Critique, Cancer, and the Afterlife

CRITIQUE

“We live in a society basted in self-regard, our moralists tell us; fat and dozy on the lion’s share of the world’s resources, polluting the seas and burning fossil fuels, we gaze in loving torpor at our own reflection, and the gnat-bite of recession barely disturbs our narcissistic trance.”

-- Hilary Mantel “The New York Review of Books” (10/29/09)

This begs the question: what is it we aspire to? The surrounding throng, it would seem, seek celebrity above all else. Reality televison reflects the tragi-kitsch consequences of this obsessive “self-regard.” Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame has been blown up, passe in its quaintness, the temporal abolished. “Fat and dozy” on slow-speed Bronco chases, Jiffy Pop balloon rides, and dancing charlatans, the bar is low. When mediocrity is the inevitable outcome of a society living in a “narcissistic trance,” seeing only ourselves in the mirror of nature, it is understandable we prefer our media indifferent and banal in attending moral matters.

After all, the grotesque depths to which our collective aesthetic appreciation has fallen, never mind our moral attention, would have us prefer Tom Delay represent a dancing star to watching Cyd Charisse in “The Bandwagon.”

I suppose the discomfort in casting that inward gaze toward the lot of others -- aside from those we can identify with -- is too painful to bother. No wonder tardy pilots trump atrocities in Congo, and celebrity extortion is the story of the day. The 14 Americans who were killed yesterday, making it one of the deadliest in the eight-year war, is relegated to page ten news when no hostile fire is involved; as if crashes during gun battles, friendly fire, and other unholy accidents, carry less gravity, encompass less lethality, and are, therefore, less worthy of our consideration, when, as the headline reads – “Hostile Fire Is Not Suspected.” Death-lite, I suppose.

History shows us that moral indifference is not solely the province of the ignorant and uneducated. At least they choose to disassociate themselves from civic obligation. Writing on human sacrifice in ancient cultures (10/26/09 NYT), Janet M. Monge, a physical anthropologist at Penn, informs us that, “Ritual killing associated with a royal death was practiced by other ancient cultures, archaeologists say, and raises a question: Why would anyone, knowing their probable fate, choose a life as a court attendant? It’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand.” Oh really? Do tell. Perhaps Dr. Monge missed yesterdays suicide car bombing in Baghdad, where the toll stands at 155 dead and counting. 9/11 must have escaped her, too.

Is there really a distinction between palace attendants loyal to royal mortuary rituals, Japanese kamikaze pilots zealously dedicated to emperor and country, doctrinally submissive Christian martyrs, and fundamentalist fanatics of Allah? “Hard for us to understand?” Monge’s is less a cold choice than a chosen obliviousness. An oxymoron, yes, but one I think applies. Scholarly over-immersion, or intellectual narrow-mindedness, is no excuse for moral inattention.

CANCER

Given my age and audience, curios of science in matters of health are an ever engaging, and always fascinating subject. Even my limited encounters with serious illness have solicited encouragements toward healing pyramids, salvific light shows, miraculous elixirs, manipulative hand cures, and preemptive energy unblocking procedures. Dear Mr. Mcgoo’s advice column has periodically invoked the ghosts of Dr. Snake Oil in recounting the pseudo-sages along the road to recovery. The smug exhortation to follow the proper diet -- as if the secret cure to immortality is as close as the people’s food co-op -- rings hollow when your next meal will be delivered by a feeding tube through your nose. Interesting it is how quickly we spawn of the New Age Zeitgeist reconsider the status of modern medical science when faced with tumors diffuse through the abdomen and suspicious masses in the breast.

With that introduction, please attend to the following excerpts from Gina Kolata’s most interesting article in the 10/27/09 Science Times section of the NYT: “Cancers Can Vanish without Treatment, but How?”

Call it the arrow of cancer. Like the arrow of time, it was supposed to point in one direction. Cancers grew and worsened.

