School of Life



Seneca: Anger management guru?

 Alain de Botton is a Swiss philosopher and author who doesn't believe in God.  But at least he sees a loss to humanity when people think God is absent.

In a Wall Street Journal piece he lists some of the things Christian faith provides that are lost in today's secular education.  They include how to "find meaning, understand themselves, behave in a moral fashion, forgive their fellow humans and confront their own mortality," as well as "advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or how to cope with the news of a medical death sentence."

Continuing de Botton's list, teaching "emotional or ethical life skills:  how to love our neighbors, clear human confusion, diminish human misery and leave the world better and happier than we found it."  Dealing with anger and "understanding the tensions of marriage" are others on a representative but incomplete list.

De Botton laments that "our universities have never offered what churches invariably focus on: guidance."  It's probably because most colleges embrace moral relativism.  This is a squishy framework in which moral judgments are subjective and up to the individual.  Its corollary is since there are no objective standards everyone should tolerate behavior that others have decided is moral.  How can universities provide guidance when there are no common standards of right and wrong?

No God, no Christianity, no moral framework, no guidance.  To attack this void de Botton and other writers, academics and artists have started a "new kind of university" in London.  It's called the "School of Life" and it uses "novels, histories, plays and paintings" for guidance.  Dostoyevsky's Anna Karenina teaches about marriage, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about death, Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems about filling the God-shaped hole in your heart, and ancient philosopher Seneca speaks of anger management.

Seneca's formula is a hoot.  He believed anger resulted from a person's failure to achieve optimistic expectations.  The solution:  before you get out of bed, think of everything that might go wrong that day.  Then when they happen you won't be surprised and - voila! - you won't get angry!  Pessimism is the key.  Who knew?

Maybe this works, but pessimists tend to be negative, hopeless and no fun.  Pessimism (borderline depression?) is a high price to pay in service to an egotistical  conviction that there's no God.

De Botton believes mankind has an inner drive to invent God.  If he suspended his condescension and substituted "seek" for "invent" he'd be onto something.  He could then accept biblical guidance that's worked for thousands of years.  Instead, he relies on cultural works, which still doesn't eliminate morally subjective decisions - it just passes them along to whoever designs the curriculum at the School of Life.

It's good that de Botton recognizes  the void left by rejection of God.  But it's remarkable he doesn't see it as evidence that He exists and knows mankind well enough to effectively guide us.

See what Seneca’s daily pessimism looks like in practice: click on

http://sophrosyne.radical.r30.net/wordpress/?p=6032

and fast forward to 16:40. The guy is Alain de Botton.

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Photo credit:  imagi-nation.com

Earthly Eternity?

Cryonic Condos

Q:  What do Walt Disney, Ted Williams and Robin Hanson have in common?

A:  A connection with cryonics, the process of deep-freezing remains in the hope that someday they can be restored to life.

Walt's body is rumored to be in a chamber under the "Pirates of the Caribbean" attraction at Walt Disney World.  Actually, his ashes reside at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Williams was an avid fisherman whose will directed he be cremated and his ashes scattered off the Florida Keys, but he signed a controversial note while in a hospital sick bed.  His body is stored in liquid nitrogen at -321F in two containers:  his head's in one and the rest of him occupies another.

Robin Hanson is alive and teaches economics at George Mason University.  Unlike the others, he wants his brain frozen.  He's doing it to satisfy his curiosity.

It's quite a process.  The body must cut through coroner's red tape, be properly packed, and hop a flight to the cryonic facility. There the patient (the subject quickly goes from patient to cadaver to patient again) is infused with a solution that replaces the blood, hardens like glass and won't freeze.

 Speed is important and it helps if the patient's legal guardian cooperates.  This can be a problem:  in the cryonics world it's called the "hostile wife phenomenom."  According to Kerry Howley of The New York Times Hanson's wife, Peggy, finds his plan disturbing.  Robin says, "Cryonics has the problem of looking like you're buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land" and committing an act "of betrayal and abandonment."  Peggy thinks it's an act of "cosmic selfishness."

J.S.  is a software engineer who sees his brain as a computer hard drive storing his memories.  But his wife isn't on board and he won't reveal his name for fear she'll divorce him.  When he finally "deanimates" (cryonicists do this instead of dying) they may both be in for surprises.  She'll be shocked at how much he's spending on this, and he'll be surprised when she buries him just like everybody else.

 What happens if someone eventually "deglassifies" Hanson's brain?  Does it go into the cranium of a pre-owned body?  Or a glass jar filled with a bubbly fluid like in a bad science fiction movie? Or do technicians download its data only to find unremarkable memories and outdated knowledge?  If so, then what?  His legally dead brain may be unceremoniously discarded.

 Even if reanimation goes well it won't be pretty.  You may want to observe them, but mainly they'll be observing you.  In the end you may just become an item of curiosity.  The cryopreservation decision is apparently based on an emotional but understandable desire for immortality.  But the endgame simply doesn't look promising.

 Christians get an afterlife without the mess, fuss and expense.  We'll have perfected bodies, they'll last forever and your spouse will like the idea.  And you can leave your money to do some good for others instead of using it to top off your tank with liquid nitrogen each week.

Want to get the heebie-jeebies?  Click on http://www.cryonics.org/phases.html

Photo Credit:  Alcor.org

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