Don't Tar Fasting by those of Normal or High Weight with the Brush of Anorexia

Healthy Fasting. One of the challenges people face when they use fasting as a tool for weight loss and other health benefits is that people around them may think fasting is more dangerous than it really is. In “4 Propositions on Weight Loss,” Proposition 2 and its gloss are:

For healthy, nonpregnant, nonanorexic adults who find it relatively easy, fasting for up to 48 hours is not dangerous—as long as the dosage of any medication they are taking is adjusted for the fact that they are fasting. …

The best evidence that fasting is not dangerous comes from the experience of those in religious traditions that encourage fasting. For example, the Mormonism I grew up in not only instructed everyone who could to fast for 24 hours once a month, it also encouraged people to fast for longer periods of time for special spiritual purposes. Mormon fasts often involved not drinking as well as not eating. Given the body of experience indicating that even fasts that risked dehydration were usually not that dangerous, nonreligious fasting that encourages the drinking of water should not be dangerous for those in good health who are not pregnant or anorexic. The biggest worry I have about people fasting is that it could easily throw off the dosage of medication they are taking. So anyone taking prescription medication should consult their doctor about medication interactions before fasting. And anyone taking nonprescription medication should think hard about lowering the dose when they fast. 

In Amanda Mull’s Atlantic piece “What Billionaires’ Fasting Diets Mean for the Rest of Us,” she unfairly suggests that a short eating window every day is extreme enough to be suspect:

Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, doesn’t eat for 22 hours of the day, and sometimes not at all. Over the weekend he tweeted that he’d been “playing with fasting for some time,” regularly eating all of his daily calories at dinner and occasionally going water-only for days on end. In many cases, severe and arbitrary food restriction might be called an eating disorder. And while researchers are hopeful that some types of fasts may be beneficial to people’s health, plenty of tech plutocrats have embraced extreme forms of the practice as a productivity hack.

I am in line with Jack Dorsey’s practice, except I try to do my eating window around lunchtime when I can, which is often, since I spend my most research-intensive days working at home. I view fasting for 20-22 hours a day and occasionally for 48 or 72 hours as quite healthy. And as I wrote in “My Annual Anti-Cancer Fast,” I try to fast for a week once a year with the idea that, however hard that might be on me, it will be harder on any cancer cells or precancerous cells I might have.

Given my view that fasting is healthy, I also don’t see anything amiss in timing when I fast to when I most need some extra time. During my teaching semester—four months out of the year—when I teaching Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I fast throughout Monday and Wednesday (making for close to a 44-hour fast when combined with my short eating window on surrounding days) and eat lunch with my colleagues on Friday. Last week, in order to help get a grant proposal done, I fasted an extra day when I wouldn’t have otherwise. During the rest of the year, in addition to the short eating window each day, I find I need to skip eating at least one day every two weeks to keep my weight steady. I wish it weren’t so, but it is what it is. On the other hand, part of that is compensating for vacation days or days when guests are visiting, when I have a longer eating window.

I have to emphasize that if I were fasting this much and it were hard, that would indicate some sort of psychological pathology. But as I have emphasized often in my diet and health posts, if one is eating very low on the insulin index when one does eat fasting can be surprisingly easy, at least for some people, among whom I am one. (See “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid,” “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon,” and “Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet.”) And I promise, I am still well within the normal weight range. Putting the lowest weigh I have seen on the scale lately and rounding up my height to the nearest inch, I still get a BMI of 23.1, which is far from any danger zone of being too thin!

In the following paragraph, Amanda Mull summarizes some of the health benefits of fasting, but then argues that fasting raises the risk of anorexia and bulimia:

Intermittent fasting, like most health-and-wellness behaviors, can exist anywhere on a spectrum that runs from very dangerous to potentially beneficial, depending on who’s doing it and how it’s implemented. Fasting in one form or another has been a part of human eating behavior for millennia, and although scientific research on it is still preliminary, early studies suggest it might help reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. For people with eating issues, though, fasting can be a very risky trigger for anorexia or bulimia. For most people, exploring Dorsey’s lengthy, everyday fasts without oversight from a doctor or nutritionist is probably unwise.

Bulimia. Amanda’s link on “bulimia” is to a Journal of Abnormal Psychology article, “Fasting Increases Risk for Onset of Binge Eating and Bulimic Pathology: A 5-Year Prospective Study.” The authors of this study are more careful in distinguishing correlation from causation in their abstract than in their title. They write:

We tested the hypothesis that fasting (going without eating for 24-hours for weight control) would be a more potent predictor of binge eating and bulimic pathology onset than dietary restraint scores using data from 496 adolescent girls followed over 5-years. Results confirmed that only 23% of participants with elevated dietary restraint scores reporting fasting. Furthermore, fasting generally showed stronger and more consistent predictive relations to future onset of recurrent binge eating and threshold/subthreshold bulimia nervosa over 1- to 5-year follow-up relative to dietary restraint, though the former effects were only significantly stronger than the latter for some comparisons. Results provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that fasting is a stronger risk factor for bulimic pathology than is self-reported dieting.

Wikipedia currently defines bulimia as “an eating disorder characterized by binge eating followed by purging.” One possibility, which I think the authors of this study would take seriously, is that girls who are likely to become bulimic later on in any case, also are prone to a variety of other behaviors. The other important possibility is that if one does fasting without eating low on the insulin index, it is quite dangerous for setting up a cycle of bad eating behavior because of the strong hunger that results. I do not recommend trying to do a lot of fasting without first moving to low insulin-index eating.

Those who are fasting in the way I do recommend should be careful to explain to others who see them fasting that the low-insulin-index eating is an important part of the practice. If people prone to anorexia could get fixated first on avoiding sugar, before they are tempted to do more than that, they would be less likely to do themselves harm.

Fasting is counted as one of the possible types of “purging” in bulimia. But the more common types of purging are vomiting and taking laxatives. Repeated vomiting can be quite dangerous. And laxative abuse is unlikely to be healthy. As far as these very dangerous behaviors go, for someone for whom fasting is easy because they are eating low on the insulin index, I don’t see why they would turn to vomiting or laxatives. And if they are eating low on the insulin index, they are less likely to do extreme binge eating because satiation kicks in fairly quickly if one is avoiding, say, sugar, rice, bread and potatoes and a few other high-insulin-index foods.

As near as I could make out from my online reading, those who induce vomiting or abuse laxatives who are underweight are called anorexics of the binge-purge subtype rather than being classed as bulimics. But clearly, the binge-purge subtype of anorexia shares a lot in common with bulimia. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders gives a .9% lifetime risk for anorexia. Of this, from two studies I looked at on the fractions of each subtype in studies that were taking all the anorexics they could enroll, it appears that the binge-purge subtype is somewhat over half of anorexics, while the restrictive subtype is somewhat less than half.

It is possible that seeing other people fast might inspire someone prone to the restrictive subtype of anorexia to be very restrictive in eating. But it is also possible that if more people not prone to psychopathology were fasting regularly, that those prone to restrictive anorexia who were not fated to fall into anorexia no matter what could be better guided into helpful, rather than harmful patterns of fasting.

