The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: "I'm Not Afraid to Die"

"I'm Not Afraid to Die" (Gillian Welch)

Nobody knows what waits ahead
Beyond the earth and sky
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

And there the work of my own hand
Be broken by and by
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

Sometimes it finds me fast asleep
And wakes me where I lie
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

Forget my sins upon the wind
My hobo soul will rise
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

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Gillian Welch - I'm not afraid to die (youtube.com)

Saturday Lecture: "Ravaged by the Impossible"

“Everyone knows what is going to happen at the end. We just do not know what it will be like when what is going to happen actually happens.” (Thomas Ligotti)

Thomas Ligotti:

Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural must be admitted if one’s inclination is to go the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be—the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the supernatural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. This mind does not keep a chronicle of “man’s inhumanity to man” but instead tracks a dysphoria symptomatic of our life as transients in a creation that is natural for all else that lives, but for us is anything but. The most uncanny of creaturely traits, the sense of the supernatural, the impression of a fatal estrangement from the visible, is dependent on our consciousness, which merges the outward and the inward into a universal comedy without laughter. We are only chance visitants to this jungle of blind mutations. The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was opened in our heads. The moment we stepped through that door, we walked out on nature. Say what we will about it and deny it till we die—we are blighted by our knowing what is too much to know and too secret to tell one another if we are to stride along our streets, work at our jobs, and sleep in our beds. It is the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos.

Say what we like, we do not believe ourselves to be just organisms. Ask any medical researcher in his home-sweet-home if he thinks of himself and his wife and kids in the same way he does the animals he left back in the lab. That we are critters is only a scientific technicality. What we see in our mirrors are human beings, and what we need in our diet is the sustenance of stories telling us that we are more than the sum of our creaturely parts. And our supply of this provender comes from only one source—our consciousness, which dramatizes survival as storied conflicts between everyone and his brother and tricks up procreation as legends of courtly love, bedroom farces, and romantic fictions with or without laughs. But such narratives are not really very far from nature, as we can confirm for ourselves. Those recitals of physical or psychological strife among us: Are they really so removed from survival in the natural kingdom? No, they are not. They are still nature, red in tooth and claw. Masked by our consciousness and its illusions to seem uniquely human, our war stories, success stories, and other bio-dramas are not qualitatively different from their analogues in the wilderness. This goes doubly for romance yarns, those dolled-up variations on mating rituals as seen in nature documentaries. They are not detached from the procreative dog-and-pony show as observed by zoologists and would be dramatically incomplete without a sexual union as their chief motive. Properly considered, they are an ornate pornography…

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, “You’re going to die, you know.” However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity. Death—do we really believe it is part of the order of our lives? We say that we do. But when it becomes lucent to our imagination, how natural does it feel? Mozart’s attributed last words are apropos here: “The taste of death is on my tongue. I feel something which is not of this world.” Death is not like survival and procreation. It is more like a visitation from a foreign and enigmatic sphere, one to which we are connected by our consciousness. 

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Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (Hippocampus Press)

Will America Succumb to the "Europe Syndrome"?

{I discovered Charles Murray’s “Out of the Wilderness” in a 2012 book titled "Future Tense," a collection of essays by conservative authors. According to Murray, modern Western civilization is running out of geniuses, artists, and innovators because modern life is too easy and because people (in the developed western world) no longer need to fear starvation, destitution, or early death. Only when existence is precarious are people motivated to create; given comfort and security, they tend to vegetate instead.}

Ten years ago, Charles Murray—a political scientist best known as a fierce critic of the “welfare state”—feared that what he called the “Europe Syndrome” was taking root in America. As he explained it, the Europe Syndrome is a worldview that “starts with a conception of humanity that is devoid of any element of the divine or even specialness. Humans are not intrinsically better or more important than other life forms, including trees. The Europe Syndrome sees human beings as collections of chemicals that are activated and, after a period of time, deactivated.” ¹

Setting aside the possibility that the Europe Syndrome was entirely a figment of Charles Murray’s imagination, it sounds utterly appalling. According to Murray, for those afflicted by the Europe Syndrome, “The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible.” ² Can you even imagine? Murray insisted, disapprovingly, that “this way of looking at life is fundamentally incompatible with a stream of major accomplishments in the arts.” Were Europe’s people for the most part better fed, better housed, or better educated? Were they healthier? Were they living longer? Murray did not seem interested in such prosaic matters; where, he asked, were the geniuses, the virtuosos, the cream of the crop? Where was the new Mozart, Michelangelo, or Dante?

