Vade Mecum: Your Student Guide to Legally Safe Sex While in College

     I have long been in favor of teaching young people, and strictly enforcing in sexual situations, the old rule, "Yes means yes; No means no; and Maybe emphatically means no more than maybe."

     I also remain convinced that we ordinarily should not insist "that people engaging in sex should ask permission for each stage of the encounter — each 'base' in the sports metaphor." After the initial Yes most couples can get along on body language and monosyllabics like No, Stop, or Oh, yeah!" (for two monosyllables).

     This issue has become immediate for me because two California politicians I like and respect (and to whose campaigns I've contributed money) are pressing for requiring California colleges to require "affirmative consent" at each stage of a sexual encounter; and the story on the latest round of their campaign for a State mandate was headlined in my local paper, "Better response urged for assault," with a subhead in a much less emphatic font, "Colleges need improvement against sexual battery …" (Ventura County Star 18 April 2015: 2A). Additionally, this movement for affirmative consent fits in with serious alarm over sexual offenses at colleges — and similar legislation will be coming soon to other legislative bodies.

     My concerns with the issue come from having spent a lifetime in America with a large portion of it on college campuses — thirty-five years teaching full time — and significant time helping to write student conduct regulations.

     Having grown up in America, I'm concerned with what matters and who matters. Sexual assault and sexual battery are serious issues, but so are nonsexual assault, battery, and what is still called at law "mayhem." We've seen over the last decade far too many expressions of distress over sexual exploitation and what was once called "white slavery" — by people who are not generally concerned with exploitation more generally. Similarly, I understand the need for politicians to go with politically "sexy" issues and how "politically sexy" frequently means issues relating to sex. And I understand how the American public and media have, as the saying goes, the attention spans of beagle pups and that politicians have to work with issues that grab attention and work while those issues have our attention. As Winston Churchill said, in a rule Rahm Emmanuel recycled, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." But if some politicians, pundits, and more normal folk don't ever complain about the exploitation of workers, I don't want to hear from them about the exploitation of sex workers; if they are totally silent on rates of mugging, assault, battery, and violence generally, they would do well to remain at least soft-spoken when it comes to those crimes combined with sex.

     Having grown up in America through the Civil Rights Movement, I'm concerned with which victims count and which don't count so much. "The rate of rape and sexual assault" of women 18-24 years-of-age "was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents (7.6 per 1,000) than for students (6.1 per 1,000)" according to a posting on the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. And to quote a Wikipedia article giving what should be a commonly-known set of statistics, "A United States Department of Justice report […] states that 'In 2011-12, an estimated 4.0% of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission to the facility, if less than 12 months'" — which may "under report the real numbers of sexual assaults in prison, especially among juveniles."

     Politicians, pundits, moralists, and other folk stressing sexual violence on US campuses, people willing to mandate detailed regulation of sexual conduct to prevent even ambiguous cases of sexual assault — I want to hear from them at least now and then on sexual assaults against victims with less clout: poor women not in college, prisoners, and, more generally, "People not well connected."

     My main concern with the proposed legislative mandates, though, comes from having helped write rules for The Student Handbook at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio; 'cause a State mandate on affirmative consent requires rules and makes inevitable clarifying guidelines and information sessions and advice from Student Affairs staff on how to have "Legally Safe Sex."

     In most of the discussions I've encountered, "affirmative consent" is defined as "'affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity' every step of the way," and this formulation raises serious questions for collegiate writers of the rules to ensure that the law is obeyed, and for those getting out pamphlets and having (compulsory?) informational meetings for students on how to obey the rules.

     (1) My first question as a rule writer would be how to write the rule for married students.

         You can't exempt married students from rules on sexual assault without having the university denying the possibility of marital rape. On the other hand, to get the State, through public universities, involved in the sex lives of married people seems a horrible idea.

         The question of married students leads to dealing with graduate students, say doctoral candidates in their late 30's. To what degree can the State, through the university, tell mature citizens how they must behave sexually if they are to ensure that they are obeying the rules, whether or not they're concerned about being accused of wrongdoing by a partner. As a practical matter, such accusations are pretty much the only serious worry for students engaged in sex, but writers of university regulations and advice pamphlets have to tell people what to do to obey the rules, not what it's safe to do if you aren't likely to get accused.

