Here’s the second installment in the wisdom of Roger Scruton’s A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY:
…[G]given that fact, it is more than ever necessary for us to incorporate death into our life plans. We need to recognize the value of timely death and the futility of living beyond the point where anyone will mourn our passing. Whatever our viewing of the afterlife and the promises and threats of religion, we must recognize that happiness on Earth is available only through giving and receiving affection. From the first-person perspective the critical question is not that of terminal illness and the suffering can usually be alleviated, and a person can be terminally ill even though fully capable of giving and receiving love. The critical question is longevity itself, which has brought about a situation in which we all have something to fear worse than death, namely the living death of the loveless.
…[T]he sense of the sanctity of human life can be damaged just as much by longevity as by a permissive approach to abortion and euthanasia. Our respect for human life is continuous with our desire and capacity to relate to it. A world in which increasingly many human beings are without affectionate relations with their kind, persisting as burdens to be carried rather than companions to be enjoyed, will be a world in which human life seems far less precious than it seems to us today. The traditional respect for age and the view of age as a repository of wisdom and authority will both dwindle. Old people will be regarded increasingly as a nuisance. Moreover, because their numbers will be growing and their legal rights will be in no way diminished by their decrepitude, they will soon be majority shareholders in all public and most private goods. They will be sitting on the collective assets of mankind, preventing the young from owning them, and maybe waving their wills in the face of their heirs, in the hope of attracting attention. The situation could rapidly degenerate, to the point where the young members of society turn on the geriatrics and compel them to get off the planet. And when that happens the effect will resemble that already witnessed in the case of abortion: the age at which geriatrics can be legally dispatched across the Styx will be constantly lowered, just as the age of permissible abortion has been constantly raised. Eventually we will be back where we started, with life expectancy reduced to three score years and ten, though with euthanasia as the usual form of extinction.
I don’t take this to mean that we have to start killing old people off as a “social threat” or even denying them the benefits of medical science’s progressing ability to extend the lives of particular persons. But we do have to think a lot more about what and who old people are for in a high-tech society that in so many ways offers preferential options to the young. The old shouldn’t be stuck with living lonely, purposeless lives as free and unproductive individuals increasingly detached from familial and other social worlds. (Bob Cheeks’ comment below leads me to add that I’m not for putting the elderly out of their misery, but for helping them have more lovable and purposeful lives.)
September 17th, 2009 | 1:55 pm
It doesn’t have to be like this at all.
http://www.sens.org/
http://www.sens.org/files/sens/FHTI07-deGrey.pdf
September 17th, 2009 | 2:18 pm
You know, Peter, I’ve happily reviewed Roger’s work over at The University Bookman but reading this and your comments is scaring the hell outta me! I’m beginning to wonder if ‘they’ don’t serve a distinct kool aide at the APSA annual meetings:
“The old shouldn’t be stuck with living lonely, purposeless lives as free and unproductive individuals increasingly detached from familial and other social worlds.”
Now tell me Dr. Lawler, what gummint committee do you suggest determines the value of our lives? And, what do you want them to do about it if they determine that we are “lonely,” or live “purposeless” existences in our dotage?
Not many years ago my wife, God bless her, had to stop drs. in a Catholic hospital from STARVING her mother to DEATH.
Are we losing our minds AND souls?
September 17th, 2009 | 2:25 pm
Great post on an important issue. Our obsession with human worth as productivity creates a less than hospitable environment for those “passed their prime”–increasingly, to be old is understood not only to be useless, but a burden or obstacle to the productivity of the young. It’s not clear to me what can be done to retard this process or to re-attach old folks to their familial and other social worlds. Of course, one thing government can do is to make caregiving easier for families encouraging and even subsidizing the opportunities for an expression of the love of one’s own versus outsourcing that love to some impersonal agency, public or private. I’ve got a 100 year old grandmother and the best policy the government could adopt is whatever conduces to my family’s continued personal and loving care for her, which in the deepest sense is the best and most human outcome for all involved parties. This application of the principle of subsidiarity might help “personalize” the increasingly impersonal care of the elderly—making it harder for their neglect to be conducted semi-anonymously and easier for their families’ affections to find expression.
September 17th, 2009 | 3:46 pm
Bob, I’m not for KILLING them, I’m for LOVING them–with for example real policy based, as Ivan says, on the personalizing principle of subsidiarity.
September 17th, 2009 | 8:15 pm
On the other hand, shouldn’t we also reconsider the Baconian project of infinite life-extension, of life at any price? I’m not, as everyone knows, a Christian. So help me resolve my perplexity at seeing a founding principles of atheistic modernity cited (not here, but not infrequently) as if it were from the Sermon on the Mount.
September 18th, 2009 | 6:41 am
Peter, here’s where the front porcher’s kick the heck outta us.
While you, as a philosopher are trying to address the complexities related to death and dying in contemporary America by incorporating gummint “policy,” in the hope of creating some acceptable sociological methodology (though mankind has been doing a good job of that for the past several thousand years), the FPR crew, for the most part, are loving their families, including the elderly, living with them in the manner of human beings, and burying them when the time comes.
So the question is, how does one determine a dollar value for human life? And, if public (gummint) policy was capable of providing “love” and “care” for individual human beings, I should think that it would have been accomplished several thousand years ago.
My point is there are certain functions that belong to the individual, the family, the community, the association, ect. NOT EVERYTHING IS THE FUNCTION OF THE STATE!
