This is a draft of a paper given at the "Dialogue of Cultures" Conference sponsored by the Center for Ethics & Culture at the University of Notre Dame from November 30 to December 2, 2007. The conference intended to consider the difficulties and opportunities of dialogue in a time of conflict. The conference was inspired by the Regensburg address of Benedict XVI, a lecture given on September 12, 2006 at a university in Germany where he had been a professor of theology from 1969 to 1971. In his talk, the Pope quoted a Byzantine emperor who had been in dialogue with his islamic opponent during a war been Christians and followers of Muhammad in the 14th century. The point of the lecture was to illustrate the irrationality of using violence to impose religious faith, and to trace the philosophical roots of how violence could be justified. Following this lecture, islamic activists rioted in different parts of the world in response to their apparent misreading of the text and the purpose of the address.
While the majority of human deaths are “natural” – the result of aging, injury or disease – the choice of “voluntary” death -- suicide, assisted suicide and euthanasia (SASE) – has been a human response to the problems of life since the beginning of recorded history. In the West, social acceptance of these actions has varied over time. Two periods of transition in popular attitudes toward voluntary death can be identified. The first shift – from approval to disapproval -- may be defined by the transition from the pagan cultures of antiquity toward a new Judeo-Christian civilization built on Greco-Roman foundations. The second shift – which we are currently living through – is characterized by the emergence of cultural attitudes more tolerant of voluntary death driven by a gradual loss of the sense of the transcendence of human existence.
From the Pythagorean school, a unique group of philosopher-physicians emerged who challenged the attitudes toward SASE that prevailed at the time. Best known among them was Hippocrates. These physicians distinguished themselves for several reasons.
With the progressive collapse of the Roman political order and the gradual emergence of a Christian culture, popular acceptance of voluntary death declined. According to some scholars (for example, Rodney Stark), the clear contrast between pagan and Christian approaches toward the sick was an important factor contributing this change in attitude toward SASE. In the Greco-Roman world, basic forms of welfare and philanthropy were based on principles of reciprocity and self interest. There was no public duty toward the sick, and sympathy for strangers was considered irrational.
Below you will read the eye-witness accounts of two plagues: one by the historian Thucydides describing what he saw during the plague of
“People were afraid to visit one another, and so they died with no one to look after them, and many houses were emptied because there was no one to provide care. … The doctors were incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the right methods…. Equally useless were the prayers made in the temples, consultation of the oracles, and so forth. In the end people were so overcome by their sufferings that they paid no further attention to such things. The great lawlessness that grew everywhere in the city began with this disease, for as the rich suddenly died and the poor took over their estates, people saw before their eyes such quick reversals that they dared to do freely things they would have hidden before, things they would never have admitted they did for pleasure. And so, because they thought their lives and their property were equally ephemeral, they justified seeking quick satisfaction in easy pleasures. As for doing what had been considered noble, no one was eager to take any further pains, because they thought it uncertain whether they should die or not before they achieved it. But the pleasure of the moment and whatever contributed to that were set up as standards of nobility and usefulness. No one was held back in awe either by fear of the gods or by the laws of men: not by the gods because men concluded that it was the same whether they worshipped or not, seeing that they all perished alike; and not by the laws, because no one expected to live till he was tried and punished for his crimes. But they thought that a far greater sentence hung over their heads now, and that before this fell they had a reason to get some pleasure in life. Such was the misery that weighed on the Athenians.”[1]
"There broke out a dreadful plague, and excessive destruction of a hateful disease invaded every house in succession of the trembling populace, carrying off day by day with abrupt attack numberless people, every one from his own house. All were shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends, as if with the exclusion of the person who was sure to die of the plague, one could exclude death itself also. There lay about the meanwhile, over the whole city, no longer bodies, but the carcases of many, and, by the contemplation of a lot which in their turn would be theirs, demanded the pity of the passers-by for themselves."[2]
From Cyprian of Carthage we read:
"This trial -- that now the bowels, relaxed into a constant flux, discharge the bodily strength; that a fire originated in the marrow ferments into wounds of the fauces; that the intestines are shaken with a continual vomiting; that the eyes are on fire with the injected blood; that in some cases the feet or some parts of the limbs are taken off by the contagion of diseased putrefaction; that from the weakness arising by the maiming and loss of the body, either the gait is enfeebled, or the hearing is obstructed, or the sight darkened -- is profitable as a proof of faith. What grandeur of spirit it is to struggle with all the powers of an unshaken mind against so many onsets of devastation and death! What sublimity, to stand erect amid the desolation of the human race, and not to lie prostrate with those who have no hope in God; but rather to rejoice, and to embrace the benefit of the occasion; that in thus bravely showing forth our faith, and by suffering endured, going forward to Christ by the narrow way that Christ trod, we may receive the reward of His life and faith according to His own judgment!"[3]
Clearly, this way of looking at the brutal world in which they lived was different than that of the pagans: the Christians had discovered new values that influenced the way they faced the dilemma of human suffering. There are well documented accounts of Christians during this plague caring for and not abandoning the dying, including those who had lapsed under the recent persecution and those who had been their persecutors.
