What is fundamental value?
Giles Fraser rebukes the godless.
Humanists (and by that I mean secular humanists for now) would do much more to persuade me of their world-view if they took more seriously the idea that the human is of fundamental value.
Of fundamental value – what does that mean? I suppose the fact that I have to ask means that I won’t be persuading Giles Fraser of anything – but then, he probably won’t be persuading me of anything either.
I don’t think ‘the human’ is of fundamental value – if by that Fraser means of value independent of, say, other humans, or the (human) past, or future. I think the human is of contingent value – and that that’s enough. I don’t think ‘the human’ is of value to the universe, or to Jupiter, or to other animals. I think the human is of value to humans, and (frankly) to no one else. But I also don’t think it needs to be of value to anyone else to be of real value to us. (I also think the ways we could be of value to non-humans could be quite sinister, and that people like Giles Fraser ignore that possibility in a really silly way. Consider the way ‘the dog’ and ‘the horse’ and ‘the chicken’ is of value to us, then ponder whether we really need to be ‘of value’ to anyone other than ourselves.)
[F]rom the British Humanist Association’s website: ‘Humanists, too, see a special value in human life, but think that if an individual has decided on rational grounds that his life has lost its meaning and value, that evalu ation should be respected.’…[I]t is clear that here is an admission that the value of human life is down graded by those who call themselves humanists. Human life is something that is deemed to have no value for the individual if that individual decides that it has not.
Exactly so. We (I’ll just say ‘we’ because Fraser seems to be talking about atheists too) think that if an individual does not value her own life, then that life (while she views the matter that way, at any rate) does in fact ‘have no value for the individual.’ Indeed that’s simply tautological – if the individual decides that her life has no value, then for her it is deemed to have no value. It seems peculiar for Fraser even to bother pointing this out, let alone disapproving of it.
I am thinking, of course, about the support that so many secular human ists have given for the assisted suicide of Daniel James, the disabled former rugby player who felt, at the age of 23, that his life was not worth living. My friend Jerry, at a similar age, broke his back in a motorbike accident, and could move only his head and tongue. With these he managed to woo his caregiver, marry her, have three children by IVF, and run a pizza franchise. Humanists see the difference between these cases as hanging from the fragile thread of individual choice. That is not good enough.
What is good enough? Assuming that what one person did is what all people can do? Assuming that what one person did is what all people want to do? Assuming that what people want to do with their own lives is irrelevant? Refusing to take specifics into account?
Not only have contemporary atheists snatched the term humanist and claimed it as their own, but — in the name of choice — they have sold out on the very value that inspired humanism in the first place: the dignity of man (and woman, too). Shame on them.
But for some people, survival as a head has nothing to do with dignity. People differ. Different people want different things, different people can tolerate different things. Taking that into account might be part of the ‘value’ of human ‘dignity.’
Bait-and-switch godbollocks, every word of it. Sanctimonious ponce.
Every single time people like Giles Fraser talk about the value of human life, they always have an example of a person who is in exactly the same circumstances as the person who has chosen to die, and they say: See how much value such a life can have! Daniel James might have wooed and married his nurse and run a pizza franchise to boot!
Who is Giles Fraser to tell Daniel James what he might do or might not have done? Who are these religious people to ascribe a value to life that ignores individual life projects and individual choices? Value? Who is doing the valuing here? Is ignoring the reasonable choices that people make about their lives the way we value human life? Why should ignoring Daniel Jame’s wish to bring his torment to an end be equated with valuing his life?
(Actually, parenthetically, it is worthwhile adding that most people who choose to end their torment do not really want to die. What they want is for their torment to end. Dying may, despite Giles Fraser’s silly argument, be the only way to do that. But the description under which they understand their dying is important.)
And yet, so far, in most countries around the world, Giles Fraser and his ilk still maintain their control of other people and their lives, control they did not surrender, and lives they wish to live in their own way. Those they value so much are forced to live in circumstances that they would choose to escape, given the means and the opportunity. And yet it is Fraser, who, unlike the humanists he castigates, is quite prepared to dictate to others how they must see their lives, and to deny them choices that they would make, who claims to value human life! After all, Jerry wooed his nurse and married her, had children by IVF and runs a pizza franchise! So, of course, it follows that Daniel James must have no choice! The illogic of that is evident. Why does Giles Fraser think that this is what it means to value human life? What is fundamental for Giles Fraser are his beliefs. Ther real Daniel James does not figure in his argument at all. Shame on him!
