I have often learned my most valuable lessons from my worst enemies. In graduate school I spent several years wrestling with the texts of the atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who taught me one unforgettable lesson: Those who lack the tragic sense of life are apt to invent realities to replace the one they cannot face.
Nietzsche aimed his argument at Christianity, with its supposed invention of an otherworldly paradise. He was wrong on this score, however: The Christian faith affirms the inevitability of suffering. The cross is a perennial reminder of the tragic limitations that all human beings must not only bear but choose.
But if you look at post-Christian America from Nietzsche’s vantage point, you’ll see that it lacks that tragic sense. Witness especially America’s current mania for creating and destroying human life for the sake of treating disease. Everything is curable, we’re told, regardless of its cost in terms of other human lives.
Celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, Mary Tyler Moore, and the late-Christopher Reeve have urged Congress to support the destruction of human embryos to extract stem cells for the treatment of spinal cord damage and childhood diabetes. Not far behind the stem cell debate will come a debate on human cloning, the possibility of making “another you” to provide replacement body parts as needed. In fact, some U.S. scientists have announced they intend to clone human embryos for the sole purpose of research.
Doesn’t anyone recognize that there are limits to what should be done to avoid suffering and death? Or has the avoidance of suffering become a kind of greatest good, conferring legitimacy on all deeds done for its sake?
When we feel our natural aversion to suffering and death, we are faced with a broad range of choices. Without the moral sense conferred by the tragic, people assume that suffering can be avoided by any means necessary, including the taking of human life.
This option was brought home to me dramatically on my family’s 2001 trip to Romania to adopt my now-twelve-year-old son, Cyprian. On the day we arrived, the Romanian government announced a temporary suspension of international adoptions. Why? More than 200 adopted Romanian children were missing, and it was feared that they had been taken across the border and killed for their body parts.
How is it possible to understand such cruelty? My friend, music critic and writer Robert Reilly, once remarked to me that the loss of the tragic sense is closely linked to atheism (Nietzsche was an exception). Without God, predestination becomes scientific determinism; the immortality of the soul becomes the immortality of the body.
This makes sense as an explanation for our current willingness to dissect human lives into whatever pieces we deem scientifically useful. Our infatuation with scientific progress and our toleration of the horrific program of harvesting body parts are nothing less than a misplaced desire for God — for immortal life — brought to bear on the treatment of illness. Avoidance of death has replaced union with God as our ultimate goal.
Reilly also pointed out to me that nature loses its moral power when God is removed from the picture, and the natural and social sciences replace theology as the highest source of intellectual authority. Believing that scientists speak the truth on all subjects, legislators and administrators tend to accept their pronouncements, even on moral matters outside their purview.
Those who accept life’s tragic limitations, however, view existence as a gift — something they may not and should not try to manipulate. They accept that there are moral limits on what the human will can accomplish in the face of death.
Over and over I hear that such attitudes change when it is your son, daughter, father, mother, wife, or husband who could be helped by embryonic stem cell research or cloning. If such a predicament should befall my family, I pray that God will give me the strength to bear my tragic circumstances without seeking to take advantage of the living.
In a country renowned for its optimism, we Americans go too far when we assume that sorrow and suffering can be avoided, and that, by manipulating life, we can beat death. The reality that we create as we try to escape our mortality will be stranger and even more cruel than the Brave New World that we were taught to fear as schoolchildren.
This article originally appeared in the September 2001 issue of Crisis Magazine.
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The example lived by Pope John Paul II and his battle with Parkinson’s disease was the most powerful Christian witness on suffering that I’ve seen. It was upsetting to see the national debate over embryonic stem cell research and cloning always including celebrities like Fox and Reeve, but ignoring this most powerful example of a Christian embracing his cross and his suffering.
JPII’s adherence to the truth about the sacredness and sanctity of human life stands above the “cure me at all costs” approach. His life is a witness to the fact that it is wrong to kill one human being to alleviate the suffering of another.
In a related issue – I am a dialysis patient and often I get asked “why don’t you get a new kidney?” as if this were the simplest most logical thing one could hope for and do – and yet at sixty one I am not jumping up and down at the thought of yet more surgery, and thirty daily medications that would be required for a least six months post-op with the distinct possibility that the kidney would fail in a few years any way….so I have opted to continue hemo -dialysis and leave the “new” kidney to someone younger and stronger….I am comfortable with this decision because of our Catholic faith and the hope of heaven and uniting our suffering with that of Christ…There is a rightness about this that gives me a lot of joy and peace…
God Bless
Melinda
A friend of mine recovering from a stroke that left him speech impaired wrote: “If my mind or my life should be destroyed, let not one helpless pre-born be slain in order that any stem cells be harvested for me. Let us pray for young lives stolen.” God has given him the strength to bear his circumstances and inspire us all.
