Letter to Anwei
Letter to Anwei:
An Explanation of Human Identity and Transgenerational Ethics
I. Identity
Dear grandchild,
I am writing this to you, rather than to my own children, because children tend not to listen to their parents. I did not listen to mine, and I have every reason to believe that you are likely not paying any heed to yours. I hope that in place of their advice and wisdom, you might listen to me, because grandparents can sometimes be a little more interesting than parents, and dead ancestors more interesting still.
What I hope to give to you is the most valuable thing that I can give. When I was younger, I tried to figure out what was most worth caring about. What matters in life? What is most worth loving?
How can you live a good life and find meaning in it?
I spent ten years caring deeply about these sorts of questions, and I studied business, power, politics, philosophy, and religion. All of these are important, but they are all transient. They do not last, and are not as satisfying as I had hoped they might be, as answers to the questions of what matters, what is worth caring about and loving, and how to live a good life.
This letter concerns what is lasting, what I believe is an answer to these questions, should they interest you. I believe it is an old answer concerning identity, one tacitly understood by generations of the distant past, but which has been forgotten in recent times. When I was growing up, we did not even have a word for it. Please grant me the patience to wind my way towards this idea with some explanation.
§
As a young adult, I assume that you have learned that the only way to accomplish anything is to invest yourself in your desired goal. Perhaps you spend time making something; perhaps you work hard to earn the money to buy an object; perhaps you take a course to learn a skill. All of these are investments of yourself in the present so that you might be better off in the future. This is how people become talented athletes, good employees, high-grade students, accomplished musicians, or anything else you might hope to become.
An old Greek philosopher named Heraclitus once said that a man can never step in the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. There is some truth to this. People change over time; they cannot stay the same even if they wanted to. If you accept Heraclitus’ view that we are different people from moment to moment, then you might say that the success of future you is dependent upon the investments of present you. Your practice, study, attention, and effort transform into a legacy that your future self inherits.
Of course, this may all sound a little strange. Unless you are suffering from a very rare psychological disorder, you probably feel very much like one person. You feel as if you are the same person today that you were yesterday, and will be tomorrow. Nevertheless, you probably recognize that you are not exactly the same today as you were yesterday. People do change over time. If we change enough, can we truly say we are the same person?
There is an old puzzle about this question called the “Ship of Theseus” problem. Theseus was a hero from the city of Athens who slew the minotaur of the labyrinth in Crete. His ship became famous in Greek storytelling because after he set sail for home, he forgot to change the color of his sail, as he had promised his father he would if his journey had been successful. Seeing his son’s ship on the horizon and seeing the black sails instead of the victorious white sails, Theseus’ father Aegeus assumed that Theseus had died, and killed himself in grief. The Athenian people were so moved by the successful defeat of the ferocious minotaur and the tragic death of Aegeus that they kept and maintained Theseus’s ship in the harbor for several hundred years. So everyone became familiar with Theseus’ famous ship.
Over the decades and centuries that it sat in the harbor, the ship needed repairs to stay afloat. First a few planks from the sea-water, then a mast from a particularly windy and damaging storm. The ropes needed to be replaced after salt-spray and hot sun wore them away. Then one day, the sailors and shipwrights realized that after all of these years, not a single part from the original boat remained. And one worker asked the question: “is it the same ship?”
It is a surprisingly tricky question. If you say “it is the same ship because it looks the same,” then I may be able to point out a dozen other boats on the Mediterranean of the same construction and appearance. They may even have been built by the same shipwright. Yet none of those are the Ship of Theseus; none of those carried the minotaur-slayer home from Crete, or flew the black sail instead of the white on that fateful journey home. It isn’t just the materials, the design, or the appearance. Something about what makes the ship of Theseus the ship of Theseus is in its history, and in the connection between that history and the present.
But let us return to yourself. Your body is not so different from a ship. It is constantly breaking down and rebuilding itself. Your skeletal system is completely replaced every seven to ten years. Your skin is replaced every two to three weeks, and some of your internal organ components take even less time. And your brain, though composed of a stable set of neurons, is constantly changing and modifying, breaking down and strengthening pathways that form our habits and memories. That’s how we learn and forget things. With all of this change going on, how can we say that you are the same person today that you were yesterday? Are you the same person? Clearly you feel like the same person, but are you?
That feeling of continuity matters. It is similar to that history and continuity with the past that makes the ship of Theseus unique. You feel like you are the same person because you share memories with your past self. Your decisions and actions are a part of your history, and the transition between your past self and your present self is so smooth that it feels continuous. If you think of your conscious experience as a kind of race, it feels more like a marathon than a relay race. It doesn’t feel as though there are constant baton hand-offs going on. This is not to say that the stuff that you are made of is not also a part of you and your history, of course, even if your cells are constantly changing. Your body shapes your experience of the world, after all.
