Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Modern life, then, has not crushed our minds and bodies, turned us into atomized machines suffering from toxic levels of emptiness and isolation, or set us drifting apart without human contact or emotion. How did this hysterical misconception arise? Partly it came out of the social critic’s standard formula for sowing panic: Here’s an anecdote, therefore it’s a trend, therefore it’s a crisis. But partly it came from genuine changes in how people interact. People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings and via digital media. They confide in fewer distant cousins but in more co-workers. They are less likely to have a large number of friends but also less likely to want a large number of friends.⁵¹ But just because social life looks different today from the way it looked in the 1950s, it does not mean that humans, that quintessentially social species, have become any less social.

Suicide, one might think, is the most reliable measure of societal unhappiness, in the same way that homicide is the most reliable measure of societal conflict. A person who has died by suicide must have suffered from unhappiness so severe that he or she decided that a permanent end to consciousness was preferable to enduring it. Also, suicides can be tabulated objectively in a way that the experience of unhappiness cannot.

But in practice, suicide rates are often inscrutable. The very sadness and agitation from which suicide would be a release also addles a person’s judgment, so what ought to be the ultimate existential decision often hinges on the mundane matter of how easy it is to carry out the act. Dorothy Parker’s macabre poem “Resumé” (which ends, “Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live”) is disconcertingly close to the mindset of a person contemplating suicide. A country’s suicide rate can soar or plummet when a convenient and effective method is widely available or taken away, such as coal gas in England in the first half of the 20th century, pesticides in many developing countries, and guns in the United States.⁵² Suicides increase during economic downturns and political turmoil, not surprisingly, but they are also affected by the weather and the number of daylight hours, and they increase when the media normalize or romanticize recent instances.⁵³ Even the innocuous idea that suicide is an assay for unhappiness may be questioned. A recent study documented a “happiness-suicide paradox” in which happier American states and happier Western countries have slightly higher, rather than lower, suicide rates.⁵⁴ (The researchers speculate that misery loves company: a personal setback is more painful when everyone around you is happy.) Suicide rates can be capricious for yet another reason. Suicides are often hard to distinguish from accidents (particularly when the cause is a poisoning or drug overdose, but also when it is a fall, a car crash, or a gunshot), and coroners may tilt their classifications in times and places in which suicide is stigmatized or criminalized.

We do know that suicide is a major cause of death. In the United States there are more than 40,000 suicides a year, making it the tenth-leading cause of death, and worldwide there are about 800,000, making it the fifteenth-leading cause.⁵⁵ Yet the trends over time and the differences among countries are hard to fathom. In addition to the age-cohort-period snarl, the lines for men and women often go in different directions. Though the suicide rate for women in developed countries fell by more than 40 percent between the mid-1980s and 2013, men kill themselves at around four times the rate of women, so the numbers for men tend to push the overall trends around.⁵⁶ And no one knows why, for example, the world’s most suicidal countries are Guyana, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Lithuania, nor why France’s rate shot up from 1976 to 1986 and fell back down by 1999.

But we know enough to debunk two popular beliefs. The first is that suicide has been steadily rising and has now reached historically high, unprecedented, crisis, or epidemic proportions. Suicide was common enough in the ancient world to have been debated by the Greeks and to have figured in the biblical stories of Samson, Saul, and Judas. Historical data are scarce, not least because suicide, also called “self-murder,” used to be a crime in many countries, including England until 1961. But the data go back more than a century in England, Switzerland, and the United States, and I have plotted them in figure 18-3.