Interlude:

Human Dignity

Conservatives are probably still bemused by the fact that the New Moralists are constantly berating them for being full of hate; for instance, that they were all "out to get" Bill Clinton--usually "from the moment he took office." The whole vendetta against him, from the New Moralist standpoint, was nothing but spiteful vindictiveness. (Of course, their "hate" is nothing to the real hate that was shown by the departing White House staff, who did neat little things like salt the computer printers with pornographic pictures, disable the "W" key so George W. Bush couldn't be written, rip out phones, scrawl graffiti on walls, and put obscene messages in the voice mail. They doubtless thought such things were "funny.")

But of course, there's nothing really surprising in this. For the New Morality, feelings are everything, and, as David Hume and Sigmund Freud have supposedly proved, no one ever chooses to do anything for a reason. Reasons are always rationalizations, "casting about," in the all-too-mortal words of Edward O. Wilson, "among alternative scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules."

So the theory (the reasoning) the New Morality is based on says that what really motivates someone is feelings; certainly New Moralists (no hypocrites they--perish the thought!) never do anything except based on their feelings. And so if they want someone punished, it's because they hate the person, and they assume that this is really true of everyone--again because the theory they have reasoned to says it has to be true of everyone. Therefore, if Ken Starr or Henry Hyde wanted President Clinton punished, then it's because they're sex-obsessed hypocrites filled with hatred and venom (and who therefore deserve to be hated to the utmost by all right-feeling people--which, of course, makes the trashing an act of virtue).

As I've been indicating here, and I've said so often, this view contradicts itself because in the last analysis, it's based on reason, not feelings. And when reason concludes that reason can't conclude to anything that's true, then that line of reasoning isn't worth a damn.

The justification of punishment.

But can a person want someone punished without feeling hatred for him? After all, if you want him punished, you want something done that's going to cause him harm of some sort. And what right do we have to want that? Because he's harmed someone? But then how is just adding to the evil supposed to correct it?

The argument here is going to be pretty subtle, so steel yourself. I'm sorry, but you can't make sense of it without splitting some pretty fine hairs.

Plato had the idea that if you committed a crime, you needed punishment to get yourself back into the right order of things, on the grounds that if you harm me, then you have also harmed yourself because you've destroyed your proper orientation toward other humans (you've tried to make yourself super-human, as it were); and the harm of the punishment supposedly restores the orientation, because now that you've been harmed also, we're back on the same footing.

But an additional dehumanization can't really humanize anyone. The perpetrator didn't really make himself super-human (he just pretended he was superior to the one he harmed), and so harming him makes him less than human, and doesn't really bring him "back where he belongs."

Now I'll grant that a criminal, who deliberately chooses an act that has a punishment attached to it, in some sense also chooses the punishment (à la Red Skelton's "mean widdle kid": "If I dood it I get a wippin'... I dood it!"--with the implication "I'm willing to take the 'wippin'"). Hence, until he does get punished, the punishment he has chosen is always hanging over his head, and the act doesn't reach what the psychologists call "closure" (i.e. it's not complete in his mind) until the punishment occurs.

This may be true, but it's irrelevant. It doesn't justify why someone else can choose to harm the miscreant--without simultaneously making himself a miscreant, wanting harm to another human being.

And here's the universally applicable rule: It is never morally legitimate to choose harm to anyone else. This is obvious for the one who first does the harm, because he's acting as if (a) as human, he has a right not to be dehumanized, but (b) the other, who is human, doesn't have this right (which is a contradiction), or (c) the other is not really human (which is also a contradiction). But this applies to anyone, not just to the initial perpetrator. Since we have human rights because of the fact that we're human, not because we've earned them somehow, then we don't lose them by what we do; because no matter what we do, we're still in fact human. Let me stress this: The perpetrator of a crime does not lose his human rights when he commits the crime, because he does not lose his humanity, and the rights are based, not on what he does to earn them, but upon the mere fact that he is a human being. A criminal wants to be superhuman in that only if he is superhuman can he consistently do what he does; but that desire does not make him either superhuman or subhuman.

Therefore, vengeance is never legitimate for any reason. Only God can exact vengeance, since only God is the potter, who can do what he pleases with the clay. The clay can't act like the potter.

