Losing My Best Friend in College to Suicide

Losing My Best Friend in College to Suicide

And My Best Advice to the Young

by

Eric Paul Nolte

While the title of this essay is about losing my best college friend to suicide, this is also a meditation on the suicidal behavior of so many young people I have known and lost to horrible and pointless deaths, especially in recent years, and to others for whom I fear they are in danger today. 

It is also my heartfelt, mindful, and best advice to all the young people I know. This is a paean to a rational love of life, and the better world such a love may engender. 

I particularly fear for those young people on college campuses today, especially those in the humanities, where a dense and toxic fog rolled in long ago and reduced the intellectual conversation to a vertigo-inspiring babble of postmodern epistemology and ethics.  

I believe that young minds and hearts are put in mortal danger when their professors assure them that all normative values are entirely the arbitrary conventions of the tribe they were born into, and that nobody can confidently say that any ideas are necessarily right or wrong, or true or false, and yet also proclaim that all cultures are equally good (except for the West, which is absolutely condemned as the essence of evil... except for socialists ... except for Stalin and Mao...)

Yet there is still the vestigial whiff of common sense, which, from my having spent years abroad, I know is not so common after all, but instead amounts to the faint scent of Aristotle and the late European Enlightenment.  And anybody who displays the faintest whiff of this common sense and sanity has to know that when you take a dose of heroin, this is not entirely unlike walking on a tightrope from rim to rim across the diameter of a live volcano.  

We recently lost yet another golden boy to such an inadvertent heroin overdose.  In the weeks since then, I have often burst into tears at the thought of this absurd and avoidable tragedy.  I knew the boy for many years.  I don't think one would be mistaken to attribute this boy's death to something suicidal.  

What the hell is wrong with the sorrows of these young Werthers, as Goethe framed the matter?

After my first trial at college was so rudely interrupted by my Army draft notice, I lost my best college friend to suicide.  What was most shattering about this loss was that my friend, Chris Lambert, was an Objectivist! I had never known a more articulate, clear, strong advocate of rational self-interest, and of life as a process of creating one's own meaning, purpose, and joy.  And yet he took his own life.  It was completely shattering to me.  Chris was also an astonishingly gifted actor.  Among other things, at 18, Chris had recreated Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight," a one man show in which he convincingly portrayed the 70 year old Mark Twain's traveling theater shows. 

*   *   *

Now, it's hard enough to come to understand Ayn Rand through the thicket of cultural hostility... but ... I was a red diaper baby, veteran of an urban socialist commune, reared to be an heir to Trotsky's world view.

So, here we are many decades since Chris' death. I could go on at some length about the horror of losing Chris and the overwhelming slap in the face to my then nascent grasp of Objectivism-- to have the most articulate spokesman for the philosophy of loving life on earth... take his own life for no reason that anybody could understand.  No suicide note.  No evident foul play.  Nothing.  He hanged himself in his off-campus apartment.  I have struggled to make sense of it ever since.  Chris and I were 19 at the time.  I am now 63.  It still makes me dizzy and sad. 

So let us move on to yet another horrible suicide:

The son of close friends took his own life many years ago.  He was a golden boy of 20, gifted at music and everything else he ever touched, but he was impatient, idealistic in a way that was deeply skewed towards the misanthropic, earth-worshipping wing of the most militant environmentalists. At the grave site, I was talking with one of the boy's closest friends, a young man who shared the dead boy's ideals. We were talking about environmentalism and the stakes for humanity. I mentioned that I had recently read that the ban on DDT had just then been determined to have been a politically hasty and scientifically unwarranted decision, and, more importantly, that the subsequent global ban on DDT had resulted in a worldwide catastrophe. Where malaria had been virtually eliminated in the world before then, the global ban on DDT caused a resurgence of malaria that over a period of just a few years had killed hundreds of millions of people, particularly in Africa. 

The dead boy's friend, speaking as a radical environmentalist, coldly snapped at me, "We don't need those people anyway!" 

An epiphany came to me at that moment: if your deepest ideals cherish the earth and despise humanity, what does this make of you, as a human being? It makes you an instance, an example, of the thing you despise. 

How are you supposed to live? Wouldn't it be a good example of idealism to cheer the deaths of hundreds of millions, to pray for the appearance of a new virus to wipe out humanity, or even to believe it would be a virtuous and laudable action ... to take your own life?

I couldn't help but wonder if my friends' son had taken his own life, motivated, at least in part, by such a horrible idea.

*   *   *

Now, here we are, still many years later.  More recently, two friends of ours were over for dinner and spoke intimately, in voices drained of heat or hope, of their high school son (well, a step-son to one of them) who has driven into a ditch, metaphorically speaking, that makes me fear for his life and moves me to meditate on his predicament while trying to figure out some strategy to help him.

This boy's entrenched lethargy makes me worry that he might want to take his own life. Now I remember him in earlier years as sweet little boy with a charming wit and an endearing warmth and affection. It's a horrible and wrenching thought to see this precious kid as snagged on a branch in a river where he is arranging things so that he might just let go and drown! How did we get here?  

The boy moved himself to his mother's house in a neighboring state, just a week before school opened. This move allows the boy to play hooky while apparently setting things up to drop out of school altogether. This kid has given his parents agonies of doubt and despair. The parents arrange one opportunity after another for him to find some way to become engaged with school, therapy, sports, and other activities. Sometimes the schools' actions have been deplorable, but always the parents are immediately available with another intervention, and always to no avail. Now the boy is grossly obese and depressed.

My wife is a public school teacher, so I hear from her an ear-searing stream of wounded, indignant, frustrated pleas, complaints, sympathies, outrages, and other observations on the schools, the unions, and the government regulators in far-flung cities from where central planning bureaucrats and politicians fire at the teachers fusillades of edicts and absurd, but faddish, ever-changing educational policy. With our experience of seeing (between my wife and me) three kids into college, and with my reading of many shelves of books on education, psychology, happiness, flourishing, and philosophy, I must say that I no longer believe in the sanctity of a conventional education, at least as it is practiced on the government controlled campuses.