         So: Should you tell doctoral candidates to be sure to ask explicitly, and with words, what it is they want to do sexually, in private, with one or more consenting partners?

         This was not a problem in the old days of in loco parentis, when schools were "in place of the parents" and all students of any age were legally "infants" in relation to school authorities. But what should be policy nowadays with thirty-year old graduate students or a thirty-year old junior? What should be the policy for a nineteen-year old sophomore male, registered to vote and registered for the Draft?

     In a time when arrested development is a major problem among young people in America, it is a bad idea to treat college students like children and set up self-fulfilling prophecies. Not so much in State statutes but in writing the rules to implement those statutes, how strictly and explicitly should colleges and universities advise adults on how to behave sexually — or risk punishment in university disciplinary systems that offer fewer due process protections than US courts?

     (2) My second question would be how to reconcile requiring the asking of explicit questions about sex with rules against sexual harassment. When does requesting "affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement" at every step become sexual harassment? When advising students on legally safe sex, what should you tell them about when to start asking explicit questions? In one form of ideal world, young men and women (or post-pusescent girls and boys) would feel free and comfortable to go up to someone they find attractive and say, "Hi. I find you sexually attractive. Would you like to talk a bit and see if we'd both like to go over to my place or yours for sex acts we'd both enjoy?" In one form of ideal world, such a conversation would be unremarkable; but for good and ill, such a world is not one we live in.

     "Hey, would you like to copulate and maybe engage in oral sex?" is not a line likely to get a guy sex — although it might work for gals. Relevant here, though, is it a line we wish to encourage or even require?

     (3) I haven't followed this debate into lurid detail, but what I've heard seems to assume pretty vanilla sex, and, indeed, vanilla is what sex usually is. But not always. With a bit of ingenuity a committee can probably write rules that cover group sex without getting gross or grotesque, but the rhetorical and ethical problems get more complex with, say, sadomasochism or just bondage. On the one hand, I'm not sure I'd like to write rules or put together a PowerPoint presentation or website entry that covered how to get consent in encounters involving handcuffs and a ball gag, especially if the major objective of the game is domination and silent submission. On the other hand, it is naïve to think that no students at no time are going to engage in low-rent, 20-shades-of-off-white S&M, one of the more popular perversions.

         Check out a porn site or two for the range of sex acts to cover; the people writing the university regulations will need to do so. And then consider if it's a good idea for university regulations to stipulate what sort of sex games are permitted or forbidden to initially consenting adults in private.

     A more practical concern is that the whole argument over the details of affirmative consent and ambiguous cases of sexual assault draws attention from simpler and more immediate issues.

     With the one instance when I had to deal with a rape issue as a member of a university and civic community, there was nothing subtle involved. My student was a serial rapist, and the solution to the problem he presented, from an institutional point of view, was his being arrested, prosecuted, tried, convicted, and sent to prison, which very effectively got him off campus and will keep him away for a very long time. My experience proves nothing in itself, but illustrates a wider concern: It may not be the case that "On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes," but the policing of sex on campus (and elsewhere) should begin with robust police and prosecutor efforts against rapists and preventing patterns of rape. 

     There are, though, social and cultural issues behind disturbing rape statistics, more subtle issues with which colleges and American society more generally must deal and deal seriously.

     Few of my students had the phrase or concept "macho asshole," nor had they sufficient experience with alternative ideals of masculinity even to make jokes about SNAGs ("Sensitive New Age Guys") or "the strong, silent type." A fair number of my students had grown up in social and political subcultures and in niches of popular culture where adolescent swagger was respected rather than scorned and where violence was associated with strength and not weakness of character. As time went on, increasing numbers of my students could use "bitch" and "bitches" and "bitch-slapped" in everyday speech where they would never use words like "nigger" (and didn't even know slurs like "kike" and "dago"). In most cases, this background cultural noise had little effect: the great majority of college students hit eighteen as good kids and continue their way as being responsible young (and not so young) adults.

     But some became macho assholes, if, with college, better schooled and better spoken macho assholes. And part of the macho asshole role is disrespect for women and weaker men, and occasional or repeated violence toward them.