But then how can you punish someone without choosing his harm? That's one part of the problem. The other part is that it's clear that if we don't punish criminals, then we might just as well have no laws at all, because no one is going to obey them. I learned this when I taught high school. I was told, "Be careful what you say when you threaten a student. If you threaten him with something, you absolutely have to carry it out, or you've lost the class from that moment on; they'll run amuck on you. If you say, 'You do that once more and I'll kill you,' you have to be ready to commit murder, or you're a goner." And it's true; I saw it happen. Not the murders, of course; but the teachers that threatened the most were the ones who had constant riots in their classes, because the kids knew they wouldn't carry out the threat. High school kids are that way.

But so are we all, to a greater or lesser extent. Think of the speeding laws. Do you really obey the 65-mph limit any more once you happened to have been going 70 and you saw that the radar car on the side of the road paid no attention?

So we're caught between a rock and a hard place. If we don't enforce the laws by actually punishing criminals, that choice is in effect a choice inviting violation of the laws, and all the resulting harm that lawlessness causes. But if we do punish the criminal, we're deliberately inflicting harm on him, and human beings as human have a right not to be harmed. (It does not say that only virtuous humans have a right not to be harmed.)

Let me give you an example of the problem. Years and years ago, the Cincinnati Bengals were a fine football team, headed (everyone supposed) for the Superbowl. One player, Ross Browner (I forget his position now, but he was a star) had been caught doing drugs, and Paul Brown, the then owner, got up and in a news conference announced that he was fired (or suspended; I don't remember the details). A newsman said, "But if you don't keep him on the team, you're giving up your hopes for the championship, aren't you?" and Brown said, "I realize that. But if we don't punish him, then we're sending a message to everyone that if you're an important enough player on the team, then it's okay for you to do drugs--and we just can't have that."

The point here is that Brown realized that he was hurting himself and the team as much as or even more than Browner when he punished him; but he felt he had no alternative.

But this gives us a clue to the solution. Obviously, he didn't want to hurt himself, so there must be some sense in which you can choose something you know has a bad effect without choosing the bad effect itself.

The Principle of the Double Effect.

And the solution moralists have come up with in these situations is called the Principle of the Double Effect, which is a set of rules by which you can assure yourself that you can do something which has an evil effect and are keeping the effect (the evil itself) out of the choice as something you can't prevent.

It is, as I say, subtle, and so let me give a perhaps more obvious example to show that it is not just fancy Clintonspeak. Take the case of rape. A woman is told by the man holding a knife at her throat, "Now you just lie there quiet, baby, and I won't kill you; but if you make a move, then I'll be raping a corpse. Get it?"

Say she lies still because she doesn't want to die. Does that mean that in any sense she wants to have sexual intercourse with that man? Isn't she obviously unwilling to have sex with him, but unable to prevent it? To say that she could choose to struggle on the grounds that by some miracle she might get free is unrealistic--and since this outcome is practically impossible, then wouldn't she be wanting to die if she struggled? So even though she knows that her act of lying still will have the effect of her sex organs uniting with the man, her will is still against this act, just as much as if the plane you're in loses its wings and you see that you're going to hit the ground in two minutes, this doesn't mean you're in any sense willing to die in the crash you foresee.

So it is possible--under certain circumstances--to choose an act which has bad consequences without actually choosing the consequences. There are five rules to make sure that the evil connected with the act doesn't enter into the choice: (1) The act itself can't be what's evil, because that's what you choose, and then you'd obviously have chosen evil. The evil has to lie in an effect of the act. (2) The act also has to have a good effect, which is what you choose the act for; if the act in effect were nothing but evil, then you wouldn't be able to keep the evil out of the choice. (3) The good effect (which is what you want) can't depend on the evil one, because if you want an end, you also want the means necessary to produce it--and so you'd again have chosen the evil. Even if both are inevitable, they have to be independent of one another. (4) You can't want the evil (using the situation as an excuse for doing evil), or you've chosen it. Finally (5) it's got to be at least as bad not to choose the act with its evil effect, or you'd rather have the evil than the alternative.

So, in the case of the rape, (1) lying still is okay in itself (if the rapist repented before his act, there'd be no problem; it's the effect of lying still that's bad). (2) There's a good effect; you don't die. (3) It isn't by having sex that you don't die, because if the rapist is caught or dies (or, as in Crime and Punishment, changes his mind) before he can carry it out, you've achieved the good effect without the evil one--so the good effect isn't dependent on it. (4) You're not using the situation as an excuse to have sex with someone not your husband (obviously, or it's not rape). And (5) dying is worse than submitting to sex with a rapist. (Note that if the woman thought that being raped was worse than death, she could morally try to struggle, even if she died. I'll let you go through the other four rules and see that they fit this situation.)