Rev Giles Fraser is quite happy to see other people suffer for his principles. How very priestly of him.
Perhaps he’s one of the “suffering is the only way we can express our true nobility” crowd?
Anyone got any prior ramblings from him that might confirm/deny this?
Giles Fraser has about six pages of listings at the Guardian. Don’t know his views on suffering and nobility, but quite a few of his articles deal with Christian homophobia, a topic on which he is surprisingly (given the Church Times article exploiting the death of Danile James) quite progressive. He objected strongly to the way that Jeffrey John was treated by the Church of England. But almost as many denounce any variety of humanism or unbelief, of which the Church Times article referenced here is an example.
In one of them he makes this suggestion:
Now, I know this is in one sense off topic, but for someone to extol the value of the point where our words fall silent, Fraser is needlessly outspoken about the choices that people make at points like this. There are other things you can do besides light a candle. ‘The need for the intangible,’ he tells us, ‘is expressed when words fail us.’ But do humanists deny the intangible? Grief, exaltation, love, awe, emotions, aesthetic enjoyment and transport, even forms of ecstacy: all these are intangibles, and often beyond words. By what trick of the imagination have supposed religious entities become the only intangibles on offer and candles the only solution? (The familiar false dichotomies of religious apologetics.)
He also says, in one of his articles, that we need to relearn the art of plain speaking when it comes to death, and refers to the words spoken on Ash Wednesday, as a cross of ash is imprinted on the forehead, and the priest says: ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’
This, it seems to me, is one of the crises of religion, that it wants to say something pertinent to life in the world, but, in the end, can only point to something else, something unreachable, intangible, beyond our knowing or saying, instead of right here, in the wonders of human thought and imagination, and the depth of human emotion and relationship, whether too deep for words, or flowing out in irrepressible words and desire.
From the accounts of his parents, Daniel James was eloquent in his own assessment of the prospects for his life, and, in some plain speaking, or at least plain dealing, about dying, reached for an intangible that Fraser would deny him (or, let us remember, Diane Pretty, or Debbie Purdy, and so many unnamed others who die in pain and unappeaseable distress).
This turning away from people in their distress, or imposing on them a vision of life that is not theirs, is not expressing ‘something important about human life that we are unable to articulate’; to the contrary, it is imposing an all too articulate vision on those who do not accept it. In what way is this vision of “humanity” not itself hopelessly impoverished? Fraser’s confident arrogance and thoughtless fundamentalism appals me.
Maybe you should write to him, Eric. Since you used to be in the same line of work, maybe he would listen to you.
(He does take a liberal line on some subjects. But on others he’s as blind as any fundamentalist – and as you indicate, doesn’t even realize it.)
I did write him, Ophelia. I didn’t mention that I had been in the same line of work, but I did direct him to your comments. Perhaps we will hear from him.
Of fundamental value? Pertaining to the fundament? Might he mean that “Life” is what one sits on? Gosh, and here I thought that “Life” was what one ate for breakfast.
Underneath all the verbiage and pseudo-intellectual flummery, it all seems to come back to the (to my mind) sinister notion that we are not our own – that we belong to some *other*.
ISTR Roger Scruton using precisely this argument in How Conservatives Think to justify imposing his own moral code (and in some cases, plain old lifestyle choices) on others. This notion that “our bodies are not our own but are God’s”)
Yes. It’s a sinister, repellent, and presumptuous notion – and it clearly is the notion behind what Giles Fraser says, and yet (rather oddly) he never really spells that out. I wonder why. Would it sound too…what…fundamentalist, or woo, or supernaturalist, or something, to his would-be liberal ears? That’s my guess, I suppose. But that’s what’s so irritating about him – he wants to be (and in some ways is) Liberal Vicar Guy, but he also wants to go right on telling us our lives don’t actually belong to us. Well you can’t do both.
