We live in an age of Cyberpunk Science Fiction like medical technology, in which the exploration of the human body and its pathologies have taken quantum leaps forward. Adn yet the not to be conquered barrier of physical death, that “undiscovered country” remains. Cancer, increasingly and tragically common, and horrific on all levels -God preserve us – remains a spectre and wraith with fierce intense wrath.
In September 27th’s online edition of the Telegraph Karol Sikora penned an article titled “The big C: cancer treatment is increasingly unaffordable” – I found it well worded and challenging but distasteful on a deeper level. I’ll admit she makes challenging points – on rising Oncology drug costs and the general tendency of cancer treatments taking massive financial and emotional tolls on people. She questions whether or not, in spite of the Miracles increasingly performed, we must move beyond “fighting over expensive drugs” adding only a “few months” to lives, because the collective costs of treatment are becoming prohibitive.
There is a coherence to her line of questions, I won’t deny that she kinda makes sense – but I detect a subtext, lying beneath, which is simply a thinly disguised argument for euthanasia being a more cost effective solution for working and middle class cancer patients. It’s, I think, basically a dignified tidy and nice way of articulating a eugenic solution…
So, I believe that the very real, yet unspoken, assumption here is that if you, dear reader, “can’t afford cancer treatment” then ipso facto you are belong to the superfluous classes: and are best replaceable, and not preserved, within a certain budget.
I say superfluous not because I believe them to be, but because I believe that those in the habit of these lines of thought regard them as such.
Certain people were once more explicit about saying such things. They no longer are, I suspect, because nowadays most of the people they have in mind can actually read (with literacy rates of 65-80% in the USA depending on who is quoted, and likewise 90-99% in the UK). With this being the case it’s simply not… fitting to openly state these things. The people they have in mind can also vote – for whatever that’s worth.
Not to rake too badly on Karol Sikora, there is a real argument to be made that trying to cling to a fading life by any means possible has an enormous emotional toll – on yourself and your family, but the financial argument in my opinion shouldn’t even enter the picture. I sicken of economic reductionism, I find it crass and banal. Families and individuals are best left to contemplate whether or not a battle for their lives should continue, or if they should peacefully and with dignity slip off this mortal coil. By admitting a social economic and financial component you explicitly open the back door for cost evaluations for various lives which simply strikes me as utterly noxious.
Ah, but someone has to pay for such treatments so it has a social consequence, the objection goes. True. I admit this, but my instinctive response to this objection is, and excuse me for saying it, “fuck you.” Not you personally, but I despise reducing anything concerning human lives into raw and crass economics. Admitting an economic dimension is a different matter from reducing it to the economic matter.
The author, she does not engage in this reductionism, but beneath her arguments its scent lingers and I find it off-putting.
Now before you write my thoughts off as unjustifiable and paranoid leaps, or class-bating snark, I think you should think carefully about the greater implications behind such well crafted and well argued appeals to death dignity.
In my opinion some people, and I do not say Sikora here, rather I’m making a more general point, probably wouldn’t know a dignified death if it bit them in their asses – being inveterate cowards with peculiar hankerings for rather useless lives. The phrase corporate welfare isn’t just class baiting claptrap, it has a reality – some very wealthy lives are subsidized by all of us, mind you, through a series of wealth transfers which, once examined beneath the surface makes a legion of GOP or Tory scare-tactic, picture-perfect, welfare moms look like drops in the bucket.
Given that an enormous number of those who find such appeals influential and who can afford such treatments themselves, also happen to also be fans of trans-humanism, are of a decidedly secular-humanistic bent, and hence often nigh obsessively concerned with the preservation and quality of their lives (though not often the lives of others). I do no more, here, than observe this fact.
I end with with – my emotional disposition inclines me to feel that those who fear death have little reason babbling about the deaths or lives of other people, particularly those poorer than they.
Whatever happened to noblis oblige? It went out with honor and courage.
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