     The swagger admired too widely in US politicians does not help here, nor similar posturing by male leads in action movies — nor their real-world behavior off-screen. We need more cultural ideals of manhood involving self-control and low-key confidence, and an ideal of courage consisting not in "Taking out the trash" and "Wasting the bad guys" but in the sort of cop who doesn't fire until fired upon and risks taking a bullet rather than shooting an unarmed civilian.

     For nicely ironic balance, the production of "good kids" both male and female is also and perhaps equally an aspect of the sexual-assault problem gone after by "affirmative consent" rules.

     Unlike the ideal of the macho bad boy, ideal "good kids" don't drink booze in high school, and they don't try to get laid. The law-abiding, dutiful parents of "good kids" don't give their kids beer or wine or stronger drinks: as the sign says in the train station in the fancy suburb of Highland Park, IL — and elsewhere — "Parents Who Host, Lose The Most." The upshot of such ideals and public policies is that nowadays fewer parents than is healthy teach their children how to "drink like gentlemen"/"drink like a lady" or how to go about getting laid (etc.) like civilized grownups.

     So young college students booze like adolescents, and engage in sex in what one theologically sophisticated undergraduate described as the good (Catholic) kid fashion of "Get drunk, get stupid, get laid," get penitent, get absolved … and then repeat the process as often as possible.

     "Affirmative Consent" goes against the subconscious strategy of being a relatively "good kid" and still getting laid. The theology is straightforward, especially for a traditional Catholic. To get drunk and get animalistic is to engage in bestial sins abhorrent to puritanical cults and subcultures. But wordless, drunken, animalistic rutting is far less sinful than getting demonic by warping one's divine Reason and Will with "affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity," i.e., in traditional Christian terms, to engage in the mortal sin of Lust realized in — for the unmarried — fornication. Falling into sin is one thing; consciously choosing sin and articulating your choice is literally willful disobedience and an enactment of Satanic Pride.

     Few college students — hell, few American PhD's! — have the theological training to do that sort of conscious analysis, but America's "good kids" can still live out such logic with exquisite exactness over a drunken weekend.

     The campus sexual assault problem will be ameliorated when assault generally in the United States is reduced. It will be ameliorated when macho asshole serial rapists are regularly arrested and imprisoned, and when macho swagger is laughed at and despised: when it's no more socially acceptable to say "bitch" than for a White to say "nigger." We'll go a long way toward a solution when American parents teach their children how to use booze and not abuse it, and how to engage in a variety of sexual activities sensibly and responsibly — and consensually, consciously, responsbibly, and with minimal feelings of guilt and embarrassment.

     Such sex should be engaged in with some conversation, but not necessarily obsessively "talking dirty" over each new move citizens in college want to try.

    

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SIDE NOTES:

              (1) Damnation: If a number of traditional theories are correct, pre-marital sex of any sort may send its practitioners to hell. In California, we have occasional signs informing people that "The State of California has determined" that some action or other is hazardous (e.g., as a risk of cancer or birth defects). It would be a sensible accomodation to religious believers to publish rotating notices along with affirmative consent rules, some statement of unarguable fact like, "WARNING: Traditional Christianity has taught that sex outside marriage — possibly any sex act without the potential for reproduction — is an offense against chastity and may condemn your soul to the lake of fire that burns forever." Or, "CAUTION: Acts of male homosexuality are forbidden under Leviticus 20.13, fornication by 1 Corinthians 6.18." As to whether or not such teachings are correct, neither the United States nor any of the States may take a position, but it would be courteous to traditional believers to state the facts of traditional belief when, arguably, one is encouraging young people to go against them.

              (2) Tuition and Fees: Off and on from the 1970s into the 2000s, I worked on rules as part of the Service requirement for my job as a full-time member of a university faculty. Nowadays at least the key portion of such work would be done by lawyers from the Office of University Counsel — and/or at the office of the state Attorney General — billing at the rate of lawyers.

Who Remembers the Armenians? (Yom Hashoah / Meds Yeghern, 2015)

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

«Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?» —

Reportedly said by Adolf Hitler 22 Aug. 1939,

most immediately concerning Poles.