You seem to agree with the author and his friend that Scientific Determinism is a problem, but you seem to be doing this in a way that is critical of the author. Did he criticize “science”? And what do “right and left” have to do with it? What is your point, and how does it pertain to the article?
Another element of Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity was the primacy of charity and mercy, which commands us to care for the weak and unfortunate. Who is weaker or more vulnerable than the unborn? In Der Antichrist Nietzsche clcaims both Christianity and and Budhism arise from an incapacity for pain, and that the rise of both marked the decline of a culture. How would he view our modern anti-Christian culture with its primacy of aversion to pain at all costs? In one of his last letters before going completely mad he wrote” “My life is now lived in the hope that someone will prove to me that my own truths are incredible.” Perhpas a view of today’s world from wherever he is would do the trick.
As a side note, I would like to relate that when I recommended Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals to a Protestant clergyman, stating that the book was about writers whose ideas had screwed up humanity. “Like what ideas?” he asked. “Like Marxism,” I told him. He replied that he considered himsefl a “neo-Marxist.” He also told me that he was using Der Antichrsit as a textbook in course he was teachings on Ethics! This man is a serving chaplain in the US Navy. Can anyone say that our culutre is not in trouble?
Stephen
Being new, first I would like to thank Insidecatholic for truly great articles. My quibble was with
“Doesn’t anyone recognize that there are limits to what should be done to avoid suffering and death? Or has the avoidance of suffering become a kind of greatest good, conferring legitimacy on all deeds done for its sake?”
Yes, and the limits should include, among other things, not torturing people and killing them to save our own asses. But of course, Jehovah, being very big and very smart, is exempt. Of course it was his perversely anthropopathic pre-occupation with even the tiniest human foible (let’s all assume, for the sake of argument, that there is an orders of magnitude difference between two teenagers having sex and one person killing another)and ensuing desire to kill the things he claimed to love that led him to have to torture his (alledged) son, god incarnate… but once again we should let gods off the hook as they are bigger than us (lets apply the logic to the human realm, sounds like Thrasymachus’s argument in The Republic) and smarter than us.
Using an embryo for stem cells just isn’t the problem you are making it out to be. An embryo is a potential human, and human life only in the sense that cancer cells are, or tissue biopsies are. I am not a supporter of abortion, per se. But I’m smart enough to know it bothers at a gut level and not rationally. All arguments are attempts to justify my emotional reaction and foist my conscience, cobbled together from my own circumstances, on others.
Abortion is nasty, sure. So is being raped. So is being told that one just has to take the psychological damage of carrying the product of that rape full term. So is letting a child be born into circumstances that are highly likely to emotionally and psychologically cripple it for life. So is letting a mother die and leave her spouse widowed to do her duty. As is requiring a young womn without the means and the wherewithall to raise a child she can’t afford and can’t nurture properly just to put your own orchid-delicate conscience at ease.
Seriosly, if you have problems with abortion and stem cell research find viable alternatives and fund them with your money. The issue isn’t whether or not pro-choicers are willing to avoid tragedy by any means necessary, but that ultimately many of us realize that it is a matter of trying to choose between the lesser of tragedies. A potential human life lost, or an actual human life…
As far as atheism being linked with the loss of the tragic sense, I can tell you personally that the events that lead to my loss of faith were tragedy and a subsequent heightened sensitization to the inevitability of tragedy. And I have found this to be true in so many other un-believers, whereas with believers I find a general lack of awareness or ability to admit to the inevitability and reality of tragedy. They tend to be extremely insensitive to any but their own viewpoint and are highly likely to have been coddled and kept from the nastier deprivations and sufferings on offer.
Thank you for this empty accusation, I hope it gave you great satisfaction. Atheists steal children for their bodyparts, but somehow they outsmart the police, that’s why they are so underrepresented in prisons. You do not even need to prove such an accusation, it obviously is a sold fact. Shouldn’t we just voluntarily go to prison? Law should punish moral bankrupcy anyway, should it not?
A really, really valuable contribution, thank you. Thank you.