Nevertheless, I believe that knowledge is a key value of life-serving consequence. The knowledge that counts most deeply, of course, is of those matters that give us the intellectual powers to put together a life of our own, by our own lights, for the purpose of our own, long-term, rational happiness and flourishing-- something like what Aristotle called Eudaimonia.

But there is no way to help anybody who will not be helped, who does not want to be helped. The boy has long resisted both school and therapy of different orientations. 

Help without self-motivation does not work. This kind of help does not work with psychotherapy, or education, or in any other important field.  And mandatory "help" is least effective of all.  Any doubt about this claim can be resolved by a look at Stanton Samenow's study on giving psychotherapy to prisoners (Inside the Criminal Mind), and another of his books which covers his life's work with children, Before It's Too Late: Why Some Kids Get Into Trouble--and What Parents Can Do About It.)

So the question is, how is this hapless laddie going to pull himself out of this graveyard spiral before he hits the ground and bursts into flames?

*   *   * 

I've heard it said that if there were some activity that troubled kids can find, something they love and enjoy, then there can be some basis for hope, some traction available between enjoyment and the ability to set a course. But this is a treacly half-truth. What if the kid loved nothing but playing violent video games all day? Drinking beer all day? These activities may be loved, but they are clearly bad for the kid, and profoundly self-destructive!

Well, then the statement must be refined: love, as usual, is never enough. Feelings are never enough!

Ah, but nothing is more common in the world than the idea that Antoine de Saint-Exupery captured in his book, The Little Prince, when his character of a wise little fox advises his eponymous little prince: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, for what is essential is invisible to the eye." 

I remember when I read this passage of Saint Ex for the first time as a twelve year old boy, my eyes welled up and my forearms turned to gooseflesh. I felt  flooded by a cosmic insight of enormous power. "Yes!" I thought, and went on to think, "Of course this is a deep and profound truth and I should hold on to this forever!"

This cloying claim to wisdom, that it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, is so woven into the ethos of our culture in general and into my childhood in particular that it took me decades to learn how to square off to this received wisdom, figure out what was wrong with this claim, and learn how to refute this notion.    

Now, passion for some activity may be the basis for beginning to formulate a goal, but passion by itself does not come equipped with a rudder by which one can steer it on a course of one's own choice. A goal is nothing without developing a plan and taking action to achieve it. Developing a plan cannot be guided merely by feelings because emotions can teach us nothing new, these effusions of the heart merely display what we already believe.

Passion spawns dreams, but dreams and goals must be judged for their life-serving power. Without such judgment, we're back at the same treacly half-truth as when we said that the boy needs something to love if he is to get any traction between the dream and setting a course to reach it, or of developing a plan of action to achieve a goal.

The goal has to be judged as rational.

If you're steering your life by the dictum, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly," you are saying, "You should steer by your feelings."  

These days, who on earth would dare to object to this idea that you just have to go with your heart!

Indeed. Who would object? The way out of the woods lies in a rational epistemology.

*   *   * 

One of the deepest troubles here is that we live in a world that is still so backwards with respect to matters of epistemology, that it remains largely unquestioned, and even unchallengeable, that faith is a legitimate alternative to reason as a means of knowledge.

I should interject that by faith I mean the dictionary denotation of belief in the truth of a proposition without evidence. By knowledge I mean a correspondence between reality and the claims a proposition makes about reality. By reason I mean logic applied to the evidence of experience; rationality; or "the faculty that grasps and integrates the material provided by the senses," as Ayn Rand defined it.

So here we are again at the sticking point of the world, the death grip of what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world," the pre-modern ethos of superstition, versus the reactionary, but equally senseless ravings of their postmodern skeptic opponents who deny that knowledge is anything but a tribal, arbitrary convention. 

The premodern mystics say, "I know what's absolutely true because God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it ... except that if you don't agree with me, you're going to hell." 

The postmoderns, by contrast, say, "There is no absolute truth (except for the absolute that there is no absolute truth) and so Truth is entirely a matter of which tribe you were born into. This is multiculturalism; cultural relativism; or the idea that no tribe's ideas can be any better or more true than those of any others. That all these tribes purvey radically contradictory ideas troubles me not at all because we postmoderns are beyond any old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy questions of enlightenment now, and this fact of contradiction between the ideas of one tribe and another could only trouble those poor, benighted sods who insist on clinging to this obsolete belief in absolutes."

It remains true today that the only foundational opposition to this stunningly false alternative between premodern mysticism and postmodern skepticism is found in the stream of thinkers that began with Aristotle and who trace themselves through Ayn Rand and her like-minded kinfolk; in short, the advocates of reason, as defined above. Rand called her philosophy Objectivism, and evaluated her own significance as arriving at a time that allowed her to take up and significantly advance the Aristotelian stream. Similarly, she saw that she had been able to take up and advance many of the key ideas of the European Enlightenment which flowed from Aristotelianism. The American founders had mined their ideological origins from the Aristotelian and Enlightenment thinkers, and Rand was aware that she had significantly advanced these ideas. For example, Rand showed how the normative values of America, such as that the idea of individual rights is secular, not divine.  As she framed the matter, individual rights are not granted by divine law, nor by congressional law, but by the law of identity, which sees these rights as bedrock conditions of survival, rooted in human nature as such.

In any contest between which fundamental outlook is the most life-serving, the premodern mystic, the postmodern skeptic, or the Aristotelian/ Objectivist/ European Enlightenment, I ask you who, given the facts, could reject reason, observation and logic, and instead uphold either a) the verification of truth by means of mystical faith, meaning the stark belief in the truth of an idea without evidence; or b) the skeptic's denial of the possibility of confidence in any knowledge? 

But we're not given the facts. And the person in question here was a sweet little boy, affectionate with his family and friends, who had a charming sense of humor, and is now a depressed, obese teenager, snagged on a branch in the river, who appears to be wholly innocent of owning any life-serving values, and probably believes the reigning dogma purveyed at school these days, that self-esteem is what other people think of you ... which is why I fear this poor soul is in danger for his life.

