Vestigial Conservatism: The Sanctity of Life

Sorry for the hiatus, busy busy. I had a conversation with my beautiful and intelligent wife the other day (yes, while I should have been blogging, but it got this one going) about health care, government, and religion. We went relatively in-depth about the problems facing us as a culture and tried to come up with a "unified theory" of what the hell has gone wrong in this country. The answer that was reached was not what you think: fear of death and the corruption of the idea of sanctity of life.

Fear of death has been covered in these blogs already, I know, but let me expand on these ideas, and I beg your indulgence of my indulgences.

It has become entirely apparent, as Einstein once said, that our technology has surpassed our humanity; that we have so many bells and whistles going off around us all the time and yet we cannot use them to good effect anymore. These technological marvels like life support, medications, complex surgeries, all of these things are not inherently good, but only good when applied with a view of humanity.

Is it a true good to keep someone on life support who will never wake? It is a true good to pay thousands on a medication that will only prolong your suffering, or undergo an operation that will drain what you would give to your children, grandchildren or a charitable cause so you can live easier for but one more year? I say no, that those who choose such things are not committed to the good of the people nor really the good of themselves. Prolonging suffering, wasting precious resources for small effect and destroying our own legacy is tantamount to lunacy and nothing more. But why, then, do we do it?

It all comes down to fear of death, that unknown equalizer we all MUST face, though we paint our faces an inch thick, though we get a hundred face lifts and botox injections, though we take a thousand drugs or undergo a thousand painful procedures. Once upon a time, and not really that long ago, religion provided the masses of people a way to face that fear, to believe there is something greater and better beyond this life. And so many of us were unafraid to go into that great night with our eyes open and full of hope. There was dignity and grace in the act of dying, of aging. Whatever evils religion has done, it has given us the ultimate tool to destroy the ultimate fear.

No more. We have become an irreligious society, placing our hope in science to take away what we perceive to be the bitter sting of death. And that is really fine, so long as our humanity and will can keep pace with the science we create. Yet we have not. As our technological power has become stronger, we find ourselves unable and unwilling to make the right choices regarding that unknown quantity. We have gone back to the days where all humanity was afraid of the dark. Rather than look upon our marvels and be at peace we have become more troubled and selfish; rather than using our knowledge to create something which will endure beyond us we have chosen to use our great abilities for selfishness and personal vanity.

But where is religion now? What has happened is not simply the fault of science, which is (real science, anyway) unbiased and simply IS, but the fault of religion for forgetting what IT is. The vestigial conservatism in the title of this blog is what is left of the belief in the sanctity of life that religion had given us. As with anything, everything has it's corollary, and in this case, the second half of that belief has been abandoned: the sanctity of life necessitates the dignity of death.

Pulling the plug is not murder, nor is removing the feeding tube of a person who has undergone a horrific tragedy. They are in fact truly celebrations of the sanctity of life. Life is not breathing, it is not simply existing; to a human being it is an amalgamation of hopes and fears and dreams and actions, of nobility and disgrace, of failure and triumph. Life is not sacred because it simply is, but because of the possibilities it gives to us. Many religions have forgotten that part of the equation, choosing to simply state that life must be preserved AT ALL COSTS, even if that cost is our humanity.

Religion, I believe, is mans interpretation of the will of God. And as such it is inherently flawed as all people are flawed. Things useful and necessary can be forgotten, altered, even warped into something it was never intended to be. This doesn't negate the good it has or yet can do, just as the good it has and can do cannot negate the evils it has perpetrated through the years. The same can be said of any human being.

But science, no matter how advanced, cannot advance us morally as a species, only technologically. The answers to when science should be used, and to what effect, cannot be quantified or given any greater value than already exist in our moral sense and, given the state of our world, I would say it is perfectly capable of turning us back on some of our greatest gifts.

We can measure the mass of a single atom, or a smaller particle still, but the greatness and possibility of the human experience is unquantifiable, and more beautiful than any machine that can be built. We as a people must remember what it is to be unafraid, we must look into that great unknown and realize that final thing is what truly gives the rest of our life meaning, and to be glad of it.