            

On Sunday, 12 April 2015, Pope Francis commemorated the 100^th anniversary of the start of the mass murders of Armenians in the failing Ottoman Empire. What made major news, and serious diplomatic waves, was that Pope Francis called the killings a genocide, labeling it the first of the 20^th century.

            I believe that the government of Turkey (and that of Azerbaijan) should apologize to the descendants of the survivors of the massacres and pay reasonable but significant reparations, even if largely symbolic; but I would not insist that the Turks use the word "genocide."

Three places I'm "coming from" (as we used to say) on the Pope's assertion and the larger (often fierce) debate:

            1. Many years ago I taught an Honors course titled simply, "Massacres." It was the one course I taught in 40 years of teaching that got a perfect score on student evaluations, but, for whatever reasons, it was never approved for me to teach again, and it was not picked up by any of my colleagues.

                        Anyway, "Massacres" was the title I went with, but the working title was the frequent paraphrase of Hitler's rhetorical question as, "Who remembers the Armenians?"; and the premise of the course included the idea out of the work of Hannah Arendt that to even begin to understand the Hitlerian Holocaust we have to place it in a perverse tradition of mass murder. The murder of some five to six million Jews and five to six million Roma, homosexuals, Communists, unionists, priests, righteous Gentiles, and other "inferiors" or enemies of the Reich had precedents, including the largely premeditated Aghed — Catastrophe — visited upon the Armenians but also the almost casual murders of masses in Africa at the height of European colonialism there, culminating in one of the last holocausts of the 19^th century and first of the 20^th, the deaths of some five to ten million people in King Leopold II's Congo Free State (1885-1908).

            2. I grew up in and regularly taught in the Orwellian tradition of questioning the power of political and other authorities to manage the meaning of words. 

                        So the Congress of the United States could say that ethyl alcohol consumed to seek pleasure or avoid pain is not a drug, and that the nicotine in tobacco is not a drug — but alcohol and nicotine used as recreational drugs were and remain drugs. The government of the United States and its international clients and allies can stipulate as a matter of practical law that marijuana is a dangerously addictive hard drug with no legitimate uses, and keep it on "Schedule 1" of the Controlled Substances Act along with heroin; but the everyday fact remains that large numbers of people use marijuana without serious problems, and, for that matter, that heroin has undoubted uses as a pain reliever.

                        The US government and the UN can say that poison gas is a weapon of mass destruction, but poison gas isn't a weapon of destruction at all — part of the point of gas warfare is killing people without destroying property — and as weapons go even sarin nerve gas is much less efficient at killing than, say, cluster bombs, or even home-made "Improvised Explosive Devices" of commercial explosives plus nails and screws as shrapnel.

            3. I had a colleague who got a good deal of guff for noting that Stalin's purges had less of an effect on the general Soviet population than usually assumed, and who pointed me toward another scholar who got seriously attacked for documenting some eight million murders ordered by Stalin. This second scholar didn't deny that there was more blood on Stalin's hands, but eight million deaths was what his study could document. And this second scholar made the point that we lived in a strange world where he could be called an apologist for Stalin with having Stalin guilty of the deaths of at least eight million people: as if massacres become serious only if they reach double digits of millions.

Now "Genocide" centrally means the planned destruction of a people as a people, mostly by killing them, and there have been genocides in human history, including fairly recent ones in Tasmania and (on a small scale — there weren't many people to kill) in California. Attempted genocide should be treated in ethics and at law as the same as achieved genocide, but in our usage we should differentiate between the two crimes. 

Some of the "Young Turks" wanted at least "ethnic cleansing" away of the Armenians with the same fascistic undertone to "cleansing" as with Nazi desires for purity. Many Turks tolerated or participated in massacres and death marches of Armenians with the effect of mass murder on a massive scale. 

            Let the Turks admit to mass murder and offer reparations.

            Let Armenians say, "In spite of the Catastrophe, we are here; any attempt at genocide failed." And let the argument go on from there as to what should be done for compassionate and sensible reparations and reconciliation. 

