Ancient Roman history begins with a suicide. The virtuous and lovely Lucretia lived in the late sixth century B.C.E. A married woman and the daughter of a man of distinction, she was known for her industry and faithfulness. The boot of Italy was ruled in ancient times by Etruscan kings, but its people already called themselves Roman. Noble Roman families supported Etruscan kings, but there were considerable tensions. Then one night, as the story is told, a group of Etruscan and Roman men were drinking and got into a discussion comparing the character of their wives. Lucretia’s husband boasted about her virtue, and when the men sent someone to check on her, indeed Lucretia was at home weaving and supervising her servants’ work. The son of the Etruscan king, Tarquin, was among the drinking party, and he grew obsessed with Lucretia. Waiting until she was alone, he went to her, told her he wanted her, and offered to make her his queen. He told her that if she resisted he would rape and kill her, then cover up the deed by killing a male slave and telling everyone that he had chanced upon them having sex and had killed them for it. To avoid ruining her reputation, she gave in to her attacker. He left believing that to defend her life and her good name, she would guard the secret of what had happened.
It is an awful story, of course, but for the Romans who told it, it is Lucretia who triumphs. She dresses herself in black and runs to her highborn kinsmen, calling together her husband, father, brothers, and friends, and tells them what the Etruscan prince did. She demands revenge against the man who did this to her, but also on the entire political system that allowed it. Then she takes out a dagger and kills herself. Having told her own story, she protects her own honor. As she breathes her last, the gathered men pass around the dagger that killed her and swear on it an oath that begins, “By this blood—most pure before the outrage wrought by the king’s son … ” and ends “I will not suffer them or anyone else to reign in Rome.” The story then usually takes the spotlight off Lucretia’s corpse and follows instead the men as they storm off to overthrow the Etruscans. Thus begins the story of Roman self-governance.
Lucretia’s death took place at the very commencement of Roman history in 508 B.C.E., and it remained an article of Roman faith that the outrages that led to her death spurred her countrymen to overthrow their foreign king and to establish not another kingdom but the Roman Republic. The story emphasizes how highly honor was prized in the ancient Roman and Greek world, even unto death. Across the next six centuries Lucretia was celebrated with increasing fervor. Suicides accent the ancient Greek and Roman worlds: Socrates, Cato, Seneca, and Cleopatra. Socrates in particular showed how to dispatch oneself with benign calm. Sentenced to death for atheism and corrupting the youth, he accepted his cup of hemlock, soothed his friends, and contentedly downed the poison. The Stoics especially came to regard death lightly; accepting death without emotion was a sign of philosophical maturity.
Lucretia’s heroic death ensured her cultural immortality. Centuries later she was painted by such celebrated European artists as Titian and Botticelli, as well as by the most renowned woman painter of the Renaissance, Artemisia Gentileschi. Lucretia’s image was rendered by the acclaimed engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, and by such lights as Dürer, Raphael, and Rembrandt. Lucretia’s story was also told in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in Dante’s Inferno, and in Shakespeare’s long poem The Rape of Lucrece.
In this book we shall follow Lucretia through history, scrutinize several other key suicides—some more famous today, like Samson’s under his ceiling and Cleopatra’s with her asp—and track self-murder’s strange, sometimes eerie, and always instructive guises. These historical travels will reveal a fascinating story about the meaning of suicide across history. It is a compelling story in its own right. It also helps us understand the way people think about suicide in our time. It is a tremendous issue.