Furthermore…what is the real issue? Is it really that we’re somehow denigrating the deity by thinking our lives are our own? Or is it that we are frightening people by insisting that lives are only as good as they are – by reminding people that some lives are shit and some people really don’t want shit lives, and that shit lives can happen to anyone and will happen to most of us eventually. Maybe it’s really the second thing, dressed up as disrespect for the deity. So the idea would be that we all have to maintain other people’s illusions about the permanent wonderfulness of every life by undertaking never to escape the bad stuff. That’s an appallingly selfish idea.
I think, Ophelia, that the answer is more sbutle than that. It’s something that I am developing, and hope to include someday in a book which I am struggling with.
I think the basic reason for Christian opposition (and I am talking here specifically about Christian reasons for opposing assistance in dying) is due to the ambiguous role that dying and death play in Christian thinking. Death is both the way that we are called by God. It is through death that we enter into our inheritance. So, at the grave Christians are called to say triumphantly, “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.” But death is also, as St. Paul pointed out, the last enemny. It is in fact the forces of chaos and evil at work. If you read the story of the great flood you can see this as a reversing of the act of creation. And death functions in precisley this way in the Christian imagination. It is the overcoming of God’s creative work, a returning to inchoate dust of that which had, till death, been a living icon of God’s creative power. After all, as Christians say, man is made in the image of God. (Women’s place is less certain. In fact, there is some reason for believing that, as Christ represents God for men, the husband represents Christ for their wives. There’s always a downside for women in these stories!).
It is this duality of death in the Christian imagination (and therefore in Christian theology), I think, that makes it impossible for Christians – except for a compassionate few – to accept endorsing anyone’s choice to hasten dying, for that is both to pre-empt God’s call, and it is also to give in to the last enemy.
Such is my reading of the texts. Karl Barth, in his Church Dogmatics makes this quite brutally clear. To quote from Vol III, Part II, he says clearly: “As the end and terminus of life [death] stands in an ominous relation to chaos.” (591) And then a bit later he calls death “the seal and fulfilment of man’s negation,” as well as that “We are obliged to live in fear of death.” (625)
Of course, that it is the death is the gateway to eternal life for the Christian needs no corroboration.
It’s remarkable stuff, and it lies in the background of Giles Fraser’s (as well as other Christian’s) inability to condone assistance in dying. It is right at the heart of Christian belief. If they give up this pass, they have given up the faith itself.
I’m sorry, I meant to go back and correct the sentence which begins: “Death is both the way that we are called by God” – which should continue – “and the work of the enemy of God.”
There are a few other errors of haste in the post, but this one needed correction.
Yes, humanists do ascribe moral value to human life. I would have thought that that was pretty much the definition of humanism. The point is, though, that as a liberal humanist, I also ascribe moral value to human freedom. There are clearly many cases in which these two values may conflict. So that for example a pacifist would oppose war even to defend freedom – because it will clearly result in deaths – where other humanists would accept that war is justified as a last resort in order to protect freedom.
Suicide is obviously another case where life and freedom conflict, and I suspect that humanists will take different views on it for precisely that reason.
In the end, liberal humanism is the belief that yes, human life has a moral value, but that crucially, that life belongs to its owner – and therefore that the person him/herself has the primary responsibility for it.
HaryG, I can understand why humanists might reasonably hold that the value of human life and freedom conflict in cases where freedom is threatened, and the defence of it might involve a risk to human life. I do not, however, see how the values of freedom and human life conflict in the case of suicide.
Of course, this is a tendentious way to put it in the first place. The issue addressed by Giles Fraser is not just a question of suicide, but of assisted suicide, or assisted dying. Daniel James went to Switzerland to bring an end to the torment that his life had become to him. Where is the conflict here, for someone else, between the values of human life and freedom?
In what way is the person for whom there is a conflict here different from the Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser, who clearly sees a conflict here too, one that must always be resolved in favour of the value of human life? What does it mean to affirm the values of human life and freedom, and yet condemn the considered choice of an individual to bring an intolerable life to an end?
Jean Améry’s book, Hand an sich legen, published misleadingly under the title On Suicide in English, is a good antidote to this principled dithering between the rights of indivduals and the rights of others to dictate their life choices. As Ronald Dworkin says in Life’s Dominion, “Making someone die in a way that others approve, but he believes a horrifying contradiction of his life, is a devastating, odious from of tyranny.” (p. 217) I couldn’t agree more. I am fed up with these odious principles of tyrants, whether expressed in the language of religion or of humanism. It’s time we recgonised that freedom is an integral part of what it means to value human life, and the denial of freedom is at the same time a denial of the life bound by that denial. New Hampshire has it right: ‘Give me freedom or give me death!” The values belong together; that’s why it is worth while to sacrifice life to preserve freedom.
