Tag Archives: Lewis Thomas

“We’re not getting out of this thing alive”

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Lewis Thomas, in Lives of a Cell, discoursed on death from the viewpoint of a biologist. He noted, “At the very center of the problem is the naked cold deadness of one’s own self, the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty, and it is unmentionable, unthinkable.  We like to think…we can avoid the problem if we just become, next year, say, a bit smarter.”

We have the notion that, “Oh, well. We can figure this out and get beyond it. It just won’t happen to me.”  We are guilty of what Ernest Becker called the Denial of Death. In his book with that title, he argued that that civilization was organized for the purpose of denying our mortality, that it is a complicated contrivance designed merely for burying our head in the sand regarding our eventual demise, our eventual return to the dust from which we are created.  (I like Hamlet’s bemused observations about us being merely worm food.)

So, what do we do with this problem?  Well, we wrestle with it as best as we can.  Here, in my daily perambulations, you get some glimpse of one person’s doubt and insecurities…and hope…regarding this issue.  A key source of hope for me has been to realize that death is merely part of life and that death is an issue that can be addressed before the actual physical death.  By that I mean that we can die before we die, that the real issue in our fear of death is the fear of the ego’s death, and that we can let the ego die long before our physical death.   Irvin Yalom argued decades ago that those who fear death fear life and only through the death of their ego can they embrace life and live life to the fullest.

James Hillman had a relevant belief re suicide. He was a Jungian therapist and he shared in Suicide and the Soul re one client who was suicidal. He told the client…and I paraphrase…”So you want to die.  You come to me and I will help you die. But, you have to promise me that in the meantime you will not physically harm yourself.”  Hillman believed that the suicidal impulse was often a misguided impulse from the heart, that the wish to die, if handled delicately and with spiritual guidance, could be the doorway to eternal life.

Boundaries and spirituality

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Boundaries are such an essential part of life. That is what I enjoyed about Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell as he illustrates how boundary setting is so essential even on the biological, i.e. cellular, dimension of life.

I think it was Rollo May who likened the absence of boundaries to a river without banks. For, a river without banks is not a river any longer it is just a muddy bog, not useful for much if anything. Yet, if we set our boundaries too rigidly then we have merely imprisoned ourselves and again will not be very useful. We will be encapsulated in an autistic shell.

Martin Heidegger in Basic Writings made a very interesting observation about boundaries and spirituality. He said, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, a boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.” A boundary is a container that is necessary for spiritual unfolding, a vessel in which Divine purpose can be revealed. And if we don’t have boundaries, and if we don’t wrestle with boundary issues, our spirituality is going to pose real problems for ourselves and for others. I’m made to think of the Apostle Paul’s admonishment that “we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” “Fear and trembling” is just the anxiety that we experience as we wrestle with these boundaries.

My work as a therapist was merely about boundaries. My job was to help clients discover various boundary problems and to address these problems. And I might add that my work also involved a daily battle with boundary-setting myself.

One of my favorite verses from the Bible is from the Proverbs, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city without walls and broken down.” And we know what happened back then if the walls of a city was broken down back then—the enemy got in.

The Dialectics of Identity

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In yesterday’s blog I discoursed re Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell and the symbiotic relationship between the setting of boundaries and willingness to “relax” them for the sake of the collective. Someone once described this process as the competing drives for homeostasis and change and is relevant to the individual and the collective. If the drive for “homoeostasis” is unbalanced, the individual will be trapped in a static, autistic world. If the other need becomes predominant, the individual will be trapped in an incorporative mode of being in which “strange” is so needed that it overwhelms the ego. This individual will be trapped in perpetual “hunger.” This can even describe the addiction process.

On the collective level, I like to illustrate with politics and there is no better illustration than our current political and social polarization. To function healthily, a culture must have “conservative” forces present as well as “liberal” forces. There must be a tendency to “conserve” tradition but that tendency must be balanced by a willingness to engage with “strange” or “difference.” There must be a setting of boundaries but this boundary-setting must be balanced by a willingness to “relax” boundaries here and there. On one extreme there is stagnation and ultimate death. On the other extreme there is “change” run amok and ultimately death.

