The four stages of life: Stage 3 – retirement

So far, the first two life stages of student and householder described by Hindu philosophy would not seem that different from any western concept of those stages. It is the next two stages (retirement and sannyasin) that the paths start to diverge.

In the US at least, people approach retirement with mixed feelings. For those people who loathe their jobs, it may come as a welcome relief from a routine that they find hateful, a chance to enjoy life free from restrictions. Such people look forward to retirement.
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When good cheeseburgers go bad

We interrupt the regular series of postings on developing a philosophy on the stages of life to talk about far more important things, like what you should do when the people working at the drive-thru don’t get your order right. Why, you call 911, of course. At least, that is what this woman in Orange County supposedly did.

Here is the transcript of the call:

***

Dispatcher: Sheriff’s department, how can I help you?

Woman: Yeah, I’m over here . . . I’m over here at Burger King right here in San Clemente.

Dispatcher: Uh-huh.

Woman: Um, no, not San Clemente; I’m sorry, I live in San Clemente. I’m in Laguna Niguel, I think, that’s where I’m at.

Dispatcher: Uh-huh.

Woman: I’m at a drive-through right now.

Dispatcher: Uh-huh.

Woman: I went . . . I ordered my food three times. They’re mopping the floor inside, and I understand they’re busy . . . they’re not even busy, okay, I’ve been the only car here. I asked them four different times to make me a Western Barbeque Burger. Okay, they keep giving me a hamburger with lettuce, tomato, and cheese, onions, and I said, “I’m not leaving . . .”

Dispatcher: Uh-huh.

Woman: I want a Western Burger because I just got my kids from Tae Kwon Do, they’re hungry, I’m on my way home, and I live in San Clemente.

Dispatcher: Uh-huh.

Woman: Okay . . . she said, she gave me another hamburger; it’s wrong. I said four times, I said, “I want it to go. Can you go out and park in front?” I said, “No, I want my hamburger right.” So then the . . . the lady came to the manager. She . . . well whoever she is, she came up and she said, um, she said, um, “Do you want your money back?” And I said, “No, I want my hamburger. My kids are hungry and I have to jump on that toll freeway.” I said, “I am not leaving this spot,” and I said, “I will call the police,” because I want my Western Burger done right! Now is that so hard?

Dispatcher: Okay, what exactly is it you want us to do for you?

Woman: I . . . send an officer down here. I . . . I want them to make me . . .

Dispatcher: Ma’am, we’re not gonna go down there and enforce your Western Bacon Cheeseburger.

Woman: What am I supposed to do?

Dispatcher: This is . . . this is between you and the manager. We’re not gonna go and enforce how to make a hamburger; that’s not a criminal issue. There’s . . . there’s nothing criminal there.

Woman: So I just stand here . . . so I just sit here and [block]?

Dispatcher: You . . . you need to calmly and rationally speak to the manager and figure out what to do between you.

Woman: She did come up, and I said, “Can I please have my Western Burger?” She . . . she said, “I’m not dealing with it,” and she walked away. Because they’re mopping the floor, and it’s also the fact that they don’t want to . . . they don’t want to go through there . . . and . . . and . . .

Dispatcher: Ma’am, then I suggest you get your money back and go somewhere else. This is . . . this is not a criminal issue. We can’t go out there and make them make you a cheeseburger the way you want it.

Woman: Well . . . that is . . . that . . . you’re supposed to be here to protect me.

Dispatcher: Well, what are we protecting you from, a wrong cheeseburger?

Woman: No . . .

Dispatcher: Is this like . . . is this a harmful cheeseburger or something? I don’t understand what you want us to do.

Woman: Just come down here. I’m not . . . I’m not leaving.

Dispatcher: No ma’am, I’m not sending the deputies down there over a cheeseburger. You need to go in there and act like an adult and either get your money back or go home.

Woman: She is not acting like an adult herself! I’m sitting here in my car; I just want them to make my kids a . . . a Western Burger.