One symptom of the Europe Syndrome is an aging population, about which Murray expressed his concern. “The aging of the population is happening not only because of low birth rates,” he noted, “but also because life expectancy is increasing.” Cause for celebration? Not for Charles Murray: “This leads to another phenomenon without historic precedent: the removal of the constant psychological awareness that one’s own death could happen at any time.” ³ Murray lamented, “The early death of a close friend or family member happens so rarely in the lives of most people that it has become an anomaly—today, we see the deaths of people in their sixties described as ‘untimely’. Our baseline assumption is that we’re going to live to old age. How is this affecting the human desire to achieve?” Blessed are the bereaved, for they shall be motivated to seize the day!

Murray elaborated his thesis regarding the salutary psychological effects of early, unexpected death:

“In a world where people of all ages die, often unexpectedly, there’s a palpable urgency to getting on with whatever you’re going to do with your life.⁴ If you don’t leave your mark now, you may never get the chance. If you live in a world where you’re sure you’re going to live to at least eighty, do you have the same compulsion to leave your mark now? Or do you figure that there’s still plenty of time left, and that you’ll get to it soon. ⁵ To what extent does enjoying life—since you can be sure there’s going to be so much to enjoy—start to take precedence over maniacal efforts to make a mark?” ⁶

I will now quote Murray at greater length so that his argument receives a fair hearing:

“This problem [of increased longevity] fits neatly with the problems associated with increased secularism and the increased material security provided by the advanced welfare state. In a world where death can come at any time, there is also a clear and present motivation to think about spiritual matters even when you are young. Who knows when you’re going to meet your Maker? It could easily be tomorrow. If you’re going to live to be at least eighty, it’s a lot easier not to think about the prospect of non-existence. The world before the welfare state didn’t give you the option of just passing the time pleasantly. Your main resources for living a comfortable life—or even for surviving at all—were hard work and family (especially, having children to support you in your old age). In the advanced welfare state, neither of those is necessary. The state will make sure you have a job (one that doesn’t require you to work too hard), and it will support you in your old age.

The advanced welfare state drains too much of the life from life. When there’s no family, no community, no sense of vocation, and no faith, nothing is left but to pass the time away as pleasantly as possible. ⁷ Put all three conditions together—no urgency to make your mark, no promptings to think about your place in the cosmos, no difficulty in living a comfortable life—and you get what I call the Europe Syndrome.”

Oh, for the good old days, when life was nasty, brutish, and short! Why, oh why, did we ever try to make life better, easier, more enjoyable, and, worst of all, longer? Hubris!

Ten years after “Out of the Wilderness,” Murray can take heart. The COVID pandemic killed off over a million Americans, many of them superannuated and presumably useless; it also put the fear of God and of untimely death into the survivors. The resultant global economic shock forced families to cluster together indoors, brought people together in community (aka “angry mobs”), siphoned trillions of dollars from the world’s bulging coffers, and led to more suicides and “deaths of despair”. Just as the Great Depression of the Thirties and the Great Recession of 2008—2011 deprived people of material security, thereby liberating their creativity and ingenuity, the COVID pandemic thinned the herd and gave people pause regarding their long-term life prospects (or anyone else’s).

In short: If discomfort, anxiety, and insecurity are part of Murray’s recipe for success, we have the ingredients at hand. Let's get cooking!

________________________

Charles Murray (political scientist) - Wikipedia

¹ Murray’s observation helps explain the modern European custom of substituting chemical symbols for people’s names, and the engravings on tombstones that read (for example) “Activated November 24, 1948—Deactivated ???” It also accounts for why Europeans greet each other by asking, “How are your chemicals doing today?”

 ² Make of it what you will, but the U.S. suicide rate is substantially higher than that of the countries of western Europe, despite the latter being infected with Europe Syndrome. Is it possible that our God-given right to “the pursuit of happiness” has become demoralizing? Is it possible that Charles Murray is full of, um, it?