Geez! Where do you even begin here?

Maybe with self-esteem, because without it, nobody can find the energy even to get his feet out of bed in the morning.

But, self-esteem is already a complicated concept, derived from a foundation of many prerequisite concepts, and a full grasp of it can not be achieved without a prior grasp of these earlier ideas.

So be it.  So are many of the important concepts in philosophy and science woven into a complicated web that requires, ultimately a grasp of the whole web. We enter the fray where we can, and then circle back later, in order to be systematic and rigorously fill in the blanks as prior personal and accumulated human knowledge allow.

                                                   *   *   *

Philosophy is a whirling merry-go-round that will never stop whirling merely to allow us to board without danger or grueling effort. How to jump aboard without faltering, getting whacked and losing teeth, is the first challenge. But it can be done if you just start running abeam the outer arc, find something to grab ahold of, and pull yourself aboard. From there we can begin to contemplate the whole machine around us, as if the machine were stopped, because now we're aboard and moving at the same relative speed as the machine itself.

So we tell the boy in question here, "Son, you're in trouble. 

"Do you hear me? I fear for your life. Did you get that? It matters! You matter!"

And here is my best advice to the young:

*   *   *

Your life matters!  Without you, without your being alive, there is no possibility that anything else can ever matter. Your being alive is, as the old philosophers put it, a necessary but not sufficient condition for anything else to matter in your life.

So you need to hold your life as important before you're going to be able to hold anything else as important.

You get this? Another term for this matter is to say you need self-esteem.

Oh, God, I bet you've heard endless fluff about self-esteem in school, but what they're telling you is nonsense! Self-esteem is crucial, but it is not what you have been told it is. Self-esteem is not the result of what other people think of you. 

Self-esteem is an accomplishment that you have to earn, and it lies at the intersection of several important things: you must come to feel worthy of achieving happiness. You must learn that this happiness is something that you must achieve by intelligent work. You must achieve a certain confidence in your ability to live your life, which you can expect to happen when you have acquired enough skills to know you are capable of making your way in the world. While you might not feel all these good things at this very moment, maybe you can see some evidence from your experience of having already learned many things. From this inductive evidence, you can know that you are capable of learning how to make your way in the world.

Let me expand on this idea that you need to acquire the conviction that you are worthy of happiness: 

Knowing that you are worthy of happiness is an accomplishment too, because, for one thing, this whole idea is awash in confusion and craziness coming from all your moral leaders who will tell you that any big concern with your own happiness is selfish and bad! But they're wrong! You need to learn that you are indeed worthy of happiness, but you'll never achieve it by going through life with hedonistic, self-indulgent thrills, or by just any old path of willy-nilly mindless bouncing off the walls. 

Your life is your most sacred possession! Your life is yours to live! You are on this earth to live your life and be happy, and you can put your life together by your own lights, and do damn near anything you want to do, so long as it is rational, peaceful, and respectful of the same right in everybody else.

Your life is the very source of the possibility of valuing anything at all. You should want to live because, barring any bad luck like being captured as somebody's slave, or experiencing the curse of an incurable illness with intractable pain, joy is the reward of a life well-lived. 

You can create a life of meaning, purpose, and, yes, joy! Why not? This is the possibility that life offers all of us, and it's not that hard! It's just not so difficult, if you'll just get your head screwed on right, and realize that the world is infected by all these crazy ideas, and that you do not have to be a victim of these ideas! 

You can get the right perspective to dismantle the crazy ideas and their power over you if you demand that the ideas you accept must make sense!

How do you know if an idea makes sense? For one thing, you can know that no idea makes sense if it contradicts itself. For example, it is a contradiction when somebody tells you that to be happy you must live a life of self-sacrifice for the lives of others. This is crazy because it is telling you that to be happy you must renounce your own happiness.

Ayn Rand got most of these matters absolutely right. She is not a deity, and you cannot trust anybody's ideas without wrestling with them for yourself and making them your own by a process of bringing everything you believe to the final court of logic, evidence, and observation. Rand, combined with your own observation and reasoning, is a good starting point for trying to unpack the wide range of puzzlements, conundrums, and imponderables that have bedeviled Homo saps since we first appeared on the planet about 100,000 years ago.

Another foundational truth here: reality exists outside you, but includes you. Your mind does not invent reality, you grasp reality by sense perception, and you judge any puzzling aspects of your perception of it by logic. Logic is the process of identifying things without contradiction in the full context of everything else you know. There are no contradictions in reality, so for one to draw the conclusion that the underlying nature of reality entails a contradiction, is evidence that one is making a mistake. This is not to be confused with the important admission of saying, when appropriate, 'I don't know.'" To say we don't know something leaves open the possibility of a better explanation as it comes down the road, and makes it a reasonable ambition actively to search for these better answers. 

Logic, which is the process of non-contradictory identification, works because reality is what it is, and not just anything we wish it were, in defiance of the facts. The law of identity states that things are what they are. A is A. A thing, A, cannot be both A and another thing, B, at the same time and in the same respect. A thing can't be a table and yet also be a fish tank at the same time. Nothing can be entirely burning in flames, and yet be frozen solid at the same time. You can't harvest a crop in the future if you eat your stock seed today, contrary to the ravings of our mainstream economists, preaching the madness of John Maynard Keynes.

As Rand put the matter, loosely paraphrased, life, your life, is the very source of your possibility of valuing anything, and if you choose to live, you must hold three cardinal values as the compass by which you steer your life: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Reason, as your basic means of survival. Purpose, as your choice of the happiness that you want your life to be about, and which your mind must then develop a plan to achieve. Self-esteem, as the fuel that alone can power your efforts to make your way in the world.

