Why Do We Mourn?
Michael Jackson died today.
There is a sense in which I find it strange that I care. I never met him, and I imagine that if I had, I probably would not have liked him personally. Except for a brief period around the time of Thriller, I never went out of my way to listen to his music (though I do appreciate some covers of his work). I harbor an absurd grudge that he and Lisa Marie Presley never had children for the sole fact that it was almost the case that someone could have said, "My father was Michael Jackson and my grandfather was Elvis Presley" - and that would have been a beautifully absurd thing.
On the other hand, that would have also been an incredibly emotionally-scarred child.
Just like his father.
This isn't about Michael Jackson, though. It's about me. I care that he died, and that bothers me. I mean that I want to be callous, but the truth is that thousands of people die every day who have far more in common with me than Michael Jackson ever did. It is rare that I mourn for any of them.
What is the distinction between these people and Michael Jackson? Four possibilities come to mind. The first is self-interest. It might be that I mourn* because of lost future opportunities. Perhaps my mourning for Michael Jackson is similar to my mourning for a favorite canceled television show. This could certainly be true for some people, but I wasn't really looking forward to anything Michael Jackson might have done in the future.
The second possibility is that I mourn for Michael Jackson because I see him as having had an impact on my life. I suppose he did, as I lived through the eighties. On the other hand, I was also living in New Orleans when David Duke was running for Governor. He certainly influenced my life. While I don't actively wish him dead, I wouldn't mourn him at all if he died.
The third possibility is that I mourn for Michael Jackson because other people - people that I care about - will be saddened by his death. I mourn not for him, but for them. There's something to this, but it ultimately rings false to me. It isn't uncommon for someone important to someone that I care about to die. I know what that feels like. This feels different. I feel bad about his death... not about the repercussions of it.
The last possibility is that I mourn for Michael Jackson simply due to exposure. I know a lot about him... at least in comparison to other people that I don't know personally. His death probably triggered some psychological reaction due to perceived closeness. Our brains aren't designed for having intimate knowledge about people we don't know. I expect we are wired in such a way that, all other things being equal, knowledge implies closeness.
Imagine you heard that "some guy in Maine had a stroke and died." Sad? I guess. Now imagine that you are watching a documentary about the day in the life of a lobsterman. You see him with his wife and children. You see him joking with the guys on his boat. You see him rejoicing at a great day's catch... then you are told that he died of a stroke the next day. Sad? Most definitely. Of course, the two men who died of a stroke could be the same person. What makes the second more worthy of your compassion than the first?
*To be fair, "mourn" is far to strong a word for my reaction to Michael Jackson's death. I'm not ripping my clothes over it.
Speaking of ubiquitous, Billy Mays also died.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/billy-mays-tv-pitchman-...
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Submitted by crimfan (not verified) on Sun, 06/28/2009 - 16:34.Emotions seem, neurally speaking, to be prior to reason so it's not like we can turn off the emotional reaction, in general. Suppress it, sure, that we can do (and do all the time).
As to the whole "why does MJ's death affect us?" question, I don't know. I had conversations with at least two different people about this and have absolutely no good answer.
Some random observations:
-For people of my age (38), he just seems to have always been there. He was a fixture of most of our lives and thus, as a previous poster noted, is a reminder of our own mortality. I think a good contrast is Heath Ledger's death. He wasn't a fixture of my youth but I guess I felt a certain WTF? and also sadness because of the sheer promise cut short.
-It was so surprising and surprises are often WTF? moments. Another contrast: My grandmother passed away in January. I was very close to her and I think she is the only truly consequential person in my life I have 100% totally unmixed feelings about. Grandma was like that: At her funeral a large room was packed to overflow with people bawling their eyes out. As hard as grandma's death was (and, indeed, still is) for me, it wasn't a WTF? moment. She was 90. She'd really been declining over the last few years and had almost totally lost it mentally in the last year. We all knew it was coming and, in the end, it was a release. MJ, by contrast, was 50. This is rather young to be shuffling off this mortal coil, though if one is an OxyContin abuser as MJ seems to have been, it's not too surprising in retrospect. (I had a cousin die of an OxyContin OD at the ripe old age of 29 a few years back but I didn't know him well. My brother did and was quite shaken by it.)
-Also, the general tragedy of MJ's life adds a certain level of pathos to the whole thing. Despite all his money and fame, he seemed desperately unhappy.
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Submitted by crimfan (not verified) on Sun, 06/28/2009 - 16:16.The last sentence of your post is tricky, and I don't like it. You seem to be defining "compassion" as something more like "sympathy" than anything else. (Compassion seems to imply taking action of some sort; sympathy is "just feelings.") Not that I necessarily disagree, but you imply that a given individual needs to be worthy of (what you call) compassion. Are there some objective criteria for compassion that we ought to stipulate?
I'd imagine that some of your sadness comes from the fact that you can remember when Michael Jackson was young. It's sort of like hearing that the cousin you remember being born is now getting married -- a sort of reminder of your mortality, and of the passage of time.
Philosophically speaking, why should we mourn anyone? If we can't find a good philosophical reason to do it, then we shouldn't modify our beliefs(and thus our emotions and behaviors) too?
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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 17:44.The implications you see in the last sentence weren't intentional.
As far as why we should mourn... that's a more interesting question. I suspect that, at some level, we mourn so as to give ourselves a chance to adjust our world-view... and this might be a better answer to my initial question than anything I wrote above. When something that is part of the way we envision the world ceases to be, we need to retrofit the way we perceive the world. It takes a period of adjustment. I suspect that we evolved psychologically to deal with this by feeling sorrow at loss and being afraid of change.
I am worried, though, about your suggestion that we should only do things that we can find good philosophical reasons to do. If that were the case, most of us would never do anything. (Also, modifying your beliefs/emotions/behaviors is a far from trivial thing. Most people can't just decide to do it.)
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Submitted by Stuart Broz on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 19:13.Post new comment