction to further the goals of a eugenicist, white supremacist state.

On Legislating Sexuality, Gender, and Race(ism): Hannah Arendt and the Loss of Plurality

There are many possible responses to the myriad attempts to legislate gender, sexuality, and race across the country, including:

Florida’s recently passed “Don’t Say Gay” bill (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089221657/dont-say-gay-florida-desantis)
Texas’s prosecution of gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse (https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/22/texas-transgender-teenagers-medical-care/)
Numerous states’ attempts to ban the teaching of what has come to be called Critical Race Theory (https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06)
Book banning attempts that have also been sweeping the nation, including Florida’s banning of many math textbooks (https://www.npr.org/2022/04/18/1093277449/florida-mathematics-textbooks)

On the one hand, these moves seem like desperate attempts to control the uncontrollable by folks who feel threatened by anything that reeks of “difference.” In that sense, the whole situation is almost laughable—you can’t actually make gay and trans people disappear by refusing to talk about them, and you can’t eradicate racism by insisting it doesn’t exist. On the other hand, there is the potential for real harm in these attempts, harms to those most marginalized and vulnerable in our society, who are already most likely to suffer from violence, whether bullying or police brutality. People who have spoken up against Florida’s ban on talking about sex in grade schools have received death threats, for instance, or been accused of “grooming” (this accusation, if not the word itself, is a long-standing slur against LGBTQ+ people that has long since been debunked: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/groomer-pedophile-old-tropes-find-new-life-anti-lgbtq-movement-rcna23931). These harms are very real, and we should be deeply concerned about them. But there is also potential for harm to all of us: refusing to acknowledge marginalized voices or allow them into the public sphere actually makes it more difficult for us to understand our common world. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, we suffer the loss of plurality, which is necessary for a robust sense of the real.

The term plurality, in its most basic sense, refers to the fact that there are numerous people on the face of the earth; our world is shared with others. Now that seems rather obvious, so what is its relevance? Why should we care? Without the others with whom we share the world, we will have a limited, impoverished sense of the world itself and of ourselves. Why? Well, because we ourselves are limited: we each come to the world from different locations, so we each have a different perspective on it. I see what I see of the world based on my experiences within it, which are necessarily limited by my literal location and by my social locations: my race, sex, gender, class, religious upbringing, all influence how I see the world and those around me. As someone raised in the Northeast, I see “Midwest nice” very differently from people who are from the Midwest, as a mundane example. What I take to be true or real is usually the result of these limited experiences and is hence partial at best and possibly completely wrong. To understand the world in its fullness (and I should!), I need the perspectives of others who are situated differently within it to expand my view.

Arendt’s ideal is a world in which as many perspectives on our shared world as possible make it into the public sphere, so that we can have as expansive an understanding of that world as we can. We do not, however, live in that ideal. Rather, there are strong social forces that work against plurality and the multiple perspectives that should accompany it, what Arendt terms “the social.” The social works to foreclose plurality by enforcing conformity to social expectations and a narrow range of acceptable behaviors; these expectations and behaviors assume and require a “oneness” of interest and opinion. This oneness of opinion and interest is the requirement of social conformity—the goal is to fit into the dominant culture by embodying proper behavior, which leads to the dominance of one way of thinking and one way of being. Attempts to legislate gender, race, and sexuality are perfect examples of closing down plurality: the explicit goal is to keep some perspectives from the public sphere, consolidating dominant cultural norms and maintaining systems of social power that acknowledge only some ways of being as legitimate.