Now, another crucial point here: A value is something we want so much that we are willing to take the actions needed to acquire it. A virtue is the means by which we pursue a value. Value is a goal, virtue is a corresponding action taken in order to gain that value. So there is very long list of virtues corresponding to all the values a person might ever hold. All our virtues pertain to the relation between consciousness and reality. The primary virtues required to achieve the cardinal values of reason, purpose, and self-esteem are: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride. There are many other virtues too, at the top of which one might include benevolence towards others, and steadfast persistence at a task in the face of obstacles.  Rand fleshes out these primary relationships in Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged. One could also add a myriad of other virtues of life-serving importance, such as optimism, humor, friendliness, nurturing love and friendship, good hygiene, cleanliness, punctuality, tidiness, a healthful diet, the good habits of cultivating beauty, good health, of running one's life ship shape and squared away, and regular physical exercise. Given the sad state of the world, I would also add the virtue of lending a helping hand to the hapless, when we can do so without harming ourselves or encouraging something else that is bad.

For now, I will end with the advice that, in any contest between your feelings and your reason, trust your reason. Why trust the mind over the heart? Because feelings are automatic evaluations made on the basis of what you already know. Feelings are not a window through which to view or acquire new knowledge. Feelings cannot offer you the means of verifying the truth of a proposition. The verification and testing of an idea depend on objective facts and logic, which are precisely what emotions cannot provide.

Morality is a code of values chosen by you as a guide to how to steer a course in the world.

As Rand put it, "The purpose of morality is not to teach you how to suffer and die, but how to enjoy yourself and live."

So go and figure out how to enjoy yourself and live! It's the right thing to do! And nobody can effectively do it for you, but you! 

If nothing inspires you to want to get up and out, then you have proof positive that an elephant of crazy ideas is sitting on your head.  All small children know what they want and they cry out to get it!  What the hell happened to you?  If you don't know what you want, you will need to figure out which cockamamie intellectual virus you have swallowed that has made you vulnerable to allowing an elephant to sit on your head. 

Taking your own life is not a good way out. Taking your own life will make it impossible to find a good way out.

So get going! Excelsior!


                                                   E  P  N 

2015.0428a
revised 2015.0610
2015.0619
.0801

Freedom Makes Asinine Ideas Ultimately Self-Correcting

Free Speech Makes Asinine Ideas Ultimately Self-Correcting

by

Eric Paul Nolte

The student organization called Young Americans for Liberty just posted a blurb on their website that praised ancient Athenian democracy for ostracizing citizens whose ideas offended them.

I would caution these young students to remember that democracy is just another oppressive political system unless it is chained on a short leash to a thick wall of constitutionally protected respect for the rights of every individual to life, liberty, and property.

Never forget that unfettered democracy is what happens when two hungry mountain lions and a llama vote on what to have for dinner! Unfettered democracy is a lynch mob, not the road to Utopia. 

Remember too that ancient Athenians, peeved at Socrates for publicly leading his students to embarrass powerful citizens, voted to put him to death! They voted to banish Aristotle too, but, thinking of poor Socrates, he left Athens before they could snag him, vowing that he would not let Athens so sin twice against philosophy. 

Attempting to censor ideas one does not like is not only wrong, but pointless and even self-defeating too, because in a free market of ideas, rational, life-serving values ultimately tend to prevail. Why? Because the rational is the life-serving! Stupid ideas ultimately must gurgle down a graveyard spiral of self-destruction because they are life-threatening. This is intellectually Darwinian and therefore the better ideas must necessarily prevail, in the long run. 

Let everybody trumpet whatever they believe, no matter how foolish. The craziest ideas will be most obviously crazy in a free market of ideas, where the contrast with rational ideas is available in a side-by-side comparison. 

A key point here is that the creation of a political machinery that might allow one party to attempt to suppress bad ideas will also allow tyrants to attempt to suppress good ideas too. 

The raging fires caused by crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses must eventually fizzle out, even when this extinction may not happen in our lifetime! 

The trend line, measured from the dawn of Homo saps to the asinine and murderous mutterings of blockheads and jackasses today, is nevertheless tilted slightly upwards, to the benefit of life, liberty, and the very possibility of Aristotle's eudaimonia, or rational happiness.

E  P  N  

2015.0427
rev. 2015.1129

Andreas Lubitz, Suicide and Mass Murderer

Andreas Lubitz, Suicide and Mass Murderer

by 

Eric Paul Nolte

As an airline captain for a major international carrier with nearly 40 years experience as a commercial pilot, I take aviation disasters very personally. I wept as I read the horrifying and saddening news of Tuesday’s crash and the death of all souls aboard the Germanwings Flight 9525, from Barcelona to Duesseldorf. 

The key facts here, announced this morning by the French prosecutor, Brice Robin, are these: the crash was without any doubt caused by Andreas Lubitz, the 28 year old German co-pilot. After the captain left the cockpit to use the restroom, Lubitz manually locked the flight deck door, thereby making it impossible for anyone to re-enter the flight deck, and then, in good weather, he disconnected the autopilot and deliberately flew the airplane in a steep dive into the side of an Alpine mountain.  All 150 passengers and crew perished instantly. The cockpit voice recorder preserved the sounds of Lubitz's breathing, the pounding on the flight deck door, and the terrified screaming from those in the cabin right up until the moment of impact.

Obviously, this crash is both a suicide and a mass murder.  The question is why did Lubitz do it?

An article by Morgan Winsor in today’s International Business Times drew attention to a debate now over the question that a reporter asked about the co-pilot’s religion. Winsor wrote that, “Robin said the crash did not show any signs of terrorism. Some were appalled by the reporter’s inquiry.”

A little while later Winsor quoted Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, an associate professor of political science with a courtesy appointment in religious studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, who said, "This line of questioning makes no sense to me whatsoever. I find it disturbing and depressing that at a time like this some people feel compelled to search desperately for explanations that presume religious causation.”

No sense whatsoever?  On what planet is this multiculturalist, politically correct  ideologue living?  Every day we hear of yet another Muslim true believer, sometimes two or even more, who has strapped a bomb vest to his body and gone out and murdered countless random innocent civilian victims.  Until the secular European enlightenment pulled the righteously murderous fangs out of the head of Christianity, the ocean of blood spilled in the name of their religion was just as deep as that of Islam, but today, no other religion on the planet but Islam can be tarred with this godawful fact.  It is perfectly reasonable to wonder about the murderer’s values, including his religious or philosophical motives, which might offer some explanatory power for why he murdered.  It is foolish to dismiss such questions about a mass murderer's motives.