Dispatcher: Ma’am, this is what I suggest: I suggest you get your money back from the manager and you go on your way home.

Woman: Okay.

Dispatcher: Okay? Bye-bye.

***

I could say that the reason for posting this is because of the light it sheds on what happens when all human interactions are believed to be under the jurisdiction of the law, or some other high-sounding stuff, but the real reason is that I found it to be funny.

Such stories are almost too good to be true, confirming our worst stereotypes of self-absorbed, self-indulgent people giving harassed fast food workers a hard time over trivialities. So I checked to see if it might be an urban legend. The people at Snopes have looked into it and report that the Orange County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that such a call came in about two years ago. But since the Sheriff’s department did not send a squad car in response, they do not know if this was a genuine caller or some prankster having fun at their expense.

You can listen to the sound file at Snopes, where the transcript reproduced above came from. (I could not open the .wma sound file on my Mac, though.)

The four stages of life: Stage 2 – the householder

In a previous post, I spoke about Hinduism’s description of the first stage of life, that of the student. Today, we’ll look at the second stage, that of householder. Once again I am using as my source the book The World’s Religions by Huston Smith, and all quotes are from this book.

The marker that indicates that you are entering this second stage is evoked by its name, which indicates that you are no longer dependent on your parents but are setting up your own home, getting married, raising a family, and starting a career. This stage corresponds to the time when your “physical powers are at their zenith.” If you view the four stages of life as paralleling a day, then the student stage is the morning and the householder stage is noon, the peak, the apex of ones energies.
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The four stages of life: Stage 1- the student

For most people, their starting philosophy comes from what they acquired in their early childhood and is strongly influenced by the religion of their family and the values of their family and local community. Of course, the religious philosophies of the major religions encompass many strands, as they must if they are to maintain broad-based support. If their basic philosophies become too narrow, rigid, or constraining, then they will lose members or breakaway groups will form. Already, major religions have broad sub-groupings, such as the many denominations of Christianity, the Sunni and Shia groups of Islam, the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements in Judaism, the Mahayana and Theravada branches of Buddhism, and so on.

But even these subgroups allow for a wide diversity of philosophies within them. But most people tend to know only the range of philosophies of the religion of their own childhood. Thus they tend to be unaware of elements of philosophies of other religions that might have appealed to them.

For those who would like to go further afield in their philosophical explorations than just their own religious tradition, I can recommend the book The World’s Religions by Huston Smith. (All quotes in this series of postings are from this book.) What I like about the book is the approach taken by the author, who is a Methodist minister. He simply lays out the basic elements of each religion. He does not try to make value judgments of each one, or compare and contrast the religions, or try to rank them. He simply describes what each one says about the major questions that concern them, and leaves it to the reader to take from them what they may. But this is not just a dry ‘just the facts, ma’am’ approach either. Smith manages to balance a non-judgmental approach with commentary delivered in a lively way.

Since I tend to be very eclectic in my tastes, not bound by any particular religious tradition, and willing to use ideas from whatever source as long as I find them interesting or useful, Smith’s book appealed to me. A section that I found particularly interesting was Hinduism’s approach to the life cycle, that each person’s life can be split up into four stages, each having its own distinct characteristics.

Although I grew up in a country where almost 20% of the population were Hindus and I had many Hindu friends, I had never really gone beyond a cursory understanding of this ancient religious tradition, so the four stages of life described by the book were unknown to me until I read this book a few years ago. The philosophy of life implied by these four stages does not seem to me to be organically connected to Hindu theology and could be adopted by believers in any religion or by atheists.

Hinduism takes the diversity of human nature seriously and accommodates “a variety of paths towards life’s fulfillment.” But it also asserts that each person goes through four stages of life “each of which calls for its own appropriate conduct.” I will end today’s post with a description of just the first stage, which is that of the student, leaving the other stages for later.

