If you live long enough, a lot of science fiction, begins to resemble reality. David Brooks' Bastille Day NYT's essay this past July entitled "Death and Budgets" is the kind of sophisticated sophistry that the "chattering classes" of the right and left love to embrace over cocktails to prove that there really is common ground on issues of importance. In this instance however it is the effort to find moral consensus for what constitutes a life of quality and then shoehorn it into politics,policy, legislation and regulation.The insertions of bookkeepers with lampshades between Doctors and patients and their families is really a predictable result of living beyond our means and looking for the lowest of low hanging fruit to balance our national ledger.
We got to this point in history because in far too many instances our vision of a good and just society ("the better angels of our nature" as Lincoln put it) is becoming defined by the acquisition of things (pepper spraying rival customers at a WalMart on "Black Friday" for an XBox comes to mind ) and not by the applications of moral imperatives based on time honored values. John Adams once said "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” This is the essence of "American Exceptionalism" for both the religious and the non-religious. We take care of one another... we do not put our old and dying on an ice flow because they have become an economic drag on the tribe...we do not place a cost benefit test on issues of life and death. History has shown us where eugenics, in all it's many guises, takes us. It inevitably leads to an Auschwitz or some other perfectly "moral and perfectly legal final solution" hammered out by "reasonable" people over a working lunch.
Our duty and history as Americans however is to strive and even fight to practice the morality of the "Golden Rule" and not just pay it lip service. Death comes to us all. Our civic freedoms may allow us the right to choose the circumstances of how we decide to depart even while for many, religious beliefs may reserve that decision for God alone. Bureaucrats, budget mavens, politicians and pundits posing as prophets have no place at the table whatsoever. In the 1973 film "Soylent Green" we find ourselves in a future NYC of 44 million people with foul air and massive shortages of food. Euthanasia is promoted for the old as a civic virtue and made to appear not only patriotic but appealing. In the end we discover that the supposed artificial food Soylent Green that sustains most of human kind, is made from the flesh of the old.
When the film first played its message was the danger of overpopulation. Today the message is more nuanced but still as relevant. When society is in crisis... there are always those who will look to find a solution that really doesn't solve the problem. Rather they will look for a way to preserve a hierarchy of privilege and call it reason ERLANDSSON
We got to this point in history because in far too many instances our vision of a good and just society ("the better angels of our nature" as Lincoln put it) is becoming defined by the acquisition of things (pepper spraying rival customers at a WalMart on "Black Friday" for an XBox comes to mind ) and not by the applications of moral imperatives based on time honored values. John Adams once said "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” This is the essence of "American Exceptionalism" for both the religious and the non-religious. We take care of one another... we do not put our old and dying on an ice flow because they have become an economic drag on the tribe...we do not place a cost benefit test on issues of life and death. History has shown us where eugenics, in all it's many guises, takes us. It inevitably leads to an Auschwitz or some other perfectly "moral and perfectly legal final solution" hammered out by "reasonable" people over a working lunch.
Our duty and history as Americans however is to strive and even fight to practice the morality of the "Golden Rule" and not just pay it lip service. Death comes to us all. Our civic freedoms may allow us the right to choose the circumstances of how we decide to depart even while for many, religious beliefs may reserve that decision for God alone. Bureaucrats, budget mavens, politicians and pundits posing as prophets have no place at the table whatsoever. In the 1973 film "Soylent Green" we find ourselves in a future NYC of 44 million people with foul air and massive shortages of food. Euthanasia is promoted for the old as a civic virtue and made to appear not only patriotic but appealing. In the end we discover that the supposed artificial food Soylent Green that sustains most of human kind, is made from the flesh of the old.
When the film first played its message was the danger of overpopulation. Today the message is more nuanced but still as relevant. When society is in crisis... there are always those who will look to find a solution that really doesn't solve the problem. Rather they will look for a way to preserve a hierarchy of privilege and call it reason ERLANDSSON
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