Harry Emerson Fosdick on immortality

The American minister Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) wrote a number of books, and in my first semester of college in the Fall of 1998, I stumbled across one of them on the library shelf. It may have been The Assurance of Immortality (1913). I took notes on his argument. At the time, it seemed to me that he was saying:

If you can't enjoy life now, and you have no hope for improving it, then you must hope for a better afterlife. If you don't believe in an afterlife, there would be no reason to continue living. People soldier on through situations that are not only difficult but intractably, hopelessly so, and this suggests that they believe, at least implicitly, that there's something worth waiting for on the other side of this life.

But isn't virtue its own reward? Or do we do good in the world only because we're waiting for something on the other side? Fosdick acknowledges this theme but doesn't seem to quite grasp that it truly means not being rewarded, at all, ever and finding satisfaction in a virtuous life. He says no one would sacrifice pleasure for virtue unless there were some other kind of reward.

Perhaps, he says, virtuous people seek not a selfish reward but rather the opportunity to become better. That opportunity — for some reason, in his view — must go on forever. Therefore, if someone didn't implicitly believe in an afterlife, there would be no reason for them to continue morally improving themselves.

He says, using Socrates' harper analogy, that our souls are like musicians who endure after the music of our lives ends. It could be true, I wrote in my notebook, but merely making the poetic analogy doesn't prove it. Where's the proof that our souls go on?

I always remembered Fosdick because for years afterward I continued to write a bit, privately, now and then, on this topic.

Everything I came up with ended up in this essay: "We don't need to be ‘immortal’: We can ask instead how we'll survive" (January 1, 2023). It's a 6-minute read. What I've given here is an unpaywalled "friends link" on Medium.

Fosdick's name in New York

On Easter Sunday 2022 (April 17), I was surprised to see Fosdick's name on the wall of Riverside Church in Manhattan. He was their first minister.

Does your 'personal brand' allow you room to change?

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, didn't want to brand herself.

In Doppelganger, she wrote:

"Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation. Conceding to having become one at age thirty would have meant foreclosing on what I saw as my prerogative to change, evolve, and hopefully improve. It would have locked me into performing this particular version of me, indefinitely."

Furthermore, journalism and analysis "rest on a tacit commitment to following one’s research wherever it leads, even if that turns out to be a very different place from what was originally expected. Trusted analysts have to be willing to be changed by what they discover." So, while "good branding is an exercise in discipline and repetition" that requires "knowing exactly where you are headed all the time," unfortunately for those who care about intellectual honesty and personal growth, this motion "is essentially in concentric circles."

— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Similarly, Klein wrote in this book: "From the start, I made a conscious decision in my work neither to describe raising a neurodivergent kid in any detail nor to discuss the merits of the labels that a doctor, who spent two hours with him, chose for him when he was four. A bit like a personal brand, defining T. in those ways would fix him at a single point in time and through the eyes of others. The decision about when (and if) to share his private world are T.’s to make."

I briefly compared gender to a personal brand: "Tell Us As You Write Your Story: What You Know and Can Act On". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Consider a paid membership on the platform.

Elsewhere, I've written that I didn't feel I had space to grow in one gender, and I picked a different category that I felt had room for me. If one's gender is a brand, for me I wanted a room to expand in, not a room to constrain me.

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"Seeking some way to acknowledge the past embedded in my name without continuing to honor it, I recalled the philosophical strategy of putting a word 'under erasure.' It was a technique popularized by the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who argued that certain words contain their own negation, which he signified by crossing them out. Such words, he suggested, are unavoidable tools for speaking and thinking, but they are also inadequate. As such, they had to be eliminated while also remaining legible."
"My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it."
I needed a way to reject my family’s role in the history of slavery without denying it.
Perspective by Baynard Woods. Washington Post. July 8, 2022.