The simple fact is that we just don’t know whether having healthy fasting be more common in our culture would make things worse for those prone to anorexia or better. To me, one possibly powerful effect in the direction of making things safer for those prone to anorexia is that if were common knowledge in our culture that weight could be lost by a combination of low-insulin-index eating and fasting whenever someone wanted to, then the total amount of angst about weight in our culture might go down. That might help. One of the biggest ways it might help is if the common knowledge that the combination of low-insulin-index eating and fasting could bring effective weight loss helped everyone to set a bright line that inducing vomiting or abusing laxatives for weight loss is bad and unjustified, no matter how disgusted one is with one’s weight.

Anorexia. Amanda’s link on “ anorexia” is the second article above, Rebecca Ruiz’s piece “Silicon Valley preaches the virtues of fasting, alarming eating disorder experts.” Rebecca Ruiz relies on Andrew Walen making the immediate judgment that fasting is “disordered eating,” which is exactly the question at issue. Actually, in context, Andrew Walen and the other expert Claire Misko are saying something more subtle: that people who think of weight loss and eating well as a big achievement might be getting into a weird and unhealthy headspace:

"The connection between achievements and food and eating is very alarming," says Claire Mysko, CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association. "Not everybody who gets into this is necessarily going to spiral into a eating disorder, but if you are at risk, this is a really triggering framing."

In other words, Claire is saying it is notion of “achievement” that could trigger disordered eating, not having people around who are calmly doing fasting in the background of their lives as no big deal. And that is exactly how I do fasting: it isn’t a nothing, but for the most part it fades into the background of my life. The reason it can fade into the background is because the combination of low-insulin-index eating and fasting is relatively easy. It is not easy for things that are difficult to fade into the background of one’s life!

Tradeoffs. As I noted above, we just don’t know if having healthy fasting become more common would tip some of those prone to restrictive anorexia—or perhaps even those prone to binge-purge anorexia or bulimia—into worse symptoms. This is not something we have causal evidence of. But even if there is a causal effect in this direction, it needs to be counterposed to the health benefits people get from healthy fasting, including reducing the incidence of all the diseases associated with obesity.

As quoted in Rebecca Ruiz’s article, Geoffrey Woo makes this point:

Geoffrey Woo, who created a private HVMN Facebook group devoted to answering questions about fasting, is sympathetic to such criticism but calls it a "stretch." 

He argues you could make a similar criticism of public health officials who promote hand-washing because some people, presumably who experience obsessive-compulsive disorder, might find such campaigns triggering. Woo knows it's not an equivalent analogy, but it speaks to his view of fasting as a public health intervention.  

"The inspiration of fasting does come from realizing two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese," he says. 

Let me make another analogy. There is another behavior that is widespread in our society, whose main benefit is pleasure—with some believing that it might aid health based on evidence that is much weaker than the evidence for the health benefits of fasting. That behavior is moderate drinking of alcohol. I think people drinking some alcohol rather than none is much more likely to create a danger for those prone to alcoholism than people doing healthy fasting is to create a danger for those prone to anorexia. But how many of us wish that alcohol and similar drugs didn’t exist? I might, but I think I am in the minority.

The majority who are happy that alcohol exists have a responsibility to distinguish carefully between moderate drinking and excessive drinking. Just so, those who are happy that we have the powerful tool of fasting to aid health in numerous ways have a responsibility to distinguish carefully between healthy fasting and anorexic behavior. Let me try. First is the bright line that inducing vomiting and laxative abuse are bad. Second, I would say that those younger than 20 years old (or are pregnant) should definitely not be fasting more than 24 hours at a stretch, and should not be fasting more than 16 hours with any frequency. Third, it is a red flag if someone is doing a lot of fasting without also avoiding sugar. This could be conducive to a binge-purge pattern. Fourth, it is a red flag if someone is keeping their eating or purging patterns a secret. It can be annoying to have to defend what one is doing with fasting, but being open about what one is doing and defending it to other people—and sometimes recognizing that their worries are well-founded. is an important safeguard against doing something really stupid.

Doctors. What about the idea that one should only fast under a doctor’s supervision? Basically, this is impractical. Do we think every practicing Muslim should be under a doctor’s supervision throughout Ramadan every year, when they fast from sunup to sundown every day? Should every Mormon only do their once-a-month 24-hour fast under a doctor’s supervision?

As another comparison, think of how many lives could be saved if we insisted that no one should eat sugar except under a doctor’s supervision!

There are certain things we should develop a common wisdom about so that we all know what is a sensible way to do them without always needing to use expensive doctors to supervise them. Let me try my hand at beginning to develop that common wisdom:

  • If your body-mass-index is below 18.5, quit fasting! Here is a link to a BMI calculator.

  • Definitely people should not do fasting for more than 48 hours without first reading Jason Fung’s two books The Obesity Code (see “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and “Five Books That Have Changed My Life”) and The Complete Guide to Fasting.

  • Those under 20, pregnant or seriously ill should indeed consult a doctor before trying to do any big amount of fasting.

  • Those on medication need to consult their doctor before doing much fasting. My personal nightmare as someone recommending fasting is that a reader who is already under the care of a doctor who is prescribing medicine might fail to consult their doctor about adjusting the dosage of that medicine in view of the fasting they are doing. Please, please, please, if you want to try fasting and are on medication, you must tell your doctor. That may involve the burden of educating your doctor about fasting. But it could save your life from a medication overdose.

  • Those who find fasting extremely difficult should not do lengthy fasts.

  • But, quoting again from “4 Propositions on Weight Loss”: “For healthy, nonpregnant, nonanorexic adults who find it relatively easy, fasting for up to 48 hours is not dangerous—as long as the dosage of any medication they are taking is adjusted for the fact that they are fasting.”

The Limits of My Knowledge. I am painfully aware of how little I know about anorexia and bulimia. Please, do educate me in the comments section below. Anorexia and bulimia are terrible. Despite some superficial similarities with fasting, I am questioning how much they have to do with healthy fasting. And no one knows what effect an increase in the fraction of those doing healthy fasting would have on those prone to anorexia and bulimia. It might well depend on exactly how those into healthy fasting do it and how they explain what they are doing.

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography.





















Silvio Gesell's Plan for Negative Nominal Interest Rates Meets the Mormons

JP Koning tweets this interesting article about Mormon stamp scrip during the Great Depression. It wasn’t just the town of Woergl that employed Silvio Gesell’s plan for negative nominal interest rates to at least some extent! JP Koning also points to Irving Fisher’s explanation of how to manage such a scrip. Ryan Decker then tweets this Cleveland Fed blog post about stamp scrip, highlighting this paragraph:

What made stamp scrip unique among scrip schemes was a series of boxes on the reverse side of the note. Stamp scrip took two basic forms—dated and undated (often called “transaction stamp scrip”). Typically, 52 boxes appeared on the back of dated stamp scrip, one for each week of the year. In order to spend the dated scrip, the stamps on the back had to be current. Each week, a two-cent stamp needed to be purchased from the issuer and affixed over the corresponding week’s box on the back of the scrip. Over the coming week, the scrip could be spent freely within the community. Whoever was caught holding the scrip at week’s end was required to attach a new stamp before spending the scrip. In this scheme, money became a hot potato, with individuals passing it quickly to avoid having to pay for the next stamp.