The student stage starts around the age of ten (give or take a couple of years) and lasts for a dozen years. “Life’s prime responsibility at this stage was to learn, to offer a receptive mind.” There will come a time later, during other stages of your life, when you will have responsibilities to bear. But “for this gloriously suspended moment the student’s only obligation was to store up against the time when much would be demanded.”

But the learning envisaged was not just factual information or knowledge just for knowledge’s sake, to create a mere walking encyclopedia. Education also required that character be developed and good habits cultivated so that one would lead a good and productive life. “The entire training was more like an apprenticeship in which information became incarnated in skill. The liberally educated student was to emerge as equipped to turn out a good and effective life as a potter’s apprentice to turn out a well-wrought urn.”

I like the fact that this says that the student’s only obligation is to learn and not be too concerned with other, ostensibly weightier matters. This enables students to immerse themselves in the learning process, to experience the joy that true learning brings with it. (Note that grades and degrees and other types of credentials are not synonymous with the model of learning described here and may even detract from it.) But although the student is absolved from responsibilities for other things at this time, learning does take place with an eye to the successful carrying out of responsibilities that must be inevitably shouldered as one goes through the later stages.

What constitutes those three later stages – that of householder, retirement, and (most intriguingly) sannyasin – will be described in later postings.

What is your own philosophy?

Professor Sandy Piderit of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case has a wonderful knack of finding interesting sites and posting the links on her blog, so you should check it out regularly. She recently posted the results of an on-line survey that asks you to rate your responses to a series of statements and, based on those responses, gives you an analysis of your philosophical outlook.
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Developing a personal philosophy of life

I wrote in an earlier posting about how college is an ideal place to start thinking about developing a personal philosophy of life, because it brings together all the resources that can help you get started on such a fulfilling journey. I also noted the disturbing trend that the number of college students seeing that as a major goal of college was decreasing over time.

But what exactly do I mean by ‘a personal philosophy of life’? And how does one set about developing one? Does it mean reading books on philosophy and taking courses in them? Not necessarily, though such things can help since it helps you develop the vocabulary to better understand those kinds of questions. I have never had a course on philosophy in my life, but I think that I do have some sort of philosophy. What studying formal philosophy does do is give you the vocabulary to label what you believe and to make better contact with the philosophies of other people.

The first thing to realize is that all of us have some philosophy of life already, although we might not be able to articulate it. What is more accurate to say is that it is likely that we have many philosophies, each dealing with separate areas of life. We might have one for our religious beliefs, one for our political beliefs, one for our scientific beliefs, one for personal relationships, one for life, one for death, and so on. These philosophies may be fairly separate and we simply pluck them off the shelves of our mind to deal with specific situations.

Developing a personal philosophy of life does not mean abandoning all of these separate philosophies and starting from scratch but instead starting the process of bringing these various elements into a common framework. In other words, trying to mold them into a coherent whole, so that the beliefs and values we apply in one area of life are compatible with those in another.

This is far from easy to do. Having separate philosophies for different areas of our lives can make life easy for us in very practical ways and prevent us from facing awkward questions and contradictions. One of the biggest problems that some people face (and which I have discussed before – see here and earlier articles) may be the different philosophies that are brought to bear on science and religion. Another might be those we apply to our friends and those we apply to strangers. People who are extraordinarily kind to people they know might be quite callous about the plight of strangers. For example, people who say they object to murder might be quite agreeable with dropping bombs on people of other nations. Or people who say they value life and yet may be agreeable to the death penalty, Or people who are vegetarians on moral grounds yet are comfortable wearing leather shoes. And so on.

We all have such contradictions. What I am saying is that recognizing their existence and trying to resolve them is the basis of understanding oneself. The act of trying to bring all our separate philosophies into one personal, individualized, coherent framework that makes sense for each one us may not be possible. There may always be some things that cannot be made to fit and we may have to live with the contradictions.