Consider Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, named “Don’t Say Gay” by its opponents: it forbids any discussion of gay and/or transgender issues until the 4^th grade, after which any discussion or instruction must be “age appropriate” (who decides what counts as age appropriate remains unclear, though the official name of the law indicates that parents can decide, which could easily mean that one homo- or trans-phobic parent could dictate the curriculum for all students). In practice, this law could prevent LGBTQ+ teachers from even mentioning their home lives in casual conversation in the classroom, and it will prevent students who may be LGBTQ+, or whose parents are, or who are questioning themselves, or are even curious about such issues, from exploring them in that setting. Preventing such conversations or explorations leaves heterosexuality in place as the only acceptable form of family, implicitly positioning any LGBTQ+ family configurations as lesser, abnormal, perhaps even dangerous. The folks who passed this bill into law seem to fully understand that this normalizing view of heterosexuality can stand only if alternative views of LGBTQ+ lives are indeed cut out of public discussion. That is, their goal is quite clearly to shut down plurality.

Attempts to restrict the teaching of Critical Race Theory are meant to have a similar effect: only those perspectives that see the US as a shining beacon of freedom and equality would be allowed a voice in classrooms. Specific restrictions include claims that some people possess unconscious bias, and that the US is fundamentally racist and/or sexist. In this case, both grade schools and colleges are targeted for regulation. These restrictions position systemic analyses of racism and sexism as unpatriotic but also as attacks on white men, who might end up feeling bad if they were taught about their unearned privilege. Analyses of power and privilege are themselves thus silenced, marginalized, and seen as power plays rather than as attempts to understand and address injustice. Without access to other ways of understanding both the history of and current power relations within the US, only one perspective is allowed a public hearing: that the nation embodies freedom, equality, and justice for all. Anyone who questions this view is thus seen as deluded or trying to get an unjust advantage over others (the language of “special rights” levied against Critical Race Theorists, feminists, and LGBTQ+ folks would be a case in point).

Anti-trans legislation is even more obviously aimed at closing down plurality, in this case what we might call gender plurality. Laws that require trans people to use bathrooms or participate in sports that correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth rather than their gender identity work to erase their transness, which positions their trans identities as unreal, or unnatural, or dangerous to ciswomen. These attempts to make trans lives invisible, or to conflate them with mental illness or willful lying, reinforce the sex/gender binary. Assuming that people are only male or female, and that they correspond naturally to masculine and feminine gender identities ignores not only trans peoples’ lives and experiences, but the very existence of intersex people, whose biological sex does not fit neatly into either male or female.

The problem here, apart from the obvious one of attacks on marginalized people, is the closing down of multiple perspectives on our common world. How can we know for sure that heterosexuality is the best way to be if lesbians and gay men are not allowed to discuss their lives and experiences? How can we be sure that racism isn’t structural if we can never confront the evidence suggesting it is? How can we know that gender identity and biological sex are naturally correlated if we prevent trans people from living their lives as they choose? The world itself becomes unknowable when it is seen through one dominant lens. We end up living a big, fat lie rather than the messy truth. For Arendt, the messy truth is preferable, precisely because it’s the truth, but also because the lie requires the silencing of marginalized voices and experiences: the lie is built on oppression.

If Socrates Were a Chief Inspector: Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache Series

Spoiler alert: this post discusses plot elements from A Rule Against Murder, A Trick of the Light, The Long Way Home, The Brutal Telling, and Bury Your Dead.

I love murder mysteries. I read a lot of them, from well-written and complex stories to “cozy” mysteries, one of the pleasures of which is their simplicity. I also love philosophy. And while murder mysteries sometimes serve as a break from heavy theory, I have come to realize that they can also be an entryway into thinking about fairly serious ideas such as the nature of justice, truth, virtue, community, and indeed the human condition itself. I see philosophy and pop culture in a reciprocal relationship: philosophy can shed light on pop culture texts, and pop culture texts can animate and embody philosophical ideas. I want to start with Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache series, largely because it has become one of my absolute favorites, and it stands up to re-readings. In thinking about why that’s so, I realized that part of it is the Gamache character himself. When push comes to shove, he reminds me of Socrates. And Socrates is at least partly why I fell in love with philosophy to begin with. So I’d like to get into the series by exploring the character.