FocusEconomics: How and When will the Next Financial Crisis Happen?—26 Experts Weigh In

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FocusEconomics had 26 people, including me, answer the question: “How and when will the next financial crisis happen?” Here is my answer:

There are two different types of extreme financial events; one is a crisis, the other isn't. In 2008, banks and other financial firms were so highly leveraged that a modest decline in housing prices across the country led to a wave of bankruptcies and fears of bankruptcy. By contrast, the dot-com crash at the beginning of the millennium led to a large decline in stock prices, but no domino effect beyond that. Because most stock-holding is done with wealth people actually have, rather than with borrowed money, people's portfolios went down in value, they took the hit, and basically there the hit stayed. Leverage or no leverage made all the difference. Stock market crashes don't crash the economy. Waves of bankruptcies in the financial sector—or even fears of them—can. The lesson is: Don't allow much leverage in the financial sector! 

Financial leverage means borrowing a lot. What does it mean to not allow much leverage? It means requiring banks and other financial firms to raise a large share (say 30%) of their funds either from their own earnings or from issuing common stock whose price goes up and down every day with people's changing views of how profitable the bank is. When people buy common stock, they know they are taking on risk. By contrast, when banks borrow, whether in simple or fancy ways, those they borrow from may well think they don't face much risk, and are liable to panic if there comes a time when they are disabused of the notion that the don't face much risk. Common stock gives truth in advertising about the risk those who invest in banks face. One might question whether banks should be forced to issue stock to immediately get up to 30% of their funding coming from stock, but forcing banks to retain all of their earnings until and unless they reach that 30% threshold of being financed by stock has no real downside. 

If banks and other financial firms are required to raise a large share of their funds from stock, the emphasis on stock finance 

  1. Provides a strong shock absorber that not only turns defangs the worst of a crisis, and also 

  2. Makes each bank enough safer that after a period of market adjustment, investors will treat this low-leverage bank stock (not coupled with massive borrowing) as much less risky, so the shift from debt-finance to equity finance will be more costly to banks and other financial firms only because of fewer subsidies from the government: less of an implicit too-big-to-fail subsidy, less of an implicit too-many-to-fail subsidy, and less of the tax subsidy to borrowing.

My view on this owes a lot to an important book by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig: The Bankers' New Clothes. This book has persuaded many economists. 

Sometimes people point to aggregate demand effects as a reason not to reduce leverage with "capital" or "equity" requirements as described above. New tools in monetary policy should make this much less of an issue going forward. And in any case, raising capital requirements during times of low unemployment such as now is the right thing to do. Sometimes people think the economy as a whole will take on too little risk if banks are required to have low leverage. My view is that if the taxpayers are going to take on risk, they should do it explicitly through a sovereign wealth fund, where they get the upside as well as the downside. (See the links here.) The US government is one of the few entities financially strong enough to be able to borrow trillions of dollars to invest in risky assets. However controversial that is, providing an implicit guarantee to financial firms that get the upside while the taxpayers foots the bill for the bailouts should be more controversial. The way to avoid bailouts is to have very high capital requirements, so bailouts aren't needed.    

Rebecca Lake—Bank Teller Fees: How Much It Costs to Talk to a Live Person →

The title of this post is a link.

This precedent can be important for negative interest rate policy: suppose for example that there is a fee on paper currency withdrawal at the bank’s ATM, and there has been a longstanding fee for seeing a teller. Coupled with a limit on the amount of cash withdrawal per transaction, this makes getting a lot of paper to store difficult.

Framingham State Food Study: Lowcarb Diets Make Us Burn More Calories

Link to the article shown above. Hat tip to Austin Nichols.

Link to the article shown above. Hat tip to Austin Nichols.

Without additional assumptions, the calories-in/calories-out identity is not by itself a theory, but this useful identify can tempt people into bad theories. In “Nina Teicholz on the Bankruptcy of Counting Calories” I write:

The calories-in/calories out identity is typically thought of this way:

Weight Gain in Calories = Calories Consumed - Calories Expended

What sneaks in with this arrangement of the identity is the questionable idea that calories consumed and calories expended are fixed quantities not subject to any deeper forces. Rearranging the identity gives a different perspective:

Calories Expended = Calories Consumed + Weight Loss in Calories

This rearrangement subtly hints at the idea that, holding calories consumed fixed, effective weight-loss that puts a lot of fatty acids and ketones into the blood stream from metabolized body fat might make one feel more energetic and so raise calories expended. Conversely, relatively ineffective weight loss combined with a low level of calories consumed will lead to internal starvation with all kinds of body signals going out to discourage energy expenditure and encourage the consumption of more calories. Those body signals are exactly the kinds of signals that can cause suffering. 

In the equations above, an important aspect of “calories expended” is that the more calories expended, the more tolerable it is likely to be for the individual. In order to get a low level of calories expended, body signals have to lower the metabolism, which makes an individual feel tired and listless so they will keep effort levels low. Low levels of “calories expended” are usually an unpleasant experience.

The Framingham State Food Study provides some of the best evidence that two different diets, both adjusted to keep weight steady, can lead to different amounts of calories expended. This is an impressive study: it “tightly controlled what people ate for 30 weeks, providing them with fully prepared food-service meals.” Here is the key result:

Over the 20 weeks, total energy expenditure (measured with the doubly labeled water method) was significantly greater on the low-carb versus the high-carb diet. At the same average body weight, participants who consumed the low-carb diet burned about 250 kilocalories a day more than those on the high-carb diet.

That is more than a 10% increase in calories expended for a typical person. (Women on average consume and expend about 2000 calories per day; men consume and expend about 2500 calories per day.) Here is how David Ludwig interprets the result:

“This is the largest and longest feeding study to test the ‘Carbohydrate-Insulin Model,’ which provides a new way to think about and treat obesity … According to this model, the processed carbohydrates that flooded our diets during the low-fat era have raised insulin levels, driving fat cells to store excessive calories. With fewer calories available to the rest of the body, hunger increases and metabolism slows — a recipe for weight gain.”

I am excited about the other new clinical trial an overlapping team is involved in: it randomizes experimental subjects to a very-low-carb, a high carb/low sugar or a high carb/high sugar diet.

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography.


John Locke on Why the Executive and Legislative Power Should Be Separated, but the Executive and Foreign Policy Power Should Be Combined

Schoolchildren in the US are taught about the division of the US government into three branches: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Where did this idea of three separate branches come from? Part of the path is likely to be through John Locke: many of the framers of the US Constitution were well-versed in the works of John Locke.