³ It is a well-known fact, memorably stated by Samuel Johnson, that the prospect of one’s imminent death “concentrates the mind wonderfully”. (See also “Sword of Damocles”.)  

⁴ The relevant maxim here is: Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. As Aristotle said, “Call no man happy until he is dead, and the sooner the better.”

⁵ “The problem is we think we have time.”

⁶ Murray here uses the word “maniacal” in a positive sense. His argument, by the way, mirrors that of Ernest Bloch in The Denial of Death, the difference being that Bloch emphasized the negative side of our maniacal compulsions while Murray worried about our losing them.

⁷ The horror!

Loss

{This is for my cousin, brother, and friend James Seidel, who now lives on across the universe somewhere. Stay strong, my brother, wherever you are.}

From Mary Oliver's "In Blackwater Woods":

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it

go,

to let it go.

Mary Oliver In Blackwater Woods (unm.edu)

 

 

Monday Mourning

From Shakespeare's Hamlet:

QUEEN GERTRUDE: Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.  

HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.  

QUEEN GERTRUDE: If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?  

HAMLET: Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, no, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected 'havior* of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly: these indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; these but the trappings and the suits of woe. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The rest, of course, is silence.

Sunday Sermon: "I Do Not Approve"

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”: 

 

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. 

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: 

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned 

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. 
 

 
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. 

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. 

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, 

A formula, a phrase remains—but the best is lost. 
 

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love— 

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled 

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve. 

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. 
 

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave 

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; 

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. 

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Election Update: Bringing Out the Dead

“I see dead people—voting!” (said by some kid in a movie once)

It is increasingly clear that the Demon-crats will stop at nothing to win steal an election.

While President Trump continues to have the enthusiastic support of Above-Ground Americans, Dims have enlisted Deceased-Americans to pad the vote totals (a phenomenon commonly referred to as The Voting Dead). To cite just one example: Rudolph Giuliani, the president’s distinguished legal counsel and a man with at least one foot in the grave himself, has discovered that famed heavyweight champion Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who died in 2011, has continued to vote in his hometown of Philadelphia. Like all rotting corpses, Frazier votes the straight Democrap ticket, having been warned, "Nice little cemetery plot you have here, Joe. Be a shame if something happened to it."

While dead people’s desire to remain involved in civic affairs is commendable, it is also unsettling. The City of Philadelphia is an egregious example of a jurisdiction allowing dead voters to determine elections. A cursory glance at the city’s voter rolls reveals that the following Cadaver-Americans continue to cast ballots:

Jimmie Foxx; Al Simmons; Jimmy Collins; Home Run Baker; Grover Cleveland Alexander; Chief Bender; Lefty Grove; Connie Mack; Herb Pennock; Steve Van Buren; Norm Van Brocklin; Reggie White; and Sonny Jurgenson (technically still alive)

That list is no doubt just the tip of the electoral iceberg that is Philadelphia, "the city so corrupt they sold its naming rights to a cream cheese company."  

The city’s perennial and long dead mayor, Ben Franklin, defends its Election Day tradition of bringing out the dead and frog-marching them to the polls. “It is important,” Franklin explained, “that our elected officials represent not only the present generation, but the past and future as well, the quick and the dead alike. In this manner, Democracy’s Great Chain of Citizenship remains intact. Wisdom does not end at the grave, no more than personhood commences only upon birth. We give Embryonic-Americans rights; why should Entombed-Americans not have them as well? Now excuse me, please; I must see a man about a kite.”

Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia’s "Police Commissioner Emeritus and Eternal," who died in 1971 but who remains active in local politics, pointed out that Philadelphia has no monopoly on posthumous ballot harvesting. “You got any idea how often Robert E. Lee still votes in the South? For a dead guy, he gets around a lot; he’s registered to vote in Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and who the hell knows where else. Same with Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, still voting after all these years. ‘The South will rise again’ ain’t just a slogan, it’s an election strategy.”   

It is time, I believe, to amend our Constitution and to specify that Deceased-Americans forfeit all their rights under the law: except their right to bear arms, of course, and also their right to drive— dead or not, these individuals are still Americans and still worthy of respect. We just shouldn't let them vote.