Armand Gamache is like many other chief inspectors in some ways: he has a sharp mind and keen insight, he is motivated by a profound sense of justice, and like at least a few male inspectors (Morse and Poirot spring to mind), he has a broad interest in and appreciation for all aspects of the human condition—he has a wide knowledge of poetry, art, and history, and he has a deep curiosity about the world and others that leads him to learn as much as he can about each case he is involved with. If that means learning about engineering or psychology, so be it! He simply takes for granted that he always has more to learn so that continual learning is folded into his process of crime solving. Learning is not simply, though, a utilitarian means to the end of solving a crime. Armand seems to love learning for its own sake. He seeks to continually expand his own understanding of the world he lives in, of those around him, and of himself. Continual truth-seeking is intimately connected to self-expansion and community-building for him, along with the pursuit of justice.

These aspects of the Gamache’s character—constant self-questioning and expansion and connectedness to his community—distinguish him from most other detectives in the murder mystery genre. All detectives are certainly working toward justice, but Gamache stands out because of his embeddedness within the communities he polices. Most detectives are positioned as removed from their communities, incapable of sustaining meaningful relationships, and hence as deeply lonely. This loneliness is often depicted as the price of doing higher level police work (even if the inspector’s underlings manage to stay married): it requires long hours, a single-minded pursuit of justice that takes precedence over all other aspects of life, and frankly a profound suspicion of one’s fellow human beings. Gamache, however, breaks this mold. Not only is he not a fundamentally suspicious person, behind his keen intellect and shrewd ability to get at the truth is kindness: time and time again, someone who knows him by reputation only will expect to meet a hard man with something like cruelty and judgment in his eyes. Time and again, they are surprised to see kindness. What makes Gamache kind? I think he genuinely wants to understand those around him rather than merely judge them (though he judges, too!): he does his best to see those around him—friends, neighbors, and suspects alike—on their own terms and through their own eyes. That openness to another perspective is kindness, I think—it treats the other person as fundamentally deserving of respect and compassion.

How do these characteristics resonate with Socrates? Let us turn to Plato’s Apology, through which we get a good sense of the kind of person Socrates was, as well as the ideas he espoused. (For those unfamiliar with philosophy, Socrates never wrote a word. What we know of him and his beliefs come from those who lived at the time. Plato, having been one of Socrates’ students, was well-versed in his beliefs and the arguments he made to support them. Socrates himself engaged in public philosophy: he drew his fellow citizens into conversation about their own values, beliefs, and goals, challenging them to always live better than they were.)

In the Apology, Plato recounts Socrates’ speech before the Athenian Assembly in defense of his life against the charges of corrupting the young and believing in false gods. The speech is perhaps best known for Socrates’ claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, a claim that positions philosophy as central to any meaningful human life. Socrates is dedicated to the pursuit of truth and justice, and he encourages his fellow Athenians to take up these pursuits themselves. He likens himself to a gadfly, poking and stinging those around him by asking them to, well, justify themselves. He begins this work, which he really does see as his life’s work, after the Delphic Oracle proclaimed him the wisest person in Athens. Confused by this claim and believing that he really isn’t wise at all, he starts questioning public figures who have a reputation for wisdom: politicians, artists, and craftspeople alike. As you might imagine, it doesn’t go so well for the folks Socrates questions. The politicians simply can’t answer his questions—they bluster and make things up rather than admit their ignorance. The artists produce beautiful and important work (poetry, for instance), but they don’t understand it themselves—they are more inspired than wise; the bigger problem is that because they produce such worthy objects, they think they know more than they do. The craftspeople are similar to the artists: they have genuine and useful knowledge and produce marvelous products, but they think their skill means they know more than they do. Socrates walks away from each of these encounters thinking that the oracle was onto something: he would rather be ignorant and aware of his ignorance than pretend to a wisdom that he does not possess.

