Euthansia and Assisted Suicide

Hold this thought from the article:

“There’s not an atom in my body that is in sympathy with what you are describing,” he replied. “This isn’t about money … it’s about empathy, ethics, compassion.”

Death on Demand: Has Euthanasia gone too far? was sent to me, and my first thought was "Oh, The Guardian," but it was reasonably good and I changed my thought to "Even The Guardian..."
 
I will take a few paragraphs to note my own opinions going in, so that you can see where my prejudices lie.

Suffering is a bad thing. I have seen suffering, and understood why people wanted to be relieved of it, or why they wanted loved ones to be relieved of it.  I have thought for myself that because I do not fear death, telling my family to have a very short rope in keeping me alive is sensible.  I have a horror of being a burden. On the other hand, the Christian church, and Judaism before it, has long had a very high tradition of preserving life in the face of difficulty. Theory melts away, either way. The heat turns up to an even higher melting point when I consider my wife.  She is likely, as we currently see things, to hang on to life with greater tenacity than I would.  She has a very high view of preserving life in general, including her own.  I know that about her and that is part of my deciding for her if a time comes when she cannot decide for herself.  On the other hand...watching my wife suffer, not just for a short season, but for a length of time...

Well, we call them principles when we intend to stick by them, and theory when we don't. We don't need to tell big lies to ourselves when small ones get us over the hump. And which is the lie?  We might exalt ourselves by calling something a principle when we are simply being stubborn and not willing to think very hard; or soothe ourselves by calling it a theory when we are unwilling to face up to hard truth. We learned early in a Bible study exercise about planning our own funerals decades before they were likely, that it is one thing to say "Oh, I don't care what you do with my body!  Throw it in a bin and pay no more attention to it," and another to think "How dare you treat the body of my loved one with anything but the highest respect?"

Dementia destroys memory and - who is David Wyman without memory?  Memory comes very close to defining who I am. I very much hurt to even think that others might have to do without because my care is expensive when I am no longer me. Yet I shrug such things off with contempt, as if the person speaking has no understanding what it means to be a human being, when considering the same questions about my wife. Side note: considering the suffering of your children looms large when they are still under your care, but recedes in stages, first when they become adults and second when they marry and you are no longer the main person affected.

The article describes the added complication of psychiatric illness, and I think I understand both sides of that as well.  There is something quite terrible about letting a person who has a treatable illness, or a temporary exacerbation of symptoms, decide quickly that it is all not worth it and bring this life to an end. If we are worried about slippery slopes when contemplating suffering, how quickly will that slope take us away in an avalanche if we regard suffering as the ultimate evil that must be relieved if at all possible?  At what point on that downhill course do we cease to have any commonality with all of our ancestors before us and what they understood to be the meaning of life? On the other hand, what if the illness is not all that treatable, and the last ten years of treatment that is only partly effective suggest decades more of the same? We might encourage others not to despair, but can we pretend not to understand them?

Now to the article:

I also see the desire for autonomy, the repeated horrified statement that “no doctor is going to control when I die.” This is theoretically clear for assisted suicide – the patient is the driver.  Yet not only is it murkier when we are discussing euthanasia and the patient’s previous versus current wishes, it is similarly murkier what we are even discussing in many situations, euthanasia or assisted suicide. Assisted suicide advocates can point to situations they call good outcomes.  They have been much less successful drawing lines to avoid bad ones. It matters. Our imaginings must include both.

If 25% of the deaths in the Netherlands are euthanasia or assisted suicides, then some of them are mistakes, just because neither humans nor their systems are perfect.  One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is that there have been errors, and there will continue to be errors.

Twenty-five percent.  On a slippery slope.

What is new in all this? Though people may reject the Bible as inspiration, its writers clearly understood suffering as well as we do, and likely a good deal better, not being sheltered from it by hospitals, senior apartments, specialized residences, and nursing homes. Not to mention that we’ve got way better palliative care now, better than even a few years ago. Modern humans are not facing anything that has not long been known. In the places of the world and the era that has reduced suffering the most in all of human history we have the loudest insistence that the remaining suffering is intolerable. This paradox is not surprising, it is exactly what we see humans insisting about wealth, food, justice, education, housing, freedom of action, and all good things.  As Screwtape advised Wormwood “'Whatever men expect they soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury."  The societies with the most comfortable lives are the surest that the existence of evil disproves the idea of God.  It is the subject of whole books, such as Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. The more you give people, the less grateful they…uh, WE - are.