--By the way, there are those who say that the fifth rule is the only one that matters; but they haven't thought things through. No one ever in practice does anything he thinks is wrong except for a good purpose that outweighs the evil. President Clinton, for instance, committed perjury and obstructed justice because in the situation the alternative was worse for him. And that makes it okay? Once you say that, then everything becomes all right, simply because no one ever does anything unless he thinks he'll be better off for it. So terrorism, rape, Unabomber envelopes, you name it, become morally all right. Nope; it won't wash. All five rules have to be obeyed in order for your conscience to be clear.

To come closer to the punishment theme, we can now assess the Ross Browner situation. (1) Firing Browner in itself was not bad; he had to terminate his career in football someday anyway. (2) It had a good effect: it avoided sending the message that it was okay to do drugs if you're an important player. (3) It wasn't the actual harm done that produced this effect, because if he weren't actually harmed by the firing, the act would still produce the desired effect that the NFL was serious about the drug issue. (4) No one wanted either his harm or the harm that would come to the Bengals. And (5), according to Paul Brown, the effect of not firing him would have been far worse.

To finally get to the point, Paul Brown didn't have to have any hatred for Ross Browner, or any desire to do him harm; he was just in a bind. If he didn't do an act which had a harmful effect, then that was worse than doing it; and so he had no choice. There was the rule that you can't do drugs or you're off the team. Once you make that rule, then you have to fire those who do drugs, or you can forget about the rule--and not having that rule would be a disaster for the teams.

The real subtlety here is that you're not exactly using the punishment to send a message. That is, you're not saying, "We're going to do this to you so that people can look at you and say, 'Wow! I'd better not do that!'" That would be to use the harm as the precise means toward the good effect (warning others not to do drugs). No--and here's where you have to make fine distinctions--that message has already been sent by the threat implied in the rule: "Do not do drugs, or you're fired."

But the interesting thing here is that the threat implied in the command itself harms no one, since (a) no one has actually done the drugs yet, and you precisely want no one to do drugs, and (b) you realize that people can be tempted, and you want to provide a motive that will help them overcome the temptation. So you issue the threat so that if everything works right, no one will ever incur the actual punishment. You can issue a threat and not want it ever to be carried out. So that act is okay.

Furthermore, it's the people subject to the rule that are in control, not you; when they choose to live under the rule, then they are in effect committing themselves not to do drugs; you're just saying that you're serious about this behavior. So there's nothing wrong with passing a law that carries with it a threat of punishment, because the hope is that the threat will act as a motivator to help people over the difficult times when they might be tempted to violate the law--and so it is hoped that no one will actually ever break it.

But then when someone does break it, you are now faced with the alternative of saying, "Well, we weren't really serious about this law," or actually punishing the violator. So, as I said, the punishment doesn't send the message that there's a threat involved; that message is there all along. It's the lack of punishment that sends a new message that there's really no law here--and so you perform the act of punishment to avoid sending the message that from now on it's okay to disobey the law. Your will is oriented away from the harm consequent upon nullification of the force of the law, not toward the harm done to the perpetrator.

Is your mind numb enough now? Think it through; it makes sense--and, trust me, it's the only theory of crime and punishment that doesn't in effect make the punisher a vindictive criminal.

Now let's apply this to President Clinton and his impeachment. Essentially, the House managers of the impeachment were saying that if we don't punish the President for this act, then any popular President can get away with anything he pleases in the White House. And we can't let that happen.

But what happened was that the acquittal said, analogously to the Ross Browner episode, that if you're a popular President, no one has any recourse against you, no matter what you do to them. Didn't it? I don't see how his acquittal can avoid sending this message to all future Presidents. Apparently, the Senate decided that, in order to avoid "disrupting the will of the people," we can tolerate having in office a man who thinks he can run roughshod over the rights of private citizens just because he's the President and they're just nobodies-- "trailer trash."

However you feel about the President, I think you can make out a very strong case that we don't want to be sending this message that the President is above the law. But by acquitting him, we've sent it. That's what crime and punishment entail. If he had to suffer because of what he regarded as not even a peccadillo (which, by the way, means "a little sin"), but even a virtuous act in New Moralism, then this is unfortunate. Just as Ross Browner might not have thought it was serious to do a line of dope, or he might have been victim to a momentary weakness, or whatever, the fact is that not punishing him sends a message to everyone that it's okay to do these things. And it's not okay, whatever message the Senate by implication sent.

