http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2011/06/mockingbird-suicide-paradoxes-and-role.html
As noted over at the Freakonomics website
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/21/the-suicide-paradox-full-transcript/
... For men and women, being unmarried, widowed, or divorced increases the risk. The most typical suicide is a man 75 or older. But in that age bracket, where a lot of people are dying from a lot of things, suicide isn’t even a top 10 cause of death. For people from ages 25 to 34, suicide is the second leading cause of death. And it’s in the top five for all Americans from ages 15 to 54. In terms of timing, suicide peaks on Mondays
The beginning of the work week, right?
WRAY: So, yes the inner mountain west is a place that is disproportionately populated by middle-aged and aging white men, single, unattached, often unemployed with access to guns. This may turn out to be a very powerful explanation and explain a lot of the variance that we observe. It’s backed up by the fact that the one state that is on par with what we see in the suicide belt is Alaska.
DUBNER: All right, so now you can get a picture of the American who’s most likely to kill himself: an older, white male who owns a gun, probably unmarried and maybe unemployed, living somewhere out west, probably in a rural area. Now, don’t you want to know: where aren’t people killing themselves?
This is not to say i'm endorsing suicide or that any of the above are but it is an interesting proposal and it seems to have a ring of truth to it. When i consider the suicides in Scripture, most particularly those of Samson, King Saul, Ahithophel, and Judas I see men who rose to a particular level within their culture, frequently to the top or very near the top of their social unit. Then they made a mistake, a huge mistake which could be described as either an irreversible decision or as an irremediable character flaw or both. Samson's dim-witted horniness led him to marry a Phillistine and compromise the national security of the people he was pledged to protect. King Saul was forsaken by the Lord for attempting to conflate kingly and priestly roles and chose suicide over death at the hands of the Phillistines who defeated him. Ahithophel sided with an insurrection against king David as retaliation for what David had done to his descendent Bathsheba and to Uriah the Hittite, one of his in-laws. Judas, well, we don't really have to get too detailed about the same of betraying Jesus now, do we?
This weekend of Valentine's Day I've decided to reprint material I've blogged about in the past that thematically ties to the nebulous and firm connection between not having a special someone and how people within our culture can react to this. This goes beyond what might be chalked up as a stuff American evangelical Christians obsess about (which, of course, they/we do) but to something broader. When a survey of suicides suggests that the unattached are more likely to kill themselves this may, to be so bald about saying so, back up my earlier observation in the weekend that being truly needed in a relational context can feel like a trap. As many have no doubt surmised before,however, what can seem like a trap from one perspective can be a safety net from another. Feminists have written plenty about the trap of domesticity and it can be a trap to anyone but Roy Baumeister's writing over the last six years might suggest that since men dominate the top and bottom that the domestic life women may find in marriage may not just trap them from rising higher in the socio-economic strata of a society, it may also keep them from falling lower than they otherwise might descend. Of course this isn't a ringing endorsement of finding or retaining a social station. Nothing is necessarily stable or automatically good for being stable.
For review, white males without jobs are more likely to consider suicide, particularly if they live in rural areas and have access to guns (or simply means of killing themselves). Living in Seattle, which is pretty generally a left-leaning and educated city, it can be easy to forget or see people forget that the sorts of men who would be seen as political "enemies" or as symbolically reigning in some oppressive position of power may not be. To flip things around, Hanna Rosin observed that the women she saw and heard to be most likely speaking against the patriarchy were often well-to-do successful urban white women who could literally afford to devote a great deal of time speaking against patriarchy. Maybe people who speak about white privilege and male privilege are themselves positioned to speak from a privilege that is unexamined. If you can access the internet at all, globally speaking, you've had to have so many privileges to start with it may blunt the edge of some elements of speaking truth to power (but, again, I digress).
From the old Freakanomics conversation this exchange also stood out:
DUBNER: “As soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to him life.”
HAMERMESH: Exactly. Well, that’s just an economic statement. You’re weighing the benefits on one side of the equation, the costs of the other. If the costs exceed the benefits, you chop off the investment.
I've heard people share over the years how and when they have considered suicide and maybe my being a single guy has biased the sample but it's always been single guys who have shared they've struggled with the question of why they should keep going on. We live in a society where you have to make your own purpose, even if you don't really, ultimately, have a whole ton of viable options.
What's been interesting for me to read over the last ten years is to see single people, and it's more often men who, purely anecdotally, seem to make this objection than women, talk about how they got sick of religion and sick of God. Some men put it so bluntly as to say they resented God they did not have a woman in their life year after year. Some resented God and others resented religion altogether. Others opted to resent women (or all the above). But what didn't get conceded at any point was that the man was single because he simply hadn't developed a sales pitch or wasn't really in a position to date or marry. Among the Christian women who at times commented about how the guys needed to step up there was no direct concession that this was more a case of women wanting certain guys to step up. As an article in the Atlantic recently put it, women are discouraged from marrying down (and for good reason, because when the woman is in a higher earning bracket or educational bracket than her husband is but the disparity is not very large that's an environmental factor that indicates a higher risk of domestic violence).
There's not necessarily a particular reason someone "needs" to be paired off with someone romantically but still people will be angry at God or society or the sex that is the subject and object of desire when they don't have what they want. It's not just in a Christian subculture where wanting a special someone but not having them leaves you in a damned if you do and damned if you don't double bind. Oscar Wilde's quip that comedies end with marriages and tragedies start with them is based on something. Perhaps across the board tragedy is when a person gets what he or she thinks he or she wants and then discovers what actually comes along with the dotted line. How many singles this weekend pined for a relationship that would complete them when they're already complete? And this Valentine's Day weekend how many people on the other side of that single/paired up divide felt trapped by having attained the relationship they thought they most wanted. It seems the grass will never really be any greener on the other side. And as Koholeth put it, in the end all meet the same fate, death, whether they choose death directly or whether death simply and inevitably finds them.
No comments:
Post a Comment