Most suicides, apart from the Islamic suicide bombers, are done in desperate pits of angst and despair, private, and alone.  Sometimes they lash out at those they perceive as having wronged them, usually family members, and here we see murders paired with suicides, but these examples are not of mass murder, as is the case with this atrocity committed on the Germanwings flight.

It would not be unprecedented for an airline crash to be caused by a suicidal pilot.  In 1999, Gamal al-Batouti, the pilot of Egypt Air 999, dove his Boeing 767 into the Atlantic off Nantucket, 30 minutes after takeoff from New York, crying, “Allahu Akbar,” several times during the fatal dive.  But subsequent investigation revealed that the pilot’s motive may have been something more like his deep depression, rather than any religious fanaticism.  So his being a Muslim would appear not to have been a factor here at all.

As I write this, we do not know what possessed this privileged and gifted young German to commit such an atrocity.  Depression?  Righteously religious and suicidal mass murder?  Depression is a thinking disorder, according to the experts, such as Aaron T. Beck and Martin E. P. Seligman.  I am persuaded that otherworldly religion and postmodern philosophy are also thinking disorders.  I will do my best to restrain my judgment until all the relevant facts come in.

My deepest blessings and compassion to the families of the loved ones lost.  Bless us all.  Even you, Andreas Lubitz… what the hell went wrong with you? A lost soul, desperate and starved for life-serving values.  Like so much of the rest of the world.  What the hell went wrong with you, you miserable tumbleweed tangle of insanity!?

E  P  N 

2015.0326c

"Peace in Our Time" Appeasement of Terrorists

"Peace in Our Time" Appeasement of Terrorists

by

Eric Paul Nolte

A cartoon portrait of a weeping Mohammed appeared on the cover of last week’s Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine of satire, declaring, “Je suis Charlie.” Above the cartoon figure of Mohammed is the declaration, “All is forgiven.”

All the commentary I have read about this declaration of mercy assumes that it is Mohammed who is forgiving the murderously rampaging Muslim terrorists who had recently killed 12 people in the Parisian offices of the magazine. The terrorists proclaimed that they were avenging the prophet Mohammed for the allegedly unforgivable sin of drawing pictures of the Prophet. 

But I wondered who or what was really meant to be forgiven? 

Couldn’t it just as well be intended that Mohammed might be depicted as forgiving the cartoonists? This would be a lovely thought! What a fond hope!   

But this forgiveness of the cartoonists would be impossible because it is contrary to the Islamic commandment to kill all those who dare to portray the prophet in pictures. Put another way, it was Mohammed himself who commanded righteous Muslims to kill such infidels. So the idea that Mohammed might forgive the cartoonists would be a lovely possibility only if the prophet could be imagined as the head of a religion that is actually preaching the kind of peace on earth that does not treat a difference of opinion as an unforgivable sin that must be punished by death. This is not the historical figure who was Mohammed, who was, instead, a petulant little snit who got his nose bent out of joint over every little slander, real or imagined, who intractably called for death to every infidel, and carried his religion by the sword damned near to the Great Wall of China, in the east, and in the west almost to the gates of Paris, and all the way to the gates of Vienna.  

Parenthetically, but not entirely incidentally, the Muslims assaulted Vienna three times, the last time as recently as 1683! John Locke had already developed his unprecedented  theory of human rights that gave us the ideological origins of the American project, including, to the point here, our bedrock belief in free speech.

So, imagining Mohammed to be forgiving the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is ludicrous, to anyone who has actually read the Koran (I prefer this traditional spelling; same for "Mohammed.") Ha! Fat chance! Yet I can indeed imagine that this Mohammed's forgiveness of the cartoonists could have been the meaning intended by the cartoonist who drew the weeping prophet.

Unfortunately, I think that these cartoonists did not intend to show Mohammed as tearfully offering absolution to the poor murdered souls at Charlie Hebdo; the reason I think this is because of an article I read in the Manchester Guardian. 

In a news interview, Renald Luzier, a.k.a. Luz, the cartoonist who drew the cover of this first issue of the magazine after the murders, was asked why he drew another picture of Mohammed, knowing that this would offend so many Muslims. 

Monsieur Luzier was clearly emotional as he spoke of how cartoonists were once children who loved to draw and play. He fervently said that so too were the terrorists once children who drew and played, but they grew up and lost their sense of humor. The idea of a weeping Mohammed simply came to him as he pondered the matter, conjured up out of his own humanity. The whole idea is of a man, sadly crying out for those who were so cruelly murdered. Luzier may have been hoping to invoke the humanity of this impossible, imaginary Mohammed. The idea simply stuck with him, and, voila!— there was his drawing for the magazine cover.

A less symbolic explanation was given by one of the surviving columnists for Charlie Hebdo, Zineb El Rhazoui. According to the Guardian story, Rhazoui said that the cover was a call to forgive the terrorists who murdered her colleagues last week. I find it amazing that she said she did not hate the murderers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. Moreover, she “urged Muslims to accept humor.” She said, “We don’t feel any hate to them. We know that the struggle is not with them as people, but the struggle is with an ideology.” Not the people? The people who hold this murderous ideology? As if people are nothing but empty vessels filled with ideologies that make them bounce around helplessly like puppets on a string, pulled by ideas they have no power to resist or examine. The terrorists are people who choose to follow a murderous ideology. 

Yes, I grant you that it is hard to exhibit intellectual independence in a culture that worships conformity to an ethos of mindless submission, which is the literal meaning of the Arabic word, Islam. But we don’t protect ourselves or make any progress against such cultural forces by encouraging them with the inducement and reward of forgiveness.