Saturday Mourning

Today's scheduled "Saturday Lecture" is cancelled, as we mourn the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

2020 is merciless, is it not?

 

The Common Task

“Roll away the stone / Don't leave me here alone / Resurrect me and protect me
Don't leave me laying here / What will they do in two thousand years?” (Leon Russell)

“Listen, I will unveil a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed in a flash, in a twinkling of the eye, at the last trumpet call.” (St. Paul, 1 Corinthians)

“Our task is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.” (Nikolai Fedorov)

Resurrection, whatever its merits, might turn out to be a complicated business.

In the opening pages of Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World, an inexplicable reversal of time (the “Hobart Effect”) has caused the dead to come back to life:

As he glided by the extremely small, out-of-the-way cemetery in his airborne prowl car, late at night, Officer Joseph Tinbane heard unfortunate and familiar sounds. A voice. At once he sent his prowl car up over the spiked iron poles of the badly maintained cemetery fence, descended on the far side, listened.

The voice said, muffled and faint, "My name is Mrs. Tilly M. Benton, and I want to get out. Can anybody hear me?"

Officer Tinbane flashed his light. The voice came from beneath the grass. As he had expected: Mrs. Tilly M. Benton was underground.

Snapping on the microphone of his car radio Tinbane said, "I'm at Forest Knolls Cemetery--I think it's called--and I have a 1206, here. Better send an ambulance out with a digging crew; from the sound of her voice it's urgent."

"Chang," the radio said in answer. "Our digging crew will be out before morning. Can you sink a temporary emergency shaft to give her adequate air? Until our crew gets there--say nine or ten A.M."

"I'll do the best I can," Tinbane said, and sighed. It meant for him an all-night vigil. And the dim, feeble voice from below begging in its senile way for him to hurry. Begging on and on. Unceasingly.

This part of his job he liked least. The cries of the dead; he hated that sound, and he had heard them, the cries, so much, and so many times. Men and women, mostly old but some not so old, sometimes children. And it always took the digging crew so long to get there.

Again pressing his mike button, Officer Tinbane said, "I'm fed up with this. I'd like to be reassigned. I'm serious; this is a formal request."

Distantly, from beneath the ground, the impotent, ancient female voice called, "Please, somebody; I want to get out. Can you hear me? I know somebody's up there; I can hear you talking."

Leaning his head out the open window of his prowl car, Officer Tinbane yelled, "We'll be getting you out any time now, lady. Just try to be patient."

While the spontaneous resuscitation of a deceased individual has clearly, in Dick’s scenario, become routine—the police have a code for it (“1206”) and have established rescue procedures—that does not make it any more palatable to those, like Officer Tinbane, who have to deal with it: “The cries of the dead…”

The 2004 French film Les Revenants (“The Returned”) postulates a mysterious phenomenon in which some 70 million people, all of whom had died in the previous decade, suddenly resurface and return to their homes—which, of course, are no longer theirs and sometimes no longer even exist. Not surprisingly, the Returned’s subsequent transition back to life is not without difficulties:

The returned suffer from effects similar to those that may be seen after severe concussion, such as disorientation, sleep disturbance, and wandering. Former professionals among the returned are moved to menial jobs when it becomes clear that, although they can perform rote tasks, they can no longer engage in spontaneous problem solving or planning, and that even their apparent consciousness may be an illusion. This behavior adds to the growing sentiment that the returned are different from their former selves. However, while the returned generally function sluggishly during the day, a doctor named Gardet has become suspicious of the returned after observing some of them clandestinely attending animated meetings, conducted in the middle of the night, during which their symptoms seem to disappear. ¹

In a world where we don’t always know what to do with the living, how would we possibly find a place for the (formerly) dead? Eventually, no doubt, we would call in the military:

One evening a series of explosions tears through the town, apparently detonated by the returned in an act of mass sabotage but without inflicting any casualties. In the chaos, the returned head for a network of tunnels. The mayor attempts to stop his wife from leaving with the rest but begins to feel ill and, after Martha urges him to "give in", apparently dies, only to appear later in the tunnels among the returned. The military responds by gassing the returned with a chemical that induces a permanent coma.