One of the main points here, and a point that remains at the center of Western philosophy, is that human wisdom (as opposed to the wisdom of the gods) is limited. We can’t possibly know everything, and what we do know is conditioned by our experience and perspective, which are also necessarily limited. If we want to strive for the truth, which Socrates thinks we should all want to do, then we need to be willing to hold our knowledge, beliefs, and values up for constant questioning—simply because we are human, we are likely to be wrong. Most of us, though, need someone to give us a nudge toward the truth, since we are likely to take for granted the beliefs, values, and practices of the culture in which we are raised. Consider the dominant cultural values of ancient Athens, which are not so different from our own: on the one hand, Athenians claim to value goodness, justice, and self-improvement/development; on the other and in practice, they clearly value material possessions and public honor. That is why Socrates sees his lifework as so important: if he doesn’t nudge his fellow citizens, they are likely to live in ignorance of their own values and the consequences thereof for themselves and others (more on which below). We human beings, then, need others to help us find the truth, and whatever truths we come to will be necessarily provisional, open to further questioning from someone who has a different perspective or experience. Truth, we might say, is a communal endeavor.

We might ask: why does it matter whether we strive for truth or live in ignorance? Isn’t ignorance bliss, after all? Socrates argues that striving for truth makes one more likely to become a good, virtuous person with values that will lead to the development of one’s soul. We don’t really talk about souls anymore, except in a religious context. So how might we think about the damaging nature of ignorance? Penny’s Gamache series provides a marvelous way into this question, I think. In more than one case, a character who lies to themselves or others ends up causing great harm—sometimes to themselves, always to others. Consider Peter Morrow, for instance. Peter is a deeply angry, resentful, self-pitying, judgmental, self-hating, and insecure person who is desperate for recognition and attention from those around him. (He’s also charming and a good host, and he is in some ways obviously devoted to his wife, Clara. He is, in other words, complex, as are most of Penny’s characters. It takes a few books to understand the depths of his jealousy, for instance.) He cannot, however, acknowledge his less admirable characteristics, and he hides his need for others’ approval behind a thick and high wall of self-protection that keeps everyone, including Clara, at arms’ length. Peter, in short, lives a complicated lie about who he is as a successful artist, husband, and community member. We learn in A Rule Against Murder that his profound insecurity and self-doubt arose from his family dynamics, which are themselves based on his and his siblings’ warped perceptions of their parents, competing with each other for said parents’ love when they really had that love all along. They are deeply cruel to one another, trying to prove their own worth by knocking the others down. They all perceive their parents as withholding: their father did not lavish his money or material possessions on them, and their mother was emotionally and physically distant. Peter and his siblings assumed their father was waiting for them to prove their worth, when really he was trying to teach them independence; they assumed their mother simply didn’t love them, when really she suffers from severe nerve pain that makes the touch of another physically unbearable (she never reveals this fact to them, perhaps because she sees admitting pain as a sign of weakness). Peter’s inability to accept the truth of himself is thus itself based on other lies—family secrets and lack of communication that warp everyone’s ability to relate truthfully to themselves and each other.

This extended example makes it very clear that ignorance can be profoundly damaging to those who live within it: Peter is filled with rage, he and his siblings cannot find a healthy way to relate to each other, and their mom seems stuck in her own literal pain, unable to meaningfully connect with others. While Peter understands the truth at the end of the novel, it takes 5 more books before he admits the depth of his self-lying and begins to take responsibility for it, to try to recreate himself. Socrates would say that Peter’s soul was damaged, while we would be more inclined to refer to something like his psyche. But the point is the same: ignorance is far from bliss; it can lead to self-deformation.

Just as importantly, however, a person’s ignorance can damage others as well. Peter’s inability to confront the truth of himself is also damaging to Clara and their marriage. He is deeply jealous of her success as an artist and her underlying attitude toward life itself that enables it, but he cannot admit that either. Instead, he plays mind games with her, planting seeds of doubt about her artistic ability and judgment. This ploy is particularly disturbing as she approaches her first solo art show about which she is predictably insecure (Clara can admit and articulate her insecurity, so she isn’t lying to herself about it). She ends up trusting herself, and her show is a great success—the major and important art reviewers all love it. But she comes to realize that Peter isn’t actually happy for her, though he knows he should be and part of him wants to be. The truth becomes clear to them both when Clara calls him on his lack of enthusiasm for her success: his profound insecurity has prevented him from genuinely supporting her throughout their entire relationship. He finally, finally completely breaks down and admits the depths of his despair, rage, and insecurity; he admits that he is ultimately jealous of her hopefulness, an attitude that is embodied in her work. His admission leads Clara to ask him to leave so she/they can reevaluate their marriage and find out if it can be saved. They agree that he will return in a year. They both understand the depth of harm he has caused her.