All of this is to say that what makes you you is a combination of your remembered history and the stuff that you are made of. However, I think that there is one more component. I’m sure I must sound like a bit of a Hellenophile at this point, but there is a Greek word, telos, meaning “end,” which is used philosophically to refer to the ultimate aim or purpose of something.
A boat is built to travel across the water, so we could say the end for which it was built—its telos—is marine travel. Humans are made—by God, or evolution, or something else—to do what humans do. Humans, after all, are much more complex than boats. A friend of mine once joked that a sheep is a machine for converting grass into sheep, and I suppose humans are a little like that too, but if a human were to do away with hunting, farming, negotiating, marrying, working, driving, complaining, and laughing, and if he were to simply wander the fields, running from predators and eating enormous quantities of grass, we might be right to say he is more sheep or cow than man. Something about who you are lies in your purpose—your telos—and in the means that you might employ to achieve that end.
So you are made up of stuff, of history, and of your ultimate purpose, just as I am. These three things remain, and make us who we are, even as parts of us may change, or even die. Some people describe feeling like they have to be different people in different situations, like they have to put on a different mask in front of their coworkers, or their family, or their friends. While we all wear different masks in different circumstances, no one would say that you lose your identity every time you go to work. There is still a core underneath that remains the same. You will feel like a coherent individual, like “one” instead of “many,” when the masks are in harmony with that core.
You and I share a special relationship where identity is concerned. I told you that the present “you” is inheriting the decisions and choices of the past “you,” but not everything that you inherit is your own making. If the present you can inherit the decisions and choices of the past you, and if you also inherit the decisions and choices of other people, might there be some similarity between these two types of inheritance? I believe that there is, and this similarity has implications in understanding what we are and how best to live. We are getting closer to the idea I hope to convey to you, but first, allow me one more introductory digression.
II. Death
Everyone has to die one day. For the longest time, I believed that this was just the way things were for everything, a kind of law of the universe that all living things died eventually. But I learned that this was not true; some organisms seem to just keep on going. The jellyfish Turritopsis dohmii, for example, seems to be amortal, or “biologically immortal,” meaning that it does not age in the ordinary sense. With most life, the odds of natural death increase with age, so that a 75 year old man is more likely to die than a 65 year old man. This is not the case with biologically immortal things. For them, it is a dice-roll with the same dice every time. A lucky dohmii might wind up living a thousand years, whereas no human, no matter how fortunate, is going to make it much past 120.
And jellyfish aren’t the only ones. Planarian worms (class Turbellaria), the Rougheye Rockfish (Sebastes aleutianus), the Olm (Proteus anguinus), several species of turtles (Chrysemys picta, Emydoidea blandingii, Terrapene carolina), the Red Sea Urchin (Strongylocentrotus franciscanus), the Ocean Quahog Clam (Arctica islandica), the Greenland Shark (Somniosus microcephalus), and
the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva), all do not age. If left to themselves, they do not die.
What allows these particular creatures to live without dying? If you look at their environments, the answer becomes apparent. All of these immortal things live in stasis. Their environment is stable and virtually unchanging. The sea-creatures live in the depths of the ocean, surrounded by nothingness and other creatures that have not changed in millions of years. The 4,000 year old bristlecone pines live in arid, rocky places where it rarely even rains or snows. The only animals they’ll see are the ravens, the ground-squirrels, the coyotes, and sometimes a great California Condor.
I’m sure you have been taught that all successful species fit into a niche in their ecosystem. They are adapted to their environment, and this adaptation is achieved by gradual change over time, across generations. If a species stays the same while its environment changes, it will die. If the environment does not change, however, then evolution is unnecessary. And if evolution is unnecessary, then death is unnecessary.
The implications of this were a little startling to me. It would seem that immortality is biologically possible in some cases. But what about humans? For us, immortality is evolutionarily undesirable.
To understand how this could be, consider your brain. You were born with more neural connections than you will have at any other point in your life, because learning isn’t mostly about making connections. It’s about pruning them. We can never get back the neurons we lose, and it is harder to build new connections than it is to cut them. By the time you are 25 or 26 years old, your world-view will be more or less set. You will be able to learn new things, but you will probably have a hard time adapting if something fundamental changed. For example, if it was conclusively demonstrated that drinking coffee was as bad for you as smoking cigarettes, I would probably have a much harder time relinquishing my morning cup than you would. If it was shown that some good organization that I had supported in my youth had recently turned evil, it would be emotionally more difficult for me to come to terms with it than it would be for you. We layer our beliefs on top of other beliefs, and after decades of this kind of stacking, the overturning of one bedrock conviction can tumble our whole worldview. Most people cannot handle such a dramatic change.
That we even live past our thirties is a testament to our adaptability. Of all the animals in the world, we humans live in the most volatile and dynamic environment of all, precisely because we are surrounded by other humans. Our own adaptability and the complexity of our environment are one and the same, and we are remarkably adaptive! But this adaptability has its limits. The older we get, the more likely we are to be left behind by our environment—the more likely we are to die. The more necessary it becomes that we die. If humans did not die, then we could not evolve and adapt to our changing environment. If we did not die, we would require a world that did not change.
