"Any man's death diminishes me." It has always sounded excessive. John Donne expressed that thought more than 350 years ago in a world without mass communications, where a person's death was signaled by a church bell. "It tolls for thee," he said. Does it really? Logic would suggest that an individual's death would not diminish but rather enhance everybody's life, since the more who die off, the more space and materials there will be for those who remain. Before his conversion, Uncle Scrooge preferred to let the poor die "and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge may not have had God on his side, but his arithmetic was impeccable.
Are Donne's words merely a "right" thing to say, then, a slice of holy claptrap dished out at the Christmas season? What does it mean to believe that any man's death diminishes me? In what sense, diminishes? And even if one wholeheartedly accepted Donne's idea, what then? What use could one possibly make of so complete an act of sympathy, particularly when apprised of the deaths of total strangers?
Assume that at the basic minimum the process of diminishing requires a state of grief. Is it really possible to grieve for any person's death? A year ago in Lebanon, a fanatic drove a truck bomb into the Marine compound at Beirut International Airport, killing 241. We responded to those deaths, all right; Americans grieving for Americans. The truck driver also died in the explosion. Any grief left over for him? What about all the Lebanese who have been dropping in the streets for a decade? Feel those deaths, do we? We say yes sincerely, but we only mean that we experience brief pangs of pity and sadness, especially if television shows death close enough to allow us to make identifications with the sufferers.
Last week in a place most Americans never heard of, more than 2,500 residents of Bhopal, India, were killed by leaking toxic gas. How deeply did we really feel that news? Numbers are always tossed up first in such events, but almost as a diversion; there seems a false need to know exactly how many died, how many were hospitalized; reports supersede reports. When the count is finally declared accurate, it is as if one were mourning a quantity rather than people, since the counting exercise is a way of establishing objective significance in the world. Still, we wept at the pictures, for a day or two.
Just as we wept or shook our heads sorrowfully for the citizens of Mexico City who were caught in the gas explosion and fire several weeks ago. Just as we have been weeping for the starving Ethiopians for several weeks in a row. There we could provide more than tears. There was money to send; one could do that.
But Donne seemed to be advocating a response that is deeper and more consistent: Any man's death makes me smaller, less than I was before I learned of that death, because the world is a map of interconnections. As the world decreases in size, so must each of its parts. Donne's math works too. Since the entire world suffers a numerical loss at an individual's death, then one must feel connected to the entire world to feel the subtraction equally.