In The Long Way Home, we learn that Peter has gone on something of a quest to recreate himself. At the time of his and Clara’s appointed reunion, he has not returned, and Clara asks Gamache’s help in tracking him down (second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir helps, too, of course). Based on their investigations, it seems that Peter has finally allowed himself to pursue what he finds meaningful rather than trying to gain attention and praise from what others find valuable—he has been trying to discover what kind of artist he can become. Having spent his life using the same technique that has brought him some acclaim and popularity—he takes natural objects and paints them in such close detail that they are not recognizable as such—he begins to explore. Clara, Gamache, and Beauvoir come to believe that Peter has been exploring his own abilities as an artist. Though his attempts are truly awful, his ability to produce something awful is itself progress for him: he is taking risks for the first time in his life. Inspired by Clara rather than by the need for attention from the establishment art world, he sets aside his predictable style, trying new approaches, and traveling the world seeking further inspiration. Though his life is cut short, confronting the truth of his deep jealousy and insecurity coupled with the desire to redress the harms he has caused, enables him to make tremendous strides toward changing himself as both an artist and a husband.

Peter’s experience thus shows us why pursuing truth matters. And we might see Clara as akin to Socrates in this case: without her pushing him to confront himself, he would almost certainly never have had the courage to admit the truth and strive to change himself. This need for others in the pursuit of truth is also exemplified by Gamache himself, who embodies the importance of understanding the limited nature of truth and the need to constantly question what we take as true: it takes a village, we might say, to solve a murder, and sometimes the village gets it wrong. The only way to achieve justice is to remain open to multiple perspectives in one’s truth-seeking, even when those perspectives challenge your deepest beliefs. Though Armand is the lead investigator on all murder cases, he never thinks he has all the answers and turns to his colleagues for their insights on whatever case is before them. Where others in his position see their colleagues as underlings whose role is simply to follow orders, Armand treats his team as equals. He makes clear everyone’s assigned place on the team, not because hierarchy matters to him but because order does. He begins most team briefings with “tell me what you know”—an invitation for all members of the team to contribute to understanding the crime itself and all of the possible suspects. His main investigative technique is listening, both to his team members and to others involved in the case, suspects, witnesses, and anyone connected to them. He begins, in other words, with an open mind and with the conviction that he can gain important insights from others. He also trains recruits to develop a similar acknowledgement of their own limited access to truth by encouraging them to become comfortable with four claims: “I don’t know,” “I need help,” “I’m sorry,” and “I was wrong.” To refuse to admit ignorance or mistakes in a murder investigation can set progress back (as when Agent Yvette Nichol claims to have checked on the status of murder victim Jane Neal’s will) or it can lead to prolonged injustice. Many recruits believe they should be trying to impress the man in charge, but he is most impressed by humility, open-mindedness, and a genuine commitment to justice rather than by the desire to impress or intimidate others.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the importance of admitting one’s mistakes is the murder of the Hermit, for which Olivier Brulé is charged, tried, and convicted in The Brutal Telling. Gamache and the whole team are convinced that they had the right person and that the trial was just, because all of the evidence pointed to Olivier, and he admitted grossly mistreating and manipulating the Hermit out of greed (the Hermit’s cabin was filled with priceless treasures that Olivier coveted). In Bury Your Dead, though, doubts arise for Gamache. Olivier’s partner Gabri sends him a letter every day, writing, “Why would Olivier move the body? It doesn’t make sense. He didn’t do it, you know.” For those unfamiliar with the story, the Hermit’s body is found in Olivier’s bistro, but only after being moved from the spa up the hill run by Marc and Dominique Gilbert. In a further complication, the Hermit had been killed in his own cabin and then moved to the spa. (So: killed in the cabin, body moved to the spa, then moved again to the bistro.) Gabri’s question is, then: if Olivier were the killer, why would he move the body from the cabin at all? It would make more sense to bury the body in the woods rather than drawing attention to the murder. (It turns out that Marc discovers the body in the spa’s front hall, and he moves it to the bistro to discredit Olivier. The two were not exactly friends at the time but saw and treated each other as rivals). Gamache starts to rethink the case, and he asks Beauvoir to reinvestigate it, unofficially. It turns out that the real killer is Patrick Mundin (nicknamed “Old”), a woodworker who lives in the area with his wife (Michelle, nicknamed “the Wife”) and their son. Mundin believed that the Hermit killed his father, who walked onto thin ice 15 years earlier, leaving the family father- and husband-less. Mudin does furniture repair for Olivier and one night sees the cane that used to belong to his father. He does not see Olivier as a killer, so he follows him into the woods to the Hermit’s cabin, glimpsing the treasures inside. He watches the Hermit from afar for a while and comes to believe that the Hermit murdered his father to steal the priceless goods. In rage and revenge, he kills him. (Beauvoir discovers that the Hermit was actually Mundin’s father, who faked his own death after moving his treasures to the forest. Not surprisingly, this information devastates Mundin.) Had Gamache and Beauvoir not been willing to question their initial conclusion, Mundin would never have been caught, and Olivier would have languished in jail for a crime he did not commit. Refusing to question, then, can lead to profound injustice.