In Sections 143-144 of his 2d Treatise on Government: Of Civil Government, in Chapter XII, “Of the Legislative, Executive, and Federative Power of the Commonwealth,” John Locke makes the case for separating the Legislative from the Executive power. The centerpiece of his case is that combining the Legislative and Executive power in the same people is too great a temptation for misrule, because it guarantees that those who hold both of these power can avoid being subject to the laws themselves. If the two powers are separated, the Executive can ensure that the members of the legislature are subject to the laws—and, unstated by John Locke in this chapter, there is at least the hope that the legislature can hold the executive accountable through some power of impeachment or vote of no confidence.

Intriguingly, John Locke’s case for separating the executive and legislative power contains an argument for legislatures being out of session most of the time (bolding added below), threaded within his argument that combining the legislative and executive powers is too great a temptation for a ruler or rulers:

§. 143. The legislative power is that, which has a right to direct how the force of the commonwealth shall be employed for preserving the community and the members of it. But because those laws which are constantly to be executed, and whose force is always to continue, may be made in a little time; therefore there is no need, that the legislative should be always in being, not having always business to do. And because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons, who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making, and execution, to their own private advantage, and thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community, contrary to the end of society and government: therefore in well-ordered commonwealths, where the good of the whole is so considered, as it ought, the legislative power is put into the hands of divers persons, who duly assembled, have by themselves, or jointly with others, a power to make laws, which when they have done, being separated again, they are themselves subject to the laws they have made; which is a new and near tie upon them, to take care, that they make them for the public good.

144. But because the laws, that are at once, and in a short time made, have a constant and lasting force, and need a perpetual execution, or an attendance thereunto; therefore it is necessary there should be a power always in being, which should see to the execution of the laws that are made, and remain in force. And thus the legislative and executive power come often to be separated.  

John Locke follows this argument for separating the legislative and executive power with an argument for combining the executive and foreign policy power in the same agent. The executive power and foreign policy power differ because, by the idiosyncratic nature of interactions with foreign powers, it is hard to constrain the foreign policy power by legislation to the same extent that the executive power can be constrained by legislation. But both the executive and foreign policy power involve someone acting as an agent for the “public good”: the interests of the people of the commonwealth as a whole. Along the way, John Locke gives a nice description of foreign policy from a philosophical point of view:

§. 145. There is another power in every commonwealth, which one may call natural, because it is that which answers to the power every man naturally had before he entered into society: for though in a commonwealth the members of it are distinct persons still in reference to one another, and as such are governed by the laws of the society; yet in reference to the rest of mankind, they make one body, which is, as every member of it before was, still in the state of nature with the rest of mankind. Hence it is, that the controversies that happen between any man of the society with those that are out of it, are managed by the public; and an injury done to a member of their body, engages the whole in the reparation of it. So that under this consideration, the whole community is one body in the state of nature, in respect of all other states or persons out of its community.  

§. 146. This therefore contains the power of war and peace, leagues and alliances, and all the transactions, with all persons and communities without the commonwealth, and may be called federative, if any one pleases. So the thing be understood, I am indifferent as to the name.  

§. 147. These two powers, executive and federative, though they be really distinct in themselves, yet one comprehending the execution of the municipal laws of the society within itself, upon all that are parts of it; the other the management of the security and interest of the public without, with all those that it may receive benefit or damage from, yet they are always almost united. And though this federative power in the well or ill management of it be of great moment to the commonwealth, yet it is much less capable to be directed by antecedent, standing, positive laws, than the executive; and so must necessarily be left to the prudence and wisdom of those, whose hands it is in, to be managed for the public good: for the laws that concern subjects one amongst another, being to direct their actions, may well enough precede them. But what is to be done in reference to foreigners, depending much upon their actions, and the variation of designs and interests, must be left in great part to the prudence of those, who have this power committed to them, to be managed by the best of their skill, for the advantage of the commonwealth.  

§. 148. Though, as I said, the executive and federative power of every community be really distinct in themselves, yet they are hardly to be separated, and placed at the same time, in the hands of distinct persons: for both of them requiring the force of the society for their exercise, it is almost impracticable to place the force of the commonwealth in distinct, and not subordinate hands; or that the executive and federative power should be placed in persons, that might act separately, whereby the force of the public would be under different commands: which would be apt some time or other to cause disorder and ruin.

For links to other John Locke posts, see these John Locke aggregator posts: 

FocusEconomics: Predictions for the Global Economy in 2019 from 13 Experts

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FocusEconomics asked various people, including me, for predictions about the global economy in 2019. Here is my answer, except that they left out my qualifying sentence at the beginning. I have restored it.

I am most likely to be wrong in my predictions for the global economy in 2019, but here is the picture in my head: 

The US employment to population ratio will continue to creep up toward 61%, which given population growth implies robust new job numbers.  

The euro-zone economy will continue to look sluggish, but will very gradually improve.

The UK economy will do OK, despite a continuing mess from Brexit. There is an outside, but important chance that a new referendum will cancel Brexit. 

The Chinese economy will be the most important news in 2019. In particular, the financial system of the Chinese economy will show a lot of strain, even though the Chinese government will contain any potential financial crisis. Besides defaults and bailouts, the key thing to watch is whether borrowing rates for state-owned and state-favored enterprises and borrowing rates for private enterprises begin to converge. This is a key metric for whether the Chinese economy is moving in a healthy direction.

For world welfare, the most important news will be that Africa and India will continue to have significant growth in per capita income. 

Pedro da Costa: How Martin Luther King Helped Shape the Fed's Dual Mandate →

Update, January 23, 2019: On the Facebook page for this link post, Charles Steindel says:

Okay, I see the connection with Hawkins and Humphrey--though in both cases I don't know if they needed the memory of Martin Luther King to prompt them to insist on the employment mandate (I don't recall Coretta King being particularly prominent in the runup to the HH Act, though that might have been the case). Furthermore, the Fed had no specific macroeconomic mandate prior to HH, except, perhaps, that related to the 1946 Employment Act. I don't see, then, how the HH shifted the Fed away from a pure inflation target.

Lisa Drayer: Is Fasting the Fountain of Youth?

There are many areas in diet and health where the lack of research to pin things down is scandalous. The lack of gold standard research that could settle once and for all whether sugar is seriously bad for health is a good example.

Fortunately, a great deal of research is being done on the health effects of fasting—periods of time with no food. Lisa Drayer’s CNN article “Is fasting the fountain of youth?” is a useful report on some of this research. The best news is that more research results are on the way. For example, she writes:

Clinical trials are currently underway of IF in patients with various diseases such as multiple sclerosis or cancer to determine if fasting can halt progression. "If you hit cancer cells with chemo or radiation, when the individual is in a fasting state, the cells may be more vulnerable to being killed because they use glucose and cannot use ketones [the source of fuel during fasting]," explained Mattson. Researchers are also currently studying how fasting may impact cognitive performance and the risk of Alzheimer's disease in overweight women.