The point I want to make is not that we must have one unifying philosophy, but acquiring the desire to have one and starting us on the road towards developing one of the most valuable things that a university education can give us.

What makes us change our minds?

In the previous post, I described the three kinds of challenges teachers face. Today I want to discuss how teachers might deal with each case.

On the surface, it might seem that the first kind of challenge (where students do not have much prior experience (either explicitly or implicitly) with the material being taught and don’t have strong feelings about it either way) is the easiest one. After all, if students have no strong beliefs or prior knowledge about what is being taught, then they should be able to accept the new knowledge more easily.

That is true, but the ease of acceptance also has its downside. The very act of not caring means that the new knowledge goes in easily but is also liable to be forgotten easily once the course is over. In other words, it might have little lasting impact. Since the student has little prior knowledge in that area, there is little in the brain to anchor the new knowledge to. And if the student does not care about it one way or the other, then no effort will be made by the student to really connect to the material. So the student might learn this material by mostly memorizing it, reproduce it on the exams, and forget it a few weeks later.

The research on the brain indicates that lasting learning occurs when students tie new knowledge to things they already know, when they integrate it with existing material. So teachers of even highly technical topics need to find ways to connect it with students’ prior knowledge. They have to know their students, what interests them, what concerns them, what they care about. This is why good teachers tie their material in some way to stories or topics that students know and care about or may be in the news or to controversies. Such strategies tap into the existing knowledge structures in the brain (the neural networks) and connect the new material to them, so that it is more likely to ‘stick.’

The second kind of challenge is where students’ life experiences have resulted in strongly held beliefs about a particular knowledge structure, even though the student may not always be consciously aware of having such beliefs. A teacher who does not take these existing beliefs into account when designing teaching strategies is likely to be wasting her time. Because these beliefs are so strongly, but unconsciously held, they are not easily dislodged or modified.

The task for the teacher in this case is to make students aware of their existing knowledge structures and the implications of them for understanding situations. A teacher needs to create situations (say experiments or cases) and encourage students to explore the consequences of the their prior beliefs and see what happens when they are confronted by these new experiences. This has to be done repeatedly in newer and more enriched contexts so that students realize for themselves the existence and inadequacy of their prior knowledge structures and become more accepting of the new knowledge structures and theories.

In the third case, students are consciously rejecting the new ideas because they are aware that it conflicts with views they value more (for whatever reason). In such cases, there is no point trying to force or browbeat them into accepting the new ideas.

Does this mean that such people’s ideas never change? Obviously not. People do change their views on matters that they may have once thought were rock-solid. In my own case, I know that I now believe things that are diametrically opposed to things that I once thought were true, and I am sure that my experience is very common.

But the interesting thing is that although I know that my views have changed, I cannot tell you when they changed or why they changed. It is not as if there was an epiphany where you slap your forehead and exclaim “How could I have been so stupid? Of course I was wrong and the new view is right!� Rather, the process seems more like being on an ocean liner that is turning around. The process is so gentle that you are not aware that it is even happening, but at some point you realize that you are facing in a different direction. There may be a moment of realization that you now believe something that you did not before, but that moment is just an explicit acknowledgment of something that that you had already tacitly accepted.

What causes the change could be many factors – something you read, a news item, a discussion with a friend, some major public event – whose implications you may not be immediately aware of. But over time these little things lodge in your mind, and as your mind tries to integrate them into a coherent framework, your views start to shift. For me personally, I enjoy discussions of deep ideas with people I like and respect. Even if they do not have any expertise in this area, discussions with such people tend to clarify one’s ideas.

I can see that process happening to me right now with the ideas about the brain. I used to think that the brain was quite plastic, that any of us could be anything given the right environment. I am not so sure now. The work of Chomsky on linguistics, the research on how people learn, and other bits and pieces of knowledge I have read have persuaded me that it is not at all clear that the perfectly-plastic-brain idea can be sustained.