Further connections with Socrates can also be seen in Olivier as a character struggling with conflicting values and the impact of those values on his partner and community. Whereas many of Socrates’ contemporaries claim to value justice and the good while pursuing wealth and public honor, Olivier obviously does value his relationships with Gabri Dubeau and his fellow inhabitants of Three Pines. Olivier and Gabri’s deep commitment to each other shines through their every interaction, even when they are a bit testy and sharp with each other: their teasing is rooted in a fundamental love and appreciation for each other, including their foibles. The price tags that hang on every item in the bistro are both a symbol of Olivier’s greed—literally everything is for sale and its value put in monetary terms—and a charming sign of his love of beauty. Gabri rolls his eyes at him, acknowledging both the charm and the greed; he loves the whole package. And Olivier loves the whole Gabri package. They are as individuals and as a couple also committed to Three Pines as a community, bringing food to folks stuck in their homes during bad storms, shoveling out cars from the always-falling snow, as members of the fire brigade, etc., etc., etc. There is no reason to think that Olivier doesn’t genuinely value all of these people and the compassion and love it takes to maintain and foster relationships. And yet. He is greedy. Really, really greedy. And the depth of his greed is greater than even Gabri understands. He can acknowledge that he likes beautiful things, and that he takes pleasure from selling them and making money, but he cannot admit to anyone that his love of money supersedes all else. He suspects that if Gabri and the other Three Pines community members knew the depth of his greed, they would not love and accept him after all. So he keeps it to himself. He tells no one that he used the money he made selling antiques to buy up all the available buildings in Three Pines, making him the landlord of all the major businesses. He tells no one that when an elderly woman gives him a house full of possessions for a pittance and he discovers priceless goods, he pockets the difference. He tells no one about the Hermit with his cabin full of treasures. On some level, he seems to understand that his greed is destructive, but he does not curb it. Instead, he threatens his standing in the community, his relationship with Gabri, and the mental health of the Hermit by pursuing that greed single-mindedly. When the truth comes out through the investigation into the Hermit’s murder, he (temporarily) loses everything: Gabri literally turns his back on him whenever they are in the same room, and most of the community won’t look him in the eye, as their anger at being manipulated and lied to seethes. It becomes obvious that he cannot have both his beloved Gabri and their community, and his profound greed; these values are incompatible.