Fasting and Cancer. The background to the explanation that Mark Mattson (chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging) gives about the effect of fasting on cancer is that cancer cells are metabolically handicapped—it is easy to damage delicate structures within the mitochondria that produce energy in cells. As a result, while cancer cells can still get quite a bit of energy from sugar and from certain amino acids that are especially common in animal protein, cancer cells have a tough time metabolizing the fat and ketone bodies that are produced from dietary fat and body fat. By contrast, healthy cells do very well taking in and metabolizing any fat and ketone bodies that are circulating in the bloodstream. (See “Good News! Cancer Cells are Metabolically Handicapped” and “How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed.”) Another likely implication of cancer cells being metabolically handicapped that is important to test is the idea that fasting can be used to prevent cancer. I am betting on this myself: see “My Annual Anti-Cancer Fast.”

Fasting and Autoimmune Diseases. An important mechanism by which fasting could help with autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis is by giving the body a break from aggravating agents in food. If we understood all of the aggravating agents, avoiding certain types of food might do the trick. (See “What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet” for one theory about particular foods that might aggravate autoimmune diseases.) But even without knowing which things in one’s diet might be aggravating an autoimmune disease, eating nothing gives the body a break from those toxins. (I hesitate to use the word “toxins” because of its use by people advocating “cleanses” that include procedures I don’t believe in, but want to work toward reclaiming the word “toxins” for the rest of us. Below, I try to reclaim the word “cleanse” as well.)

Fasting and Dementia. The proposed research about cognitive performance and risk of Alzheimer’s disease is theorizing that insulin resistance—and the resulting high levels of insulin in the bloodstream as the insulin-producing cells compensate—could have bad effects on the brain. Here, the potential benefits of fasting come because periods with no food are the most powerful way to get to the very low insulin levels that might eventually reduce insulin resistance. Fasting is like a drug holiday from the internal drug insulin, that might be able to restore the effectiveness of the drug at low or moderate dosages. (See “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.”)

Fasting and Longevity. It would take a lot of time and money to see the effects of fasting on how long human beings live, but researchers have shown that mice live longer when they fast periodically. Lisa writes:

Research involving animals has revealed that intermittent fasting can reduce the risk of obesity and its related diseases, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, diabetes and cancer. According to Mark Mattson … research from the 1980s revealed that the lifespan of rats increases substantially when they fast every other day, compared to rats who have food available at all times.

A much more recent study, published this month, found that mice who fasted, whether because they were fed all of their calories only once per day or because their calories were restricted, which naturally caused them to eat all of their limited food at once -- were healthier and lived longer compared to mice who had constant access to food.

Trying to tease out whether fasting is simply a form of calorie restriction is very complicated, according to experts. But "in the absence of calorie restriction, and independent of diet composition, fasting mice do better than non-fasting," explained Rafael deCabo, a scientist at the National Institute on Aging and the study's lead author.

Good Health Effects Beyond Weight Loss: Better Blood Sugar Regulation and Less Belly Fat. The good health effects of fasting are not just about weight loss. In two human trials, those who ate less on some days than others had more improvement in regulation of glucose (blood sugar)—a good sign in relation to diabetes—than those who ate somewhat less, but the same amount every day. They also lost more belly fat—a good sign in relation to heart disease. Lisa writes:

The research behind the popular 5:2 diet -- a type of intermittent fasting where people eat whatever they want for five days per week, then limit their diet to 500 calories for two consecutive days, has also revealed health benefits.

"We published two studies with Dr. Michelle Harvie at the University of Manchester; each included 100 overweight women, and the design of both studies was the same," said Mattson. "We divided them into two groups; one group got the 5:2 diet; the other group had three meals per day but we reduced the amount of calories by 20% to 25% below what they normally eat -- so that the weekly calorie intake of both groups would be the same."

Both groups lost the same amount of body weight over a 6-month period, but that was where the similarities ended. "We saw superior beneficial effects of 5:2 diet on glucose regulation (a risk factor for diabetes) and loss of belly fat (a risk factor for cardiovascular disease) compared to the women eating regular meals but restricting calories," said Mattson.

Fasting and Cellular Renewal. When food intake is low enough, the body looks for old cells it can cannibalize for resources. It breaks apart cells that look substandard for parts. Getting rid of the old junker cells can help avoid problems. When is food intake enough for such cleansing cannibalization to get in gear? The production of ketone bodies from body fat seems to be an important indicator. Lisa writes:

According to experts, a critical aspect of fasting -- which is different from simply restricting calories -- is that the body undergoes a metabolic switch from using glucose to using ketones as fuel, a result of the depletion of liver energy stores and the mobilization of fat. (This switch also occurs during extended periods of exercise.)

"If ketones are not elevated, you don't see the beneficial effects," said Mattson. What's more, these metabolic changes that occur during repeated "cycling" from fasting to eating may help to optimize brain function and bolster its resistance to stress and disease, both of which have positive implications for aging.

According to Longo, the presence of ketones in the blood signifies that on the cellular level, the body is "regenerating" itself, which protects against aging and disease.

"We've published many papers, and the main thing we talk about is multisystem regeneration," said Longo. For example, fasting seems to lower the level of damaged white blood cells -- but when you re-feed, stem cells are turned on, and you rebuild and regenerate new, healthy cells, explained Longo. "You get rid of the junk during starvation -- and once you have food, you can rebuild."

"The damaged cells are replaced with new cells, working cells -- and now the system starts working properly," said Longo. This ultimately impacts disease risk, as risk factors for disease decrease when tissues are healthy and functional, explained Longo.

The metabolic switchover during fasting from using glucose (blood sugar) to using ketones as fuel has another likely implication that needs to be more fully tested. Based on my own experience and the experience of others I know, going entirely without food is much less painful if before beginning the fast one was eating in a lowcarb, highfat way. (See “A Barycentric Autobiography.”) In the first few hours of fasting, a big reason is avoiding what I called the “carb rebound effect” in “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and more accurately the “insulin backlash” in “Using the Glycemic Index as a Supplement to the Insulin Index.” But experientially, there seems to be some suffering later on in a period of fasting when one has been eating highcarb. The best hypothesis I can see for this is that a rough switchover from being all set up to metabolize glucose to metabolizing fats and ketones accounts for a lot of that suffering. My notion is that the more one’s body is set to be metabolizing dietary fats rather than carbs when one does eat, the smoother the transition to subsisting off of one’s own body fat during fat. As far as I know, this claim that there is more suffering during fasting for those who are eating highcarb or otherwise high on the insulin index), has not been tested. But it is worth testing. If people’s perception of fasting as very difficult is just a side effect of eating highcarb or otherwise high on the insulin index, then periodic fasting might be a more sustainable practice for more people if it is combined with low-insulin-index eating. (The perception of fasting as very difficult—in a context where most people are eating highcarb—is reflected in researchers’ use sometimes of a “fasting mimicking diet” in which for five days out of a month, people eat between 800 and 1,100 calories.)