On the other hand, I am not convinced that the socio-biological views of E. O. Wilson, and more recently Steven Pinker, who seem to argues that much of our brains, attitudes, and values are biologically determined by evolutionary adaptation, are correct either. That seems to me to be too pat and too much like Kipling’s Just-So Stories, where Kipling’s fictional characters accepted the present state of affairs as ‘normal’ and biologically determined, and concocted fanciful tales to ‘explain’ how they came about. I am always skeptical of theories that try to make the status quo seem ‘natural’ and just. It seems to be very convenient for those who benefit from that status quo.

It seems reasonable that some structures of the brain, especially the basic ones that enable it to interpret the input from the five senses, and perhaps even learn language, must be pre-existing. But I am not convinced that the more sweeping claims, such as that men are better than women at math or that women are more nurturing than men or that our behaviors can be explained by the desire to maximize the spread of our own genes, are biologically determined.

So I am currently in limbo as regards the nature of the brain, mulling things over. At some point I might arrive at some kind of unified and coherent belief structure. And after I do so, I may well wonder if I ever believed anything else. Such are the tricks the brain can play on you, to make you think that what you currently believe is what is correct and what you always believed.

The purpose of teaching

I have been teaching for many years and encountered many wonderful students. I remember in particular two students who were in my modern physics courses that dealt with quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology.

Doug was an excellent student, demonstrating a wonderful understanding of all the topics we discussed in class. But across the top of his almost perfect final examination paper, I was amused to see that he had written, “I still don’t believe in relativity!�

The other student was Jamal and he is not as direct as Doug. He came into my office a few years after the course was over (and just before he was about to graduate) to say goodbye. We chatted awhile, I wished him well, and then as he was about to leave he turned to me and said hesitantly in his characteristically shy way: “Do you remember that stuff you taught us about how the universe originated in the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago? Well, I don’t really believe all that.� After a pause he went on, “It kind of conflicts with my religious beliefs.� He looked apprehensively at me, perhaps to see if I might be offended or angry or think less of him. But I simply smiled and let it pass. It did not bother me at all.

Why was I not upset that these two students had, after having two semester-long courses with me, still not accepted the fundamental ideas that I had been teaching? The answer is simple. The goal of my teaching is not to change what my students believe. It is to have them understand what practitioners in the field believe. And those are two very different teaching goals.

As I said, I have taught for many years. And it seems to me that teachers encounter three kinds of situations with students.

One is where students do not have much prior experience (either explicitly or implicitly) with the material being taught and don’t have strong feelings about it either way. This is usually the case with technical or highly specialized areas (such as learning the symptoms of some rare disease or applying the laws of quantum mechanics to the hydrogen atom). In such cases, students have little trouble accepting what is taught.

The second type of situation is where students’ life experiences have resulted in strongly held beliefs about a particular knowledge structure, even though the student may not always be consciously aware of having such beliefs. The physics education literature is full of examples that our life experiences conspire to create in people an Aristotelian understanding of mechanics. This makes it hard for them to accept Newtonian mechanics. Note that this difficulty exists even though the students have no particular attachment to Aristotle’s views on mechanics and may not have the faintest idea what they are. Overcoming this kind of implicit belief structure is not easy. Doug was an example of someone who had got over the first hurdle from Aristotelian to Newtonian mechanics, but was finding the next transition to Einsteinian relativistic ideas much harder to swallow.

The third kind of situation is where the student has strong and explicit beliefs about something. These kinds of beliefs, as in the case of Jamal, come from religion or politics or parents or other major influences in their lives. You cannot force such students to change their views and any instructor who tries to do so is foolish. If students think that you are trying to force them to a particular point of view, they are very good at telling you what they think you want to hear, while retaining their beliefs. In fact, trying to force or bully students to accept your point of view, apart from being highly unethical teaching practice, is a sure way of reinforcing the strength of their original views.