When Olivier returns to Three Pines after his time in jail for the murder he didn’t commit, he is genuinely worried that he will not be accepted, that because his greed went too far, he will have lost all of the relationships he cherishes. Indeed, old, cranky, foul-mouthed, poet-laureate Ruth’s interactions with him suggest he’s right: rather than flipping him off, she waves; rather than cutting him down, she is polite and respectful. Ruth reserves such behavior for outsiders, if anyone; she is marking him as one who does not belong. Olivier does his best to apologize for his behavior, and he learns to reign in his greed so that it no longer threatens the relationships he turns out to value even more than money and material possessions. He has learned the lesson that acknowledging one’s values allows one to choose them rather let them rule. His worry is that the community will not be able to see that he has genuinely changed. Ruth’s eventual forgiveness stands in for the forgiveness of the entire Three Pines community: in response to Olivier draping Rosa the duck, Ruth’s greatest beloved, in a sweater, Ruth says, “Thank you. Numb nuts.” The seeming insult is the sign of belonging and acceptance Olivier needed, and that acceptance enables him to continue choosing relationships over greed.

Olivier’s struggle with conflicting values, Peter’s struggle with creating himself in line with his values, and Gamache’s constant search for truth and justice all embody the Socratic injunction to live an examined life. Penny’s story lines and characters reveal the difficulty, poignancy, and genuine joys of trying to live well and responsibly with others, bringing to life what might otherwise seem to be abstract principles and goals. That’s why I see a productive relationship between the two: the series enlivens the philosophy, and the philosophy helps identify the depth of meaning in the series, encouraging reflections on the nature of human existence itself and hence enabling connections to everyday life.

On Rights, Freedom, and Covid

“We have to make sure this transcends politics,” he said. “It can’t be the mask game again. Vaccines are not political”—President Biden (reported by Politico, 3/15/21)

When I was home for the holidays, I visited my 80-year-old aunt in a rehab facility where she has been since she fell a few months back. My mom and I were chatting with her when one of the staff came into her room to inform her that she had been exposed to Covid the previous day, and that she would need to quarantine for the next 14 days. At the front desk on our way out, there was a man yelling about constitutional violations—every visitor had to answer a series of questions about their vaccination status, travel history, and known Covid exposures to enter the facility, which he clearly understood as infringing on his right to privacy. Standing next to him was another man, “wearing” his mask under his chin, and behind the main desk, the receptionist had her mask under her nose. Well of course my aunt was exposed, I thought, if these are the facility’s practices. Like many of my fellow citizens, I remain flummoxed by the behavior I witnessed: why wouldn’t everyone do what they can to prevent an 80-year-old from being exposed to a potentially lethal virus? Why wasn’t the facility itself doing more to protect its residents, all of whom are there because they are vulnerable—isn’t protection, after all, its very purpose? How does selfishness get transformed into a constitutional right in some people’s minds? In order to explore this situation and the questions that arise from it, I would like to consider the nature of the political itself and its relation to the underlying issue of individual freedom.

To do that, we need some background on the political theories that contributed to the creation of our founding documents that ground freedom and the political in the notion of individual rights. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is a marvelous example of this school of thought. In Leviathan, Hobbes explores the purpose of government, distinguishing civil society from what he calls the State of Nature. Hobbes argues that human beings are naturally free and equal: we each have the same fundamental right to life and autonomy, and we each have the same basic ability to act on that right. This condition puts us in competition with each other: everyone has the same right to life, so everyone has the same right to the goods that enable our survival. You and I are both hungry. We see the same apple tree, and we both want (and need) those apples. In the state of nature, there is nothing to stop us from fighting to the death to get them: we each have the right to do what we need to do to survive. Nothing is out of bounds—I can steal the apples you have spent hours picking, I can assault you to get to them, etc. Hobbes describes this situation as “a war of all against all.” Perpetual competition is not, it turns out, a good way to live. As Hobbes puts it, life in the State of Nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” If I’m constantly looking over my shoulder for someone who wants what I have, I do not have the luxury of industry of any kind: it would actually be foolish to try to plant a garden, for instance, when the chances are good that someone will come along and steal all the food I have carefully grown. Poetry? Literature? Music? Philosophy? Architecture? Impossible. So, living in the State of Nature is less than ideal.

