Suicide for Some

is a reasonable, logical, normal course of action.  If one is in pain, such as that of bone cancer, or attainted of a wasting disease, a lethal dose of morphine or sodium pentathol, self-administered, were an option we would all like to have open to us, and should concern no one but ourselves. Even suicides for no discernible reason whatever, like that recently of Robin Williams the great comedic actor, while they disappoint, we must dismiss ultimately as none of our business.  It is only those suicides which seem like cowardly and unnecessary submission (such as Seneca's), or a paltry and cowardly evasion of justice (Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, etc.)  that we feel, by common impulse, that we may properly judge of adversely.  Seneca--bearing in mind how little flight had availed Cicero to shield him from the malignant, partisan, searching hatred of Mark Antony, and resolving to be a lot quicker than Cicero--should, in my opinion, at his first apprehension of Nero's unappeasable resentment and envy, have used his reputed great wealth to move himself and his household, faster than he could be pursued by agents of the emperor, to Parthia, and thence hired a caravan to bear him safely to India, where, in the tranquil Punjab (even in Kashmir) under the Kushana, he might have flourished, and learned Buddhism, and grown truly wise.

Whereat, suddenly, I am struck with a cynical aperçu, fruit of long observation: For men of median wits and lesser Virtues--but who are thought clever, even wise, by their contemporaries (Nero, of course, for one, but Henry VIII for another, and Louis XIV for yet another--and, among us, such lights as Joseph Campbell, William James, Thomas Dewey, Michel Fouquet, Stephen Jay Gould, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, George Lakoff, William Kristol, Gertude Himmelfarb and Norman Podhoretz) confrontation with wisdom higher than their own ignites a furious, even murderous resentment.  Think of Henry VIII and Thomas More; Louis XIV and Fénelon; George Lakoff and Stephen Pinker; Midge Decter (Mrs. Norman Podhoretz) and Gore Vidal....Hmmm, I see that it doesn't always work, or works backwards.   Still it does sometimes; and I'm wondering who the pseudo-historian Joseph Campbell might ever have met, who, just by the fact of his superior intelligence and deeper understanding of things, must have scorned and shamed Campbell, and made mock of Campbell's ignorant, presumptuous and nasty "Viennese Depth Psychology" approach to the Divine Science of Mythology.  When I first ran across the complacent idiocies of the insufferable, pragmatic, half-vast metaphorist George Lakoff, my second thought (after "how odious and untrue"), imploring Heaven, was, "Surely there is a Champion of Truth out there somewhere who can confute this Monster of Pious Unwisdom--and then, almost immediately, I discovered, as if on cue, the dire, delicious things that Stephen Pinker had said right to Lakoff's face (or anyway by return email). Oooh.  Like a thunderstorm on a hot day in Umbria.  Like a reprieve from the Emperor.

Then, as in the course of too long an afternoon under the Vela of the Flavian Amphitheater,  I was rather less gratified to see what a silly hash Noam Chomsky made of Stephen Pinker--but still pleased to see the blood flow.  So it goes.  Ave Caesar!