            And let the United States and the International "Community" —defining "community" as "people who are stuck with one another" — let the powers that be in such matters confine the use of "genocide" to the obscene success of the destruction of a people and move swiftly and effectively to prevent not just genocide but attempts at genocide. Indeed, let the human community accept our responsibility to act swiftly and effectively to stop all mass murder and literal massacres, well before they become massive enough to qualify as attempts at genocide.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and the Rise of Modern Fundamentalisms

So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite.

But suddenly, I knew they were really

the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the

unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle.

 I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens.

The universe, worlds beyond number,

God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite.

I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. […]

That existence begins and ends in man's conception, not nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing.

My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance.

All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something.

And then I meant something, too.

 Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too.

To God, there is no zero. I still exist!

— Scott Carey, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

         For a while there — let's say 1400-1650 C.E. — educated folk could take a wide view of the saying of Protagoras that (drumroll here), "Man is the measure of all things," or as a character of E. M. Forster's puts it, "Man is the measure." Since then it's been pretty much downhill and rolling out of center stage for "Man."

         First off, the meaning of "Man" got complicated with the "voyages of discovery" that helped put European White men at the center of things geopolitically, in positions of power, but "things" just in terms of human politics got much bigger much faster.

         Educated folk had known since the ancient Greeks that the Earth was a large ball, but they came to learn just how large a ball it is, both physically and socially. "It's a small world / After all" the Disney song may tell us with maddening persistence, but our planet isn't small on a human scale. The ball of Earth was a whole lot bigger than, famously, Christopher Columbus thought and larger still in terms of its peoples. Back when civilization was getting started, kings could proclaim themselves Lords of the Universe when they controlled territories the size of New Jersey, and even Alexander the Great could see himself at times as a world conqueror. But not even Genghis Khan and his successors, however much of the landmass of Eurasia they conquered, could see themselves as conquering the world.

         Just as "European Man" set himself on the road to being top dog, he started to learn just how big the kennel was.

         And how diverse.

         If your goal was "One God, One Land, One Culture, One King," well good luck, to that! The more European Man came to control more and more peoples, the more he came to learn — if damnably slowly — that his culture was but one among many. The Prime Meridian may've been placed at Greenwich, England, UK, but another 359 of those meridians went around the Earth. The sun may've never set on the British Empire, and it was commonly the attitude that "The wogs begin at Calais," and that the "wogs" of the Earth — like Barbarians to the snootier ancient Greeks — really didn't count. But there were a hell of a lot of them thar "wogs," and as time moved on from the Medieval through the Early Modern into the modern, a lot of those "wogs" got their freedom and the vote, and started to count — and then doubled in number when women were added in. So Britain, say, could've been great, but that greatness had to be shared among a lot of other Brits, and the British may've been less top dog in a small pack as at the top of the heap, and the heap one more like ants or termites.

         If scarcity value is part of value, "Man" as an individual was getting diminished just by discovery of our numbers — and that's over seven billion as I write — and an individual's being the wonder of a whole society diminished in value against the large number of societies, many of whom have never heard of you and might not think much of your accomplishments if they had. (Like, Alexander the Great isn't so great by the standards of the Amish, and Amish kids are unlikely to have seen movies about him).

         "Man" as species fared little better as Earth moved out of the center of the cosmos and the cosmos kept increasing in size.

         Now, a Medieval astronomer could wow an audience with the size of the Ptolemaic universe, and I had a teacher who had a lot of fun with a spiel from the time on how an anvil dropped from the Sphere of the Fixed Stars would take nine days — nine full days! — to fall to the Earth. It was a big world, after all, but Earth was still the center.

         And then came Copernicus and Galileo and evidence for a sun-centered cosmos and hints that there might be reason to believe one or two of the wilder bits of Renaissance mystic speculation that had not only the Earth not at the center of the universe but suggested a universe with no center and no end. Or at least the possibility of a "plurality of worlds": i.e., a number of planets beyond the known Solar system, some of which might have life, even intelligent life, making Homo sapiens, the "Wise Man" just one intelligence among many.

         Meanwhile, though, back on Earth, even as the cosmos was expanding in volume, "Man's" world was expanding in time.

