Oooh, Sheldon writes about his Beliefs (ooh, ahh, cancel the opera dear)
[Written on a bad forum I contribute to for Moral Reasons Obscure]
Crowley is perfectly justified in suggesting that Grover is insensitive. He's mourning the lives of 6 people he didn't really know as being more upsetting than 6,000 people he's never even seen. This response is not at all ideological. Ideologically, you'd mourn every time a great amount of people die, and also, as Koestler points out, the ability for such an inhuman (I use this word with great irony) act to occur. On an individual level, this response is merely indicitive of human nature.
It can be argued that the human reaction to death is essentially a selfish one. Firstly, you're upset at this person close to you who has just died. You'll never be able to enjoy whatever benefits this person gave while you were alive: perhaps he made you feel less alone, perhaps he was going to help you with a tricky situation, perhaps he had a neat jetski you wanted to borrow. Secondly, a death in your vicinity reminds one of his own mortality. Essentially responses which are full of eulogy and woe try to denounce death, by suggesting what a horrid tragedy it is, and try to revive the memory of the person in such a way that you'd want to be remembered yourself. But the whole point of death is it's finality. One shouldn't necessarily be forgotten, per se, but there should be an acknowledgement that death is a part in the natural progression of man. Without it, you wouldn't be human. This is how cultures like Mexico had celebrations at the death of a person. Woe! How inhuman! Obviously they weren't as cultured as us, aye?
Which brings me to a literary response. In Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus' novella "The Outsider" the opening scene is that of the funeral of the mother of the protagonist. At the retirement home in which she has died, friends gather around her and makes similar remarks about death as people have in this thread. The protagonist, Meursault, feels nothing. The woman on the bed is not his mother, he feels. He recognises that her death is insignificant in the wider scheme of things. The palimpsest at work here, the aesthetic one can gather from reading the passage, is that Meursault is upset, justifiably, at the passing of a creature which he loved, but this is tempered by the absurdity of the situation presented to him. As he stands seemingly impassive over his mother, other people begin to condemn him for having such a socially inadequate response. They think that death means nothing to him because he does not act in the required way. Eventually, this will condemn Meursault to his own death when he reacts against the inadequacy of society. I'm sure anyone reading this can get the point of all this.
I don't believe that there should be any single "right" reaction to have to a death. If you want to cry, then don't hold it in. If you feel the need to eulogise, go for it. But be aware of the implications of what you are actually doing. If we don't question what we're doing, how the hell are we going to ever know anything? Crowley has summed all of this up in that original short post of his. He's not an "insensitive person": his reactions, similar to Meursault, would make him vastly more empathetic than one who can only mourn what he covets.
Crowley is perfectly justified in suggesting that Grover is insensitive. He's mourning the lives of 6 people he didn't really know as being more upsetting than 6,000 people he's never even seen. This response is not at all ideological. Ideologically, you'd mourn every time a great amount of people die, and also, as Koestler points out, the ability for such an inhuman (I use this word with great irony) act to occur. On an individual level, this response is merely indicitive of human nature.
It can be argued that the human reaction to death is essentially a selfish one. Firstly, you're upset at this person close to you who has just died. You'll never be able to enjoy whatever benefits this person gave while you were alive: perhaps he made you feel less alone, perhaps he was going to help you with a tricky situation, perhaps he had a neat jetski you wanted to borrow. Secondly, a death in your vicinity reminds one of his own mortality. Essentially responses which are full of eulogy and woe try to denounce death, by suggesting what a horrid tragedy it is, and try to revive the memory of the person in such a way that you'd want to be remembered yourself. But the whole point of death is it's finality. One shouldn't necessarily be forgotten, per se, but there should be an acknowledgement that death is a part in the natural progression of man. Without it, you wouldn't be human. This is how cultures like Mexico had celebrations at the death of a person. Woe! How inhuman! Obviously they weren't as cultured as us, aye?
Which brings me to a literary response. In Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus' novella "The Outsider" the opening scene is that of the funeral of the mother of the protagonist. At the retirement home in which she has died, friends gather around her and makes similar remarks about death as people have in this thread. The protagonist, Meursault, feels nothing. The woman on the bed is not his mother, he feels. He recognises that her death is insignificant in the wider scheme of things. The palimpsest at work here, the aesthetic one can gather from reading the passage, is that Meursault is upset, justifiably, at the passing of a creature which he loved, but this is tempered by the absurdity of the situation presented to him. As he stands seemingly impassive over his mother, other people begin to condemn him for having such a socially inadequate response. They think that death means nothing to him because he does not act in the required way. Eventually, this will condemn Meursault to his own death when he reacts against the inadequacy of society. I'm sure anyone reading this can get the point of all this.
I don't believe that there should be any single "right" reaction to have to a death. If you want to cry, then don't hold it in. If you feel the need to eulogise, go for it. But be aware of the implications of what you are actually doing. If we don't question what we're doing, how the hell are we going to ever know anything? Crowley has summed all of this up in that original short post of his. He's not an "insensitive person": his reactions, similar to Meursault, would make him vastly more empathetic than one who can only mourn what he covets.