But as a paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted last week, data from more than two decades of screening for breast and prostate cancer call that view into question. Besides finding tumors that would be lethal if left untreated, screening appears to be finding many small tumors that would not be a problem if they were left alone, undiscovered by screening. They were destined to stop growing on their own or shrink, or even, at least in the case of some breast cancers, disappear.

“The old view is that cancer is a linear process,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. “A cell acquired a mutation, and little by little it acquired more and more mutations. Mutations are not supposed to revert spontaneously.”

So, Dr. Kramer said, the image was “an arrow that moved in one direction.” But now, he added, it is becoming increasingly clear that cancers require more than mutations to progress. They need the cooperation of surrounding cells and even, he said, “the whole organism, the person,” whose immune system or hormone levels, for example, can squelch or fuel a tumor.

Cancer, Dr. Kramer said, is a dynamic process.

It was a view that was hard for some cancer doctors and researchers to accept. But some of the skeptics have changed their minds and decided that, contrary as it seems to everything they had thought, cancers can disappear on their own.

….Cancer cells and precancerous cells are so common that nearly everyone by middle age or old age is riddled with them, said Thea Tisty, a professor of pathology at the University of California, San Francisco. That was discovered in autopsy studies of people who died of other causes, with no idea that they had cancer cells or precancerous cells. They did not have large tumors or symptoms of cancer. “The really interesting question,” Dr. Tisty said, “is not so much why do we get cancer as why don’t we get cancer?”

….With early detection, he said, “our net has become so fine that we are pulling in small fish as well as big fish.” Now, he said, “we have to identify which small fish we can let go.”

But enough about miracles and the obligations of living, what about the afterlife?

THE AFTERLIFE

Coming from a proselytizing atheist, you may find it odd I’ve even broached this subject. Has he left his senses, come to his senses, had an epiphany, or worse…? Is the man daft? Has he no shame? Like a minority of other fools we suffer, I, too, wonder what the state of conscious reality is circumscribed by. Imagining other worlds, physical laws, apart from those which lie within our understanding is, by definition, inconceivable. Is there something, anything, beyond understanding? For some, faith allows a way of imagining a realm beyond the specific worldy context that shapes consciousness and its awareness of that world. A rhetorical digression, but worth saying as a preface to my own struggle with contemplating an afterlife.

But first, some excerpts from Carl Jung’s reflections on the afterlife:

“Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves.”

“Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers.”

“Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things.”

“What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean , or what kind of reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know. We cannot tell whether they possess any validity beyond their indubitable value as anthropomorphic projections.”

“The question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it. But how? My hypothesis is that we can do so with hints sent to us from the unconscious – in dreams, for example.”

-- C. G. Jung (c.1957)

Dreams, paranormal activities, crop circles, the Mystery Spot, Sea Shell City, might not these strange psychic manifestations suggest something beyond the constrictions of consciousness? I recall a recurring dream I’ve had where I’m chased down and knifed repeatedly. In another, the top of my neighbors’ heads has vertical zippers from ear to ear. Further, my dead friend, Ned, unzipping his head, so that he might better share his thoughts, bows to me, at which point the head of a dog I once had emerges and begins to lick my face incessantly. Is this evidence that dreams are really a form of unconscious flatulence that releases the various psychic debris that accumulates over the course of one’s life? Or perhaps a banal conflation of non-linear subconscious memories, akin to the mental structures that inspired the surrealists.

But how do we escape our “anthropomorphic projections”?

Jung writes, “It seems probable that the real nature of the archtype is not capable of being made conscious, it is transcendent.”

Here, Jung, a lifelong student of philosophy and psychology, implies the archtype as something arising from our animal instincts. Why not simply say the impetus toward spirituality and religious belief is innate rather than learned. For Jung, our belief in the myths and stories we collectively share is correlative to having a faith that our conceptions concerning the afterlife are equally valid to the convictions of the non-believer. And how might this benefit us? While I don’t know if he had the existentialists in mind, here’s Jung:

“While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archtype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them.”

-- Randy