Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths

A reference book for making sense of life—from action (good except when it's not) to thinking (depressing) to youth (a treasure).

This book offers a guide to human nature and human experience—a reference book for making sense of life. In thirty-eight short, interconnected essays, Shimon Edelman considers the parameters of the human condition, addressing them in alphabetical order, from action (good except when it's not) to love (only makes sense to the lovers) to thinking (should not be so depressing) to youth (a treasure). In a style that is by turns personal and philosophical, at once informative and entertaining, Edelman offers a series of illuminating takes on the most important aspects of living in the world.

Edelman avoids reductive synthesis, staying clear of both exuberance and negativity. Drawing on an eclectic range of sources—quoting from a pre-Islamic Bedouin poem on one page, from Gogol on the next, citing both Borges and Marx—Edelman offers insights into the bright and dark sides of our nature. About anxiety, he observes, “All sentient beings are capable of physiological stress response, but it takes special skills to also do anxiety.” Happiness is “a commodity that Americans pursue with almost as much verve as oil.” Human language, on the other hand, is “an essential window into the sublime.” All in all, human nature has much room for improvement. Working out ways to improve it, accompanied by this guide, is an exercise for the reader.

Preface xiii
Executive Summary: A Rhyming Lore of the Human Condition xvii
1 Action 1
The native hue of resolution. The pale cast of thought. And lose the name of action.
2 Ambition 5
Pelf and place. A small goat.
3 Anxiety 9
Possession. What you know you don’t know can hurt you. What—me worry? Yes.
4 Beauty 13
The imminence of a revelation. Evolutionary bait and switch. Between the world and a grain of sand. The pathos of things. The seven sad senses of beauty.
5 Children (The Raising of) 19
Be good. Plan B. Other ways to be.
6 Complexity 23
The dark forest. A spotlight shines on an enigma. Back in the forest.
7 Consciousness 29
The Tempest in a teapot. The insubstantial pageant. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. The splendor and the misery.
8 Death 35
The tragic sense of life. The Switch. Still The Switch. Only in silence the word.
9 Empathy 41
To em or not to em. Us and Them. From ordinary household objects.
10 Emptiness 45
Einstein meets the Buddha. Enter Borges.
11 Evolution 49
The mountains and the monsoon. A universal history of iniquity. Definitely maybe.
12 Existence 55
A bit of Talmudic existentialism. I think, therefore I ache. The mindfulness ruse.
13 Fear 59
Where the wild things are. True grit. We have seen the enemy.
14 Free Will 63
Complications. Misapprehension. Chance. Necessity. Implications.
15 Happiness 69
Machineries of joy and sorrow. Happiness fast and slow. The dark side of happiness.
16 Home 73
No home. No homeland. No rest. No end.
17 Language 79
The tentacles of intent. The Ring of Fire. Gaming the Game. Big Two-Hearted River.
18 Love 87
What a lovely way to burn. Che cosa e amor. Tuqburni.
19 Mathematics 93
Unreasonable effectiveness. Ineffectiveness of reason. But time and chance happeneth to them all.
20 Memory 99
The waters of Naihe. Some work of noble note. Across the universe. The Time Warp again. All memory and fate.
21 Morality 105
Silentio Dei. On the genealogy of morals. Human, all too human. Away from Omelas.
22 Old Age 113
Comfortably numb. Catabasis. Cassandra’s golden years. Volver.
23 Parents (The Liberation from) 119
Be good. Be you. Be back.
24 Perception 123
Use your illusion. Umwelten. How things really are.
 25 Politics 129
The tools of the trade. A shining city on the hill. Into the catacombs. News from Nowhere.
26 Power 137
The great chains of being. The invisible hand. Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
27 Poverty 141
Cui bono? Double double jeopardy. UBI bene?
28 Regret 145
Nothing, really? The ledger. Fools and heroes.
29 Religion 149
A rose by any other name. Hanging onto the tiger’s tail. The heart of a heartless world. Pride and prejudice.
30 Science 155
Truth to power. The two towers. Power-proofing science.
31 Stupidity 159
Human, all too human. An eclipse of common sense. The wages of folly. Worse than a fool. The stupidity of crowds. The unholy trinity.
32 Suffering 165
Mindsets. Varieties. Mechanisms. Options.
33 Technology 171