AND, WE DON’T NEED THE STATE (GUMMINT POLICY) TO TELL US HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DEAD AND DYING, simply because the state is not capable of accomplishing that goal!
Beyond Ivan’s suggestion that gummint relieve the tax burden (and I’m not really gung ho about that, simply because it’s usually the “camel’s nose under the tent” thing), gummint should have NO hand, NO business, in death and dying!
Peter, I know you never said you wanted to “kill” the aged, and I never charged you with that offense. And, gummint based ‘policy’ is, in no way, an expression of “love” for the elderly.
As my wife just said, “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel!”
September 18th, 2009 | 8:44 am
I don’t see how we can stop the indefinite progress of science with an explicitly pro-death policy. We’re hardly in a life at any price mode, and I certainly wouldn’t throw all our precious resources at medical science. But what we can do, we will do, in the service of life. That, I think, is in the so-called Old Testament too. The challenge we’ve been given by our Creator is to live well with what we can do.
September 18th, 2009 | 2:19 pm
There is no reason for Christianity to be opposed to indefinite healthy human life extension. Indeed, Christians should support such efforts.
http://strategicphilosophy.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-catholics-should-support.html
September 19th, 2009 | 10:31 pm
kurt9, the link is full of deistic assumptions and naivety about the human condition. For instance, that evolution just happened and God played no part in guiding it. It also states that because of this, man’s maximum age of a 120ish is accidental. It wasn’t. It was deliberately reduced down to 120ish:
http://www.biblecodeintro.com/intro15.html
From the practical standpoint, it’s actually a good thing. If we all lived to 1000 (far less than the transhumanist goal) from the time of Moses, the world would be wall to wall people, we would have a food shortage, and the environment would be unlivable. Of course, you might rig long life to low fertility, but that causes other problems…we’d be a world with few children. This alone is tragedy enough, but beside this, we’d be more and more set in our ways as time goes on. Marriages will simply be assumed to be temporary since “no-one can expect to live 1000 years with the same person”. Yes, many of us will be married the full term, but given than many in the western world already use this excuse, I think it will get worse and many may just give up on the concept of marriage without even trying.
Brutal dictators that thankfully have reached the end of their lives, would still be with us and citizens would be forced to suffer for generations.
This of course assumes that all humanity is simultaneously made long lived. It won’t happen that way. Most likely, the rich will get there first — leaving them with an unfair advantage which they can use to become global power players. But even if it rapidly spreads to the common first world population. It won’t reach the common third world citizen….except for the ruling class which would be like the dictator scenario only worse. The dictator could believably make himself to be a god.
Getting back to the individual, most people make the major transitions in life because “their biological clock is ticking”, namely “they’re getting old”. With extra long life, there just any pressure to grow up. We’ll have an entire population of immature people who have none of the innocence children have. And that extra time would not help us gain converts to Christianity. Mortality is a primary motivator for many people to even think about God, and if humanity has gained such mastery over nature, fewer people will think of turning to God or even thinking about him. With such a long life, many will just think it’s too long and just want to end it. Euthanasia and suicide would become socially acceptable, as will relaxed morality in general since with such a long life, the chances of incurring multiple “unforgivable morals” will increase.
Thanks to God’s wisdom, we only live to 120. I sincerely doubt the trans humanists will be able to achieve anything more than 160 years, so the above nightmare won’t happen to any significant degree.
September 19th, 2009 | 10:38 pm
Oops, sorry for a watchtower link. I did a quick google search to justify the 120 year limit and failed to read too deeply at the content other than the age chart, which was accurate. The rest of the page is non-biblical and can safely be ignored.
September 21st, 2009 | 1:48 pm
Ronald,
You might want to check out the SENS link I provided earlier.
http://www.sens.org/
http://www.sens.org/files/sens/FHTI07-deGrey.pdf
Your response represents a self-defeating attitude to the problem. The posting was about the medical costs associated with a medical system that currently does not treat aging itself as a disease. This is analogous to a ship with a leaky hull and you use only bailing pumps to keep the water out, but do nothing to fix the leaky hull itself. If you do not treat aging itself, then the problems of the original posting are essentially intractable. I do not believe in dealing with intractable problems. Neither do most people. You will not like the outcome this generates.
Curing aging represents a positive sum solution to the problem. I do not believe the problems of an “aging” populace and medical costs can be solved by any other approach. Aging is a disease. Transhumanism is the cure. There is no other cure.
Its funny that you cite overpopulation as an objection to curing aging. Most of the time, you guys go on and on about the problems of declining birthrates and the coming depopulation. Now you tell me that over population is the problem. So, which one is it? Depopulation or overpopulation? If the coming depopulation is such a problem that we have to have more kids, then we are certainly entitled to live indefinitely long healthy life spans.
As to the demographic consequences of defeating aging, this has already be addressed.
Check out the powerpoint “demographic consequences of defeating aging” on the following website:
http://longevity-science.org/present.html
You will see that this is not a problem.
You say that mortality forces people to accept the concept of religion and the afterlife. Yet you consider suicide to be wrong. If the afterlife exists, there is no reason to believe that suicide is wrong, particularly if your body is falling apart. Getting rid of an aging body is analogous to getting rid of an old car. The afterlife is analogous to moving to say the Tokyo area, where you do not need to own a car (because of the extensive train and subway system).
Your world-view holds that suicide is wrong, yet that it is also wrong to cure aging. This is logically self-contradictory. I see no reason why I should subscribe to this world-view myself.
September 23rd, 2009 | 7:45 pm
Ronald,
Thanks for reminding me why I am no longer a christian.
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