The life we’re prepared to kill for
Following the recent approval of the ‘abortion drug’ RU-486, and now with stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning once more on the agenda in the Australian parliament, it is tempting to see our society as sliding into a ‘culture of death’.
William McClay, over at First Things, sees it slightly differently, and I think rightly:
Abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, the cannibalization of embryos—all these things are linked, but they do not reflect a desire to promote death per se. Instead, they reflect a world in which the overwhelming desire of the sovereign individual will to have its way, and to order and manufacture a world it can live in without let or hindrance, is regarded as the chief source of value, or at any rate the value that trumps all others. They reflect a view of life that trivializes death, precisely because it fails to understand what life is.
Our society is not in love with death, but infatuated with a particular vision of life—an autonomous, individualistic life, in which my happiness and fulfilment is the supreme value. This is the vision that gave us feminism, the sexual revolution, ‘no-fault’ divorce and ‘greed is good’. And now it's the philosophy that is promoting the destruction of human life through embryonic cloning in the service of improving the freedom and health of other individuals.
It's a vision of life that will happily bear the collateral damage suffered by others (unborn babies, the children of our marriages, the sexual partners we cast aside), so long as my own personal freedom and flourishing is not threatened. Our culture is so in love with it, it's happy to kill for it.