In Response to Matt Walsh

I have no idea who Matt is, and I have never read anything else he has written. But I did stumble across this link while browsing the internet on Robin William’s recent death http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/08/12/robin-williams-didnt-die-disease-died-choice/, and felt, if only for my own sake, that it needed to be addressed.

Matt makes two primary contentions:

1.       Suicide is a moral failure in virtue of being a choice.

2.       Spiritual emptiness is an essential cause for depression and spiritual health is the best cure for depression.

As disagreements often go, it isn’t so much that I think Matt is wrong so much as I think his thought is imbalanced, and, at times, naïve. My main beef lies with Matt’s criticism of phrases that people make of Robin while they're grieving. Many of them say that Robin is now “free” or “at peace.”

Matt writes:

“It is not freeing. In suicide you obliterate yourself and shackle your loved ones with guilt and grief. There is no freedom in it. There is no peace. How can I free myself by attempting to annihilate myself? How can I free something by destroying it? Chesterton said, “The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” Where is the freedom in that?”

I hate that Matt quotes Chesterton here both because the quote does not follow from Matt's claim (which opportunistically abuses the word ‘free’)[1]--probably Matt is just being incoherent--and because I think that Chesterton, for all his insight on gratitude and joy, was far too predisposed to glee to understand much about a lifetime of despair. (Is it any wonder that Chesterton’s sentiments and rational in “Orthodoxy” lead him to eventually commit to the Catholic Church—whose own staunch position on suicide is well-known?) That is, I think Chesterton is the doctor with (part of) an elixir, not the patient in need of it. He knows no more of the hauntings of despair than a life-long healthy doctor knows of what it is to live with chronic cancer. He may be right, but he is naïve. He prescribe the pills, he doesn't know what it is to force oneself to take them over and over.

There is no denying that suicide is a type of selfishness, if not, in certain scenarios, a very selfish brand of selfishness. There is also no denying that a choice is involved. But to concentrate one’s interpretation of Robin’s death around Robin’s selfishness is…. what? 

Ill-timed? Insensitive? Misguided? Conveniently reminiscent of Matt’s religious convictions? 

While I think Matt is sincere—and even judicious—I also think he talks about people’s false senses of security and their sloppy sentimentality toward Robin in order to promote his religious convictions. What, after all, is the function of his entire blog other than to promote his brand of belief? In the same vein, what is the function behind nit-picking at a few therapeutic colloquialisms if not to advocate his ‘nuanced’ position over those who are colloquializing?[2]

 

That's the reason people are upset at Matt, including myself. It’s not necessarily because he's wrong;[3]it’s because he's being an asshole. No one cares about the ‘finer’ theologies driving one's interpretation of Robin’s death right now, let alone a theology that convicts Robin. 

People are just sad. Let them be. 

They might even be misguided in their sadness. So what?

Is it really appropriate to focus on Robin’s moral culpability a day or so after he passes? Not only that, but on a public venue?

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[1] All people mean when they say that Robin is free is that he is not haunted by depression or its symptoms—which in this case includes thoughts of suicide. A good night’s sleep or drugs can be just as freeing; they’re just not permanently freeing. The function behind killing oneself is permanent freedom from depression. Matt, upon my research, might be hinting at (however unclearly) his view that Robin’s consciousness lingers on post mortem and is still not free.

[2] Of course, like many, he is probably naïve to the fact that it is, in fact, a brand.

[3]  I think Matt has some of this right, but I also think he's to unclear to really say anything too meaningful.