In my own experience, fasting in the context of generally low-insulin-index eating is easy enough that an eating window of four hours—implying on average 20 hours of fasting a day—seems relatively easy. And occasionally going an entire day without food beyond that—implying at least 30 hours of fasting even if one eats late in the day before the fast and early in the day after—is not that bad. When fasting becomes as easy as it is when one is generally eating low on the insulin index, then it can easily be used as a tool to enhance health in many ways.

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography.


Kenneth W. Phifer: Is Death Meaningful?

When I left Mormonism for the Unitarian Universalism in 2000, Ken Phifer was the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He gave beautiful sermons. I am grateful for his permission to reprint one of them here: “Is Death Meaningful,” his June 10, 2007 sermon.

Ken’s sermons “The Faith of a Humanist” and “My Sermon” also appear on supplysideliberal.com. And you will find links to some of my own UU sermons here. Also, Noah Smith has a related guest religion post here on supplysidliberal.com: “You Are Already in the Afterlife.”

Below are Ken’s words.

Is death meaningful? 

Is there meaning in the fact that I shall die and you shall die and almost all life forms shall die?

Is there meaning in the decay of the flesh and blood and bone of which we are made, in the end of brain wave activity, in the cessation of breath?

Was the Talmud right when it declared that “whosoever speculates on these four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world—what is above? What is beneath? What was beforetime? And what will be hereafter?”

How shall we answer Lev Tolstoy’s question: “What is the purpose of this strife and struggle if, in the end, I shall disappear like a soap bubble?” 

In Philip Roth’s recent meditation on death, Everyman, he reminds us that “life’s most disturbing intensity is death,” and that intensity, that inescapable fact of our existence, “overwhelms everything.” 

Knowing from a fairly early age onward that we shall die, that I shall die—I was six when my two year old cousin who bore my name was run over by a car, and even before that I was surrounded by death because I was born in 1938 and tales of war and dying filled the air around me as the Second World War began and then our nation became involved and families I knew in my church sent men off to fight and some of them did not return alive—knowing from a fairly early age onwards that we shall die, we grope, inadequately, for some sort of reason for this cutting off of life. We struggle for meaning in the face of that which seems to negate meaning.

If I am not alive, how can there be meaning? If those I love are taken from me, how can there be meaning?

Milan Kundera, in his novel, IMMORTALITY, comments that “to be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet we have never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. We don’t know how to be mortal.” 

We don’t know, that is, how to live with death, how to find meaning in what seems to destroy meaning. But we have long tried to do so.

One hundred thousand years ago or perhaps even longer ago than that, human beings began to treat their dead with reverence. Bodies were not left to rot where they fell mortally wounded or mortally ill. They were buried. Rituals were created to honor the dead and ease the sorrow of the living. The continuing connection of the living and dead was asserted, and ways of remembering those who had gone were established. Every known human society has such rituals, and they are at the very least an attempt to place meaningfulness in the context of death.

Among ancient peoples, death was usually considered to be an abrupt, unnatural end of life which would otherwise have continued naturally. Those who did die—by violence or because of a disease caused by magic—simply continued existence in another realm, but one in which the bodily needs of this existence went on. That is why so often food and clothing and religious artifacts and weapons and other necessities of daily life were buried with the deceased. Death was more change—from one mode of existence to another—than it was the end of existence. 

The first evidence we have of humanity understanding death not just as inevitable but as final, the cutting off of existence, is found in the 3500 year old Epic of Gilgamesh. In this epic, the king of a Mesopotamian city seeks immortality only to be forced by the gods into a painful recognition of his mortal limits.

Across the centuries since then, numerous efforts have been made to address the question of human meaning in the face of death. The answers have ranged from the darkly pessimistic to the glibly optimistic. 

Many of the Mediterranean peoples, noting the hardships and corruptions of this life, assumed that such misery would continue for almost everyone after death. The Elysian Fields of the Greeks, the direct ascension into heaven of such figures as Elijah and Jesus among the Hebrew people, and other tales of a glorious life post mortem were exceptions to the dismal fate imagined for most human beings.

For all but a few very special people, death was a gateway into a continued unhappy existence.

To offset the gloomy view of death as a transition to further suffering, four types of theories were brought forward. They were developed in many different cultures across many centuries, but all of them in one way or another offered comfort in the face of death. Death would not be just another round of suffering, but something a little or a lot better than this life.

One set of theories argued that death is the end of pain, the end of suffering, the end of any kind of unpleasantness. Epicurus, for example, argued that death should cause no worry because death is the “deprivation of sensation…(It) is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us, and when death comes, then we do not exist.”

Death may not be sensation but it is also not misery. Death in this view is eternal rest, eternal peace, eternal unknowingness.

A second and very popular set of theories was first stated by Plato. It involves a dualism of the body and the soul. The soul, Plato believed, is temporarily united with the body in this earthly existence. When the mortal flesh has ended its day, the soul is set free. This freedom is a genuine liberation, and is very pleasurable. Modern versions of this dualistic notion are found in the writings of Kant, Bergson, and William James.

There were people who believed in the resurrection of the body. Various Greek mystery cults, for example, held such a view, and the Jewish group that was so instrumental in shaping Rabbinic Judaism, the Pharisees, had a doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Christianity, of course, in almost all of its creed, has from its earliest days held to the conviction that the body will be resurrected at some future point. 

The fourth type of belief about death that was designed to show that death does not destroy meaning is reincarnation. Hinduism and Buddhism are the two most prominent religions that embrace such a doctrine, but there are others, especially among indigenous peoples. It is a simple and compelling idea: How we live now helps to determine in what form we live in the next life. It could be human or animal or in some religions even vegetable. The point of all these transformations is for us to grow spiritually. Death is the mechanism by which we are transformed so that we can grow, eventually to be released from the cycle of growing and all its cares and responsibilities. We shall have attained Nothingness/Oneness/Nirvana.

These are the four main ways in which humanity down to the 20th century has asserted either that death does not destroy meaning or that death is part of a meaningful process by which we are able to go on with some form of conscious existence.

For more than a century, these traditions have been under attack, not because better ideas have been brought forward but because death has come to seem not just horrifying but random, not just needless but in such numbers as to render meaningfulness impossible. 

The poet and critic Sandra Gilbert, in her extended meditation on death, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, writes of the transition to another way of looking at death, from expiration to termination. She describes how the 19th century looked at death as an expiration, a breathing out or breathing one’s last, breathing out the soul into another realm of spiritual existence. Termination, on the other hand, is an ending, a cessation of everything.

Gilbert along with many others charts the change from expiration to termination as following the path of our dreadful modern wars. The Civil War began the shift in understanding, 600,000 dead in a huge charnel house of grievous agony and slaughter of brother against brother. Almost for the first time, the murderous nature of war was captured on camera. It was hard to romanticize war—that is, give it a meaning in glory and sacrifice-- after seeing its terrible toll in stark photographic outline.