And so this first transition from approval to disapproval of voluntary death -- a change that might accurately be characterized as revolutionary rather than evolutionary – seems to have been initiated by the heroic attitude of service of ordinary people toward their suffering peers, actions which clashed with the prevailing standards of socially acceptable behavior. In these first steps of transition, we can glean a merging of those rich elements of Greco-Roman culture compatible with Christian anthropology, an anthropology that was first lived, and then explained.
In the
"…it is never licit to kill another: even if he should wish it, indeed if he request it because, hanging between life and death, he begs for help in freeing the soul struggling against the bonds of the body and longing to be released; nor is it licit even when a sick person is no longer able to live".[4]
The first break probably occurred among English intellectuals who began to debate a variety of rationalizations of suicide and voluntary death in the 18th and 19th centuries, and with particular enthusiasm following the French Revolution. The debates were motivated in part by an apparent epidemic of suicides throughout
First, social and political upheavals (the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, the Enlightenment, the Reign of Terror, the Napoleonic Wars) led to a generalized pessimism and moral relativism throughout
Second, materialist philosophical projects developed in direct opposition to the basic principles of Christian anthropology. Among these projects was the theory of “transmutation” or “evolution” which held that matter possessed the intrinsic capacity to randomly develop all known forms of life over very long stretches of time. By offering evidence for the “natural selection” of traits that conferred survival advantages on animals, Charles Darwin came up with a scientific support for the theory of evolution. His findings were used by others, including his cousin Francis Galton and the philosopher Herbert Spencer, to advocate a social philosophy promoting the improvement of human hereditary traits through selective breeding of humans, birth control and euthanasia in order to create healthier, more intelligent people, to save society's resources and to lessen human suffering. Darwin and others reasoned that charitable efforts to treat the sick and support the mentally or physically disabled could adversely affect the human race, leading to a “degeneration” of the human condition by favoring the survival of defectives. Their approach became known as “eugenics” or “the self-direction of human evolution”, a view that found support among intellectual circles in Anglo-Saxon countries first and later -- with particularly terrible consequences -- in
Third, developments in science led to a surge in popular confidence in the ability of physicians to uncover the basic causes of human diseases and to treat them effectively. Two early scientific advances are especially relevant to our topic.
The first is the verification of the “germ theory” of Koch and Pasteur. It could now be said that the mysterious diseases that repeatedly killed large fractions of European and other peoples over the centuries were caused by invisible living organisms. Soon after, vaccines proved effective in preventing these diseases, and by the first half of the 20th century, antibiotics began to cure many of those infected.
A second event affecting the SASE debates was the discovery of analgesic and anesthetic chemicals. In preceding centuries, physicians had little to offer patients in pain, but toward the middle of the 19th century, chemicals that could reversibly alter human consciousness and pain perception -- including chloroform, ether and morphine – could be given to the sick and dying to ease their distress. Some intellectuals argued that these chemicals should be used to cause the deaths of persons who were suffering excessively. However, no physicians are known to have publicly recommended this practice for their patients until the “euthanasia movement” began, first in
Historical evidence suggests that the euthanasia movement of the late 19th and early 20th century and the contemporary right-to-die movement are campaigns organized by social elites – including intellectuals, Protestant and Unitarian clergy and wealthy agnostics – to overcome deep-seated popular opposition to voluntary death in its various forms.
In summary, over the course of Western history, changes in social acceptance of SASE have been driven primarily by re-examinations of the dominant cultural views regarding the nature and meaning of human existence in a particular historical period, and to a lesser extent by developments in medical care. One could argue that the first shift -- from approval to disapproval of voluntary death -- was driven by a “grass roots” movement, where ordinary people, inspired by a new understanding of who they were, acted with extraordinary heroism and encouraged others to do the same. The second shift on the other hand presents itself as a “top-down” imposition of ideology on a popular culture which struggles to retain its Judeo-Christian identity. The first shift involved the assimilation of Greco-Roman values of rationality into a lifestyle characterized by the radical gift of self. The second involves the withdrawal of man into himself – according to Benedict, into the “realm of the subjective” -- and his alienation from God, the source of rationality.
From Pontius, The Life and Passion of Cyprian, the full text of which may be found at http://www.users.drew.edu/ddoughty/Christianorigins/persecutions/cyprian.html
From Saint Cyprian of
1 comment:
I have read your article about the pill at http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/50_years_of_the_pill/.
Very nice and useful
Couple of things remain unclear to me.
1) you mostly wrote about guys: Marker, Djerassi, Rosenkranz who developed something, albeit Pinkus and others tested something that came from another source -- I did not catch the idea
2) Within a few months of the trial, half of the women withdrew from the study -- despite veiled threats of adverse academic repercussions by some of the investigators -- citing side effects and cumbersome data collection requirements.
I did not understood this sentence -- English is not my mother tongue.
Could you simplify it.
Thank you very much in advance
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