After guiding some of the returned to the tunnels, Mathieu makes his way back to Rachel, and recounts to her the events leading to his fatal car accident. He reveals that he crashed the car while looking for her after the two had fought. Rachel follows him into the tunnels, tearfully kissing him before he disappears into the darkness. She returns to the surface and observes the military carting away the comatose bodies. The bodies are laid atop their graves in the cemetery and slowly vanish.

At the close of Counter-Clock World, Officer Tinbane wanders through a cemetery where the dead continue to beg for life:

Flashing the meager beam of his light on the monument he read the inscription. ‘Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi expugnata dabunt labem putresque ruina,’ he read, without comprehension. ² He wondered what it meant. He could not remember. Did it have any meaning? Perhaps not. He withdrew the yellow beam of light from the monument.

For a time, a long time, he sat listening.

Silence.

And then, as he sat, he heard voices. He heard them from many graves; he detected the growing into life of those below-- some very close to it, some indistinct and far off. But all moving in that direction. He heard them coming closer; the voices became a babble.

Under me, he thought. One very nearby. He could-- almost--make out its words.

"My name is Earl B. Quinn," the voice crackled. "And I'm down here, shut in, and I want to get out…can anyone there hear me?" Earl B. Quinn called anxiously. "Please, somebody; hear me. I want to get out--I'm suffocating!"

"I can't get you out," he said, then. Finally.

 Excitedly, the voice stammered, "C-can't you dig? I know I'm near the top; I can hear you real clearly. Please start digging, or go tell everybody; I have relatives--they'll dig me out. Please!"

Tinbane moved over, away from the grave. Away from the insistent noise. Into the babble of all the many others.

The resuscitation of Tilly M. Benton and Earl B. Quinn is nowhere near as miraculous or as glorious as the Easter stories of the Christian tradition, but they have the advantage—once you concede the existence of some “Hobart effect”—of being plausible. Clawing their way out of the grave, “the returned” are not divine, they are not saviors of any sort, and their fate, like that of the living, is uncertain, even perilous.  This is not resurrection as transformation, nor is it a “new creation”; neither Tilly M. Benton nor Earl B. Quinn seems prepared to judge angels. More prosaically, their brand of resurrection is simply a second chance at being human, a chance (perhaps) to do a better job of being human; and most of us, I suspect, would settle for that.

Let someone else judge angels, then; the "common task" of humanity is right here on earth.

_________________________________________

 ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Came_Back

 ² The inscription is from Lucretius. Translations vary, but a consensus is "So likewise the walls of the great universe assailed on all sides shall suffer decay and fall into moldering ruin." It means, essentially, that nothing lasts.

Two Blinks

{For the uninitiated: "blink" is my term for a post that offers a link to another blog, with selected excerpts interspersed with my own brief commentary.}

At Vox, Tara Isabella Burton cautions against a too-easy acceptance of "assisted suicide" and "the right to die": 

End-of-life debates...raise vital questions for which we, as a society, do not have fully articulated answers. Who has the right to end a life — and why? And what does it mean to make assumptions that a life is, or is not, worth living? At what point do the sometimes competing ideas of “best interest,” individual freedom, and the inherent goodness of life overlap, and where do they contradict each other? And what does the increasing medicalization of death say about our attitude to life?  

For "right-to-die" advocates, "the idea of freedom — that it is a human right to decide how and when one will die — trumps the idea of life itself as a moral and existential good." But opponents like Catholic bioethicist John Paris "[have] expressed concern over an approach to life that emphasized human sovereignty and agency over the sheer fact of existence. “The idea that everyone is sovereign” — and should have control over all aspects of their life and body — is itself a flawed one, [Paris] said."  

Ms. Burton continues: 

The worry, [Paris] says, is that life is seen as something that is only worth living if it possesses certain qualities, and that life is therefore not seen as worthwhile for its own sake. “What kind of a society wants to do that? Life is made simply an option that you have when you’re happy. But if you become distressed or depressed you can end it. You shouldn’t have to suffer for anything,” he says.  