I am baffled, no, that’s not quite it, I am appalled by Rhazoui’s expression of forgiveness and her claim not to hate the terrorists who so righteously and terrifyingly murdered her colleagues.

Our emotions, the psychologists tell us (see Martin E. P. Seligman, for example) are the embodiment of our values, they are an automatic, psychosomatic barometer of our beliefs. Hatred is the emotion that arises from a perceived injustice, it is our response to what we believe to be unfair. So what would it mean not to feel hatred for a person who murders someone we deeply love? Imagine what you would feel towards someone who would murder your child, your wife, or your husband? What would it mean to forgive such a monster? Should we forgive Hitler? 

Now, a reasonable person might be inclined to forgive somebody who expresses regret for his wrongful actions, begs your forgiveness, promises never to do it again, expresses some understanding of the evil actions he did, and offers a logical argument to persuade you to believe why he will never do it again. But to forgive these unrepentant, righteous murderers? Never!

I find it hard to believe that Rhazoui truly forgives these Islamic terrorist murderers. Such forgiveness sounds something like pious, Christian, turn-the-other-cheek bushwa. Maybe she is scared that she will anger the Muslim crazies even more if she expresses hatred and provoke them into committing ever more atrocities. 

Or … here it is … maybe she holds the delusional hope that she can somehow appease these despicable monsters. 

Maybe Madame Rhazoui truly believes that only by not condemning the terrorists can she leave open a space for dialogue and eventual reconciliation with Muslim murderers, for the purpose of achieving “peace in our time,” as the hapless British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain put it in 1938, after his appeasement of Hitler, and one year to the month before Hitler invaded Poland. 

Fat chance of appeasement, rapprochement, or dialogue with Islamist totalitarians, like the Charlie Hebdo terrorists. 

Those who wield swords in the name of mindless submission to the murderous commands of any ideology or religion are the least likely people on earth to be open to peaceful co-existence. If outright self-destruction is not our goal, then the language of those who begin wielding force, impelled by mindless faith, must be answered by force, in the name of self-defense.

If, without initiating physical force against others, we express our opinions, and affirm our cherished belief in freedom of speech, if our ideas offend their tender sensibilities, well then, too damned bad. Let them grow up and get on with their lives, peacefully. Or else we stop their threats with appropriate force.

E  P  N

2015.0120
rev.0801

Searching for a Musical Voice of My Own

Searching for A Musical Voice of My Own

More Thoughts on What Matters in Music?

And on What is There to Sing About?

Eric Paul Nolte

A couple musical matters have been on my mind recently. 

One is the question that dogs me now: what is there to sing about? This moved me to write an essay recently, but I have more to say. 

Also I've been thinking again about M. Zachary Johnson's Dancing With the Muses, and how, from my experience of working at music for many years, I feel that Johnson illuminates and integrates many matters that, for me, were stuck in a rather murky state. What really matters in music? I especially appreciate Johnson's explication of Rameau's wooly-headed but portentous, dire and cognitively destructive attempt to begin a student's musical education with instruction in four-part harmony, long before there has been any discussion of the more fundamental matters bearing on melody. This is like trying to learn algebra without knowing arithmetic or how to handle common fractions. Rameau's book was published in 1722 and its message of beginning music theory with learning four part harmony has dominated music pedagogy ever since.

It has personally taken me years to sort out my grasp of harmony and counterpoint, and truly begin to figure out what I believe matters most in music.

While I was genetically doomed to be musical, given that my parents were accomplished symphony string players who set me to playing the violin and the piano at five, I did not work very hard at music as a child, and the music bug never bit me until I was in my mid-twenties. At that point I contracted a virulent case of it. 

In my late twenties, after the Army, I had been a pilot for two wobbly commuter airlines, and when the last one of these went bust, I went back to school, enrolling at New College of Florida, at Sarasota.

Arriving at New College, I knew I wanted to study music, but I had it in mind that I was a musical failure because I had flunked out of the North Carolina School of the Arts as a piano major, a few years before. 

(Footnote: all right, in fairness, I did very well during my first semester at NCSA. I studied with Marjorie Mitchell, learned a Beethoven piano sonata in E, Opus 14 Number 1, which I performed in master class with Claude Frank, and a Mozart piano concerto in A, K.414, which I also performed in master class. Neither of these were huge virtuoso knuckle busters, but they were hard enough. Then at the start of the second semester, my draft board wrote me to say, in essence, "Boy, you know that college deferment we gave you? No more. We'll kindly let you finish out the year in which you're enrolled, but this is to remind you that your ass belongs to us, and we expect you to present it to us at your local induction center in June!" Thereafter I was incapable of so much as cracking a book. I even flunked piano. Eight years later I was admitted to New College on academic probation.)

So, at New College I wanted to study the psychology of what makes it possible to learn how to make music at a high level. This was maybe a self-deluding strategy for trying to get around my own perceived failure at music.

What I found instead was Gray Perry, then an 83 year old concert pianist and pedagogue extraordinaire, who had a musical pedigree that on one side went back to Beethoven, and on another side went back to Chopin. Gray had studied in Paris in the 1920s, at the American Conservatory at Fontainbleau, where Nadia Boulanger taught.

I went to Gray because I'd made friends with one of his students who suggested that I approach him. When I told Gray that I thought I was a musical failure but that I still wanted to study piano, he listened to me play for a while, and then he gently growled at me, "Son, you're not a musical failure. You don't know enough to be a musical failure!"

I was taken aback until Gray continued and said, "Now... here is how you can go about mastering this thorny figure in this little etude by LeCouppey...." What he meant to say was a kind nudge in the right direction and to point out that I simply had not worked long and intelligently enough to know what kind of goods I might have!

Gray gave me a stunning insight that amounted to a profound shift in focus. Where I had felt paralyzed by doubt about if I could learn to play the piano at a high level, Gray blew away my cloud of doubt with a much better question: don't ask if you can do something, instead ask how do you do it? How can I figure it out? How to unravel a knot? How to take a problem apart and put it back together? And the answers were forthcoming. Gray gave me a tool kit full of powerful ideas on how to build one's powers at music, intellectually and physically. 

