The Consolations of Mortality
Page 13
It’s a stance one can take to other arenas of one’s life. There was once a highly regarded Canadian politician named Robert Stanfield, who lost three consecutive elections to long-time prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Whenever he made a postcareer public appearance, Stanfield typically found himself introduced as “the greatest prime minister Canada never had.” At the end of his life Stanfield truly had, as was said prematurely of Churchill during his midlife wilderness years, a “brilliant future behind him.” But the greatness of Stanfield’s prime ministership is tied to the fact that it never happened. His real prime ministership would assuredly not have been as great as the mere possibility. An old man who, looking backward, treasures a great future that now lies behind him does so precisely because it remained only a golden possibility and never became a tarnished reality.
If that doesn’t work for you, then other Harvard men have crafted a different kind of interpretation of events to palliate regret. Instead of cherishing a possibility precisely because it never became a reality, they embrace the only reality they believe was ever possible. Suppose that the now-old man, decades earlier on the moonlit walk, had made a play for the girl. Who knows where that would have led? Everything in his life afterward would have been different. In fact, everything in his life beforehand would have had to have been different too. To have made a play, he would have had to have been bolder or more optimistic than he actually was. And that would have meant an entirely different childhood, with less emotionally stifled or reticent parents. But then, had his parents not been so reserved, he wouldn’t have opted for an inward life as the acclaimed writer he became, whose specialty was the deep subtext beneath cramped and hesitant human relationships.
You must, Nietzsche says, accept or reject the entire road you actually traveled. Everything is tied together through webs of causation, and you can’t pick and choose.4 To regret even one thing in your life—to regret not having made a play for the girl—is to regret one’s entire life itself. “Joy and woe are woven fine,” as the Harvard Study’s George Vaillant observes, quoting Blake. You can dampen regrets, he advises, by accepting your “one and only life cycle as something that [had] to be and that permits no substitutions.”5
Several Harvard men endured long and less than ideal marriages. The way some tell their stories suggests yet another late-life regret-management strategy. Instead of viewing the past as an iron reality dictated by the causal laws of nature, a man might see the past as having been genuinely open to any number of possible paths. He could have married any of a number of women, including the one who got away on the moonlit night. But—thanks to his individual neuroses or crochets, the laws of his own nature—their union would ultimately have been no happier than the one he actually did settle into. In the same way, if Lily Schreyer had married the one who got away instead of the one who didn’t, she would have—thanks to her skills and ambition, the laws of her own nature—ended up in an identical “power couple” relationship.
One Harvard man, who was now at peace with his emotionally stultified marriage, had come to understand that the deepest aspects of his own character—his own restraint and reserve—were the causes. “As he saw it,” Vaillant writes, there “was nothing to be done about it; it was just the way he was”—and would have been no matter whom he had married.6 One can apply the same thinking in other spheres of life. “What is your biggest regret when you look back at your career?” the New York Times asked the R&B singer Bettye LaVette, who had never quite broken through to stardom. “Leaving Atlantic [Records],” she replied. But LaVette then immediately added, “Not that I would have stayed there and become a star” either.7 No real cause for regret, then, because the road not taken would have led right back to the road that was in fact taken.
For some of the Harvard men, finally, the road they took seems to have ultimately led them back to the very road they didn’t. The fulfillment, joy, and pleasure they imagined—in the long intervening years—that they would have enjoyed with (say) the one who got away was present all along, they now realize, in their actual marriages. With the wisdom of years comes a different understanding of those terms: “fulfillment,” “joy,” and “pleasure.” Several Harvard men who had reported bad unions at earlier stages came, with a greater sense of what really mattered to them, to view the marriage they had made as precisely the kind of relationship they might have thought they’d let slip away years before. In 2012, speaking wistfully of her love interest in the 1984 teen-movie Sixteen Candles, the actress Molly Ringwald observed, “my husband resembles him a lot so in a way I kind of got him.”8
Or if it’s not his marriage that a Harvard man might come to see in that way, then it’s something else. One Harvard man now refers to his vineyard as his “second girlfriend.” He thought he had lost the opportunity for a later-life romance. But it turns out, assuming he looks at matters the right way, that he got that romance after all. Another, who had regretted not pursuing an artistic career, came to see that he was a kind of artist after all: an artist at mentoring young associates in his law firm.9 By reinterpreting our life, we can conclude that we have realized what once seemed like a lost possibility. Regret ebbs.
In retrospect, then, maybe it’s good that kissing the girl remained only a golden possibility, never tarnished by having touched the realm of the real. Or maybe the reality in which the boy didn’t kiss the girl, taken as a whole, was the only one he would have ever wanted or could have ever had—it could never have included that particular possibility. Or maybe even if he had pursued the possibility of kissing her, it would ultimately have led him right back to the downbeat reality he now inhabits. Or maybe the reality he inhabits, he now sees, has come after all to embody the upbeat possibility he had earlier regretted foregoing by failing to kiss her.