The First World War added an unspeakable misery to western consciousness by showing us the ease with which huge numbers—millions, in fact—could be killed for no reason worthy of the name. Then came the Second World War with its 60 million soldiers and civilians dead, the new strategic assault on civilians at Guernica and Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima, the Holocaust. Death was so ubiquitous, meaning was stripped from it. What has come since has not comforted us—Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, and too many other killing fields.

Wallace Stevens captured this new mood of death as termination, a final closing out of possibility and hope, in his poem, “The Death of a Soldier.”

The Death of a Soldier

by Wallace Stevens

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction. 

Last September, in a weekly column called, ‘Life, With Cancer,’ Lauren Terrazzano, a Newsday reporter dying of cancer, wrote: “I have seen people like my grandfather live simple but happy long lives. He died when he was 93. On the opposite end, in my job as a reporter, I have seen 3-year olds die at the hands of abusive parents. Nothing really makes sense when it comes to death.”

Is Terrazzano right? Does death really never make any sense? Is death the path into meaninglessness?

For some of us, the traditional answers suffice to bring us a sense of purpose and comfort in the face of death, whether the stoical view of death as eternal rest or the Jewish view of a Messianic Age where lions and lambs lie down together or the Christian and Muslim view of eternal union with God in paradise for the worthy and eternal suffering for the unworthy in some form of hell or the Hindu and Buddhist understanding of reincarnation into another life along the road to spiritual Enlightenment and Oneness. These views are well known and need no further elaboration.

For many, though, the ancient answers do not satisfy and there is no sure answer that does. Edna St. Vincent Millay spoke for the confusion and the courage of many in her “Dirge Without Music.”

Dirge Without Music

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the
love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the
world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. 

There is a tension in many of us between the knowledge of our mortality and our resistance to that knowledge. If we cannot fully or even partially agree with Cardinal Basil Hume that “to go through life and think there is nothing after death…is a totally inhuman thought,” we also do not find it especially comforting to dwell on Bertrand Russell’s matter-of-fact statement that “I believe that when I die I shall rot and nothing of my ego will survive.”

Where and how can we find meaning in death given what we know of life, given the human propensity for violence, given our own inability to accept answers that our forebears found sensible, given what we know of the world and how it works?

Whatever our answer, it must be asserted with modesty. There is no hard evidence about death, only our gaze upon it from without. All statements about death are statements of faith. I want to make two such statements.                                                                                                       

First, in an age of relativity, death remains an absolute. An individual may believe in God or not believe in God. An individual may believe in good and evil or not do so. An individual may accept the theories of science about the Big Bang and Evolution or imagine other explanatory schemes for the way the world came into being and the world as it is now came to be.

No individual can deny death.  The fourth century Chinese sage Zhuangzi spoke of death as simply part of the endless cycle of change, flux, what is now becoming something different. Life and death are the rhythm of the universe, the forms of being manifesting in alternative ways. Death is a reality, the most real thing we know.

Not that we do not try to deny death’s ultimate claim on us. Martin Heidegger noted that when we use the phrase that every human being is mortal, we silently add to it, “but not I.” We spend most of our waking and sleeping hours not focused on the reality of death. But it never leaves us.

Sooner or later—and in our media saturated age, it is likely to be ten minutes from now—death will enter our lives. It could be a tv or radio broadcast about the Sudan or the Middle East or an earthquake or a hurricane. It could be a parent or child or friend who receives a bad diagnosis. It could be strange symptoms of our own that cause us to wonder if this is the moment when we get the Bad News.

In a period of history when all the epistemological foundations have been eroded, when all the wounded languages of authority are radically at odds with each other, we are all forced to agree on one fact, the Fact of Death. Death is our Absolute.

That is my first assertion. My second is this: death is necessary.

Death is necessary if life is to be in the form that we are and that we know. To form the complex elements that our bodies are made of requires the death and explosion of stars, sending the atoms that comprise us our way. Robinson Jeffers was right, “the tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars.” Single celled life forms endure without death, but I suspect they do not have nearly as much fun as we do!

The whole process of change, of mutation and the development of diversity, depends on one generation dying to allow for the changes to spread to more than just the individuals in whom they have first occurred. This requires death, our leaving in order to make room for future generations. 

Jalaja Bonheim states this more graphically: “Life did not intend for us to be inviolable, but to be used for fodder for its workings. We are meant to be chewed up and digested and transformed into the blood and sinew of the world.”

So it is that 60 million of us perish each year around the world. We humans are not alone in our dying. Millions of animals and insects and plants also die every day. We are not alone when we die because life is constantly changing into death everywhere. Transformation from one form into another is the nature of the universe. Death is the mechanism. Death is necessary.

Two things we know for sure about death: death is an absolute, perhaps our only absolute, and death is necessary in our world and for us to be as we are. 

Grounded in these two facts, I believe that death points us towards meaning, and does so in at least three ways.

First of all, death forces us to take life seriously now.

It is certainly typical of human beings to put off till tomorrow almost anything that is not absolutely required for survival today. We forget or deny so easily that we shall not live forever. We do not always remember that we do not have all the time in the world to do the things we want and need to do: to love our family and friends, to pursue justice, to improve our skills, to learn something new. All we have is this brief interlude between birth and death that to the longest-lived among us will seem short.

When we older folk lament that youth is wasted on the young, we are in part expressing our own regret at not using the abundant energy of our younger years in more fruitful and significant ways. We older folk know in our own bodies and in the loss of too many friends and relatives that death is always near. When we are young, that is not always clear. To be young is to feel immortal, even if we are not, to feel the energy of the universe, to feel that we can accomplish anything: world peace, an end to hunger, justice for all; to feel that we simply cannot die.

We tarry then, too many of us and all of us in some ways, and youth flies.

When death intrudes upon our lives, we are brought up short, suddenly realizing all that we should have done: to discipline ourselves and develop better habits, to use our time more wisely, to have taken care of those we love more fully and joyously, to have used our talents in more creative ways.

Guilt at our slothfulness almost invariably accompanies the experiences of dying and death, our own dying and death or the dying and death of someone we love.

It is when we come to full consciousness of death—our own and that of others—that we realize that we cannot postpone the search for goodness and beauty. We cannot put off doing deeds of kindness. We cannot hesitate about plunging into the depths of life to find out who we really are. We cannot avoid facing our own selves.

We have all known people who have hidden themselves, hidden their abilities, hidden their desires—perhaps we have done so—until death intruded upon their lives: the death of a parent, a mate, a close friend, or their own diagnosis of a mortal illness. The fact of death wakes them up, wakes us up!, brings them alive, gives them a purpose and an energy that even they never knew they had.

Like ducking one’s sleepy morning head into a basin of cold water, confronting death can be bracing. Even the most reckless or lethargic of us can be charged with a new commitment to responsible living when we see death face to face.

Such an encounter teaches us an important lesson: that immortality is not about an endless stream of days and hours and minutes stretching into infinity. Immortality is about the depth of this moment. It is about living fully in what Karen Armstrong calls “the Eternal Now.”