But as I say, you didn't have to hate the President to want him removed from office, any more than I would be expressing hatred for Janet Reno (whom I pity) if I were President and she ordered the attack on Waco and I fired her (as indeed I would have).

No, ladies and gentlemen, it is perfectly possible to say that someone should be punished and not feel any hatred whatever for him, even to feel sympathy for him and wish him well and hope that in the last analysis he makes it to heaven and is happy forever. I sometimes used to shock my students when I asked them if they'd ever prayed for Hitler and Stalin. (Have you? Why not?) I suppose they think I'm a crypto-Nazi when I say that I do (of course then I have to be a crypto-Commie too), because it might be that my prayers now are necessary in the Divine scheme of things to have given these men a chance at the last minute to say, "Lord, forgive me; I'm sorry," and to hear Him reply, "Today you will be with me in paradise."

It's in this context that only the sinless can cast the first stone. You can't want harm to the sinner, no matter what the sin. As St. Paul says in the first part of Romans, if you do, then you want hell for yourself--because you know damn well you deserve it (and if you don't think so, you're deluded). He who wants the sinner to rot in hell has himself committed the essence of sin: willing harm (in this case irreparable harm) to another. Therefore, he wants to see himself rotting in hell.

But this should not blind us to the fact that we must punish unlawful acts, even if this results (unfortunately) in harm to the perpetrator. Otherwise, we are a nation without laws. The punishment, and the carrying out of the punishment, are a conditio sine qua non for the reality of the laws; and without laws, all is Somalia.

So did I want to see President Clinton removed from office? I did. I emphatically did. Do I wish harm to President Clinton? I do not. Do I pray that some day we will meet in heaven? I do. (Though I can't imagine what I'll say to him. I admit I certainly feel plenty of resentment against what he did to the highest office in the land I love. But I'll worry about how I'll deal with him when we get there; by then, if I make it, I'll be able to handle it.)

The curse of "self-esteem."

But you see, the New Moralist can't see this business of wanting someone punished and not hating him, because the only real motivator for actions is feelings, not thinking things through and doing what's logically necessary.

And this leads from this digression back to the expansion of the idea that I promised in the discussion of the Seventh New Commandment. This business of basing morality on feelings rather than reason and facts leads to all sorts of inconsistencies and hypocrisies. Whites feel guilty about what "we" did to blacks, and men feel guilty about the "oppression" they've visited on women, and so we feel we have to make up for it.

And this follows from the First Great Commandment, that feelings, and the agenda based on them, are the truth. And so, what is taught, in addition to "health" (read: sex) and the environment, in schools nowadays, is really "self-esteem," rather than the actual subjects. Teachers, you see, must be "facilitators," not teachers, because the teacher is no better than the student; he's just been around longer. But there aren't any facts, and so he doesn't have anything that the students don't have. And so, no matter what the subject, the student already has everything inside him, which simply has to be "brought out."

Now this is no Platonic theory that we all actually know everything from our existence as pure spirits before our souls were trapped in a body that blinded them. Heavens, if you even mention "spirit" in school any more, you're called on the carpet for violation of Church and State. No, this modern view is that of the First Great Commandment, that there are no facts, only agendas, and only feelings count. With Plato, you didn't teach facts, you reminded people of them by asking adroit questions. With moderns, there are no facts to teach--only "facts for" the person who happens to believe them. And nobody's facts are privileged, and therefore everything is opinion--and so education boils down to sharing opinions.

But of course, some kids can see through this--or at least, see around it--and are brighter than other kids, and they actually learn something. But then they stand out. But that makes the other kids feel inferior--because they are inferior. So we've got to see to it that the self-esteem of these other kids is not destroyed, poor things, or they'll go through life believing that there are actual differences between people, and they can't do what some other people can do. And that will make them feel bad about themselves.

You say, "Well, gee!" But what you don't understand is that feeling bad is the definition of harm in the New Morality. It doesn't really matter what you do to a person, as long as he feels good about it--remember the "different lifestyle" depicted by Robert Mapplethorpe, where someone urinates in someone else's mouth. But if you make the person feel bad, and especially feel bad about himself, then you've done the truly inhuman thing.