There is one particular story I am reminded of from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass where the Red Queen is leading Alice on a blindingly fast run. After sprinting faster than Alice thought possible for at least ten minutes, they took a rest, only for Alice to realize that they hadn’t moved anywhere at all. After Alice comments on this, the Red Queen says that here, “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” I think aging is a lot like that; you have to run faster and faster to stay in the place and not get left behind. And then at some point, we can no longer keep up. It seems, then, that we were built to die; it is the culminating and final procedure of our design. Cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer’s, all of these sometimes feel as if they come too soon, but in the end, they are a natural by-product of our body’s natural metabolic processes. They are supposed to happen. We are like fireworks, designed to shoot only so high into the air before self-destruction.
Sometimes, people take death into their own hands by committing suicide. When I was around 14 or 15 years old, some friends and I would occasionally listen to a band called Linkin Park. They were an enormously successful band at the time, led by a talented singer named Chester Bennington. Bennington had everything: a beautiful wife, children, fame and fortune beyond the hopes of nearly everyone who has ever lived. Then on July 20, 2017, he killed himself. He was found by a cleaning lady, hanging in the bedroom of his spectacular home in Palos Verdes Estates, California.
People today usually say that suicide is the result of depression and despair, and that depression and despair come from material failings or from not being loved. But Bennington is only one of many powerful, famous, and loved people who have killed themselves. Accompanying Bennington in 2017 was fellow musician Chris Cornell, who killed himself only a week before Bennington—also by hanging. Bennington even sang “Hallelujah” at Cornell’s funeral. These two are accompanied by dozens of other sports stars, actors, musicians, and celebrities who have killed themselves in the past decade, and will surely not be the last.
It may be tempting to believe that suicide among the powerful is a modern problem, but this turns out to be wrong. In the Theseus story, Aegeus killed himself, after all. Before even the 2nd century A.D., Hannibal, Brutus, Mark Antony, Nero, Otho, Cleopatra, Demosthenes, Cato the Younger, Metellus Scipio, and Qu Yuan all died by their own hand. Judas Iscariot hung himself before Jesus’ trial in front of Pontius Pilate. And Boudica, the Celtic warrior queen, poisoned herself.
Other ancient texts referencing suicide include Plato’s Phaedo, the Bible, Augustine’s City of God, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I have even heard it argued that Socrates’ death was a suicide, because he had the chance to escape his fate but voluntarily chose to stay and drink the poison Hemlock.
Natural death may appear as an unavoidable part of nature, but suicide is harder to explain. The philosopher Albert Camus once said that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem: whether or not we should kill ourselves. But if we are the products of evolution, and if evolution is about survival and reproduction, then this question should strike you as rather strange. How is suicide a question at all? How did evolution allow the suicidal impulse to survive? It does not appear to be conceivably beneficial to the individual. As with other varieties of death, there is no “you” left to reap the rewards of whatever benefits suicide may bring. Who could death benefit? What purpose could suicide serve?
A friend of mine wrote an essay about the psychology of suicide[1] after Chester Bennington died which sheds some light on this subject. According to his research, there are situations where suicide makes evolutionary sense:
A basic sentiment commonly expressed by the suicidal is: “Everyone would be better off without me!” Evolutionary analysis suggests that suicide exists because we really do have innate mechanisms crafted to evaluate whether or not everyone would be better off without us. Why? Because if our handicaps require assistance that limits our close kin’s ability to survive and reproduce, we may in fact increase our own genetic fitness more by committing suicide and removing the reproduction-limiting obligations we impose upon them than we would be going on living with the help of our kin.
In other words, the idea of killing oneself doesn’t come from not having things, but from not providing things; from not being needed, rather than not being loved. If biological success was about the individual alone, suicide would be unthinkable. Yet here it is.
Now let me be clear that in almost every instance, suicide is the wrong decision. There are very few cases where suicide is a rational choice, and fewer still for people under 40. Young people like you are the most valuable, evolutionally speaking, because you still have all of your reproductive capabilities. I am somewhat less valuable than you are, as you will be less valuable than your grandchildren. I don’t bring up the dark subject of suicide to defend the practice, but to explore what we are as humans. I hope that my explanation of this will give you fortitude and courage to dismiss suicidal impulses should they one day come to you.
With that cleared up, we can return to our subject. Despite their vast difference in appearance, suicide and natural death actually have the same cause: it is beneficial! But who benefits from our death? To answer this question, a biologist might say that death is beneficial for “the gene.” This is a good start, but I am not so sure it is a complete answer. It is like talking about a person just as “stuff,” without history or telos. Without these other components, our “stuff” is just transient matter, and even our genes will change over time if these other elements are not considered.