So Doug’s and Jamal’s rejection of my ideas did not bother me and I was actually pleased that they felt comfortable telling me so. They had every right to believe whatever they wanted to believe. But what I had a right to expect was that they had understood what I was trying to teach and could use those ideas to make arguments within those frameworks.

For example, if I had given an exam problem that required that the student demonstrate his understanding of relativistic physics to solve, and Doug had refused to answer the question because he did not believe in relativity or had answered it using his own private theories of physics, I would have had to mark him down.

Similarly, if I had asked Jamal to calculate the age of the universe using the cosmological theories we had discussed in class, and he had instead said that the universe was 6,000 years old because that is what the Bible said, then I would have to mark him down too. He is free to believe what he wants, but the point of the course is to learn how the physics community interprets the world, and be able to use that information.

Understanding this distinction is important because it is this type of misunderstanding of the purpose of education that leads to things like Senate bill 24, which seems to assume that students are like sheep who can be induced to believe almost anything the instructor wants them to and thus require legal protection. Anyone who has taught for any length of time and has listened closely to students will know that this is ridiculous. It is not that students are not influenced by teaching and do not change their minds but that the process is far more complex and subtle than it is usually portrayed. (This is a topic I will come back to in a later posting)

My own advice to students is: “Listen carefully and courteously to what knowledgeable people have to say, learn what the community of scholars thinks about an issue, and be able to understand and use that information when necessary. Weigh the arguments for and against any issue but ultimately stand up for what you believe and even more importantly know why you believe it. Don’t ever feel forced to accept something just because some ‘expert’ (whether teacher, preacher, political leader, pundit, or media talking head) tells you it is true. Believe things only when it makes sense to you and you are good and ready for it.�

Can ethical behavior be legislated?

If there is one underlying idea that drives the effort to pass Ohio’s Senate Bill 24, it seems to be the idea that college faculty cannot be trusted to behave ethically in their dealings with students, in what they teach and how they assess and grade.

College faculty are probably no better or worse than other people in their ethics. But in my experience, both university administrators and faculty know that it is in their interest to have everyone behave ethically. What this bill ignores is that there are already remedies available within the universities and in the courts for the most egregious violations of ethics, and tries to micromanage ethical behavior by detailing what can and cannot be read, taught, discussed, and examined in each course.

I am not convinced that people can be forced to behave ethically. The presence of rules can prevent the more obvious or overt forms of unethical behavior, but it cannot completely eliminate them. For example, we know that there are laws on the books, and official university policies, that prohibit discrimination against people based on their gender, ethnicity, or religion. We also know that we have to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.

But do we really believe that the existence of such laws and policies has eliminated discrimination? People who want to can always find ways within the laws to discriminate against people. In fact, the creation of lots of rules might work against more ethical behavior because it shifts the burden of proof. Now someone can say that as long as they are following the rules, they are behaving ethically, although they may be violating the spirit of ethical behavior.

People who value ethical behavior will, if left to themselves, of their own accord go beyond the letter of the law. Putting a lot of rules and regulations around them is likely to create resentment and hostility and a rule-following mentality.

For example, there are lots of things that instructors can do to help or hinder students that cannot be governed by rules. How an instructor responds when a students asks a question in class or asks for assistance outside of class can have a huge impact on a student’s attitude and learning. The amount of encouragement that an instructor gives, the level of guidance the instructor provides, even the letters of recommendation that they write, are very important for students, but such things cannot be legislated.

The same thing applies to students. An instructor who puts in a lot of rules designed to ‘make students learn’ is, in my opinion, doing something counterproductive. When confronted with a lot of rules and requirements, most students will simply do what is asked for and no more. What an instructor should do is to try and create the conditions which makes students want to learn and then give them the resources to do so. Learning is an inherently voluntary act and you cannot force people to learn any more than you can force them to act ethically.

