Category: Attitude
What alarms are for
Hany Farid, Algorithm King
Compelling Interests
On Hail Mary Passes
Dignicide
I went to my first conference on Physician-Assisted Suicide in 1988. It was an educational effort by a Legal Services Corporation national service center, on whose Board I served. The motives of the Center personnel who organized the conference were opposed to normalizing a practice seen as opposed to best interests of those whose legal interests were our focus: the medically dependent and disabled.
As conferences tend to be, it was earnest, sometimes compelling, talk. And in liquid modernity, talk, however logically compelling, rarely carries the day. PowerPoint arguably makes it worse, though TED and TedX seem to enhance talk a bit.
The day gets carried by story-telling. It’s a powerful combination when you can sell an audience of able-bodied bon vivants that getting rid of their aging parents and disabled children promotes the parents’ and children’s autonomy and dignity, and thus makes you, the proponent, a virtuous person. That it frees up your inheritance (while one still remains), or removes a great financial and emotional burden from you, is (Of course! Heaven forfend! Perish the thought!) not the point at all (wink, wink).
[A] steady stream of uncritical coverage in the media continues to push the euthanasia movement along. Such coverage usually takes the form of TV documentaries that follow, and gently cheer, a disabled or terminally ill patient’s journey to the death chamber.
(Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal)
Finally, someone is telling a better, truer story. Liz Carr, an actress and activist “who suffers from a genetic disorder that prevents her from extending her muscles, among other impairments,” has staged “Assisted Suicide: The Musical” in London.
Much of “Assisted Suicide” involves Ms. Carr taking on her alter ego, a character named Documentary Liz. Film footage shows Documentary Liz living a humdrum disabled life, while a lachrymose melody plays and a narrator dourly describes the scene: “Liz feels trapped, imprisoned by her difficult circumstances. Liz has few freedoms, few choices on a day-to-day basis.”
Onstage, the real Ms. Carr rolls her eyes and provides a running commentary, acidly mocking the documentary clichés …
“Assisted suicide has become part of the narrative of death, of illness, of disability,” she says. That was the work of euthanasia proponents, who knew that “it takes 15 to 20 years to get social support and to get the culture to change—then you pass the law.”
(Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal)
The sketch of rebranding Assisted Suicide was very clever and knowing that it was a real exercise does not deflect from the truth – the campaign for Assisted Suicide (AS) is very well funded and slick. .There is a scene with flip charts, marker pens, and PR specialists trying to come up with the catchphrase to make suicide palatable. They come with: ‘Society is off the hook…I choose it as my free will and I’ll be brave,’ The idea linking freedom and choice with AS is sown.
(Eleanor Lisney at the Disability Visibility Project)
The main watchword of the euthanasia movement is dignity. The argument runs that disability, terminal illness, senility and the like rob it from their victims. Assisted suicide allows people in such circumstances to die on their own terms, before their conditions erase their sense of personhood. In making their pitch, some proponents use the portmanteau “dignicide”—dignified suicide—a coinage that comes in for much ridicule in Ms. Carr’s musical.
“We’ve lost the word ‘dignity’ to the concept of ‘death with dignity,’ ” says Ms. Carr. The truth, she insists, is that “your state of health, mental or physical, has no bearing on your dignity.”If voters and lawmakers take the view that dignity derives from good health and ability, then all sorts of weak and vulnerable people can be discarded.
…
The other slogan for euthanasia is self-determination. That phrase was used at least 97 times in the various government hearings that resulted in Belgium’s 2002 legalization, according to the religious-freedom advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. Autonomy and self-determination are at the heart of the Western liberal project: Shouldn’t people have the choice of how and when they die?
Ms. Carr’s answer is: Whose choice? Whose determination?
“Even if you go to the doctor where assisted suicide is legal,” she says, “you don’t get it on demand. You have to jump through some hoops. The doctor will make the choice.” It’s a subtle but crucial point: “Legalizing euthanasia doesn’t empower you. It empowers doctors.” In the context of the modern welfare state, that means empowering agents of the government.
Legalization hides a dramatic action—the taking of life—behind the veil of the patient-doctor relationship, with all the power imbalances inherent in it.
…
The line between “exercising autonomy” and feeling goaded into assisted suicide is blurry, especially for vulnerable people who are already made to feel they are a burden. “We don’t applaud healthy people deciding to kill themselves in the name of autonomy,” Ms. Carr says. “We conveniently herald choice and autonomy as concepts that should be supported for people who are disabled and ill but not for everyone else.”
…
Assisted suicide isn’t ultimately about autonomy, Ms. Carr thinks. “It’s about fear of mortality,” which is harder to manage in an increasingly secular society. “Religion, certainly in the U.K., used to hold our fears and our discussions about death. That’s where we saw death, in church or in funerals, and that helped us and provided us with a way through.” She’s quick to add: “I say this as an atheist.”
(Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal)
I’m a purveyor of futile words. I’ve been involved in theater only very, very marginally, but it seems to me, unfortunately, that Assisted Suicide: The Musical might not travel well because Liz Carr, a known figure on British Television, may not travel well, and she’s the riveting star of the production.
Do we have an American version of Liz Carr?
* * * * *
“The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life.” (G.K. Chesterton)
Fierce anti-intellectual speaks
Do Evangelicals Have What It Takes?
Does it feel like the world has turned upside down and inside out? Does it feel like people whom you love and know — good people — almost seem like they are under some kind of spell right now? Saying odd hateful, hurtful things you can’t account for based on your history with them? Does it feel like there we are under some sort of powerful corporate mass delusion? Are you shocked, not only at what is being said, but what is not being said by Church leaders whom you have known to have a heart for justice, mercy and truth?
