Show me a culture that despises young and old alike
The ever-lucid Mark Shea wonders about the contrast between Madonna the rockstar and WNBA star Candace Parker. http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-of-those-western-values-we-are.html here is his comment and link:
Get married and have a baby, you are vilified as "selfish".
Show me a culture that despises virginity, and I will show you a culture that despises children.
Myself, I wonder about the contrast between the alleged benevolence of the new socialist America under our New ‘New Deal’, and the cool ruthlessness to be shown to the graying baby boomers as they age.
Specifically, I note that a provision in HR1, the so-called stimulus bill, provides that the federal government has erected a board FCCCER (Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research) to oversee the efficiency of medical treatments in hospitals and private practices throughout the nation, and to fine those deemed inefficient. (The irony of a government bureaucracy tutoring the free market on how to work efficiently is not lost on me.)
The allegedly scientific procedure used to measure efficiency is to compare the cost of the treatment to the number of years the patient is expected to receive a benefit thereby. Since old people have fewer years on earth yet remaining, the denominator in this ratio is always small for them. Spending fifty dollars on a treatment for a patient expected to live another fifty years is considered more efficient than spending twenty dollars on a patient expected to live another fifteen years.
The draft report accompanying the House portion of the bill notes that procedures and drugs “that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.”
This is not an advisory board. It can fine doctors giving treatments to patients that the government deems it inefficient to treat. So if grandma is in pain, but not expected to live long, she should deal with it, so that medical money can be spent on the young.
The British have a similar board which uses the same calculation. With no sense of the ironic at all, this was called the N.I.C.E. (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) almost as predicted by C.S. Lewis. The N.I.C.E. made international news when it ruled that an expensive treatment for macular degeneration, a condition that leads to blindness, was not allowed until the patient had gone blind in one eye. This story has a happy ending: public pressure after three years forced a reversal of that ruling. But it should give an American pause to wonder what will happen to him if his case is not so worthy of publicity.
So these FCCCER’s are going to FCC with us. We’re FCC’d.
Likewise, the reaction of the elite to the famous Terrri Schiavo case showed the same contrast. The Left uniformly favored having a man kill his wife because she was useless to him. She was brain-damaged, and no fun any more, and so could not participate in the fun-filled orgy that a hedonist defines as the source of all good in life. Out of respect, she was allowed slowly and painfully over a period of days leading to over a week to dehydrate and starve to death. There are other cases, less famous, of patients begging for food, being let to starve to death, and nurses who lost their jobs smuggling food in.
I regard this with a sense of horror and astonishment. The Baby Boomers are aging. They are old and gray and worn out. They have not reproduced in such numbers as to assure a rising generation willing and able to care for them: social security both displaced private retirement and is bankrupt. The family structure, the norms of filial piety, have been decayed, or even destroyed, by a culture that does not trust anyone over thirty, as if keeping a fiendish anti-fourth-commandment to dishonor your father and mother. Keeping care of grandma at home during her twilight years is now odd and unusual: for more often, the crones and greybeards are packed off to old folk’s homes.
So two things are going on similtaneously: the elderly have ever less private control over their health care and fate, and, meanwhile, the government has embarked on a policy of thrifty cost-savings, by letting the useless bread-gobblers die. Both these things spring from a general movement urged on by the Boomers.
I cannot fathom it. I suspect the answer lies in the metaphysics, the world-view, supported by these rebels against reality: I refer once again to that excellent essay
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
