on d

The most vivid fear I remember I have about death probably occurred when I was a little boy, when one day I heard a wild story at our kids' hang-out about a mother in our neighborhood who mysteriously disappeared and never returned. The thought of "what if this happens to my mom" caused great fear in my little mind.

And when I first heard the saying: "Death is part of nature," it was an uneasy and incomprehensible concept to me. Death is a terrible thing that ends life. If it's not outright anti-nature, it's definitely un-natural, I thought. 

We Chinese are pragmatic people, who don't think about things that are not of much practical value or grand ideas that are too much out-of-this-world. The old Confucius saying "Don't ask me the meaning of death, I am yet to figure out the meaning of life" (未知生, 焉知死) is pointed out by some as reason why Confucianism never developed into a full-blown religion in Chinese culture, because it shied away from that big "D" question. Without at least exploring and trying to understand the meaning of death, you can't understand the meaning of life either, they say.

So the Western (and other) religions delved deep into that question and came up with some answers, that our life on earth is transient by design, that it's a trial to better our character, and we'll have a perfect life in heaven once we get there, (or we may need to reincarnate quite a few times before we reach that Nirvana, according to Buddhism) ...

And there are people who say "I don't know if I even care for an eternal life, all I do is live one honest day at a time, and when my time is up, it's up." To these people I salute their integrity and even more, their continuous conscientious living. For not even the best of the Christians I know can maintain that "pray without ceasing" practice 24/7, and many people "live like they didn't know they will die one day, and die like they had never lived"--inertia seems to be the only force that keeps many hang on to life. 

Is there life after death, does our life continue to evolve in different form after our earthly body disintegrates? All right, I now accept decay is part of nature, just like growth is part of it, they form a cyclical process, like sunrise and sunset, flowers blossoming and wilting, and so on. But how about our spiritual or mental strength, that continues on an upward path through our life if nurtured right, so when we reach the end of our bodily existence, we are supposedly at the peak of our spiritual or mental climb. Do they then just drop out and disappear like our physical body?

My mother passed away some 19 years ago. It was a shocker for all of us. She was only 67, for one thing, and other than feeling a little short-breathed and palpitations just a couple weeks prior for which we took her for a thorough exam and the doctor assured us everything was OK, she showed no signs of illness. I still remember the shock and heart rending pain I felt when I received that mid-night phone call from my sister in Taiwan that Mother had just passed away in her arms.

The shock came from the loss of something I thought I would always have but now realized it's gone forever. It's no longer the fear, but the great pain that came from the sudden, ruthless take-away of my dear mother, and then the deep, nostalgic sorrow of feeling things better in my life have been lost for good.

In the end we sob for the dead not because we feel sorry for them, but because we feel sorry for ourselves. Rather than saying we fear death, we love life. Even those little, routine emotional highs and lows--those that make up inertia living, you may say--are enough to carry us through the day, every day, even though our hard-to-please soul always fancies something grander. 

And where do these precious little contentments come from mostly? Relationships, I gather. A bear hug from father to son, a complimenting smile from wife to husband, an encouraging note from one friend to another... These are what happy living is made of. 

Some relationships we have in life are born, such as familial relationships (parents, siblings, relatives); some are chosen (spouses, adoptions, business partners); and some are in-between (co-workers, classmates, church members). We tend to hold on to born relationships closest and longest simply because it's most natural thing to do, hence the pain deepest when that relationship is severed from us--like a death in the family, literally. 

But the truth is all relationships--like spiritual and mental growth--get richer and deeper if nurtured properly and continuously, and will give us same satisfaction whether it originates from familial, social, or cultural background. Thus we all have experience having friends with whom we are more intimate than with our own brothers or sisters, and adopted children are in general closer to their foster parents than their biological ones.

One dear uncle of mine just passed away last month. Out of the four brothers my father had, this was the one closest to him and to us since we were kids. It was again a sudden thing: In March he started coughing severely and went to the doctors, where it was diagnosed to be lung cancer at its terminal stage.

I visited him a couple times when I was there last month, didn't get a chance to talk to him. But then I heard from my sister who had once had a long talk with him at the sick bed, and he told her, after reflecting back on his life, "I have no regrets."  I was somehow quite moved and comforted hearing this.

No fear, no dissatisfaction, only peace at the end.

God rest your soul, dear uncle.

egypt, greece, rome ...

scotland? Yes, this according to an erst-while New York Times best seller "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" I picked up at Barnes & Noble bookstore a couple months ago. Though the title may make you chuckle at first (how in the world can a lowly country make such audacious claim), I was most impressed by this well researched and written 450-pager and enjoyed learning some interesting facts and stories that I didn't know before.

The book starts with an incident that occurred on one cold August day in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1696, when one inappropriate remark by a young theology student led to the relentless prosecution and eventual hanging of him by the authority-that-be of the day, the all-encompassing Presbyterian Church of Scotland founded some 150 years ago by John Knox, a devout Calvinist whose life-long mission was to make Scotland the "New Jerusalem" of the world during the days of fierce Protestant Reformation movement. 