If time stretched out infinitely before us, what difference would it make when, or even if, we ever did anything? There would always be a tomorrow on which we could turn our lives around, stop being indolent, start doing good. Death reminds us that the only life we truly have is the life we live today, in this moment.

Petru Dumitriu has it right: “If we are conscious of the divine nature of every happening and of every fact, then everything is miraculous.” Every moment of life then becomes full of meaning. Our lives become full of meaning. 

Death as the end of all conscious existence drives us back into life to find or to create meanings to satisfy our hungry souls.

Another way that death points us towards meaning is that it shapes the way we think of life.

Death as the absolute and necessary fact of our existence demands of us an answer to the question: how shall I live in the face of my eventual, all too soon extinction? How we answer that question tells a great deal about our character, our integrity, what we think life is all about. 

How we answer that question describes our philosophy of life, our religion as it were. John Bowker has pointed out, in his study of the meanings of death, that religion began as “an assertion of value in human life and relationships which does not deny, and is not denied by, the absolute fact and reality of death.” Issues of love and trust and loyalty, issues of caring and faithfulness and hope are all bound up in the way we address death, and thus in the way we address life.

Emily Dickinson faced the fact of death and said gently “That it will never come again/Is what makes life so sweet.”  And Wallace Stevens said that “Death is the mother of beauty,” because it teaches us to value the sweetness of life to which Dickinson refers.

But let us take not just the poet’s words, because poets can do tricks with words that may deceive us. Let us look at the life of Nancy Mairs. Nancy Mairs is a woman in her middle years who has contended with multiple sclerosis for several decades. She has been declining in  health for some years. Her husband, George, has had several bouts with cancer. In the midst of these maladies that keep both of them on the edge of mortality, they have also struggled with each other’s adulterous ways. Her description of the pain they have caused each other is almost unreadable.

She knows that facing death frankly is necessary if we are to understand and embrace life. She writes with disdain of “the terrorism of cheerfulness” by which some people feel that they can “grin their way out of death.” That is no more possible, she says, than grumping your way into it.

Mairs recognizes a hard but profound truth: “thoughts of death can darken one’s spirit, to be sure, but they also deepen it.”

That is why and how she can say to George when he reveals his adulterous affair of several years standing as he also tells her of the return of his melanoma, “I can safely promise you that…I will always love you.”

It is out of the depths of her spirit that she is able to see that love, not rage or fear or a sense of defeat, is the strongest, wisest answer we have to the question of death, and the best way we have to live, even when love is very painful and very hard to practice.

When George asks how she could ever believe him again after his infidelity, she tells him that she prefers to do so, because that affirms his goodness. “Belief,” she writes, then “becomes an act of love.” This remarkable love story of a couple who for years have every day faced the prospect of death has been strengthened by their encounters with death. Death has taught them about love.

Nancy Mairs writes: “Coming to death, then, is a conversion experience, a turning away from old angers and infidelities, a turning toward this moment, and this moment, and this, and this. Death has moved into our household—not a welcome guest, oh, no, our courtesy doesn’t extend that far…and its presence, far from rendering us morose, has made us spiritually alert and vigorous. One might almost say we need death in order to live this fully.”

Michel de Montaigne wrote that “one who would teach us how to die would teach us how to live.” Nancy and George Mairs fit that description very well.

How and what we think of death profoundly influences how and what we think of life. As the Mairs instruct us, death can add rich layers of meaning to our lives.

A third way in which death points us towards meaningfulness is by asking of us the question: what did you do with your life? How have you contributed to life? Of what use were you? In answering this question, we shall learn much about what life has meant, at least for us. The sooner we begin to answer it, the clearer and more firm the answer will be.

Because death ends our existence, it matters to us that in some way in our brief span of days we have made a difference. That is part of the anguish and the glory of being human. More than any other condition or event in our lives, death places the question squarely before us: what good have I done? How have I helped? Did I change my world for the better even a little?

Lewis Thomas, in an interview he gave a few weeks before his death, spoke of the importance of usefulness in comprehending life and death. Being useful, he suggested, is far more important than obtaining goods or knowledge. “Contemplate the times when you’ve been useful, even indispensable, to other people,” he said. In that contemplation can be found a plenitude of meaning.

John Lithgow, the actor, in a Commencement Address he gave at Harvard a few years ago, cited usefulness as one of the essential qualities of the happy and successful people he knew. Montaigne thought the value of a life lay in the use that is made of it. Meaning can be found in doing things that help other people, doing things that beautify the world, doing things that need doing.

Consider the experience of  Sadie Virginia Smithson.

She was a seamstress in Johnson Falls, Virginia, who grew to young girlhood before she discovered that she did not belong in the upper crust society of her small town. Upon graduation from high school, she was denied admission into the Laurel Literary Society, the pinnacle of high society in Johnson Falls.. She was turned away because she took in sewing and her father ran the livery stable.

She decided to save her money, take a trip to Europe, return and write a paper about her experience, which a century ago was still a bit unusual for a young woman. This would be the means by which she would be welcomed into the Literary Society. The ladies would want her to come and read her paper there.

When she had saved enough, she took her trip, only to have war break out shortly after her arrival. Being driven from Belgium to Paris in the grim late summer of 1914, she came upon the scene of a battle just concluded. She heard a man moaning for water, and then others crying out in pain. She leapt out of the car and began to offer what succor she could to these wounded and dying men. Refusing to go on with her party, she stayed there, as she later put it, “holding Hell back all night.”

She told her story to a sympathetic listener on the voyage going home. This new friend said that she would surely be invited to join the Laurel Literary Society now, to which Sadie Virginia replied, “But you don’t understand. I’ve been face to face with war and death and hell and God. None of the things I once thought important matter now.”

“What does matter to you, then?” asked her friend.

“God and love and doing things for folks.”

An encounter with death brought a new dimension of meaning into the life of Sadie Virginia Smithson, a dimension of usefulness that gave her life a meaning it could not otherwise have had.

Death points us towards the meaningfulness to be found in usefulness. 

As a public speaker since I was 12 years of age, I have learned that talks of any kind, certainly including sermons, have a soporific tendency for some folks that simply cannot be resisted. Indeed, I recall a young man once telling me that he slept better listening to my sermons than he did at night in his own bed! For this reason, I have made it a practice briefly to recapitulate what I have said so that sleepers will have a chance to evaluate my remarks as well as those who managed to stay awake.

The question of this presentation was: Is death meaningful?

I suggested that that question is fundamental to our humanity, and that for at least 100,000 years we have given various answers to it. Those answers began to change in the last century or so. Wars now made more horrible and more visible because of modern technology drained the faith of many people in the traditional answers to the apparent senselessness of death.

Two facts remain through all the centuries: that death is for humanity and almost all life an absolute and that in our universe death is necessary.

I believe that, regardless of our theology, death drives us towards meaningfulness in three ways.

Death forces us to take life seriously right now. 

Death shapes the way we think of life.

Death reminds us that meaning is found in usefulness.

In these ways death is revealed not as the negation but as the beginning of all meaning.