"Ethic of Immortality " Sapping Our Humanity?
The January 07 issue of Christianity Today (no link available) has a fine editorial warning against what it calls an "ethic of immortality" that has "warped our culture's perspective" and that of the church. It quotes Leon Kass--always a good idea--as warning that a "new moral sensibility has developed...Anything is permitted if it saves life, cures disease, prevents death." (My emphasis.)
Can anyone deny it? CT notes that the ethic of immortality causes Christian and non Christian alike to support destroying nascent human life in ESCR. But it could just as easily have pointed out that many of the same arguments made on behalf of ESCR would justify exploiting living fetuses for their parts, and indeed, that New Jersey has already legalized cloned fetal farming. Moreover, many of our leading bioethicists support harvesting cognitively devastated patients or experimenting upon them before they are dead, while a thriving organ market exists in China--for those with the money to pay and the willingness to overlook from where and whom that quickly obtained liver or kidney may have come. And many transhumanists are even willing to cast their humanity aside in their quest for a corporeal near-immortality.
CT warns that our terror of death is distorting our ethics and moral values. Like the drowning man willing to push the lifeguard under the water to take one more breath, we are becoming increasingly willing to exploit the weak to benefit the strong.
Christianity Today is oriented to Christian perspectives, but I think this paragraph, aimed explicitly at church members is also applicable to the wider community: "We disparage the elderly when we let our media focus exclusively on the young, when visitation to nursing homes is replaced with more exciting mercy activities, when we fuss over young visitors with children but offer only polite handshakes to elderly couples, when we avoid the sick and dying. If the church learned to care for those on their final journey (rather than leaving it to the clergy), it would do much to reshape our attitudes toward the use of technology at the end of life."
Do I hear an, "Amen?"
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 5:37 PM
9 Comments
9 Comments:
It's heartbreaking when I ask a patient who is about to enter "end of life care" whether they have a church group or friend, a preacher or minister that we can talk to and there is none that they want involved.
(There was the lady who told me that she understood people who needed that crutch, but she didn't. She ended up firing hospice, too, when they were too "touchy-feely." At least she told me she has always known there is a God, but just never found any organized religion necessary. So, prayers for her.)
I'll say AMEN. Good that CT is getting in the game. I hope CT finds its voice on this and keeps at it like First Things, which is miles ahead.
I found this quote in Human Cloning And Human Dignity in The Report of the President's Council on Bioethics regarding the opinion of some of the members on the case against cloning for biomedical research:
"What we owe the suffering. We are certainly not deaf to the voices of suffering patients; after all, each of us already shares or will share in the hardships of mortal life. We and our loved ones are all patients or potential patients. But we are not only patients, and easing suffering is not our only moral obligation. As much as we wish to alleviate suffering now and to leave our children a world where suffering can be more effectively relieved, we also want to leave them a world in which we and they want to live – a world that honors moral limits, that respects all life whether strong or weak, and that refuses to secure the good of some human beings by sacrificing the lives of others." (p. LVI, also on line. See executive summary.)
This from a reader: "There was an interesting line in Francis Schaeffer and Everett Koop's 1981 film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?: "There is little difference between active euthanasia and the way so many of the elderly are abandoned to a living death in the old folks' homes."
Overstatement? Granted, but done to illustrate a point about human abandonment. For that benefit I'll not argue the point.
"
Immortality is severely over-rated. Amen to CT's argument.
For the non-Christian in our midst, here's a line that I like from Eco's THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE:
"Sir," Saint-Savin replied, "the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to heaven where only the planets have eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void. Be strong like the sages of ancient Greece and look at death with steady eye and no fear. Jesus sweated too much, awaiting it. Why should he have been afraid, for that matter, since he was going to rise again?"
I disagree with the bit about the Savior sweating too much, but the sentiment is one that anybody who's not Xtian can get behind and still understand that fear of death is silly, especially if it makes us harp on corporeal immortality.
Who wants to live forever?
I don't know, Tabs. I should think that fear of death is a very natural thing _precisely_ if one does not believe in an afterlife, if one is an atheist or secularist. And that this is exactly what would make one cling in the wrong way to life on earth. (Perhaps part of the problem here is that I dislike Eco's novels anyway. :-))
I've just been reading the autobiography of a Christian novelist named Elizabeth Goudge. She describes her atheist grandfather's despair in the face of death. "It has all been for nothing," he said of his life. "I will die and be nothing."
Wesley, I agree with your praise of Schaeffer. It's hard to believe now, but life issues used to be thought of as "Catholic issues." It is only a bit of an exaggeration to say that Francis Schaeffer (aided in the U.S. by the fortunate rise of Ronald Reagan, which gave the religious right hopes of political influence) changed that perception.
The praise of Schaeffer came from a reader, although there is much truth to the analogy.
I think we all fear death. But our natural fear does not justify doing "anything" to remain alive. The answer is love and inclusion, which often the dying and people with disabilities are denied, as the CT editorial pointedly discussed.
Lydia:
Well, the majority of folks I know who are atheist (and I admit I don't know many personally - most are optimistic agnostics) say that they fear dying, but not death, because, to quote one in particular - "there's nothing to be afraid of, and nothing just isn't all that scary." There are a lot of atheists who think that fear of damnation makes the possibility of an afterlife worse than the possibility of no afterlife. It's all relative to how one views one's life and death.
Eco's interesting, but I don't blame you for not liking the novel.
Wesley:
Fear of death is natural because we're SUPPOSED to want to live as long as we can. After all, we all have a destiny here, whether you believe it was sent down by God or not.
What gets me is that so many people approaching death are so calm about it. Not just because they've accepted fate or made peace with their Creator, but because so many of them have some weird SOMETHING happen that totally relieves them.
(Aside - I don't get how Approaching Death Visions and Near-Death Experiences might have evolved. Neither is really useful to the survival of the species a la Darwinism, and if one is to suggest sexual selection, I really can't see Uggette chosing Ogg over Gnarl because Ogg had a death vision and then came back - if Ogg had died, he'd be totally dead. CPR didn't exist back then. Just two pennies worth of a thought.)
I notice that most of the people who are paranoid about dying and who want to download their brains into a computer haven't had any close calls with death. They don't know what it's like, so why are they knocking it? Even if there's "nothing" after death, the positive benefits that folks have gotten from NDEs and ADVs make me think that the transhumanist movement is unduely paranoid. If someone can almost die, come back, and be ten times as loving and happier with life, it can't be all a bad thing.
Here's the other thing - if near-immortality is a good thing, then why do so many folks like me recoil in horror at the thought of living forever? Why does the very idea of never dying make my skin crawl?
For those of you who want to bring up Freudian theory, 1) If Frued says we all want to die (Death Drive) then bypassing that drive is a bad thing, if you believe in his theories, and 2) I can't really take the theories of a guy who was addicted to cocaine seriously, 3) nor can I take seriously a guy who talked about phallic images, but when questioned about his smoking habits, excused himself by saying, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
During my time as a hospice volunteer, I encountered many who had passed beyond the fear and were ready to die. This is not the same thinga as being in anguisn and "wanting" to die. The goal of hospice was to struggle against the latter to help people achieve the former. I have seen it work and it is amazing to behold.
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