We can effect death with less mess, that is true, and as the article points out, the fact that someone has to discover the old-fashioned suicide’s body is indeed a trauma.  So that’s new. That’s better.  We can also keep people alive longer, sometimes beyond what their lifespans would “naturally” have been, if we had any idea what we meant by that.  We can keep many systems going as we age, but they are not all preserved equally well. Though that argument of artificially-extended life has been advanced for many years, and in individual cases it certainly looks to be so, I am not sure that is actually new. It might seem to our eyes that hunter-gatherers abandon their old very quickly, but within the context of their survival they bring food, warmth, and protection to those who can no longer get it for themselves.  That’s not any different from what we do, or the Dutch. Extending life is not new, it is human.

“Live Free or Die. Death is not the worst of evils,” General Stark said.  But he meant that dishonor and subjugation were worse – he wasn’t talking about suffering.  We might say in the same spirit that suffering is not the worst of evils either. Apparently that is considered much less true now. The idea is growing that suffering makes life not worth living. Whatever else happens, our culture is going to change very quickly, in unpredictable ways, when the number gets up to one-fourth of all deaths being terminated.  Is it a road to The Giver (book, not movie)? "...death will eventually “get a different meaning, be appreciated differently”.Yes, it will, and we know not how. This is precisely the sort of philosophical idea influenced by facts on the ground that seem "just obvious" in retrospect - because we share the assumptions of the New Society so thoroughly that we cannot even imagine how people could think otherwise.  (CS Lewis, as usual, has the definitive commentary on the phenomenon in is introduction to Athanasius's On The Incarnation.) Yet it is telling, brutally telling, that late in the article the Guardian notes: "Rather than drink the poison or open the drip, 95% of applicants for active life termination in the Netherlands ask a doctor to kill them. In a society that vaunts its rejection of established figures of authority, when it comes to death, everyone asks for Mummy."

And also from the essay and brutally telling, because the advocates do not engage the argument It was also carried out without regard to her relatedness to other human beings. In this case, the woman's son. I am reminded of my friend Dale Kuehne's book Sex and the iWorld, about the isolation of the individuals' decisions from their communities (also pertinent in transgender and abortion issues)

And now, back to the quote at the very top of this essay again.  This is what scares me, not only the moral certitude, which is suspicious enough, but the complete confidence the advocates have that they have no ill motives.  Even the best of us at the best of times have some ill motive. I spoke to a patient this morning who asserted it was obvious he has no illness.  I told him I didn’t know him, but from the little I had read and seen, it was certainly not obvious.  He insisted that he was 100% fine.  I cautioned that this was a bad sign – none of us is 100% fine.  I asked if he was using a figure of speech or if he was making an actual declaration.  He insisted, this time angrily, that he is "150% fine." I told him that is an even worse sign.

It is a worse sign. I extracted the most damning quote from the article, but that attitude runs through the statements of the advocates.  Also, it is clear that they do not quite understand the objections raised against them.  They think they do, but they get them wrong. It is always disquieting to me to read the moral arguments of people who have crested over into that iron obliviousness to the goodwill of at least some others.

 

Outrage

Aren't we on schedule for a new outrage to fill up the newspapers?

Pray it's not about you.

Two Years In

Trump has been president for two years.  We now have a basis for evaluating him as president.  Prior to his inauguration, we had only estimates, speculation based on how he had acted in the past and what he had said during the campaign.

His actions prior to becoming president are now much less relevant in discussing his success or failure as president.  They remain valid for discussing his overall character or trying to understand why he does things. If you were a biographer they would be fair game. But they would no longer matter much in rating his presidency or projecting forward. What he did during the last campaign remains pertinent, because he will likely be engaging in another. Yet that is something of an exception.

I have long said pay no attention to what he says, watch what he does.  There is no clean division, certainly, because saying things - or tweeting them - are actions. Also, what one says as president does have magnified effect which cannot ever be split off from what one signs or orders. I have read that his State of the Union speech was quite good.  That has some value and meaning, as the ceremonial part of all leadership is real. Or if it wasn't good, that is still worth noting and factoring in to any final grade. People still get outraged at his tweets.  I should mention what I learned here from a reader the last time I mentioned that: people get outraged at some percentage of his tweets, and as he has an opposition which is looking to highlight the worst of them, the overall effect may not be as great as once thought. He has flooded the market, and the influence of Twitter may have contracted to sports and entertainment, with journalists and political figures squeezing it ever-harder to get juice out of it.

Think what you will about Trump's career as a developer, whether it was brilliant or stupid, deeply corrupt or merely average for the field - it was useful only as a predictor. The many chapters of his family life and relationships were worth considering in estimating how he would act going forward. But the time for estimating is gone.  We have real data now. Not only do we have measurable, describable actions, we are beginning to see their effect.  Trump's supporters wanted to give him entire credit for the improved economy, even though presidents are less important than congress, and both are less important than world events on the matter. I was always more reserved, as an entire economy is a large thing, and rather like an ocean liner, does not change quickly. Trump created optimism, and optimism is a real thing, but if it is unwarranted it can return and bite you. But two years in the illusions of the moment* have faded and we see where the ship is headed. Economically. things are good and Trump deserves at least some of the credit. Less than he claims, more than his opponents grant, but that will always be the case. Bill Clinton and his team played those perceptions better than anyone, but even that is leveling out two decades later.

