The bright side

Looking forward to this afternoon's capstone defense, as another student in our Master of Liberal Arts (MALA) program prepares to debrief her faculty advisors and move on. 

This one conveys a powerful personal message, that one's attitude largely shapes the quality of one's experience... even, and maybe especially, in adversity and ill health. MP's quotes from the stoics* and from James are spot-on. She's an inspiration, turning her long bout with cancer into a testament to philosophy's relevance for life. And death. And keeping each in its place. And being happy.

* "Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding... Some things are within your control. And some things are not." Epictetus

"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts." Marcus Aurelius

"A sense of humor is just common sense dancing." WJ 

I'll raise only a couple of quibbles: she asks if anything "really causes cancer"... Cancer clearly has causes, behavioral, genetic, cellular etc. Not all smokers get cancer, but smoking is nonetheless an evident carcinogen. And yet, the fact that some smokers escape unscathed while some non-smokers succumb to other causes is maddening. Plain bad luck is also a factor. But I don't think we should deny the science that medical researchers have worked so hard to establish, and that has saved so many lives and will save many more. But probably you're just making a rhetorical point: life is unfair. It is. And yet, as Christopher Hitchens said: to the rhetorical complaint "Why me?!" the only possible answer is: Why not you?" If we didn't have bad luck, we wouldn't have any luck at all. That's what luck is: random. (But I still like to quote Branch Rickey, "luck is the residue of design." Well it is if you're lucky.)

And the other quibble: she credits her religious beliefs with getting her through the ordeal. I'm glad she's found solace in her faith. But as I know she knows, at least as many people of faith suffer and die unfairly as do those without traditional religious beliefs. It's understandable that the survivors of shipwreck and natural cataclysm are inclined to credit faith with saving them, but what to say to the faithful who went down with the ship and were blown away in the gale? Surely not that they were of little faith.

In any case, her ten good years and counting are a credit to the philosophy that urges us to see the glass half full (cue Monty Python-MP once gifted me a shirt inscribed "Always look on the bright side..."). 

But speaking of that...

I wonder if she's ever seen the late Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (alternately published under the "blunt" title Smile or Die) or if she has a thought about these quotes from it:

“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”

“I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

Ehrenreich subsequently wrote about her particular form of what she calls her spirituality, by the way, in Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything. There she writes: “if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.” Ehrenreich would have liked MP's stoic lines. Not sure she liked James as much, though he had a strong stoic streak and was fond of "Mark" Aurelius too.  And she did say positive things about WJ's discussion in Varieties of mysticism and exceptional mental states. And she was a meliorist in the best Jamesian spirit, as her September obit notes:

Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world.

“The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us,” she told The New Yorker, “but that we will die trying.”

I can't mention James's friend Mark without repeating his (and my) morning meditation:

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."