"But if he feels bad about himself, then he'll just give up, and then he'll act out his inferiority and never make anything of himself." So? So you don't let him give up; you make him keep trying to surpass the limits he thinks he has. You should have seen the looks on the faces of my college students who got Fs on their first test--as many did, because I demanded that they not simply react to what I was teaching, but learn it and be able to reproduce it in an essay of their own writing (Yes, I demanded that they "regurgitate" what I had told them.) They were shocked! Shocked! Several told me that they'd never gotten below a C in their lives. But you should have seen their papers; some of them couldn't even write a sentence, let alone develop a coherent thought. So I said, "Do it over, and do it right this time. Study the material, and if you need help, I'll help you." And they did. Some of them--many, in fact, over the years--went from an F to an A, once they had learned some tricks on how to study to actually learn something. They did it because they had to take the course, and so they had to spend the rest of the semester and take the rest of the tests, and it was either fail all of them, or do something about their unsatisfactory performance. Sure, I hurt their self-esteem; and sure, some of them gave up and quit the course; but lots and lots of them made something of themselves. Most will never be philosophers, but so what? They suffered no harm to the blow to their self-esteem. Self-esteem, phooey! Some of the greatest people in the world--St. Thomas Aquinas, Brahms, Michelangelo, "suffered" from what we today would call "low self-esteem." They felt bad about themselves, so they pushed themselves and produced prodigious results.

I remember once in Florence Italy, I was going up a stairway in some museum there; and on the landing was a half-finished statue of a Pietà--Mary taking Jesus down from the cross. It wasn't like the one in the Vatican; this Jesus was a corpse, falling off her lap like a hunk of meat; and the look on her face was a whole encyclopedia of a mother's reaction to a murdered son. The leg of Jesus below the knee, however, wasn't attached to the body, and the faces of two of the onlookers were only roughed in; the face of Mary Magdalene was there, but oddly out of synch with the rest of the sculpture.

I asked about the statue, and it turned out that Michelangelo had got that far (except for the Magdalene's face), and was about to take his hammer and break up the statue in disgust, when an assistant cried, "No! No! Don't do that! Give it to me!" He did, and the assistant put the face on Mary Magdalene, and saw that he was ruining it, and had sense enough to leave the rest alone.

And there it is. This overwhelming thing, perhaps even greater than the Pietà everyone knows; a failure in Michelangelo's eyes. Low self-esteem. (He put his own face on the skin the guy in the Last Judgment scene is holding as he realizes to his horror that he's damned.)

But this isn't the New Morality way. Self-esteem is all. But no matter how you reinforce their self-esteem, "facilitate" them in their education, some kids still learn a lot better than other kids. So what do you do? Simple. You make the stupid kids think--pardon, feel--that they're just as good as the bright ones, because we're all equal in our feelings, and that's the truth of what we are. So we actually have math courses where if the kid says that two and two are five, we praise him for trying, and make him think he's done a great thing, and we "guide" him so that eventually he hits on four as the answer--we hope, but if he doesn't, what difference does it make anyway? Everybody uses calculators nowadays.

What this breeds is complacency and arrogance, not ambition. I used to get these kids, all of whom feel good about themselves, in my college, which is one of the private colleges that's supposed to be selective in the people it takes in. They'd have had good grades in high school and yet couldn't, as I said, write a sentence; but they were convinced that they were just grrreat! I remember one time I was trying to coach a drama student in a TV presentation I was directing, and she was saying her lines all wrong, emphasizing prepositions and conjunctions the way Americans are prone to do; and when I read the line (which I had written) correctly, she bristled and told me that I was trampling on her art, that she had to make the lines meaningful to her. (The fact that they wouldn't be meaningful to anyone who heard it was irrelevant--as was the fact that if she already knew all about acting, why was she a student?)

Really, you have no idea how bad it is. I had three kids in a class in metaphysics during my last semester of teaching--nice kids, good kids, in their way, and, as philosophy majors, supposedly the crème de la crème. I gave them some tough stuff to read, granted, and one of them "got confused" with the argument, and just gave up, rather than buckling down and trying to understand it. I was the guilty one, because she couldn't grasp what I was saying on the first reading or even the second. One of the others conceded that my conclusion (that there is a God) followed from the premises, but he was "into" Zen and so forth, and what I was doing was "too logical," and he chose not to believe that God exists--never mind that he agreed that I'd proved it. You see, if the conclusion was true, then "what about the third of the world that was Buddhist, who disagree with it? You're making them second-class thinkers." The evidence made no difference; I was dissing the Buddhists by giving evidence that their conclusions were false. And he liked their agenda.