Similarly, we have evaluations for foreign-policy actions, colored by hopes and fears as they occur. We predict what meeting with North Korea might cause, and keep a running tally after, though we can never know what would have happened otherwise. We project what building The Wall might do, even though much of the result will be debated for years after. Without attempting even a partial evaluation of Trump's presidency on such large matters, I will note that my greatest fear was that his thin-skinned nature would carry over into his treatment of other countries, and we would get involved in a succession of fruitless military actions. I was not the only one. Something closer to the opposite has occurred.  We cannot replay history to see if that is right, but we can make our guesses.

*More permanent illusions, such as ignoring the debt, remain.

Anti-Science

This is not an original defense, but I think it is topical.  CS Lewis is criticised for being anti-science in That Hideous Strength. He defended himself that the only real scientist in the book, the chemist Bill Hingest, resigns from the N.I.C.E and is mysteriously murdered on his way home that night. The real scientist wanted nothing to do with those who were claiming to be scientists but weren't. They had a veneer of scientific talk and had an attitude of stopping all argument by claiming the mantle of science, but Lewis called that scientism, an entirely different thing. 

It is worth noting that these were primarily journalists and social scientists. There were also some second-and-third rate scientists in the background who may have been in legitimately scientific fields of study, but had been co-opted by the excitement of getting to be on the deciding edge of being important and making other people do things charting a course for the progress and uplift of humankind.

With a change of some cultural details, something similar could be written today. They showed their colors 75 years ago, then.  Not to the average observer, perhaps, but at least to one who was as clear-eyed as Lewis.  That's what I call being woke.

Grave Goods and Gift- Giving

I have sometimes wondered why so many valuable items were buried with ancient rulers. I understand there is some social pressure to make grand gestures in honor of someone who is beloved or admired.  Yet still, one would think that tribes which acted in this way were putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.  That’s a really nice dagger you just put in there, Jack. We could use that.  Those two rings are all the gold we’ve got in the whole clan, and now they’re just going into the ground. Why didn’t people cheat on that?  Similarly, all those potlaches, funeral feasts, and sacrifices of animals – what if some tribe just said “That’s just a waste.  We’re keeping that stuff.”

I get that people worried that the ancestors would be ticked and try to punish you for that, but wouldn’t someone…wouldn’t lots of someones have tried it over many centuries and places, and wouldn’t those tribes have more food, more weapons, more trade goods than their neighbors? We think of it as a waste because we don’t believe the ancestors are really going to punish you for that.  We have slight vestiges of that in our language. “My father would come back and haunt me if I gave that to his brother’s wife.” “Miss Foley would turn over in her grave if they switched back to that history text.”

Look at these these things in the broader context of sympathetic magic rather than strict appeasement of hostile spirits.  If I act in generosity, the gods are do not merely like me better and consider being generous to me also, they are bound to do this, because that is the nature of the universe.  If I give, I make the universe give to me as well.  As far as grave goods go, the items are not gifts, they are not objects that the deceased owned, they are items which have the spirit of their owner in them. Especially with items associated with magic, such as metalworking or musical instruments, they would be regarded as something it would be wrong for another person to use, or might not work successfully.

Do we regard that as impossible and unnecessary?  The exhibition of the piano John Lennon used writing “Imagine” was booked solid, and people wept to touch it.  We have a strong Germanic and Celtic tradition of swords that can only be wielded by kings. In more abstract but only slightly less mechanistic terms, religions offer the same deal:  in Buddhism and even Confucianism, acting in accord with the true nature of how the universe is supposed to work means that the universe will help you; in Hinduism, the actions of karma add to your store of what the future will bring you – the wheel may turn slowly and you cannot force the hand of the universe, but a long justice will prevail.  The early Hasidic rabbis believed they could make the messiah come with their mystic practice, their recitation of letters and words. 