Thinking along such lines, you can diminish and perhaps banish regrets at the end of life. Mortal life, then, can come to embrace a faux immortality, insofar as one of the goods we seek from immortality is the capacity to stamp our own preferred meanings and definitive interpretations on the past. To tie up all the loose ends. To attain closure.
Yet most of us, when we lie in bed and think about the way things might have been, do not—we cannot—wrap things up so nicely. There must be some hocus-pocus going on here. The chanteuse who belted out “Je ne regrette rien” also sang “La vie en rose.” Aren’t those who tell themselves these just-so stories about the way things might have been—on which all regrets conveniently vanish—looking at the world through bottle-thick rose-colored glasses?
Lying in Bed and Thinking About the Way Things Might Have Been
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Princeton philosophers David K. Lewis and Saul Kripke each pioneered an innovative way of thinking about the question “I wonder what would have happened had I done X instead of Y?” And in different ways, their philosophies each subvert the life stories of the Harvard men.
How should a man now think about what might have happened had he—to continue with the same example—kissed the girl on that moonlit night many years ago instead of freezing when the moment was ripe? Begin, David K. Lewis suggests, by imagining countless possible pasts: possible ways things might have unfolded instead of the way they actually did. Think of them, Lewis says, as “possible worlds” occupying various orbits in concentric circles around the real one. Those possible worlds in the closest orbits duplicate the way our own real world unfolded in almost all respects.10 For example, a very near possible world would be identical to our own real world in every way except that on January 20, 2009, Chief Justice Roberts did not muff the words to the presidential oath of office, but otherwise everything that happened before and since is exactly the same. Then, as we move toward the outer orbits, we find possible worlds that resemble our own real world less and less. For example, a very distant possible world would be one in which, instead of inaugurating President Obama, the chief justice signaled to a roving spaceship containing a band of Justice Roberts clones fr
om another galaxy, who then descended, staged a coup, and ran America according to the principles of strict judicial restraint.
So what would have happened had the boy kissed the girl? To answer this question we must, Lewis says, imagine what would have happened in the closest possible world in which, unlike in the real one, he did kiss the girl. And how do we determine what that world would have looked like? For Lewis, it’s generally a world that’s identical to the real one right up until the moment just before the boy had the chance to kiss the girl. It then varies from the real one due to a “small miracle”—a tiny momentary violation of the laws of nature—such that a neuron fires in his mind that didn’t in the real world, with the result that he leans over and gives her a kiss. Why do we need the laws of nature to be momentarily suspended? Because: since everything that caused him not to kiss the girl in the real world also would have happened in the closest possible world—that’s what makes it the closest—then, unless the laws of cause and effect are momentarily suspended, he wouldn’t kiss the girl in this closest possible world either.
So let’s say that in the real world, the boy grew up with cool and undermining parents, and simply lacked sufficient emotional responsiveness and confidence to kiss the girl. In the closest possible world to that real one, in which a random neuron fired and he did kiss her, it’s reasonable to say that—due to his emotional unresponsiveness and lack of confidence—he and the girl would have spent a disappointing night together and then one of them would have furtively crept away before the other awoke, leaving profound memories of shame and embarrassment. No real cause for regret, then, about not having kissed her in the real world.
Lewis’s work has provoked considerable criticism from other philosophers. But much (though certainly not all) of it buys into the general idea that the question “What would have happened if the boy had kissed the girl?” requires imagining what would have happened in the closest possible world to the real one in which he did kiss the girl. It’s just that Lewis’s critics dispute that that closest possible world would be one whose past is identical to the real world’s right up to the moment when a minor miracle causes the boy to kiss the girl. After all, any world in which even minor miracles can occur—violations of the laws of nature, such as totally uncaused neuron firings—doesn’t seem particularly close to our own.
A better answer, some say, would be to imagine a world whose past differs just enough from our real one to get the boy to kiss the girl without the violation of the laws of nature that a miracle entails. In that version of the closest possible world, his slightly less uptight parents would have encouraged him to be a little more emotionally responsive and confident than they did in the real world, just enough so that he would have kissed the girl, but also such that he would have then likely spent an enjoyable night with her and even embarked on a short affair. There’s reason, then, for lingering regret about not having kissed her. Other philosophers have offered further, often spectacularly ingenious, ways of thinking about what the closest possible kiss-the-girl world might look like.
The point of them all, however, is to deal with the problem of physical determinism. If physical determinism is true—if the past is what it is and the laws of nature hold—then the real world could not have unfolded even a jot differently from the way that it, in fact, did.11 So if there’s going to be any kind of answer to the question “What would have happened if the boy had kissed the girl?” we have no choice, these philosophers say, but to imagine either a world in which the past up till the moment of truth was the same as it actually was, but the laws of cause and effect then got briefly suspended due to a minor miracle, or a world in which the laws are not suspended, but they instead govern a past which has to have been at least a little different from our own. Depending on what happens in whatever we deem to be the closest possible world in which the boy does kiss the girl, we can then gauge whether regret is in order.