Exactly.

Do you wonder that I retired?

Living in fantasyland.

But you see, if you're a New Moralist who's bought into the Darwinist view of humanity, you have to say that what life is all about is feeling good about yourself and feeling that it's all worth while, because objectively the big picture makes no sense, and in practically everyone's case, your own life turns out not to make any sense either--and is probably pretty horrible to boot.

And the reason we have such a high suicide rate, especially among the young nowadays, is that reality will tend to intrude itself on our consciousness in unguarded moments, and when it does, it makes us feel perfectly dreadful about ourselves and our lives; and ultimately, with this worldview, there are no rational grounds for hope. So once the irrational feeling of optimism departs, then what's the sense of going on?

But this we dread with all our hearts, and so we construct this fantasy world of feeling good about ourselves and our lives and our "relationships," (which of course aren't relationships, since we never really abandon ourselves to someone else--we wouldn't dare make our happiness dependent on how someone else feels about us), and pretend all sorts of things are true that we know deep down are lies.

In this nation of people who have not only all they need, but all they want, and in fact more than they actually want, but merely think they could want, we are populated with neurotics who have to pretend that it all means something when the whole basis of their lives says that it means nothing and all they have is just dust and ashes. There are more unhappy people, I would venture to say, in the United States at the end of the Twentieth Century than there ever were in medieval Europe, even with its hundred years war and bubonic plagues. Why? Because we've got it all, and we can't help saying, "But is this all there is? But what am I? Am I worth anything?"

The "value" of life.

I hate to disillusion you, ladies and gentlemen, but the answer is No. Why? Because, as I said, a value is a means toward a freely-chosen goal; and as Immanuel Kant astutely pointed out, a human being is the goal, he is not a means toward someone else's goal. Thus, human life is the criterion for which all values are values; it is not itself a value. It just is.

Now wait a minute! Doesn't "Thou shalt not kill" say that human life is the supreme value? No. Right and wrong are not in the same category as good and bad. Right and wrong are what is consistent or inconsistent with the way you now are; good and bad (values) deal with the future self you want to become. It is wrong to kill a human being; but it can be good to do so, if the person's death lets you achieve your goals. And don't tell me this doesn't happen. Every woman who has had an abortion has used her own child's death as a means toward the goals she wants, and nothing has happened to her.

This, as I said, is the great conundrum of life, which I'm going to address in the final chapter. How can life make sense, if you are more fulfilled by doing what violates your very reality?

Of course, there is a sense in which a life can be said to have value; when one's life helps another achieve that other person's goals. But "life" in this sense is the actions you perform rather than your reality. In this sense, President Clinton's life (at least while he was President) was "more valuable" than an ordinary citizen's, because what President Clinton did affected more people than Joe Blow.

But the whole of the impeachment business was about whether the "value" his life has toward making others happy then permits him to use other people as if he were the end and they were the means--as if he were the only touchstone by which value could be assessed, and other persons weren't ends in themselves that had to be respected.

When you say that "life is the supreme value," then, what you're really saying is that human life is something that has to be respected, not that it's the "most useful thing there is." But even saying it in that sense is to bastardize the word "value," because it's then unclear when something is one of these values-to-be-respected and not a value-to-be-used. It commercializes what is absolute and can't be compared with other things, and treats it as if it's just very very expensive.

The meaning of life.

But then if my life has no value, what's the point of living? My whole life is meaningless then, isn't it?

No it's not. Your life is the meaning; it doesn't have one. Well, it does, actually; but it has the meaning you give it.

And this is basically what being human is. We don't start out with a life that means something; we start out with potential. All we are as we grow up and develop our powers is ability to do things--which is another way of saying "ability to be somebody."

And the agony of adolescence is the discovery that I can't find out who I am, because all I am is potential; I can be this or that kind of person; but I can look and look inside me all I want, and all I find is possibility, not who I really am.

And why is that? Because of the freedom we are given. That's precisely the point. You are given a range of possibilities, and it's up to you which of these possibilities are going to be realized; you choose among the various potential selves you foresee in the future, and work to actually make yourself into what you have chosen.

And that self you choose is what gives meaning to your life, because it is now "headed somewhere," somewhere you have decided it shall be headed toward; and every step you take in that direction is meaningful, because the step is toward the end, the real reality of your life.

