For human dignity

Warning, harrowing

For all those who have abided me.

The demand that everyone should matter is an unpopular proposition, including among those who think they support it. Yet the demand struggles everywhere, always and sometimes with great power to be born into history. I’ve gathered together some passages that speak in one way or another to that struggle.

If a single person doesn’t matter, then being a person isn’t enough to matter. If a person can be outside concern, being a person isn’t enough to be inside.

“Consequently, all available evidence suggests that the CN-46700 [Neanderthal] individual probably had Down syndrome, which is the most common human genetic disorder, and it is also present in great apes. Down syndrome is associated with a wide variety of impairments in addition to those produced by the inner ear malformations. These alterations affect growth and physical and cognitive development, which has a strong impact on all stages of child development up to adulthood[…] It is reasonable to think that the long survival of individual CN-46700 could only have occurred because it received continuous care and attention during that time.” Mercedes Conde-Valverde et al., The child who lived: Down syndrome among Neanderthals?

I

“For the one who suffers, suffering is always new. For witnesses, however eager and tender, suffering ages and becomes routine.” Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain.

“To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.

“…I don’t want to wake up with pain as the first thing on my mind, there’s more to life than that. We’ve been taught that there’s more, there’s more out there…” Anonymous quoted in: Experiences, Beliefs, and Values of Patients with Chronic Pain Who Attended a Nurse-Led Program.

“What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.” William Styron, Darkness Visible.

“The reason why I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.” Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

The above describe the experience of depression, let me tell you what severe anxiety can be like. In the throes of OCD I felt like I knew, for a fact that every single person who loved me, would turn against me with hatred, with the possible exception of my parents who would be wounded beyond accounting. That I would be ruined utterly, left materially destitute, but denied the escape of suicide because of the harm it would do my family. Except there was a curious double vision- I knew it and I did not know it, if I had truly known it there might have been some relief in that, the sad resolution of one doomed. I had no such certainty, and it made it immeasurably worse. Near constant, almost unimaginable agony is the only summary, and when I considered the condition as a whole, the response was: just let me die, please just let me die.

When I look back, what fills me with anger is that my condition, along with all chronic pain conditions, psychic or physical, are not regarded with any sense of social, research or clinical urgency.

II

Journalist Lester Kinsolving: “Does the president have any reaction to the announcement by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?”

Larry Speakes: “AIDS? I haven’t got anything on it.”

Lester Kinsolving: “Over a third of them have died. […] It’s a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this.”

Larry Speakes: “I don’t have [AIDS]. Do you?”

The press pool laughs

“It was a warzone over here, a battle-zone with bodies just everywhere. We couldn’t even get funeral homes to take their bodies” Sister Kitty Catalyst of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of queer nuns who among other roles during the epidemic, cared for those dying of AIDS. Quoted in Genderfucking nuns are here, queer and shitloads of fun [nice article from 2015 with a terminal case of Vice-voice].

Lying in bed, quite possibly delirious, feeling as if he were burning or freezing with fever, John Donne heard a bell toll, another victim of the epidemic. This impression later led him to write:

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.

III

“My first morning at Jerry’s, when the hypoglycemic shakes set in, I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. ‘Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,’ she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don’t know why the antismoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims — as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them.” Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

“Dumpster diving is outdoor work, often surprisingly pleasant. It is not entirely predictable; things of interest turn up every day and some days there are finds of great value. I am always very pleased when I can turn up exactly the thing I most wanted to find. Yet in spite of the element of chance, scavenging the more than most other pursuits tends to yield returns in some proportion to the effort and intelligence brought to bear. It is very sweet to turn up a few dollars in change from a Dumpster that has just been gone over by a wino.” Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving.

Amongst reviews for this book, I found one commenting that the book made him angry because dogs should never be homeless.

