“We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.” – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
While Anne Lamott has been a voice of wisdom for me, I think she’s half wrong here. If by “we” she means “everybody,” then it’s clear to me that we don’t all know – existentially, truly know – that we’re going to die. The people who blithely scoff at the COVID-19 virus as “just the flu” and who assume that youth or health or power or wealth or belonging to the “master race” or having “superior genes” or whatever will protect them clearly do not understand their own mortality in any meaningful way. More alarmingly: we all don’t even know that, should we be blessed with a long life, we will become weaker, diminished in our physical or our mental capacities. You can be healthy for seventy or for eighty-five or for a hundred, but that’s not the same as being healthy for a thirty-year-old.
The older most of us get, of course, the more most of us know this – though some find a way to live in denial of their own diminution. Must be nice.
“Trees in Winter,” December 27, 2012 – photo by L.D. Burnett
In the discourse surrounding COVID-19, I have noticed a troubling motif: the idea that the old should be willing to die for “the economy” or “the future” or “for the sake of our grandchildren.” That’s the language of capitalistic extraction, measuring everyone’s worth based on how much productive labor and profit can be leached out of their very bodies so that others may accumulate wealth. The oft-invoked “grandchildren” in this framing are to be protected because they have decades of productive life ahead of them. The elderly are to be sacrificed because their only economic contribution now is in their dying – they represent per-bed profits for nursing homes, sales figures for medical equipment vendors, steady money for funeral home directors. “Get on with dying, old people, and be sure you do it as expensively as possible” – that’s the ethos behind this immoral exhortation. The idea that society must choose between protecting the young and protecting the elderly is a false and pernicious framing and it should be resoundingly rejected.
And here we can turn to Anne Lamott for a wise word. In a different chapter of Bird by Bird, she writes about her initial impressions of people she saw in a nursing home she would visit regularly as part of the ministry of her church, and about one particularly confused nursing home resident.
If I’d written about her and the other old people after the first few visits, the smells and confusion would have dominated my description. I would have recorded our odd conversatons—one woman is convinced we went to school together; another once asked if Sam was a dog—and I would have tried to capture my sense of waste. Instead, I continued to go there, and I struggled to find meaning in their bleak existence. What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter.
What will our society become? What direction will we take in this moment of crisis – a crisis that, I fear, is only beginning? What kind of people are we going to be in the face of this? What kind of country are we going to be? Are we stuck in the grooves already slashed across the land we traverse? What does the future hold?
We can’t answer that question by looking at present circumstances and events and predicting a particular outcome. And we here are historians, so we should not be making predictions in any case.
The only way to answer this question is by what we do, by what we strive to or allow ourselves to become, by what community we work toward or we allow to come into being in our midst.
We can’t predict the future. But we can shape whatever future might be possible. And what we do depends on who we think we are and what we think we’re here to do.
I think we’re here to love as we are loved – “underneath are the everlasting arms” – and to gain wisdom as we go along.
Yes, the children need a future. Yes, the old people need dignity and safety and care. And yes, we all need each other.
Peace.
3 Thoughts on this Post
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While I hope it is true that “we’re here to love as we are loved – ‘underneath are the everlasting arms’ – and to gain wisdom as we go along,” I want to focus on a more modest proposal that may nonetheless be in the spirit of such hope.
The preeminence of economism (homo economicus, for whom moral and ethical principles, norms, and standards are subordinate or incidental to capital accumulation and the profit motive) in capitalist ideology is indeed at work here, as is a rather crude sort of utilitarianism and perhaps a variation on the late Garrett Hardin’s notion of “lifeboat ethics” (inspired by Malthusian social Darwinism as captured in a ruthless social epidemiological notion of ‘survival of the fittest’). Perhaps lurking in the background as well are assumptions about human nature that are primarily of Christian provenance (emphasis on ‘original sin,’ our sinful nature, etc., as opposed, say, to a European Enlightenment emphasis—after Condorcet and Godwin—on human ‘perfectibility’).