Gray was the only piano teacher I had ever known to speak with depth and sophistication about the problems of piano technique and how to develop it. He brought with him a sensibility of music steeped in the golden tone and long line of melody and structure, purveyed during the golden age of such piano virtuosi as Rachmaninoff, Josef and Rosina Lhevinne, Joseph Hoffman, Artur Rubinstein, etc. I studied with Gray for three years and progressed enough to learn, for example, a few of the Chopin Etudes. He was a dear soul to me and taught me so much that was wonderful! He very kindly always made me his last student on my lesson day, and while he only charged me for an hour, he always gave me twice that and often more! He was the closest thing to a mentor I ever had, and I was bereft at his loss so soon after I left New College.

Marc Silverman, also a student of Gray's and another graduate of New College, who went on to become chairman of the piano faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, told me that Gray was the only teacher he ever knew who spoke so effectively about piano technique. All the other teachers were "expression coaches."

My theory and composition teacher at New College was the late Ron Riddle, a curious and wonderful combination of things. He was a serious-minded composer, a jazz pianist who had studied with Oscar Peterson, and an ethnomusicologist who studied with Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Ron had become a specialist in Chinese opera, if you can fathom this vocal taste that screws the voice into the sound of something like mating cats in a dark alley in Beijing. But Ron was an excellent teacher, and at New College all my classes with him were tutorials or small group tutorials in which Ron himself played and commented on every note I wrote! This intense attention was illuminating. He taught harmony from Roger Sessions' Harmonic Practice, the Bach chorales, and species counterpoint from Knut Jeppesen's book. We studied modal counterpoint, then tonal counterpoint, leading up to fugue writing and analysis. In short, I came by something like Johann Joseph Fux's perspective on learning music, and this helped me to find my way to the beginnings of a voice of my own.

However, I always felt that I was missing something, so some years later I began running laps through other harmony and counterpoint textbooks, including those by Walter Piston and even Arnold Schoenberg's book on harmony, which I found surprisingly thorough. I seriously worked through every page and exercise in Hindemith's books on harmony and his Elementary Training for Musicians (which was vastly more comprehensive than its title might suggest.)

But I felt that I still needed something more. At the time, I felt that Hindemith's book on harmony was the best of the lot, but the man simply did not believe in this harmony of the common practice period, the harmony he taught in his book. He felt that this conventional formulation of harmony and tonality was obsolete. He had deep ideas of his own, which he explained at length in his books on The Craft of Musical Composition. But what I liked about Hindemith's book on harmony was that it was written by a deeply accomplished and original composer who brought a composer's sensibility and perspective on what he chose to include and call important.  

Still I felt that what I needed was the work of another accomplished composer who seriously believed in tonality, so I turned then to the books by Tchaikovsky, which I found surprisingly derivative and lacking, and finally to the one by Rimsky-Korsakov, which I liked very much.

One book that saved my sanity, early on, in an age in which the whole world seemed to have fallen off a cliff, was Henry Pleasants' Serious Music and All That Jazz. Pleasants asserts that serious art music of the 20th century had become something of an aesthetic train wreck, far removed from the ability of audiences to grasp or love it. The composers of serious art music had become effete, inbred, and haughtily wrote only for each other, not for the regular audiences of classical music. He believed that jazz had become the only voice of truly serious music in the 20th century, and while I did not agree with this assertion, his book nevertheless helped me to feel more confidence in my own voice and my own ability to make good judgments about music.  

When I moved to New York after New College of Florida, I spent two years studying at (what was then) the New School for Social Research, in the workshop of Aaron Frankel, author of Writing the Broadway Musical. I was paired off with a collaborator, John Benedict, the editor at Norton who created the various Norton anthologies of literature. John wrote the book and lyrics for a children's show about an adolescent niece he dreamed up for Sherlock Holmes. She yearns for exciting adventures of her own, like those of her illustrious uncle, but falls into deeper and deeper trouble before she eventually pulls herself out of the fire. Sadly, John died after we had written a couple dozen songs, and all my work there made its way into yet another one of my portfolios of musical orphans. 

(Footnote: I rewrote some of these pieces, echoing Mendelssohn's title, Songs Without Words, as my own "Songs Shorn of Words," and I transcribed some of these pieces for brass quintet because I had a friend who played in one. Speaking of my portfolios of musical orphans, I also have the sad remains of an hour's worth of music for an orchestral score I wrote for the offbeat, feature length film created by Jonathan Sherer, who was then a young, recent graduate of the School of Visual Design. The project died when he ran out of money in post production.)

Where Henry Pleasants' work stimulated me to think about the weird direction that musical composition had taken in the 20th century, Ayn Rand's work introduced me to some foundational philosophical ideas that allowed me to begin to make sense of the crazy aesthetics of modern art in general. While Rand did not write very much about music per se, her thinking about philosophy in general, and aesthetics in particular, gave me some tools with which I could begin to have a deeper understanding of how and why we got the serialism of Schoenberg and the aleatory music of John Cage, et al. Pleasants and Rand's works helped me to develop more intellectual independence and confidence to judge the musical ideas I came across.

So I come back to Johnson's book again. Dancing with the Muses shines a strong and intelligent light on what is truly important in music. I have come to feel that I can see more clearly than ever before what deeply matters in music, why it matters, and how, in the last century, so much music by so many otherwise talented but misguided composers came to be so ugly and nihilistic! In this regard, once again, let me praise Stephen R. C. Hicks' illuminating and important essay on "Why Art Became Ugly."

Johnson's discussion of the importance of melody above that of harmony makes the very important point that melody, or line, has primacy in music because it comes first, developmentally, or psychologically, and harmony emerges from the interplay of simultaneous voices, or lines, or melodies. Melody is the horizontal line which, when played together with more than one line, creates the vertical dimension of harmony.

Notwithstanding this primacy of melody, I come back to the idea that since the publication in 1722 of Rameau's Treatise on Harmony, it is Rameau's view that dominates the teaching of music theory.