“Their landlord, in addition to charging rent, requires that all households sell any scavenged material to him at whatever price he determines. Households that work for him are allowed to use the local well that he built rather than a public well half a kilometre away. Wulan used to collect scrap materials to help earn income for the family, but with no one at home to care for her children, they became sick and malnourished. She stopped working in order to care for and spend time with them, but now she has no money for daily necessities, nor can she afford to send her children to school. Whenever she is completely out of money, Wulan pawns her clothes at a government-run pawnshop for Rp. 5,000 (75 cents) apiece. She has no other assets and very few clothes left. She dreads the day when she will be forced to borrow from the local moneylender, who charges 20 percent interest per month. She knows that once she resorts to this she will inevitably sink deeper and deeper into debt.” Patti Petesch and Deepa Narayan, Voices of the Poor : From Many Lands.

There’s a common fantasy that first world and third world poverty are wholly different species. And of course, they are profoundly different, but of the same kind. Skipping meals, living on the streets, not being able to pay for medicine can be common to both. In the most severe cases of first-world poverty compounded by disability, death by starvation may even occur.

IV

“A single entry to the subreddit consists of anywhere between two and 16 screenshots of a social media profile (usually Facebook, with last names scrubbed out) belonging to someone who died after aggressively rejecting precautions that could have protected them and others. […] The first few screenshots typically feature the individual in question deploying a remarkably consistent set (there are 30 or so) of memes. Some vilify Dr. Anthony Fauci or champion the right to be unvaccinated. Others warn people they’re experimental rats or offer scripts that will properly punish wait staff for daring to inquire about vaccination status. […]. The final few screenshots typically announce the disease, its progress, and the eventual death announcement, frequently followed by a GoFundMe for the family. If someone is merely hospitalized, the flair on that entry reads “Nominated.” When they die, it changes to “Awarded.”” Lili Loofbourow, The Unbelievable Grimness of HermanCainAward, the Subreddit That Catalogs Anti-Vaxxer COVID Deaths.

“You want them to notice
The ragged ends of your summer dress
You want them to see you
Like they see every other girl
They just see a faggot
They hold their breath not to catch the sick” Laura Jane Grace, Transgender Dysphoria Blues

“Matthew Shepard’s father: Matt officially died in a hospital in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Hе actually died on the outskirts of Laramie, tied to a fence. You Mr. McKinney with your friend Mr. Henderson left him out there by himself, but he wasn’t alone. There were his lifelong friends with him, friends that he had grown up with. You’re probably wondering who these friends were. First he had the beautiful night sky and the same stars and moon that we used to see through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him. And through it all he was breathing in the scent of pine trees from the snowy range. He heard the wind, the ever-present Wyoming wind, for the last time. He had one more friend with him. He had God. And I feel better knowing he wasn’t alone.” Moisés Kaufman, The Laramie Project. Note that these words were spoken more or less verbatim by Shepard’s father.

“Russell Henderson’s Mormon Home Teacher: I’ve known Russell’s family for thirty-eight years. Russell’s only twenty-one so I’ve known him his entire life. I ordained Russell a priest of the Mormon church, so when this happened, you can imagine – disbelief. After the sentencing the church held a disciplinary council, and the result of that meeting was to excommunicate Russell from the church. And what that means is that your name is taken off the records of the church, so you just disappear. Russell’s reaction to that was not positive. It hurt him and it hurt him too to realize at that point how serious a transgression he had committed. But I will not desert Russell. That’s a matter of my religion and my friendship with the family.” Moisés Kaufman, The Laramie Project. Note that these words were spoken more or less verbatim by Russell Henderson’s Mormon Home Teacher.

V

“Just as a mother would protect 
her only child with her own life, 
even so, let him cultivate boundless thoughts 
of loving kindness towards all beings” 
Traditionally attributed to the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, The Metta Sutta

“And the Lord said to Cain, Where is Abel your brother? And he said, I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Genesis 4:9 “But wanting to justify himself, he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”” Luke 10:29.

“About 2 in every 3 patients, the mode of death was very stereotypical: mom starts to cry, nurse observes erratic breathing pattern, nurse calls a doctor, child gasping, resuscitation attempted but not successful.” Prof. Terrie Taylor, interviewed in the Malawi Medical Journal. She’s speaking about Malaria, but the mundane structure of loss could apply to a thousand other diseases.