Is there some limit to how much suffering a person should be expected to endure, and, if so, who decides that limit?  Concern about the consequences of socially accepted suicide is not limited to theists; Burton also cites the secular humanist Brendan O'Neill, whose "objections to assisted dying are twofold. First, he argues, it brings what should be an intensely personal sphere into the world of bureaucracies and tribunals, causing unnecessary suffering for the dying. Second, he says, it fosters a culture where those who are terminally ill, or disabled, might be led to believe that their own lives — or indeed, life for its own sake — is not valued." 

Indeed, O’Neill’s argument is very similar to Paris’s when he writes that debates over euthanasia have “become bound up with society’s broader inability to value and celebrate human life today. It is clear that society finds it increasingly difficult to say that human existence is a good thing." He sees a certain “moral exhaustion” in a society that no longer sees life for its own sake as a de facto good.  

“It’s very important that society doesn’t give the green light to suicide,” he said. “That life is worth living, however difficult it might be … is valuable.” Saying to people, “Well, maybe your life isn’t worth living and maybe you should give up,” is an example of what he calls “moral defeatism.”  

There is no easy way to resolve this conflict between "the limitations of freedom" and the inherent value of life--nor should there be. As Ms. Burton recognizes, we have to take this issue seriously and we have to talk about it seriously; lives, after all, are at stake. 

Burton concludes: 

At a societal, cultural level...we haven’t necessarily come to a collective conclusion about what life means. Societally speaking, as we move toward a cultural paradigm that increasingly sees individual liberty as the ultimate moral good, we have to reckon with those instances in which life and liberty do not coincide...Few people would argue that individual liberty is a bad thing. But it’s worth recognizing what we lose when we collectively change our value system to accommodate its supremacy.  

What Paris and O’Neill both tap into, despite their differing perspectives, is that we haven’t necessarily found a way to talk about existence or life as entities in themselves. Is life “worth living” for its own sake? As a culture, we lack a secular vocabulary to talk about what Catholics sometimes call the “sanctity of life.” But [to deal with this issue], it’s a vocabulary we need. 

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/21/17360978/right-to-die-assisted-dying-suicide-david-goodall  

At The American Conservative, Bruce Fein insists that America needs to return to proper constitutional order, by which he means "separation of powers and checks and balances to achieve an Aristotelian mean between rule by Platonic guardians and mobocracy." Fein explains (sort of) what that should mean in practice: 

No law, regulation, policy or government practice should be embraced without a showing that (1) it is authorized by the Constitution; (2) the branch of government responsible for exercising the authority has done so; and, (3) the government has shouldered its burden of documenting with concrete evidence that compromising the individual right to be left alone is justified by a clear, present, and alarming danger to domestic tranquility or national security. ¹ Speculation is not good enough to satisfy the third prong. Neither are remote or ephemeral harms.        

The benefits of this approach would be many and wondrous, according to Fein: 

Probably 90 percent or more of our multi-trillion-dollar warfare state, surveillance state, bail-out state, and welfare state would be eliminated over time if the Constitution were made the battleground of American politics. Among other things, federal taxes and spending would tumble; the national debt would shrink; crony capitalism would die; the economy would flourish; privacy would be honored; and, our nine known unconstitutional, gratuitous presidential wars would cease. 

Most importantly, concludes Fein, "The nation’s individual liberty index—the proxy of national greatness—would climb by orders of magnitude." 

I was not aware that there was such a thing as the "individual liberty index," nor do I know how it might be calculated. What I do know is that, while our constitution enshrines and safeguards a good deal of individual liberty, it also mentions something called "the general welfare," which I happen to think is an even better "proxy of national greatness".

I see no reason why Benjamin Franklin's warning that "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately" should be limited to wartime; it strikes me as a perfectly good metaphor for how we ought to approach our public life and public policies. There's more to our great national experiment than "individual liberty"; we're either all in this together or we're not in it at all. 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-constitution-must-be-the-battleground/  

¹ The Constitution does not mention any "individual right to be left alone". It would appear that Fein, a conservative, has conjured that right in the same manner as the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who famously (in Griswold v. Connecticut) referred to the Constitution's "penumbral rights of privacy and repose."  Conservatives have yet to stop mocking that phrase, coined in 1965; but Bruce Fein, at least, has apparently come to terms with the concept of "penumbral rights".