Monday, December 5, 2011

It's happened twice now so it must be really important

Sort of political Monday
Last week, Susannah Breslin blogged about her positive diagnosis for breast cancer. Medicine is a place where "positive" is a bad thing and "negative" a good thing.

Today, Pastabagel at Partial Objects writes about a woman who live-blogged her breast exam only to get an unexpected "positive" jolt. Pastabagel is really good on this so you might want to read the whole thing. For my part, I want to zero in on the moral and metaphysical aspects he brings up in two observations.

Here is the first:
At the end of her doctor’s visit, she learned she may have cancer. That is a frightening and sad conclusion to what I can only assume she thought would be a routine examination. But by publicizing her experience this way, she highlights the poignant limit of the connected world, and that limit is this: we all face death alone.
A good point made before by Freud and Wittgenstein but worth repeating to ourselves daily. Death is the limit of, well, quite possibly everything. And maybe you can already see where I'm going with this but are wondering how this is a political issue?

Here is the second of Pastabagel's profound observations:

But more importantly, and unlike photography, social media validates our own mistaken belief that our lives are worth visiting, that our private joys and tragedies somehow play out on a grander scale than is actually the case.

Psychotherapist Otto Rank wrote that the fear of life is the fear of separation and individuation. The fear of becoming an individual. Conversely, the fear of death is the fear of the loss of individuality.
So let's talk about Jesus now. No I'm not asking you to believe (I'm not insisting that you do anyway). But I want to consider some aspects that come with belief and the political impact this has had here in the west.

We argue more about this question on the leading edge of the experience: when exactly does that mass of cells become human? But what about the other end? When does "I" disappear and become organic matter suitable for growing plants out of? And why do I, even after death, deserve special consideration different from, for example, the cow I am eating parts of as I type this? (And yes, I know some people would say I don't.)

If we want to be "humanists" whatever we might make of that term, there are two very different ways into the position.
  1. One is to argue that there is something about "humanity" that is so darn special that every single "human" must be treated according to different standards than those that apply to everything else on earth.
  2. The second is to argue that there is nothing special about me all by myself and whatever special humanity I have is a function of the fact that God so loved me that ....
You can believe whichever one you want, meaning that I can't force you to take my side here. But consider the politics a bit. What consequences in terms of moral culture, which is the soil that politics is planted in, do you think follow from each of the above choices?

"Adam" means soil. From dust thou art and to dust thou shall return. That brute fact is as true for the atheist as it is for anyone else. But if we take it seriously, as seriously as we should, what are the limits of the claim that human beings are so special? Why should anyone else take our belief that "our private joys and tragedies somehow play out on a grander scale" seriously? Other than that we really, really want them to that is?

And how many other religions are there that attribute our specialness to God's loving us? That I would be nothing but another mass of organic matter except that God loves me? How many other cultures are built on that understanding? Yes, I'll cheerfully grant that our culture is full of lies and hypocrisy about this but you have to believe something in order to be a liar and hypocrite about it. So how many cultures are there like this? I'm not saying there aren't any, although I can't think of any off the top of my head. But politically speaking, if we are asking about one group of people accommodating themselves to another, it would matter a whole lot wouldn't it?

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