         In the 19^th century, truly ancient languages were deciphered and in a sense human history doubled: Egypt was an ancient kingdom when the Hebrews arrived, and even older were Sumer and Akkad and the civilization that could produce an epic like Gilgamesh ca. 2100 BCE. If a human person was to be a historical big shot, there was now even more competition, plus a reassertion of the old question of Ubi sunt, "Where are they now." You could be a world-historical character indeed, but so was Ramses II, perhaps best known, to the few who know the name, as the Ozymandias ironically celebrated by Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies[…].

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,  

The lone and level sands stretch far away.  (1818) 

         So, Hey, Big Man: If you want to get "world-historical" you have to compete with Ramses the Great among a whole lot of others. Chances are you'll lose, and even if you win at that game: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Eventually, even the pyramids will wear down. Fame is fleeting, and nothing human-made will last very long, let alone "forever."

         And the human species …? That was the bigger blow during the 19^th century, reverberating down to our day far more than the extension of history through early scientific archeology and philology (ruins and word studies).

         During the 19^th century scientists got an inkling of, and then strong confidence in, the great age of Earth, and, along with confidence, some idea of the large form of the history of life on our planet and, eventually, where Homo sap. fits in.

         It's not a reassuring picture. And wasn't even before Alfred Wallace (1858) and Charles Darwin on evolution (Origin of Species 1859).

         Finding all those fossils of extinct species was itself a major downer.

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life [* * *]. 
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death [...] The spirit does but mean the breath[...].’
And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,Such splendid purpose in his eyes,[...] Who trusted God was love indeedAnd love Creation’s final law–Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and clawWith ravine, shriek’d against his creed– [...]  [Shall he] Be blown about the desert dust,Or seal’d within the iron hills?

                             [i.e., as just one more extinct species]
                                   — "In Memoriam A. H. H.," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1849 [LV-LVI])

Tennyson's question is apt: If all those species are extinct, will Man — God's and/or Nature's "last work" of creation — also go? Well, not if we're special, not if in us humans the animating "(life)breath" (ruach, anima, spiritus) is spirit in the sense of immortal soul, separable from the body and immortal: immortal in individuals and thereby, in a sense, the essence of an immortal species. But if Homo sapiens is just a recent work of Nature, evolved by variation and natural selection from precursors who in turn had evolved; if we're only the top of a tree of life, or just another twig on the a biological bush? Well, then we get to the allusion in Tennyson's "The spirit does but mean the breath," that is, we get to some hard words from Koheleth, the Preacher, "Ecclesiastes," words I like to quote so often because other religious folk quote them so rarely. So as the Bible saith, in the words of the Preacher: "So I decided, as regards men, to dissociate them [from] the divine beings and to face the fact that they are beasts. For […] the fate of man and the fate of beast [are] one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust. Who knows if a man's lifebreath does rise upward and if a beast's breath does sink down into the earth?" (Tanakh 1985; cf. KJV 2000: 3.18-21)

         In the 20^th and 21^st centuries we can say that humankind evolved on a small planet orbiting an unremarkable star on in one arm of an unremarkable galaxy of perhaps 400 billion stars in an observable universe of perhaps 170 billion galaxies or more. And there may be much more to the universe than we have yet observed or perhaps can observe, and there may be more than one universe. Indeed, there may be a "plurality of worlds" in the sense of a multiverse. And how many worlds to a plurality of worlds, universes to a multiverse? If it is a multiverse and not the uni- sort, there's no reason in simple logic to put a limit on "multi," and we'd need to consider the possibility — and some physicists believe in the actuality — of an infinite number of universes.

         And the value of a man or Man or a woman or humankind in such a multiverse? Well, a realistic view might be whatever the value we put on the best of beasts, "the paragon of animals" in Hamlet's nice phrase — whatever value we put on the greatest achievement of the material world evolved over time, placed as a numerator over some denominator that is minimally humungous, up to infinity.

         I value nonhuman animals more than Koheleth did, but, in our universe, the arithmetic means "both" — both human animals and nonhuman animals "amount to nothing."

         So we are invited to "face the fact" of The Incredibly Shrinking Us, look into the Abyss of the Real, and despair.

         Except we don't. We just don't often face such facts. Most of us, most of the time (including astrophysicists and philosophers) just ignore the vastness of the Real and stick to our petty little lives on a human scale: as we evolved to do and as we usually should. Sometimes, though ….

