Tube or not Tube? That is the Question
March 24, 2005
William Bennett vindicates the editors of tNP with his call for Gov. Jeb Bush to follow a “higher law” and exercise his police powers in defiance of the Florida courts to restore Terri Schiavo to the care of her family and friends, even if it results in his impeachment.
Meanwhile, the young neocalvinists–
aside: I have previously had kind words for neocalvinist institutions, but I increasingly fear this fig tree is barren…
–wring their hands and fret for the rights of individuals to do themselves in while playing the Southern Church to tNP’s MLK, urging caution and a respect for the law. Mr. Brink goes so far as to discourse against “shooting up the courthouse” and in favor of the role of judges as “surrogate decision makers.” While I am sure that the editors herein are always happy to be lectured by a law student flush with the new found wisdom of his 3 o’clock con law section, I am too old for such patience. Mr. Brink goes further still, castigating Catholics for causing “all hell to break loose.” While it is certainly true as our Lord promised that what the Holy See looses or binds on earth shall be loosed or bound in the heavenlies, Mr. Brink has gotten his facts backwards, for it seems our Holy Mother the Church is making the superior showing in this matter, standing for human order and binding the death-wish of Hades which shall not prevail against Her. The church of the neocalvinists, however, has much to answer for.
This is how I view the matter. Should a competent adult be allowed to refuse any and all medical treatment, including a tube? This appears to be the driving concern of my friends cited above. The answer is that the question is rotten. Yes, of course treatment can be refused, but the decision can never be made from the ground of choice; from the revolt of the ego which has forged our culture of death from the instrumentalist fires of its modern mind which declares: “It is my life, my body, my self, and I can do with it as I please.” To the contrary, no man is his own, he belongs to the membership, and every moral decision must account for that belonging.
As a general rule, I dislike the medical profession, especially since it convinced most of my constituency that it was their bodies that were sick rather than their souls. Ever since then my job has been markedly more difficult! But moreso, I dislike getting medical treatment and think hospitals and doctors usually succeed in making people sick rather than well. I am unlikely to want even relatively non-invasive treatments such as, say, my recently prescribed cholesterol lowering medication. (I have already lasted 500 years without such quackery!)
However, the Schiavo situation is fundamentally not about these issues: it is a conflict of allegiances. It is about the colonization of older traditional structures of social and political order such as family, church, village, caste, and craft. It is about the disassociation of these relationships from the functional application of power in our national political and economic life and in our individual moral choices. It is about the way in which power and responsibility, once exercised in a personalist, direct way within small, primarily concrete relationships, has been usurped by rationalist contractualist systems which are ever increasing in their centralization, impersonality, and remoteness from order on a human scale.
The medical and legal/political systems in this case are both invasive and are invasive in ways that buttress the total power of the other based on a grossly individualistic understanding of what constitutes the good life; or a good life, as the case may be. And in so doing, the freedom of Schiavo’s community of care is being squeezed. Is it any wonder our social order carries such a pathological sense of alienation from meaning?
Wendell Berry’s short story. “Fidelity” is worth citing here, about a family who kidnaps an ailing father from a hospital that wants to keep him alive so he can be tenderly cared for until his allotted days pass. Berry’s loyalties and allegiances are clear: to the membership rather than to the machine. Just so.
Also of note, Ivan Illich’s essay, Brave New Biocracy:”
In societies confused by the technological prowess that enables us to transgress all traditional boundaries of coming to life and dying, the new discipline of big-ethics has emerged to mediate between pop-science and law. It has sought to create the semblance of a moral discourse that roots personhood in the “scientific ability” of bioethicists to determine who is a person and who is not through qualitative evaluation of the fetish, “a life.” What I fear is that the abstract, secular notion of “a life” will be sacralized, thereby making it possible that this spectral entity will progressively replace the notion of a “person” in which the humanism of Western individualism is anchored. “A life” is amenable to management, to improvement and to evaluation in a way which is unthinkable when we speak of “a person.” The transmogrification of a person into “a life” is a lethal operation, as dangerous as reaching out for the tree of life in the time of Adam and Eve.
The point is neither “right to life” nor “right to die.” Both sides make a fetish of “a life” to the destruction of social and personal order rooted in something outside of ourselves.
This is Tube or not Tube? That is the Question in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Žižek on Authentic Conservatism | Next: The Autonomy Regime | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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