  
Now, knowing that Rameau admired Descarte's rationalism, we are not surprised to see that Rameau begins with some mathematical formulas and somewhat arbitrary axioms and proceeds deductively to spin out implications that are deaf to inductive experience and blind to observation.  

If you've read David Harriman's book, The Logical Leap, on the matter of inductive inference in physics and philosophy, you would know of Descartes' disastrous book on physics, which was an exercise in rationalistically spinning out the implications of crazy, arbitrary axioms he dreamed up, divorced from observation and experience, with results that are as similarly misguided as Rameau's theory that teaches the primacy of harmony in four parts before teaching melody. Indeed, as a matter of theoretical system, he teaches in Part One of his 1722  (which is the deep theoretical and mathematical section) he teaches that melody is derived from harmony. Tell that to all the peoples of the world, whose music everywhere begins with melody and nowhere develops anything like a system of animated harmony, except for the music of Europe, and there only beginning around 500 years ago! (Well, okay, to be completely accurate, there have been some cultures around the world who have employed the occasional drone of two steady tones like the interval of a fifth or a fourth.)

Manfred Clynes' work comes to mind here too. I've mentioned him before, but his conclusion about the nature of music, reached after decades of scientific inquiry, is worth saying again. Clynes is a neurosurgeon, an ethnomusicologist, and a concert pianist (if you can wrap your mind around all those accomplishments!) who has done research into the music of many of the far-flung peoples of the world. You will not be astonished to learn of Clynes' conclusion from these studies.  

Clynes found that, yes, there are vast differences between the music of all these peoples, differences in such elements as the choice of vocal timbre and in the particular division of the octave into their scales, but whether the scale is divided into five, or six, or more notes, these tones are invariably chosen from among the first several harmonics of the overtone series, and not by some artificial, rationalistic division. 

To the point here, Clynes' conclusions from studying all these peoples' music is twofold: 

The music of all the peoples of the world, prior to that of the 20th century's effete and pixilated academics (my pejorative adjectives, not Clynes...), is rooted in the physics of sound. 

The defining characteristic of music everywhere in the world is ... melody.  

Blessed melody! Surprise!  

Tell that to the gangsta rappers and the vulgar hip-hopsters!

*   *   *

Now, before I close up shop here, let me turn back to the question I posed in the subject line of my recent essay by the same title, namely:

What is there to sing about?

In some profound way, I owe this question to my wife, Terri, who, once upon a time made her way through the lesser diva circles as a soprano in New York City, singing many leading roles with lesser companies. Her name then was Teresa Hoover. She won a couple big, international opera competitions, one of which, that of the Center for Contemporary Opera rewarded her in 1990 with a full solo recital at the Weill recital hall at Carnegie Hall. On another occasion (as Josephine in a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, HMS Pinafore at VLOG, the Village Light Opera Group, in 1989), she received a review from the New York Times's James Oestreich, who called her singing "excellent."

(Footnote: this production of HMS Pinafore at VLOG was infused and tweaked with a little original material written by Isaac Asimov--yes, that Asimov, the famous science fiction author--who was a big fan and supporter of the VLOG, and this production was actually billed as USS Pinafore.)

What is there to sing about?  It was Terri who opened me up to understanding the power of the human voice to drill down into the deepest core of our heart, soul, and mind. I'm a believer! Hallelujah! Hosannah! Well, of course, as a longtime student of Ayn Rand, to put it this way may sound perilously close to the unreasoning epistemology of faith, but I hasten to add that I try to believe nothing in the absence of evidence, and I try to hold all my beliefs in a context that is open to rational revision in the light of new evidence. 

(Footnote: yeah, yeah, ...  of course I know that not everything is available to revision, given the self-evidently axiomatic realm, where Rand points out how we find that the concepts of existence, identity, and consciousness are at the base of all knowledge, and, moreover, we find that these ideas are genuinely axiomatic because they show themselves to be impervious to rejection or revision, in that one must employ these concepts in any attempt to reject them.)

So, a few years ago my wife got me to audition for a 30 voice a cappella choir, Charis Chamber Voices, in Westchester County, then under the direction of Scott Turkington, with whom we sang for a couple years.  We performed a piece I wrote for them too. In recent years we've been singing with Collegium Westchester, Eric Kramer's lovely group, where my wife once sang the soprano solo with orchestra for Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. 

These experiences with vocal music and the daily presence of a glorious singer under my own roof at home have radically transformed my appreciation of what the human voice can do in song.

So, here it is, in short: I am devoting the rest of my life to writing vocal music.  My projects from now on will be shaped by this question of what there is to sing about.  

We live in a time that is largely pixilated by crazy aesthetics and driven into mental vertigo by incoherent philosophy. Ayn Rand's work gave me something even more important than the insight to dismiss the crazy aesthetics of Schoenberg's serialism and John Cage's aleatory music: her work gave me the power to begin to embrace my own vision, to hone and trust my own power of reason above that of any Authority (since who else is there to try to make sense of the claims of so many Authorities who are clamorously asserting contradictory and mutually exclusive propositions), and she led me to the wider philosophical, and specifically ethical conviction (and the arguments rooted in facts by which to defend the idea) that one's own happiness is of the most crucial importance to a human life. It is morally right, to pursue our own happiness. 

Happiness matters. And whether my music is good or bad is not the point. The point is that my study and practice of music bring me joy and contribute greatly to my sense of meaning and purpose in life. What greater possibility does an activity in life offer?

What the world needs now is reason, sweet reason! And song! But so much of what people find to sing about is neither exalted nor inspiring.

Not heavy metal music for me (although I would not sneer at you if this brings you joy) ... how about "heavy mental" music? (as Jana Stanfield, a motivational speaker/singer/songwriter, puts it... I don't know her music, but I love the term!)   

We have work to do, those of us who love the glorious power of the human voice rising in song with words and music, and I suspect that there are audiences hungry for work of a more exalted and uplifting nature than so much of what came to us in the dizzy 20th century!

E   P   N

2014.1223
revised 2015.0428