Comfortably numb. The fiery sword. Cura te ipsum.
34 Thinking 175
Transitional. Treacherous. Transgressional.
35 Time 181
The sandstorm. Faster, slower, true. The tyranny of now. The arrow of time.
36 Truth 185
A melancholy pearl. Ministries of information. Into the well.
37 War 189
A room with a view. After Babel. Blowing in the wind.
38 Youth 195
Another difficult dilemma. Silver spoon or not. Choice and chance. Janus introversus.
Afterword 201
Just dropped in (to see what condition my condition was in)
Acknowledgments 203
Notes 205
References 271
Index 311"This work will be welcomed by any reader interested in the complexity of the human condition, and will especially appeal to students of the arts and literature, psychology, and ethics." 
— CHOICEShimon Edelman is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of Computing the Mind, The Happiness of Pursuit, and other books.Our brains, bodies, and behavior are the products of a long history of interplay among the many factors that have determined the course of life of each of our ancestors, going back billions of years. How those lives were lived is now water under the bridge. Out of each individual’s entire life, the only thing of any consequence for evolution is the bottom line: their fitness, which is a measure of how effective their lineup of genes and their cultural repertoire are at replication.
Neither bodily perfection, nor subjective well-being are optimized by selection based on fitness. This simple fact should cut short any complaints about various deplorable aspects of our physique or about the paucity of HAPPINESS in our lives. Railing at evolution is as pointless as throwing a tantrum at the elements: one may end up as laughingstock for the ages, like Xerxes, the Persian king who ordered the waters of the Hellespont to be given 300 lashes and branded with red-hot iron for obstructing his invasion of Greece. Still, keeping a record of the iniquities that have been visited upon us by evolution makes sense: it may help us understand what we are and why, and perhaps eventually act on this understanding.
The list of regrettable traits that evolution has saddled us with runs long. Some of these—teeth instead of a nice beak; a wobbly stack of vertebrae instead of an exoskeleton—are mentioned in chapter 22, which is about OLD AGE, a condition that makes one really feel some of evolution’s worst screw-ups. Quite a few others come to mind. On the bodily side, the list includes, in addition to teeth and the spinal column, the useless appendix and the inane anatomy of shoulders and knees. On the side of behavior and culture, I find particularly lamentable the traits that underlie discord between adolescent CHILDREN and their PARENTS, due in part to the evolution sanctioned drive for territorial dispersal.
A revealing illustration of how closely intertwined biological and cultural evolutionary processes are is the case of pain. It is commonly thought that pain signals tissue damage, but there is more to it. There are striking differences in how humans and other animals experience pain. A deer with a broken leg appears much less affected by it than a human with the same predicament (which I know from personal experience, having once broken a leg and, on another occasion, both clavicles). A compelling explanation of this difference may be found in our ultrasociality: humans, but not deer, have come to depend in their survival on help from their conspecifics. In the woods, a lame deer would do well to keep quiet, lest it attracts wolves; a human with a broken leg can reasonably hope to be carried away by the rest of the foraging party before the wolves arrive.
Even if similar reasons can be found for other types of pain too, they would not justify our continued susceptibility to SUFFERING—neither with regard to our evolutionary fitness, nor with regard to our well-being or HAPPINESS. Our social environment and our TECHNOLOGY are now such that experiencing agony that makes us scream would appear to be unnecessary. When I was lying on my back with two broken clavicles after flying off my bike, the driver of a passing car called an ambulance; any screaming on my part would have only interfered with the paramedics’ work. On my solo hikes in the wilderness, where no one can hear you scream, I make a point of keeping my satellite communications device where I can reach it even after a fall. And if my ache is mental, I know where to find help. And yet, I can hardly hope to be as serene as a deer in the face of pain or suffering.