"Now wait a minute, wait a minute!" I hear you believers say. "What about God's plan for you? Isn't that what gives meaning to your life?" I'll tell you a secret: God created you free, and He has no need for you whatever. His plan for you is precisely that you determine for yourself what life you want to live, and work to carry out that plan. That's profound; think about it.

That is, you are so created that you create for yourself what makes your life meaningful, and then the achieving of that meaning is God's (natural) plan for your life. (I say "natural" here because there's an added something in the actual scheme of things--the Beatific Vision, in which we become God without losing our finiteness, just as Jesus is both God and a man; but that's a gift and can't even be conceived as a goal by any human being, because it's beyond anything we could desire. It's not part of the "meaning" of your life, because the meaning has to be something you can think.)

Another way of saying this is that you define for yourself what in the concrete your happiness is to consist in (because happiness is what you're looking for, isn't it?), and you work toward that, and that is what gives meaning to your life. But this means that happiness does not consist in feeling good, but in being what you have chosen to be.

Oh yes, there's a big difference here. I'm a happy man; and I have been for most of my life; but until very recently (my retirement) I also happen to have been clinically depressed. You see, I'm the child of a blind father and an alcoholic mother, whom I saw go into the DT's when I was--I must have been--seven, staring at the wall in the dark in the middle of the night and screaming "They're coming through the wall! They're coming through the wall!" Needless to say, my childhood was all screwed up; and this screwed-up childhood had a physical effect on my brain, so that when there's any pressure on me and I'm not taking medicine, everything feels hopeless and horrible.

But I learned at Kang's funeral that the way you feel has nothing to do with the real situation--thank God!--and I spent forty years ignoring my feelings and basing my actions on the facts about my life in spite of them. Then I finally discovered that a little pill can make things feel neutral! That it was actually possible to wake up in the morning, and feel as if the day might be worth getting through! It was amazing. I told the coordinator of the study I was in (I was taking an experimental drug) "I'd forgotten you could feel this way!I haven't felt like this except for a few days when I was a teenager and I could finally leave my home!"

But that didn't mean that I wasn't happy, even then. I knew who I was, I knew where I was going, I knew how to get there, and I knew I was on the way. The fact that I felt as if it was hopeless didn't mean it was. It wasn't. It isn't now.

So here's some advice from the old philosopher: Forget about self-esteem. Forget about what you are now, and never mind who's to blame for the state you're in. Figure out what you want to be and set off on that road.

What life is all about is that it simply doesn't matter what you are now, or how you got to be that way: whether you're male or female, white or black or Asian, whether you had a happy childhood or a rotten one, whether you feel like shit or feel as if life is glorious. What matters, and the only thing that really matters, is the self you choose to be, and to start on the road that leads there.

The second thing to remember is this: If you're not failing, you've set your goals pretty low. The thing is not to avoid failing, it's to fail forward. The easiest thing in the world is to be successful. All you have to do is define your goal in life to be what you now are. Since there's no built-in goal in life, you're automatically successful.

But in that case, that's all there is. What you now are is the whole meaning of your life, because that's all the meaning you've given it--and you'll find no more meaning to your life, because you can't find any meaning to your life; you have to give it to your life.

You see what we're doing with our obsession with self-esteem? We're robbing life of the only meaning it has: the meaning we give it. We're saying that life as it is is all there is, and we're trying to make ourselves feel as if this is just peachy and wonderful; but it's all meaningless; it just feels good--if you don't pay attention to reality, and pretend that life is just a Barney program.

"But wait just a second now!" you say. "Suppose I set a goal for myself, something I'd really like to be, like a second Michelangelo, or another Bill Gates or something. For every Michelangelo, there are a thousand sculptors who are starving to death and never have anyone buy what they've done, and for every Bill Gates there are a million programmers who never amount to a hill of beans. Why should I try?"

Because this life isn't the only life. But that's something that belongs to the final chapter of this book. But let me tell you that even if what I say there is wrong (and it isn't, but even if it were), and you set that goal for yourself and get on your horse like Don Quixote, you will find that your life will be a struggle, and a harder struggle the higher the goal you set--but the struggle will be worth every minute of it. You may not have self-esteem because you're always failing on your way to your goal; but you know where you're headed, and you're on your way. You're acting the way a human being was made to act.

Self-esteem, phooey!