Rigid and uncompromising as it was, the Presbyterian church-state of pre-modern day Scotland did instill a deep sense of self-governance and common people's rights against the monarchy, as well as awareness and establishment of universal education (boys and girls must know how to read Holy Scripture, therefore nearly every parish in Scotland had some sort of school and a regular teacher), making Scotland's literacy rate the highest in the world (it was probably not by coincidence that Encyclopedia Britannica was first compiled and published by a group of Scottish publishers in Edinburgh), and sowing the seeds for its intellectual enlightenment movement during the 18th century, when Scotland enjoyed economic prosperity after its successful union with England at the beginning of that century. 

The Scottish Enlightenment shared same humanist and rationalist outlook of European Enlightenment of the same period, with some firebrand ideas of its own, though. 

For more than two thousand years Western philosophers had praised the primacy of reason as the guide to all human action and virtue, that the job of reason was to master our emotions and appetites. With one earth-shaking book, "A Treatise of Human Nature," David Hume, one of the most influential Scottish thinkers of the day, and some call modernity's first great philosopher, turned the theory on its head. "Reason is," he wrote, "and ought to be, the slave of the passions."

"Human beings are not, and never have been, governed by their rational capacities," he elaborated, "Reason's role is purely instrumental: it teaches us how to get what we want. What we want is determined by our emotions, our passions, or our desire to live according to the rational principles. We are, in the end, creatures of habit, and of the physical and social environment within which our emotions and passions must operate."

For Hume, self-interest is all there is. The overriding guiding force in all our actions is not our reason, or our sense of obligation toward others, or any innate moral sense, but the most basic human passion of all, the desire for self-gratification.

Now Adam Smith, another great Scottish intellectual of the day, and later recognized to be father of modern science of economy by many, was a good friend of David Hume's. He was somewhat disturbed by such characterization of human nature, for his insight of man came from a different school of thoughts, one held and infused in him by his teacher/mentor, another great Scottish thinker, Francis Hutcheson, who insisted morality is inborn, a gift from God and nature, not something that has to be imposed from outside, as Hume suggested.

What Smith eventually came up with was what he called "fellow feeling," a natural sense of identification with other human beings. When we see someone suffer, we suffer; when we see others happy and celebrating their good fortune, it raises our own spirits. "Empathy," in today's term.

"Nature, when she formed man for society," Smith explained, "endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard."

So being moral demands that we put ourselves in another person's place, and put another person in our place. It leads us to promote the well-being of others, by making them as happy as ourselves.

For Adam Smith, then, our moral life, as well as our cultural life, is a matter of imagination. The richer the inventory of objects for its diversion, and the deeper our own fellow feeling, the happier we become, but also the more we can perceive happiness in others. The rich man is the man with the most fertile imagination. By devoting all his efforts and those of his employees and tenants to his land or his warehouse of factory, he ends up producing far more than he can consume himself. Thus, without intending it, without knowing it, as if led by an invisible hand, the rich "advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species," he said in his book "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," 17 years before publishing his other classic, "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776.

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The latter part of the book talks about the diaspora, or dispersion, of Scots around the world through expansion of the British Empire. From Canada (Nova Scotia, one of Canada's four founding colonies, is Latin for "New Scotland") to United States, South America, Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and so on, many Scots served the roles of valiant soldiers, shrewd merchants, prominent educators, devout missionaries, and hardy homesteaders that helped build and maintain the Empire upon which the sun never set. 

One particular branch of Scottish migration actually occurred well before the British colonial expansion to the world. Beginning in early 17th century, many Scots were lured to settle in Northern Ireland on lands confiscated from Irish nobility by King James I, who had been king of Scotland before becoming king of England, as well as driven by famine and poverty at home, through the whole of the 17th century. 

Waves of these "Scotch-Irish" (or "Ulster Scots," Ulster being the ancient provincial name of Northern Ireland) again began to move to British America in early 18th century, landing on Eastern seaports such as Philadelphia or Chester, then quickly expanding into the Appalachian Mountains, across southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and eventually Tennessee.

The habits of colonizing Ireland and seizing arable land from Catholic enemies carried over to the New World. Their insatiable desire for land, and the willingness to fight and die to keep it, laid the foundation of the frontier mentality of the American West.

Place names and language reflected their northern Irish or southern Scottish origins. They said "whar" for "where," "thar" for "there," "critter" for "creature," "nekkid" for "naked"... These were the first utterings of the American dialect of Appalachian mountaineers, cow boys, truck drivers, and back country politicians. The term used to describe them was redneck, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for "talk," meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.

Well known Americans of Scottish origin in the early pioneer days include Andrew Jackson, army general who defeated both Indians and the British army and the 7th President of the United States; William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific Northwest; Sam Houston, soldier politician who led Texas to the Union. Notable modern day Scottish Americans include Andrew Carnegie, steel industry tycoon and philanthropist; Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of telephone and his namesake telephone company; and President Woodrow Wilson, an idealistic politician whose father was one of the founders of Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States.

Nope, MacIntosh Computer was not invented by the Scots, nor were the McDonald's restaurants, even though the names sound Scottish and both are tell-tale contraptions of modern world :)