VI

“The reader feels Bruno’s anguish when contemplating the final dissolution of his consciousness as the black box of oblivion takes up his memory. This darkness will also appear years after when Murdoch herself describes her emotional experience with Alzheimer’s as “being in a very, very bad quiet place, a dark place” or even “sailing away into the darkness” (in Conradi 684). It is at that point, that Bruno is finally ready to die, when he finally stops remembering.” Mariángel Soláns García, “In At my age, you live in your mind”: Reviewing the Past in Bruno’s Dream by Iris Murdoch.

To which we might add this quote from her journal, two years before her diagnosis, quoted by Peter Conradi in The Life of Iris Murdoch: “Find difficulty in thinking and writing. Be brave.”

"I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse" Allen Ginsberg, Howl for Carl Solomon

VII

“However, such a heaping-up of violent deeds would have a frigid effect, were it not for the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard, though often only a single word marks its presence, often a mere stroke of the verse, or a run-on line. It is in this that the Iliad is absolutely unique, in this bitterness that proceeds from tenderness and that spreads over the whole human race, impartial as sunlight. Never does the tone lose its coloring of bitterness; yet never does the bitterness drop into lamentation. Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent. Nothing precious is scorned, whether or not death is its destiny; everyone’s unhappiness is laid bare without dissimulation or disdain; no man is set above or below the condition common to all men; whatever is destroyed is regretted. Victors and vanquished are brought equally near us; under the same head, both are seen as counterparts of the poet, and the listener as well. If there is any difference, it is that the enemy’s misfortunes are possibly more sharply felt.” Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force

“I got me slaves and slave-girls.” Tell me what sort of price you paid. What did you find in creation with a value corresponding to the nature of your purchase? What price did you put on rationality? For how many obols did you value the image of God? For how many coins did you sell this nature formed by God? […] If God does not enslave a free person, then who would consider their own authority higher than God’s?” Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, the first surviving (and first known) document to oppose slavery in all cases.

“I resolved to fight; and suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also. While he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer.” Frederick Douglass in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.

VIII

“It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” George Orwell, A Hanging.

“Shortly before the war of 1914, an assassin whose crime was particularly repulsive (he had slaughtered a family of farmers, including the children) was condemned to death in Algiers. He was a farm worker who had killed in a sort of bloodthirsty frenzy but had aggravated his case by robbing his victims. The affair created a great stir. It was generally thought that decapitation was too mild a punishment for such a monster. This was the opinion, I have been told, of my father, who was especially aroused by the murder of the children. One of the few things I know about him, in any case, is that he wanted to witness the execution, for the first time in his life. He got up in the dark to go to the place of execution at the other end of town amid a great crowd of people. What he saw that morning he never told anyone. My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit.” Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine.

IX

“Therefore, the human being was created singly; to teach you that whoever destroys one soul, Scripture reckons it against him as though he had destroyed a whole world; and whoever upholds one soul, Scripture reckons it to him as though he had upheld a whole world.” Author unknown, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5.

There is, I think, another reason saving a person is compared to saving a world. We cannot in our egoism imagine the vastness of another life, another inner world. Comparing the salvation of one person to the salvation of a world shocks us into a recognition of the scale of another person.

“Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done — nothing more complicated. It was not decided from one day to the next what we would have to do. There were many people in the village who needed help. How could we refuse them? A person doesn’t sit down and say I’m going to do this and this and that. We had no time to think. When a problem came, we had to solve it immediately. Sometimes people ask me, “How did you make a decision?” There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!” Magda Trocmé, interview.

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Eugene Debs, remarks before sentencing.