There are real reasons for this. This is apocalyptic time. “Apocalypse” in Scripture means “revealing” or “unveiling.” And these are the days when the hearts of men and women in America are being revealed — deep divisions that have long been present are being exposed. Apocalyptic time is inside-out, upside down kind of time. In apocalyptic time, some things are dying and some things are being born. But mostly, it feels like things are dying, at least at first.
I found that quote via Sharon Hodde Miller, who tells in Evangelicals and the Lose of Prophetic Imagination of the “apocalypse” that changed her:
This year has changed me. I say this in all earnestness and with no dramatic intent, but this year really has changed me. I am not the same person I was, and my calling has shifted too.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when the change occurred. Perhaps it was a series of events. It began when conservative evangelicals began to endorse a presidential candidate whose rhetoric, lifestyle, and priorities resembled nothing of Christ, but much of the fool as described in Proverbs.
I watched Christians use dubious biblical interpretations and downright bad theology in an “ends justify the means” kind of ethic. I watched those same Christians bend over backwards to prove that this man, who possessed no discernible fruit of the Spirit, was a Christian. I watched Christians remain silent as the man they put in office continued to lie, name call, belittle, and slander. And I watched conservative Christians take up the mantra “Do not judge” in lock-step with the liberals they used to deride, as if Jesus’ words were intended to silence sound judgment.
I saw the same thing, though it affected me much less since I’m no longer an evangelical. It also surprised me less (though the cravenness of it did surprise me) because I had already lost confidence in the ability of evangelicals to conserve anything at all when the heat was on.
But Albert Mohler, who is evangelical (Southern Baptist), made a startling revelation in interviewing Rod Dreher, for Mohler’s podcast, about Dreher’s forthcoming book, The Benedict Option.
Late in the interview, he said something to the effect of, “Now, I have to ask you a tough question, and I want you to be honest when you answer me.”
I seized up. He continued, “Do you think that Evangelicalism has what it takes to do the Benedict Option?”
I gave him my honest answer: “I don’t know.” I explained that I don’t want to make a comment on a form of the Christian faith about which I know so little. I told him that I have to believe it is possible, because I know Evangelicals personally who are doing it (and interviewed some of them for my book), but in general, I don’t see that they have nearly the resources in their tradition that Catholics and Orthodox do. But that could just be my ignorance.
He replied that he is certain that Evangelicalism does not have the internal resources to do the Benedict Option — but that classic Protestantism does. He talked about how Evangelicals need to plunge deeply back into their Reformation roots and recover the spirituality and structure of the Reformers.
(Emphasis added)
At that admission, I cannot claim to be anything less than stunned. “Does not have the internal resources” for reform is, I believe, the sociological meaning of “corrupt.”
With some evangelicals capitulating to the full spectrum of what now is styled “LGBTQ Rights,” others (perhaps there’s overlap?) becoming Trumpistas, and Al Mohler tacitly calling evangelicalism corrupt, telling it to to go ad fontes to borrow some classic Protestantism to heal its infirmities, I can only wonder
what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
UPDATE: Rod Dreher has heard from some folks who consider themselves evangelicals who think their traditions (Anglican and Reformed) have what it takes or are in the process of reclaiming it. I was Reformed, and considered myself “equivocally Evangelical” when I was. Anglicans as evangelicals seems a stretch to me, but “evangelical” is notoriously hard to define.
UPDATE 2: More response to Dreher, this time from someone who’s starting to confront the shallowness of his “Bible-believing Church.”
UPDATE 3: Three very thought-provoking responses, one each from an Evangelical, a mainstream Protestant, and an Orthodox.
* * * * *
As I look at the way we are now, I see a people who wish to be light, free from the weightiness of responsibility, limits, duties. We want sex without fertility, food without calories, endless consumer goods without (observable) environmental degradation, religion without law, divorce without fault, mobility without loneliness, bodies without aging, entertainments without limits. We want our freedoms to be endless and without cost, allowing us to float free from now this to now that, casting off identities and responsibilities like old clothes discarded.
Of course, to those who are unbearably light, nothing is more repugnant than weight, but we are in our very natures called to weightiness, for we are moral agents, responsible for all.
Whether you think of the text as Holy Writ or mere literature of the past, the early chapters of Genesis indicate to us with bracing clarity the choice before us now. The human emerges from the dirt and yet is somehow responsible for the dirt, capable of tending, keeping, filling, and ordering the very dirt from which he is. The human is told to build, till, improve, cultivate–to husband (in the old sense) the cosmos as its responsible priest. And yet he is to exercise this creativity within the limits of fidelity, for he is steward and not Creator, always dependent, and obligated to be responsible.
How will we make our world and ourselves? Will be we unbearably free, infinitely light, using our creative capacities to cast off our responsible nature and soar into the beyond? Or will we be heavy, using our skill to tie ourselves into the loam from which we came, hoping to be faithful to obligation, duty, and the task of responsibility? Will the tapestry we weave have substance, or just the play of newness, with the shuttle undoing all that has been created before?
I want to be heavy. I want my children to be heavy. I want my life to be one of creative fidelity, finding new ways to be obligated and woven into the fabric of the world and the lives of my lover, my children, my neighbors, and friends.
And yet, weight is difficult to bear, especially for those of us weaned in an age of the insufferably light.
(R.J. Snell, Creative Fidelity and Weighty People, 2/9/12, emphasis in original)
* * * * *
“The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life.” (G.K. Chesterton)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 