In the United States over the past twenty years more than 30,000 people have taken their own lives per year. In the latest documented data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2010, the number was up to 38,364.1 Consistently, historically and now, more people die of suicide than are murdered.2 Worldwide, more die of suicide every year than by drowning, or fire, or maternal hemorrhage. Worldwide, for both men and women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, more die of suicide than in war. In the first half of 2012, active-duty U.S. troops killed themselves at a rate averaging one a day; in 2010 (the latest year for which statistics are available) the rate among U.S. military veterans reached one every sixty-five minutes—about twenty-two a day.3 For American men under thirty-five, suicide has killed more than AIDS in all but three years since the disease first appeared.4 Suicide is among Americans’ top ten causes of death, and for adults under forty-five, it is among the top three. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, a death is more likely to be by suicide than by anything but accident; more die of suicide than of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease. The rate of increase has been higher among the young, but in sheer numbers suicide is most common between ages thirty-five and sixty-four.5
Worse yet, the rates are rising. According to the World Health Organization, in the past forty-five years suicide rates have increased by 60 percent worldwide.6 In the past ten years the rise has been shocking: in 2001 the number of suicides per year in the United States was 30,622 compared with more than 38,000 in 2010. Between 2008 and 2009 alone, the suicide rate in the United States rose by 2.4 percent.7 Some of the dramatic increase in this most recent period has been among the young, middle-aged white women, and soldiers and veterans—but the increase is felt across most groups that have been examined. Why are we not responding to this tragedy? Unlike so many other dangers to public health and safety, suicide can seem like a crime without a real victim. But the person who commits suicide is, in fact, a real victim. Additionally, the friends, family, and community of those who die suffer mightily, even fatally, and are likewise victims. The whole of humanity suffers when someone opts out. The suicide is also a real victim because he or she had a future self that may not have wanted this.
As I examine the history of how, in the West, we have understood self-killing, I also will put forward what might seem to be a contrarian position, a nonreligious argument against suicide. It is a philosophical argument but parts of it can or even must be told in terms of history, and parts must be demonstrated through modern statistics. One of the arguments I hope to bring to light is that suicidal influence is strong enough that a suicide might also be considered a homicide. Whether you call it contagion, suicidal clusters, or sociocultural modeling, our social sciences demonstrate that suicide causes more suicide, both among those who knew the person and among the strangers who somehow identified with the victim. If suicide has a pernicious influence on others, then staying alive has the opposite influence: it helps keep people alive. By staying alive, we are contributing something precious to the world.
Another main argument that I hope to rescue from history is that the suicidal person owes something to his or her future self; a future self who might feel better and be grateful that the person who he or she once was fought through the terrible times to make it to something better.
We tend to think that as modern people we should be able to live our lives with less delusion than people in the past. Yet by looking at ourselves from a fresh historical perspective, we see that our arguments with the old beliefs of our culture have led us into some ideological dead ends. In this book I show that history set us up for an unwinnable battle—there is no triumph in having argued people into the grave—and offer the reader another way of seeing our historical path and our possibilities for ourselves and for the future.
When I looked into history to find whether philosophers had articulated this idea before, I was surprised to find two excellent arguments against suicide widely commented upon in history, but still relatively unknown. The first is that we owe it to society at large, and especially to our personal communities, to stay alive. The second is that we owe it to our other selves, especially, as I have mentioned, to our future selves. Both religious and philosophical writers have written marvelous things about both these ideas, but they are often in the background. The reason is that a foreground argument has gotten all the press: Religious people have tended to lean heavily on the argument that God forbids suicide. Meanwhile, in response, secular, philosophical people have insisted that we are free to take our own lives. In my experience, outside the idea that God forbids it, our society today has no coherent argument against suicide. Instead, many self-described open-minded, rationalist, sophisticated thinkers emphatically defend people’s right to do it. How did the secular philosophical worldview come to claim people’s right to suicide? How did those in the modern world—who fight death so fiercely elsewhere—come to accept or at least leave unchallenged an ideology that kills? The answer is a fascinating story of a reaction against religion that somewhat accidentally led to a dark fatalism.
Historically there have been some great minds, religious and secular, who have argued for our interdependence and mutual need. More recently, there have been numerous sociological, epidemiological, and psychological studies demonstrating the reality and power of suicidal influence. We also have evidence that intervention can reverse that influence. Schools have been shown to experience a rise in the suicide rate after a single suicide, but “talk-throughs” can change those results. Ideas can take lives and other ideas can save lives.