Hobbes sees human reason as the way out of this horrible life: we can think about the nature of human existence and make choices about better ways to be. Realizing that a short and painful life is no good, we consider how to ensure a longer, less painful, perhaps even flourishing life. It becomes clear that if we work together, we can create some peace and security among ourselves that will put a stop to perpetual competition and allow us not just to live, but to live well. How do we accomplish such a goal? We agree to set aside some of our natural rights, such as the right to kill each other, in exchange for the protection and safety provided by civil society. We make implicit promises to each other: I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me; I won’t steal your possessions if you don’t steal mine; I won’t harm you if you don’t harm me; etc. These simple agreements allow me to plant a garden: if I no longer have to worry about you killing or harming me, then a modicum of trust exists between us. And the security of a (relatively) peaceful and cooperative society eventually enables genuine flourishing for the entire populace: grocery stores, schools, businesses, technology, health care, all emerge out of a safe and secure collective life.

On Hobbes’s view, then, it is in my best long-term interest to limit my natural freedom (which allows me to do whatever the heck I want) so that I might live well with others rather than merely survive. Looking longer term allows me to see the benefits of cooperative living; rather than seeing my fellow human beings merely as competitors for survival, I can see them as enabling and contributing to my flourishing. Rather than acting impulsively on my immediate needs and wants, I consider the effects of my actions on others in the long run. The State of Nature allows me to kill you; civil society insists that my rights end where yours begin: I can do whatever the heck I want up to the point where my behavior threatens others.

The benefits of Hobbes’s view seem obvious to me: even if we human beings are basically self-interested, it makes sense to live together in some kind of secure and peaceful society. Sacrificing my own immediate desires is actually good for me.

In order for this cooperative living to work, however, Hobbes argues, government must be instituted to guarantee that each of us will abide by our implicit agreement to limit our natural rights and freedoms. If someone breaks their implicit promises (not to kill or steal or assault, for instance), the government steps in to punish them for breaking that promise, restoring the peace and security disrupted by the breach. Without that overarching authority, Hobbes argues, we cannot trust each other to hold to our promises. While we each individually agree to limit our own rights and freedoms, government enforces those agreements. Hence the association of government with limiting freedom; hence the notion that politics is about fighting over interests.

When government is understood as limiting individual freedom, and when individuals focus on their immediate (I want a haircut!) rather than long-term desires/interests/wants (I want to live a long and healthy life!), the government itself can be positioned as an impediment to individual choice and freedom. Any government directive, any government policy, can come to be understood as suspicious simply because it comes from the government—it may be seen as ploy/plot to control individuals rather than empower them. That is precisely what has happened during Covid-19’s emergence and spread. Rather than seeing mask mandates, closed businesses and schools, and vaccine drives as ensuring the safety and security of citizens, they have been seen by many as government intrusion on free choice. This view makes a certain kind of sense given Hobbes’s analysis: freedom is pre-political, and the very purpose of the political is to limit individual freedom so that society overall may flourish.

That notion of flourishing is the key to understanding the inherent limits to civil, as opposed to natural, rights: my right to privacy ends where your right not to be harmed begins. Even if I’m willing to risk my own life by refusing to wear a mask or get vaccinated against Covid, I do not have the right to risk your life by doing so. (Hobbes would also point out that I’m kind of an idiot for refusing these potentially life-saving measures, since the virus makes life very much like the State of Nature—poor, nasty, solitary, brutish, and short, a state we sought to leave by entering into society with one another.) If I do refuse a vaccine or a mask, I give up my access to public spaces, because being in them causes potential harm to those around me. It is not only reasonable for national, state, and local governments to limits citizens’ behavior when it endangers others, it is their very purpose.