“You should be stripped of your stripes, you chicken-livered traitor, for the trouble you have caused our country and our military. What do you think war is? A game of ping-pong? That village was a threat to our own men. Would you rather see our men mowed down by the enemy? Your kind is our worst enemy, the rat commie within our country[...] May our country always be right (which is not easy when dealing with international communism). But our country right or wrong. If you don’t believe that way, you are no American; you are no better than the fanatic communist animals who have trapped and killed all the U.S. military to date. You are worse than they, as you are supposed to be an American. I was proud of my town until (now). You have disgraced us all.” “Jane Q. Citizen”, in a letter sent to Hugh Thompson Jr.

“These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them” Hugh Thompson Jr., Interview with the Associated Press.

X

“The rate of homicide in the first episode of psychosis in these studies was 15.5 times the annual rate of homicide after treatment for psychosis.” Olav Nielssen and Matthew Large, Rates of homicide during the first episode of psychosis and after treatment.

“Suddenly, from one day to the other, I started to hear voices saying, “Kill her, stab that woman” and “she is not your mother”. […] I didn’t even understand what I’d done, only when I got to the [forensic psychiatric] institution and they gave me the first pills. I came round and “Oh my God, you have killed your mother”. That came to my mind at first. And I condemned myself, but I still pray for her every night.” “János” as quoted in The recovery of homicidal people diagnosed with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder—An interpretative phenomenological analysis by Kovács et al.

XI

“A month or so before his arrest, I thought I was losing my hair from stress. In the shower, red strands swam in the water by my feet. Chunks were stuck to my fingers. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t felt pretty in years. When I rubbed the shampoo into my scalp, the skin was tender, and I realized I wasn’t losing my hair. He had ripped it out, and I hadn’t even felt it. I went into a cave when he hit me. I curled into my body like a slug, then traveled into a deep darkness where I felt nothing. I heard his voice, his fists, the blasts in my ears from the blows to the side of my head. I heard my own screaming.” Kelly Sundberg, It will look like a sunset.

“The crude mortality rate (CMR) per 100,000 person years for in-prison suicides was 133.8 (CI 100.5–167.1) and was ten times higher (CMR = 1535.0, CI 397.9–2672.2) on day one of incarceration. Suicides after release (overall CMR = 82.8, CI 100.5–167.1) [Sic, point estimate appears to be outside CI] also peaked on day one after release (CMR = 665.7, CI 0–1419.1).” Anne Bukten and Marianne Riksheim Stavseth, Suicide in prison and after release: a 17-year national cohort study.

A back of the envelope calculation says 133.8 per 100,000 person years is approximately equivalent to six times the equivalent figure for age and sex matched controls in the general Norwegian population.

Serious wrongdoers attract the greatest meta-stigma- condemnation attached to those who refuse to condemn. Even those who claim to care for prisoners often do so by portraying them as a motley crew of low-grade drug dealers, shoplifters and so on. But there is no need for such distortions. Almost all those suicides wished at least once that they were better people. Even the ones who never had that wish were people.

Finally:

“For the sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and love. He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. […] Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.” Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force

Afterword:

Nine or so overlapping groups reoccur among those cast outside our moral circle: poor people, those whose suffering implicates us, those perceived as burdensome, those whose suffering we see as self-inflicted, wrongdoers, enemies, the distant, minorities and those who suffer in ways we cannot see, or who are disbelieved.

The only response that I could make to my own condition was to regard everyone as mattering. Perhaps other people have found a different way, but this was the only way I could withstand OCD. But by its nature that resolution cannot be a private one, I wanted a world that saw every single person as inside the moral circle. Naturally, I was at a loss for a way to achieve this. I set out to find out accounts of people who had undergone moral transformation. What I noticed was how many said that it happened by reading a passage. I then set out to write a map of the struggle for human dignity as I saw it and soon realised that my own prose wasn’t up to the task. I therefore went in search of others’ writing. I’d already found many such passages over the years, and many more I found while looking over the last few days. I am sorry if I upset you, and even sorrier if I made you feel like there is no hope. We can win and we must. There are hard design problems here, difficult questions not so much past the Pareto frontier as past the frontier of imagination; yet there is a shore both unimaginable and possible and we know this because we have reached many such shores before. History is the ruin of impossibilities.