Re this dialectic of the collective noted above, there is an interesting article in today’s Washington Post newspaper. The article describes the conservative response of one Oklahoma community toward changes that seem to be threatening them. The article reported the citizenry’s anxiety, fear, and anger toward an over-reaching government, creeping socialism, and liberal values from that bastion of liberalism “up north in Norman.” But this was not a hatchet job on conservative values. It merely conveys to the reader the genuine sadness that some communities feel when their world view is perceived to be threatened. And on the same idea, you might find PBS’s American Experience from this past week as it portrays the Amish response to encroaching civilization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/to-residents-of-another-washington-their-cherished-values-are-under-assault/2012/03/01/gIQAsbhXlR_print.html

Sociobiology and Lewis Thomas

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Though I am steeped in the liberal arts, I have been increasingly curious about the biological sciences. Those of us who have “escaped” into abstraction must always remember that there is a biological dimension to all these “new-fangled ideas” that we revel in. One of my favorite books in biology dates back to 1963, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. Thomas vividly describes this “biological dimension” and suggests at times its inextricable relationship to human behavior, individually and collectively.

From this book I posit the notion that life itself is basically about the creation of boundaries and the evolution of these “boundaries” into increasingly complex relationships. These relationships require that boundaries be there in the first place but at the same it time means that these boundaries cannot be so rigid that communication between the various “boundaries”, or entities, is not possible. Either extreme leads to grave complications and ultimately death itself.

On an individual level this means that an ego, a specific identity that wells up from within a body, must have boundaries to exist psycho-socially. Without an ego we would have only a blob of proto-plasm with no process of differentiation that can lead to higher-order organisms and eventually human beings. But simultaneously this “ego” must not be too impermeable. It must be firm enough that it can quickly learn to endure Shakespeare’s “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” And for this “learning” to take place, this ego must not become a fortress but must be open to the world outside of itself, it must be a “human” at some point, a social creature.

I would like to here share one tidbit from the book itself, an observation about the Iks culture from Uganda. Thomas argues that impingement from the outside, “modernity”, encroached so much and so quickly on these people that they could not function. They devolved into a very reproachable, detestable tribe of erstwhile human beings. Their talk with each other was rude and self-serving, they stopped singing, they lost emotional connection with their children, and they even would defecate on each other’s doorstep. Thomas’ intention here is a demonstration on what will happen on the collective level if the outside world does not respect the boundaries of a specific culture. And the impact that the “victim” culture experiences depends on two things—-1) its own “ego-integrity” (the ability to handle feedback from the outside) and 2) the rapacity of the outside world.

The above example illustrates the “abuse” that one culture, or even the “world culture” at large, can impose on a particular culture. It also vividly illustrates what can happen on the individual level if a child, in particular,  is abused—sexually, physically, and even emotionally . In human terms, the “soul” gets ravaged and often the soul cannot function meaningfully any longer or is at least gravely impaired.

Lives of a Cell

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In 1974, Lewis Thomas wrote a little book entitled, Lives of a Cell:  Notes of a Biology Watcher.  In this book Thomas discoursed about the intricacies of cell development and reproduction and noted how this process had its parallel on the human social level.  He explained how that cells had not evolved membranes they would not have been able to “communicate” with each other and organs and tissues would not have evolved.

He then explained social interaction in terms of boundary-setting and communication.  Without boundaries, there would be no communication and the social body would lack the dynamic quality necessary to thrive.  But just as with the cellular level, these boundaries must be permeable as, again, no communication could take place.

The dance of boundaries is an essential part of the human drama.  When we are born, we quickly discover the basic boundaries that our social body has constructed and which are being proffered us.  In our day, our “social body” is under a lot of flux and so young people…and old people…have more freedom to play with boundaries without drawing the scorn of “The Boundary Setters”, i.e. the local patriarchy.  But there are certainly many, especially die-hard conservatives,  who do not approve of this “flux” and seek to repress it.  They are sure of “the way things are.”

 

 

 

Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) was a physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher.

Thomas was born in Flushing, New York and attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. His formative years as an independent medical researcher were at Tulane University School of Medicine.