Carry on with that book, Eric – it’s needed.
I don’t really understand the more subtle Christian idea though. It just seems like another way of saying: on the one hand they see death as everyone does, and on the other hand they see it as the opposite of that. But we knew that. In other words the stuff about Paul and chaos and the last enemy doesn’t seem any different to me from the ordinary reaction to death – it doesn’t seem like anything special or particular to Christianity. What am I missing?
Well, in one sense, OB, you’re not missing a thing, since this is a mythologising around death. However, from the Christian point of view, since death is the work of the Evil One, it is something we must fight for all we’re worth. Giving in to death, is to surrender to God’s enemy.
But on the other hand, it is to pre-empt God’s call. As John Donne points out in his Biathanatos it is through death that God calls us. But we must make very sure that we are being called. Just suffering is not enough. We must, as the pope so cavalierly says, wait for natural death (it’s cavalier, of course, because the locution ‘natural death’ begs so many questions).
So there is a twofold reason why we must struggle against death, since death is giving in to God’s enemy (that’s why Barth says we have an obligation (no less) to fear death), but hastening death is pre-empting God’s call.
Christians don’t see death the way that everyone else does, though. We may see it as the end of life, and the dissolution of the body. Christians see it at once as the inrushing of chaos (the formless void at the beginning of creation), and the call of God. (The latter, of course, is borrowed from Socrates (or perhaps Pythagoras). One must not leave one’s post until relieved.)
Does that help?
I’m no theologian, but it seems like the Christian views are so rife with contradictions. Wasn’t it Jehovah himself who created death as punishment for the original Fall in Eden? Satan was definitely a minor player in that drama-it wasn’t Satan who posted the angel with the flaming sword???
I’m also confused about this concept of an Enemy. Is it not true that God is omnipotent? How can there be an “enemy” with any power beyond that which God himself allows?
These may be side issues w/r/t the main issue…my apologies for theological digressions :)
Well, BrianM, I don’t know that there can be theological digressions here. After all, the thread starts off with a theologian (although he lectured in philosophy at Wadham College), taking humanists to task for devaluing human life.
Yes, Christianity, like most religions, is rife with contradictions, and death certainly plays an ambiguous role in Christian theology, as I’ve tried to point out. There has to be some explanation for the manifold evils of the world. You can blame a lot on human beings, but how did they go wrong? They were created by God and share his image (so we’re told), after all. Must be an enemy. Paul tells us that the last enemy is death, and Revelation (or the Apocalypse) even speaks of a second death.
The whole thing may be a rather desultory pastiche of ideas (as most religions are), but it has very real practical consequences in our lives, because churches still wield fairly substantial forms of power. In fact, that’s what Giles Fraser is up to, and along with the Church Times, the Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and so on, are all putting their weight behind the rule which tells people that they can’t die until God says so. Of course, they don’t put it that way. They try to make their arguments sound nice and ‘secular’.
Of course, if God is the one that determines when we die, in what way is death an enemy? Well, that’s where the contradiction comes in. Death is the enemy, but it’s also through the grave and gate of death that we enter into our joyful resurrection. (Some good Christian language there.) After all, if you’re going to be resurrected, you have to die first. So, we cannot welcome death – as Barth says, we are obliged to fear it – but we must also anticipate death with confidence. (That’s why, even at the grave, we make our song, ‘Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia’!) In any event, say Christians, we may not hasten it. And I say, that’s fine, don’t hasten yours, then. No one says you must. But why must this be denied to others for whom life has become a burden – failing the love of one’s nurse and a pizza frachise – and who are not burdened by these conflicting beliefs?
Well, that’s the rub with totalizing religions such as Christianity, isn’t it? When the Christian says “we are commanded to X”, they genuinely believe two things: 1) this commandment derives from the supreme authority of the cosmos, and defying it is unthinkable, and 2) this commandment, coming from a supreme and universal source, applies to everyone whether they profess a belief or not.