Throughout the medieval and early modern periods in Europe, suicide was condemned by the major Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Suicide was considered a more damning sin than murder, because you were actually stealing from God; what is more, you were doing so with no time left for repentance. The prohibition did not stop everyone, but we have examples in fiction and nonfiction from across history of people turning away from suicide because of the religious rule against it. It was not only divine justice that a suicidal person had to worry about, though. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Christian Church condemned suicides; commonly the church enforced punishment of the corpses, which might be dragged through the streets, impaled on a fence and left to rot and be eaten by animals, or buried at crossroads with stakes through their hearts. More practically, the suicide’s estate could be confiscated, further harming his surviving family. Dante’s Inferno is but one of many works of literary and figurative art to provide graphic depictions of the hell awaiting the suicide’s soul, and these must have been a serious deterrent for some Christians.
Religion took a wrong turn by relying so heavily on divine disapproval of suicide, and on corporal (even postmortem) punishment of the offender, and secular philosophy took a wrong turn when it concluded that without God and religion, man was his own master and thus people should be free to kill themselves. Both religious people and those against or indifferent to religion have written about other reasons to reject suicide, and my intention is to bring those arguments to modern attention.
In the early modern period, Hamlet could not think about suicide without worrying about the possibility that the afterlife might be a horrible dream. Shakespeare wrote the play around 1603, just as ideas about suicide were in flux, with some theatrical description still showing it as evil and some taking it as a reasonable response to bad fortune. Indeed, it is worth hearing him mull it over in his own words:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country …
A bodkin is a large needle with a large eye used for pulling ribbon through a hole or loop in fabric. It will come up several times in the history of suicide.
“Who would bear” this painful life, Hamlet asks, if he or she were not kept from suicide by “the dread of something after death”? Even for those who did not believe in the specifics of Christian hell, the prospect of some kind of life after death was full of fears and doubts. For Hamlet, suicide is off the table because death might be worse than life.
During the Enlightenment, as people questioned church doctrines, from its attitude toward poverty to sexual mores and marriage laws, the prohibition of suicide also came under scrutiny. Philosophers such as David Hume and the Baron d’Holbach launched campaigns defending suicide. The church had long had enormous power over private citizens, and its gruesome suppression of suicides and would-be suicides reflected that imbalance. Secular thinkers now declared that the church had no right to outlaw suicide. Wrote Hume,
The superstitious man, says Tully, is miserable in every scene, in every incident in life; even sleep itself, which banishes all other cares of unhappy mortals, affords to him matter of new terror; while he examines his dreams, and finds in those visions of the night prognostications of future calamities. I may add that tho’ death alone can put a full period to his misery, he dares not fly to this refuge, but still prolongs a miserable existence from a vain fear lest he offend his Maker, by using the power, with which that beneficent being has endowed him.8
The Enlightenment enhanced the value of the self above that of community and tradition and made of each man and woman an independent being. As we will see, both Hume and d’Holbach sometimes advocated the right to suicide so vociferously that they can be said to have been recommending suicide. Thus, built right into the world’s most momentous revolution about the value of average individual human beings was a mechanism by which they were invited to judge their own lives, possibly to find them without value or worth, and to end them.
The Enlightenment’s rationalist defense of suicide grew through particular historical events and conversations, especially between clergy and philosophers. On the one hand, persecution of attempted suicides continued, albeit in much attenuated form, and in some places, the suicide’s estate was still liable to seizure. On the other hand, some secular voices rejected the religious condemnation of suicide, even defending it as a positive phenomenon, honorable and emancipating. For the clergy, suicide was wrong because God said it was wrong, and harsh injunctions against it were demanded. For Voltaire and Hume and d’Holbach and other rationalists, God and the church had nothing to say about the matter.
The advance of modernity brought new concern for individual rights and private property, and these, as well as the rise of the scientific medical profession, began to have an effect on government policies. In the seventeenth century suicide had still been seen, in part, as the work of the devil. By the eighteenth, “melancholia” was the dominant term in discussing suicide—and melancholia was the purview of doctors. From the worst sin possible, suicide became relatively value neutral; it could even be seen as virtuous when enacted in protest against an insult to one’s ideals. By the twentieth century, there was a general sense among secularists that people had a right to suicide, and a right to make the decision on their own.