There are more than threads of it in Christianity, and those are the hardest parts for us to understand.  Bread cast upon the waters returns a hundredfold.  Is that a law, or a tendency?  Either way, it is an indication that generosity begets generosity, not just from the people around you in a mid 60s sense, but from the world itself.  The early church collected relics of anything that Jesus or one of the apostles may have touched (and there is NT support for this around a bit of cloth), believing that they might heal. The more complete teaching, of God being generous by his own choice because that is His nature, supersedes but does not discard the earlier, perhaps more primitive one.  We are judged in the measure that we judge.  We are forgiven in line with how well we forgive.  In neither case does God refuse to be merciful when we do not deserve it, but there is a strong sense that we must somehow go along with this to get there.  It is not a present we receive that God might withhold until we give something ourselves, it is a road we must travel to get somewhere.  I admit that God does phrase it in the former way sometimes, and does not draw back from framing it as an exchange, an almost mechanistic practice.  There is a deep truth that we must act in accordance with His nature to know Him, much closer to the eastern ideas of adjusting ourselves to the fitness of things, and the pagan ideas of making the gods provide fertility for the tribe by bringing plants and animals for sacrifice, than it is to our rather chilly and abstract notions of careful requests to God of how we think the world should be run.

Health and Wealth gospel has been dangerous not because it is a lie, but because something in it is true, though it comes to us without balance or caution. I am not trying to describe exactly how all this works, because I think we cannot know it as words – I can’t, at least.  We can begin to know it in action, and God seems to encourage it.  We see the danger of getting this wrong and people being disappointed, but He seems more concerned that we fail in the opposite direction, not risking treasures or blood. At the very least, we have to admit that other peoples and other eras, even outside the church, have been less puzzled and repelled by these ideas.  There may be default belief that this is how the universe does work, which we have overwritten with our abstract discussions, and perhaps not wisely.

  

Tolkien, Lewis, and Racism

You knew it was coming. There have long been murmured comments, that Tolkien's swertings seemed not entirely sympathetic, and Lewis's Calormene's are rather obviously influenced by the Arabs of the British world, and their religion is regarded as a dangerous item (though its adherents are not irredeemable).  Something similar happened when JK Rowling was uncomfortable with Lewis's sexism in the Chronicles of Narnia. In my discussion over a dozen years ago, I noted that in some ways Lewis's girls are more adventurous than hers.  But that's (literally) another story.

These are the sort of battles that social justice warriors (sorry to use the hackneyed term, but I have no other here) tend to win over time, because of where they place themselves in the culture and who they can punish. Witness the recent withdrawal of the young adult novel by Amelie Zhao. However much Narnia and Middle-Earth are beloved now, they will go beneath the waves themselves in time, not because of any lack of quality, but because the central ideas will be increasingly undermined in culture and eventually abandoned.  Individual incidents and phrases will be the focal points and take the blame, but it is the values which are hated.

While that process is just beginning, and well before it is complete, I would like to note that in Lewis, and even more in Tolkien, there are different races. They have their own histories, their own abilities and preferences, and their own downfalls. None are as wise as the elves.  The weakest and least able of the races, the holbytla, turn out in the end to provide the very few key individuals who rescue them all.  All are different but essential, and this is not accomplished in other literature.  Hollywood achieves it only with an insulting tokenism.  At no point do we believe in Lewis that he is thinking "Well, we must find something good to say about giants, to show how non-prejudiced we are." The differences are central to the story.

They were essentially less racist, not more, than the folks of our age, whatever scraps of the culture they came from we  now find unattractive.

On Forgiveness

We discussed the difficult verses about our forgiveness being tied to our forgiving at small group last week. I mentioned that I had heard once that this can be understood better by doing it rather than trying to reason it out.  I had some experience with that this week.  I sometimes hold grudges. I don't know if I do this more than other people, but I know that I do it.  I don't think of them day after day so much as never get rid of them, so they pop back in uninvited whenever a name or a situation comes up again.

When we do this, we think of it as normal. Of course, we remember and resent someone who was critical of us in a vulnerable time.  Wouldn't anyone?  Of course we remember and resent the people who helped ruin something we cared about.  Isn't that just natural?  But when we think of that as normal we smuggle in the idea that God must be that way, too.  We think He must remember and resent when we did something selfish or angry. If we consciously think that we reject the thought immediately, knowing that God is not really that way.  But I think that's just an intellectual exercise and we revert right back to our old thinking unless we have practice in what forgiveness is from doing it ourselves.  We only believe it about God when we have some inkling of it in ourselves.

Which means I personally am screwed, of course, but maybe my thought will be useful to others.

Blackface

I was in blackface, as a six-or-seven year old in 1959-60.  It was in Massachusetts in a minstrel show my father was in. He played the poor sap who always has trouble land on him but resourcefully has a trick up his sleeve.  I was a hungry-looking child who came and looked sadly at his sandwich as he sat on a park bench.  I had fun writing about it in 2013, tracing how minstrel slowly went away.  Or rather, how it merely morphed into picking on another kind of victim.  There's a clip from a minstrel show at the link.

Recognise This?

Does anyone remember what this is an imitation of?

Entertainment

Time to find a YouTube to put up before going to Bible study.  I'm not sure what I am looking for.