The Two Faces of Suicide

The Two Faces of Suicide

Barett Swanson

Whether we bow before the altar of transhumanism, with its robotic promise of eternal life, or congregate in the house of wellness, with its grunting sect of CrossFitters, we are nevertheless embracing an ideology that supplies a certain framework of meaning. Recognizing the spiritual function of these ideologies might help us understand their role in staving off suicide, but Bering fails even to consider them.
For Bering, parsing the etiology of a person’s mental health leaves little room for the musty errand of ideological contemplation. At one point, Bering notes that churchgoers—who place a high premium on communal fallibility—are four times less likely to commit suicide than their secular counterparts. But Bering cannot extract any comfort from this statistic. He admits that he cannot espouse “religion or any other belief system in which human suffering is conceived as meaningful.” Setting aside the question of what sorts of suffering Bering means by this, the point is not that we should all don vestments and recite the catechism. Instead, it’s that the systems we embrace might not be value-neutral, at least insofar as they buttress us against the despair that Camus so painstakingly explored.

The act of suicide necessarily involves the ravages of biology and personal disposition. But it also intersects with the ability of a society—its structures, mandates, and dominant ideologies—to impart and sustain purpose. In December, GQ published a cluster of testimonies about Anthony Bourdain, collected after his suicide, in 2018, which includes a poignant anecdote about his popular “Parts Unknown” episode with Barack Obama. Apparently, during an idle moment while sipping beers in Hanoi, Bourdain leaned over and asked, “We’re both fathers. Can you tell me, is everything going to be O.K.?” The President replied, “Yes, Tony. Everything is going to be O.K.” Bourdain, who on his shows revelled in cosmopolitan curiosity, was appealing to Obama as a fellow-parent, but his query was also, perhaps, that of a writer, one who had grown doubtful of the plotline’s coherence and who wanted our narrator-in-chief to restore the story’s truth and meaning.

“The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not write,” Kierkegaard, who himself wrote at length about the scourge of suicide, argued. “Those who write represent despair, and those who read disapprove of it and believe that they have a superior wisdom.” Victoria McLeod was herself a writer and, even at her young age, displayed a gimlet-eyed approach to the world and a winsome narrative persona. In her diary, Vic was at work on a profoundly important story, one that was asking all the right questions. Her struggles across its pages reveal a consciousness that chafed against expectation and social pressures, and that was in desperate search of a more stable narrative. It’s impossible to know, of course, whether a better story would have saved her. The onus falls upon us to examine the ones we’re still telling.

The Two Faces of Suicide

Barett Swanson

This is an interesting and erudite review in the New Yorker of a new book on suicide by materialist psychologist Jesse Bering, "Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves". According to the reviewer, this book apparently has a major flaw: it focuses only on various biological/pathological, neurological and genetic determinism causes, mostly ignoring the many other clear social or cultural causes. In particular, instead of recognizing nihilistic materialism and the loss of meaning of life as one of the major causes of the rise of suicides, Bering apparently feels modern "zeitgeist" nihilism can actually be a possible solution. I suppose that is not surprising since Bering apparently is himself a nihilist and has somehow come to terms with it. Maybe a few dedicated and determined philosophers could benefit that way.

Anyway, I agree with the reviewer that this is a major flaw in any analysis of modern suicide. It looks like Bering would benefit from a perusal of some of the works of Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl, who originated Logotherapy or Meaning-therapy from his experiences and observations in the death camps. 

From the review:

"Bering admits that suicide isn’t “inescapably” determined by genes, but he fixates throughout on the pathology of the individual. The critic Mark Fisher, who himself committed suicide, in 2017, rejected this approach in his book “Capitalist Realism”: “The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.”
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Bering says, because we lack eternal souls, “there’s no afterlife; without an afterlife, there’s only the theater of the now. Suicide? You’ll be dead soon anyway.” It is this “spiritual power” of nihilism that offers Bering a solution.

In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus’s landmark essay, it is precisely this conception of daily life that foments suicidal thinking. “It happens that the stage sets collapse,” he writes. “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.” The desiccated procedure of modern life soon reveals itself as a proscenium. But, unlike Bering, who finds this a relief, Camus considers it a viable reason to terminate his existence. The rest of his inquiry wonders how we might persist in a world devoid of consequence.
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Given Bering’s dogged fatalism—his personal mantra is “nothing matters”—the question of whether people feel this anxiety now strikes him as retrograde and impertinent. This despite evidence that many do, including a recent Op-Ed in the Times, by the behavioral scientist Clay Routledge, which presented new data showing how the surge in suicides could be attributed to a “crisis of meaninglessness.”
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The act of suicide necessarily involves the ravages of biology and personal disposition. But it also intersects with the ability of a society—its structures, mandates, and dominant ideologies—to impart and sustain purpose."