Today, millions of people have no religion, and there are millions more whose religious beliefs do not completely rule out suicide. Yet our culture’s only systematic argument against suicide is about God. This limitation is untenable because even among believers, some believe that God will forgive the act and provide a blessed afterlife, and even in the absence of that faith, a suicidal person in her darkest hour might not be able to feel the God she otherwise believes in. Those who believe in no god, obviously, will not be dissuaded from suicide by a divine proscription. Generally, we ask people not to do it, for their own sake, but we do not say that they must not do it. We have no secular, logical antisuicide consensus. The arguments against suicide that I intend to revivify in public consciousness assert that suicide is wrong, that it harms the community, that it damages humanity, that it unfairly preempts your future self.
Throughout history an optimistic cavalcade of people has sidestepped the religious debate and put forward sound reasons to resist suicide based on each of our relationships to humanity, especially friends and family. Today’s sociological studies back up the historical claim that we need one another—or, rather, the specific claim that suicide causes suicides. Antisuicide philosophers, meanwhile, claim that we owe ourselves better, that the self that wants to do us in is not the true self, that something real and potent exists beyond the individual. Furthermore, religion had something right when it emphasized the collateral benefits of surviving through pain. Some brilliant secular minds have also written on the subject. The atheist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in particular believed that the very pain we want so much to avoid is the most express path to wisdom. I will also consider some modern dissenting opinions to the idea that suicide is wrong, and offer some responses.
As may be clear already, this book is chiefly about despair suicide, rather than what might be called end-of-life management. People who are fatally ill and in terrible pain are dealing with different issues and may certainly be seen as altering the way that their illness kills them, rather than actually taking their own lives. Of course, ailing people may also be depressed and may struggle with the worry of being a burden, and in this sense the message of this book might be of use to them as well. It is possible to be unkindly permissive to such a person on the subject of hastening death. Still, what I am most particularly addressing is the problem of darkness in the midst of life, and what I want to say is that there are arguments against suicide that ask individuals to hold on. It is also worth mentioning that I am attempting to reach those people sufficiently lucid as to be available to be reached through argument. Camus surmised that he was “only slightly indulging in irony” when he guessed that this population vacillating on the brink of suicide constituted the majority of humanity.
I also want to point out that I do not mean to pass judgment on those who have committed suicide. I mean instead to express to the suicidal person who has rejected suicide that you deserve gratitude from your community and from humanity. I assign no blame to those already lost, I only feel sorrow for them. Instead, I am trying to proselytize to the living in favor of rejecting suicide. The main New York University library has put up a high decorative wall (above the old fencing) around all the precipice walkways that abut an open middle space down to the lobby floor. They did this after losing too many students to suicide there. Writers through history have given us conceptual barriers to suicide with which we ought to be familiar, as a culture.
Some of the stories this book tells of are dark but rich; when read deeply, even desolate stories can help us live. Consider contemporary author Pat Conroy, writing of literary characters who committed suicide but whom he sees as warnings against it. “Let me call on the spirit of Anna Karenina. … Let me beckon Madame Bovary to issue me a cursory note of warning whenever I get suicidal or despairing as I live out a life too sad by half.”9 Karenina threw herself under a train; Bovary drank arsenic. Both somehow call us back to ourselves—and, as Conroy attested, back to life. We need to recognize the strange nature of human experience and let it encourage us. We need to share our pain: it is an act of consolation when Conroy offers a description of his life as “too sad by half.” Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s heroines had many predecessors.
Familiarity with these stories provides a strange solace. In 1621 the scholar Robert Burton wrote, “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.”10 Likewise, reading about depression can lend some peace of mind. It helps to find out that one is really not alone in extreme sadness, but that it has been shared by much of humanity. Many people have contemplated suicide. Many have done it. Many have rejected suicide for one powerful reason or another. In this book I intend to let the arguments against suicide pile up, in the hope of letting these thinkers lobby the reader on behalf of life.