         Well, here I will tell an insensitive but useful joke.

         A kid has grown to be twelve, and his parents think he's autistic or otherwise neurologically or mentally impaired because he's never said a word. Doctor after doctor has failed to find anything pathological in the kid's brain or the rest of his body, but he says nothing, nada — bubkis! Then, one day, at breakfast, he looks up from his oatmeal and says, "This oatmeal sucks." And here you throw in as much as you like of parental amazement that the kid's finally communicated and you get to their demand for an explanation for the silence, and the punch line from the kid: "Well, up to now, everything's been okay."

         Clichés on the value of suffering are mostly cruel bullshit, but this much is true: in times of disruption, when social networks come apart and people find themselves in pain — though sometimes pain from just boredom — in some sense increasing numbers of people find themselves in pain and unfulfilled and alone, then they sometimes (some of them) start questioning and get an inchoate intimation of that abyss.

         And at times like that, times such as our own, you get one answer to that pain in "Fideism" — choosing faith over reason — various fundamentalisms, and, with a small but significant minority, fanaticism.

         Fideism and fanaticism have one actively denying anything that goes against the Faith — any Faith — and are highly effective ways to give one's life direction and a sense of meaning. After their fashion, fanatics and the unquestioning faithful are highly comfortable in the universe. They tend, however, especially the fanatics, to make the human-scale universe very uncomfortable for others.

         Alternatively, one could accept one form or other of secular humanism, which in most contexts I do, but secular humanism requires starting with the idea that human life is somehow special and valuable, and it should be clear by now that believing that is a statement of faith and a leap into not only the Absurd but the "counter-factual."

         Other, and better answers — more intellectually respectable answers, safer-for-the-world answers —include a healthy Existentialism ("Human life begins on the far side of despair") or a calm spirituality or restrained religious faith.

         With atheistic Existentialism one can "face the fact that" we humans "are beasts," if very special kinds of beasts in our neighborhood of the galaxy, and then get on with life — insisting that our being a special kind of beast includes a practical requirement for law and ethics of postulating that creatures with consciousness, starting with humans, have value in themselves and are not to be merely used, like insensate (unconscious, unfeeling, inorganic) things.

         With calm spirituality and some variety of mysticism, one can groove on nonBeing; with a calm and restrained religious faith, one can say with Scott Carey, "To God, there is no zero."

         What is a bad idea, though, is the symbiotic complement of the various religious Fundamentalism: i.e., a very bad idea is the militant atheism that insists on a scientific view of the universe and then refuses to deal with the philosophical implications of a rigorous — in a broad sense of the word "materialism" — materialism.

         You want a really rigorous materialism? Well, the Marquis de Sade is far out of date in his science and was far, far out of his mind — psychopathic serial killer and all — but he was strong on intellectual daring and pushing an idea to its conclusions. "What we call the end of the living animal," Sade notes in a very long philosophic pause from a pornographic novel, what we call death and killing of a human or other animal (or plant) is not "a true finis" — end, finish — "but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter, what every modern philosopher acknowledges as one of Nature's fundamental laws" ("Manners" section of "Yet Another Effort Frenchmen, If You Would Become [Real] Republicans" 1795). Modernizing the argument: Kill someone, bury the corpse, let it rot, dig it up, and weigh it, and the biomass of the human remains, putrefactive bacteria, maggots and such will show no significant loss.

         If you feel that a living human being is superior to a mass of putrefactive bacteria (and I certainly hope you do), how is that feeling any more than the product of our "small human vanities," species chauvinism, and "stupid notions of pride"?

         I don't think 10^th grade science teachers or Neil deGrasse Tyson ought to read aloud excerpts from de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom when discussing cosmology, but in extolling the glories of the vast universe of the scientific world-view, they should show sympathy for those who resist a totally secular understanding of the human condition. Many people wish to look at the universe and multiverse and say, "I still exist!" and not have to add too emphatically, "If only in a trivial and vanishingly small way."

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ADDENDUM, 1 Jan. 2018: Tyson does get into human smallness, but in a cheerful, upbeat way <http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/01/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-brings-astrophysics-down-to-earth>.