But if physical determinism is true (and Lewis along with many of his interlocutors believes it is), then these are all mental games. Lovely games, but games nonetheless. If physical determinism is true, then there is only one real world, with its specific historical past and natural laws. Beyond that, all that remains are any number of other imaginable worlds. Yes, we can array those worlds on nuanced spectrums of greater or lesser metaphysical possibility depending on how much we would have to tweak the real world’s past or laws of nature to get to them.12 But as actual physical possibilities, there’s no greater or lesser; they were all equally impossible. Due to physical determinism, no one of them was ever any more reachable from the real world than any of the others, given the real world’s particular past and laws of nature.
And if there is just the one kissless real world, then we can palliate regret only as the Harvard men suggest we do. We would understand that we must either accept or reject that real world in its entirety. And we would treat everything else that we might call a “possibility” not as a comment on what might have happened—it couldn’t have—but for what it says about that one real world. Namely, that the man was once a boy who captivated a girl on a moonlit night without disappointing her.
Let us return to ourselves lying in bed and thinking about the way things might have been. We have available, thanks to Saul Kripke and others, another way entirely of coming at the question.
Kripke turns away from the attempt to rate imaginary worlds as more or less possible based on their degree of divergence from our own, whether in their laws of nature or their factual history. Instead, Kripke asks us simply to consider the bare rules of logic and certain basic terminological definitions. Logical and definitional criteria do rule out a few extreme possibilities. It’s impossible that water could have been anything other than H2O, or that bachelors could be married. But logic and definitions do not in any way rule out the possibility that the boy kissing the girl could have led to a passionate affair. Nor, though, do they rule out the possibility that his kissing her would have led to a slap in the face instead. Or a demurral by the girl coupled by an introduction to her best friend with whom he then would have become infatuated. Or perhaps the slap on the face would have required stitches, leading the boy to fall in love with and marry the emergency-room nurse. Nothing, simply on logical or definitional grounds, bars any one of these possibilities more than any other.13
But just as Lewis’s metaphysical approach to possibility seems too nuanced, Kripke’s logical approach seems insufficiently discriminating—at least if our goal is to figure out how to deal with regret. Logic, coupled with definitions, doesn’t rule out much.14 If a passionate response from the girl is just as logically possible as a slap in the face or a thousand other scenarios, how does the man know whether to regret not having kissed her?
Here again the Harvard men speak more directly to us than do the Princeton philosophers. They come at matters not from a logical but from a psychological perspective. And from a psychological perspective, some possibilities are much closer to—in the sense of actually being reachable from—the real world than others.
Look at it this way: as a boy a Harvard man might have kissed and then married the girl on the moonlit walk instead of his actual wife, or married another woman to whom the girl introduced him, or married a nurse to whom she sent him, and so on. All of those are logical possibilities. But given his own psycho-logic, his own neurotic sluggishness, each one of those possibilities would have ultimately led to the same point he presently occupies in the real world: he would have been looking back on a life with a troubled marriage. “I do not flatter myself,” Montaigne says; “in like circumstances I would still be thus.”15 In the real world, then, the Harvard man actually realized all those logically possible marriages: they would, from the perspective of where he is now and what matters to him psychologically, have been no different than the blighted reality he lived.
Or alternatively maybe, from a psychological perspective, the reality he lived turns out to have been no different from many blissful
logical possibilities he thought he had missed. The Harvard man who tends his vineyard manages to psychologically equate its sensual and emotional pleasures with those of the possible girlfriend whose heart he failed to win. The one who pursued a creative legal career believes that, after all, he really did—given his psychological needs and nature—lead the artistic life he thought he’d foregone. The real world as it transpired can be interpreted to psychologically encompass—to have realized—those particular possibilities. His regret is assuaged.
It may be that for Kripke, the rules of logic, combined with the meaning of terms, classifies only a certain set of extreme possibilities as, in fact, impossible: that triangles could have had four sides, for instance, or that George Clooney could have been a potato. But the much richer psychological meaning that the Harvard men give to certain terms—that a vineyard could be a girlfriend, or a legal career could be an artistic one—allows them to ultimately classify a range of possibilities as having, in fact, actually been realized.
The question on the table is how to deal with late-life regret within the confines of a mortal existence. And in the end, the kinds of thoughts emerging from the Harvard men’s off-the-cuff ruminations are more helpful for that goal than the finely wrought theories of the Princeton philosophers. The Harvard men look to the one real physical world we have, in which they could have acted only as they did. And they reflect, too, on the way that that world allowed them to realize a particular array of psychological possibilities. Beyond that they have little interest in searching for the one closest metaphysical world in which they might have acted differently. Nor do they spend much time entertaining an endless array of strictly logical possibilities.