What stands out for me is the extent to which such inhumane sentiment pops up among both elites and the masses who slavishly follow them (sufficient enough to be noticed by and circulated throughout mass and social media fora), suggesting philosophical and political concepts or conceptions of human dignity (alluded to in your next to last paragraph) have not firmly taken root in our society, despite their centrality to axiomatic principles of international law, human rights instruments, and pride of place in many nation-state constitutional documents. Neo-conservative capitalist globalization has, in this instance, ideologically trumped a metaphysical and moral cosmopolitanism of the sort referred to in this passage from a work by Kwame Anthony Appiah:
“The roots of the cosmopolitanism I am defending are liberal: and they are responsive to liberalism’s insistence on human dignity. It has never been easy to say what this entails, and indeed, it seems to me that exploring what it might mean is liberalism’s historic project.” — From Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005): 267.
Consider too the following from Allen Buchanan:
“Whether or not the notion that the international legal human rights system is grounded in and serves to affirm the inherent dignity of humans is a central feature of the system, it is surely at least a desideratum for a justification of the system that it can make sense of this notion given its prominence. [….] [T]he relevant notion of dignity can be understood to include two aspects. First, there is the idea that certain conditions of living are beneath the dignity of the sort of being that humans are. [….] Let us call this first aspect of dignity the well-being threshold aspect.
The second aspect of dignity is the interpersonal comparative aspect, the idea that treating people with dignity also requires a public affirmation of the basic equal status of all and, again, that if they are not treated in this way they suffer an injury or wrong. [….] The well-being threshold aspect of dignity concerns whether one is doing well enough for a being of the sort one is; it makes no reference to how one is treated vis-à-vis others. The interpersonal comparative aspect has to do with whether one is being treated as an inferior relative to other people. The point is that one’s dignity can be respected in the well-being threshold aspect and yet may be compromised in the interpersonal comparative aspect.” — From Buchanan’s The Heart of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 99-100.
Perhaps it would help if we had an amendment to the U.S. constitution which accorded express recognition to the idea of human dignity (such dignity might be thought assumed or presumed by particular ‘rights’ in the Constitution but that fails, I suspect, to grant it the depth and breadth it attains with explicit recognition and affirmation). In this regard, we are far from a “city on a hill,” although it does make for a disturbing kind of American exceptionalism. In any case, here are a few titles which might help us think through the usual and possible meanings and implications associated with widespread valorization of the concept of human dignity:
• Capps, Patrick. Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law (Hart Publishing, 2010).
• Daly, Erin. Dignity Rights: Courts, Constitutions, and the Worth of the Human Person (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
• Düwell, Marcus, et al., eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
• Kateb, George. Human Dignity (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
• McCrudden, Christopher, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Rosen, Michael. Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Harvard University Press, 2012).
• Waldron, Jeremy (et al.) Dignity, Rank and Rights (Berkeley Tanner Lectures, 2009) (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Thank you so much for this, Patrick!
Thanks for this reflection, Lora.
Appreciated, of course, this sentence: “That’s the language of capitalistic extraction, measuring everyone’s worth based on how much productive labor and profit can be leached out of their very bodies so that others may accumulate wealth.”
The particular word here that’s most evocative, for me, is “leach.” Allow me to riff a bit.
Capitalists have long been described as bloodsuckers, leaching from market structures for no gain but their own. This contrasts to the history of medicine, however, where another bloodsucker, a leech, was used to further health–to draw off some of a person’s essence to bring balance to the humors.
For millennia those leeches were useful, good actors in the animal kingdom. I’m sure our present-day capitalists think of themselves as bringing balance to the animalistic, dog-eat-dog world of business. They think of themselves as adding to the health of society by clearing out the weaker businesses and their detritus (leaching a boil, perhaps, to stay with medical terms). Their creative destruction contrasts sharply, as always, with their cultural conservative allies who the aged as filled with wisdom–entities to be respected. And who will raise the grandchildren, for conservative capitalists, when the adults are off to work for gain the world of markets?
For me, as with Thomas Haskell, this comes back to the history of ethics. Maybe I’m with Patrick, above, in thinking about “lifeboat ethics,” human dignity, liberal cosmopolitanism, and other such ethical modes of operation (thanks as always, Patrick, for appearing here—love your bibliographies and reflections from them). How and why have our ethics changed toward a disrespect for the aged? Why are they now disposable, in the long history of capitalism as its existed in this country? Did the capitalists say the same thing in 1918-19? I haven’t looked into that, but need to.
Anyway, thanks for the provocative post—and the questions you’ve asked. – TL