There will be the rare student who will abuse this freedom, just as there will be the rare professor who abuses the freedom given to him or her. But they have to be treated as special cases and dealt with accordingly. Putting in a lot of rules to take care of such isolated cases results in the learning experience being spoiled for everyone else.

In my own experience most, if not all, students react very positively to being entrusted to take charge of their own learning. Our goal in universities should be to create students who are self-directed and ethical learners, people who enjoy learning even when no one is looking over their shoulders, and to encourage faculty to trust students and be ethical in their dealings with them.

How can people learn to achieve this higher level of self-direction if they are always viewed with suspicion and constrained by detailed rules? What we should be aiming for are fewer rules, not more.

Private grief and public spectacle

I have not posted anything so far on the big story that seems to be consuming the whole country, which is the sad, sad case of Terri Schiavo. This is partly because I intended this blog to be more concerned with reflections on slower-moving themes, and not consist of commentary on current events (which other people have the time to do much better), and partly because I felt that there was nothing that I could say that would add anything of value to the substance of the case. I have no moral or ethical wisdom to offer that would help people decide what should be done with the feeding tube.

But the non-substantive issue that depresses me most about the Schiavo case, and caused me to break my self-imposed silence, is the public circus that it has become. I can completely understand the grief that the immediate members of the family must be experiencing. This is an awful situation and as far as I can see, there is no ‘right’ answer to this problem. Whatever the outcome, there is not going to be a victory or a defeat for anyone, and no right or wrong.

While we can try and wrap this event up in big, overarching issues of national importance or see matters of grand principle, at its core it is just the sad story of a family tragedy. As such it is something that the immediate family has to come to terms with, with whatever help and strength that they can get from their close friends, the medical community and, as a last resort, the law. What surprises me that so many people who have little or no connection to the family have got so passionately involved.

I am fortunate that I have never had to make a decision that directly affected the life or death of a human being, especially someone close to me. Making that kind of decision about my much-loved dog caused me so much grief that I don’t even like to speculate about it happening to people that I care about.

I think that it is very risky to predict what one would do if placed in the kind of situation faced by Terri Schiavo’s family. I think none of us really knows until we are actually in that situation, because it is so extreme, so far removed from what we have experienced before, that hypothetical speculations are useless in such cases. I would like to think that, finding myself in such a situation, I would behave bravely, nobly, and selflessly, but I really cannot know in advance. This is why I refrain from judging the people directly involved in the Schiavo case or other cases like that.

I have only sympathy for the members of families who grapple with end-of-life questions for their loved ones. If any friend of mine had to make such a decision, I would simply stand by them and accept whatever decision they made, without urging them on or trying to tell them what to do, because the last thing that grief-stricken people need is gratuitous advice coming at them all the time from all directions. The rest of us should simply be thankful that we do not have to make the kinds of agonizing decisions that they must make.

If Terri Schiavo’s parents were my friends, I would accept their decision in their time of need. If her husband were my friend, I would accept his decision too, even though what he has decided is the opposite of what his parents have decided. The reason for my apparent indecisiveness is because I cannot know what either of them should do since I am not sure that I know what I would do if I were in their shoes. But since neither are my friends, I would just leave them alone to let them work their way through this with their real friends and their doctors, without the intense media scrutiny they are currently experiencing.

I also have nothing but respect for those doctors (and judges and juries) who are required to be involved in such decisions. It cannot be easy to do so and the fact that they have been put in this unpleasant position should make us refrain from criticizing them just because they make decisions with which we do not agree.

In cases like that of Terri Schiavo, there is enough tragedy and sadness to go around without it also becoming a media circus. The best thing we can do may be to just leave the family alone.

POST SCRIPT

The invaluable Juan Cole has a very interesting post on how the mixing of public advocacy with private lives in the Schiavo case has disturbing parallels with cases that have occurred in the Muslim world, where fundamentalist clerics have used that mixing to interfere in the private lives of private citizens. That posting is a must-read.