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Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death. For non-believers, though, ear
by slibhb 3y ago
Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death.
For non-believers, though, earthly life is all there is, so reducing suffering, disease, and poverty are much more pressing goals -- goals that might be worth a little alienation.
I would emphasize choice: people can (and do) embrace alternative ways of life, from the Amish to kibbutzim. Similarly, we don't have to drag out our final years: we're free to opt out of medical treatments. You can also opt out of modernity in smaller ways, decisions like not owning a car, not watching TV, and so on.
- walleeee 3y agoI would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death. Also it remains rather difficult to "opt out" of a protracted, likely intubated decline, at least in the US. Moreover there is no opting out of modernity writ large. This is the nature of multi-polar traps: choosing not to join an arms race is a local, temporary reprieve. The optionality modernity seems determined to optimize for is narrow at best. At worst it threatens its own end
- ses1984 3y ago>I would contest the notion that a lack of religiosity must magnify discontent with death It’s the other way around. Lack of religiosity is the default state and with it you get the default discontent with death, but a religion with an afterlife could reduce discontent with death.
- telmo 3y ago> Lack of religiosity is the default state On the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio... > and with it you get the default discontent with death That is a huge assumption. There is a huge variety of ways in which societies, cultures and individuals relate and have related with death.
- ses1984 3y agoPopular or widespread doesn't mean it’s default. Religion is part of culture and that’s something that’s passed down person to person. A blank culture or no culture has no religion. Tabula rasa. I’m not assuming anything, I’m not pegging the default discontent with death to a particular value, I don’t know what it is and it’s irrelevant. I’m just saying the some religions, with certain concepts of afterlife, like catholicism, would reduce that discontent.
- dan_mctree 3y agoWhy do you assume a tabula rasa person would assume that consciousness ceases to continue on death? I don't think there's anything obvious that would suggest this goes one way or the other and that different people could end up settling for different conclusions. An obvious natural guess would be that it'd be similar to sleeping, as in, you would see dreams
- XorNot 3y agoBecause why would consciousness continue after death when it didn't continue before birth? What's different about the post-birth state compared to post-death?
- ses1984 3y agoWhy would you assume that I assume a tabula rasa person assumes that consciousness ceases to continue with on death? I assume that they wouldn’t know what happens and have some baseline level of feelings about death.
- markhahn 3y agoisn't it more that people cleave to magical thinking, archaic though it is, because they have trouble dealing with the despair of poor health and final death? one big support for this is the gradual decline of religiosity in areas of the world where life is improving. conflated, of course, with the hegemonistic aspect of organized religion.
- pas 3y agoOne argument is that we simply replaced the archaic (religion-focused) dogma with a modern (consumerist, individualist, hyperpoliticized) one, but their function is the same, to serve as complex death denial rituals.
- thfuran 3y agoThat doesn't sound likely to be a compelling argument.
- pas 3y agoHm, consider it the flaw of my botched paraphrasing/summarizing/application of it, and maybe give it another chance in a better form: https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-158-the-creation-of-meaning-nietzsche-the-ascetic-ideal-f8k5h-k8xfx-6tyfj-xc8hy https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-158-the-cre... (the URL is misleading, it's about Ernest Becker's ideas, there's a transcript too ... if for some reason that link doesn't work, you can listen to it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ )
- ceasefire 3y agoPossibility remains that adverse conditions are not being masked by psychological devices, rather that these conditions are conducive to heightened spirituality (which may be present in varying degree in all humans). one big support for this is the fact that many saints came from affluent backgrounds and chose the device of asceticism ("harsh life", "corporal despair", "terminal denial of certain pleasures", "dying to earthly life") to heighten their experience of spiritual communion and worship.
- lacrosse_tannin 3y agoYou only get so much time on earth either way!
- ogurechny 3y agoIt's a bit offensive to give us all “non-believers” zero metaphysical depth
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- saghm 3y ago> Criticizing modern medicine makes a lot of sense if you're a devout Catholic because the afterlife tempers the sadness of death > Similarly, we don't have to drag out our final years: we're free to opt out of medical treatments OTOH, Catholicism also is strongly against euthanasia, which is arguably at odds with the sentiment of not having to drag out final years. I think there's plenty of room for a philosophy to "not drag out final years" as a non-believer who doesn't need to rule out certain measures like that.
- hudon 3y agoIt isn't at odds, since in both cases (euthanasia and medically-prolonged end-of-life), it is the human person that is trying to control the ultimate outcome of life. The Catholic approach is to say "let God decide".
- saghm 3y agoI guess to me it sounds like it's at best orthogonal to the idea of dragging out life; sometimes it drags out longer than it might otherwise have to, sometimes it ends much earlier than it would otherwise have to. I think my confusion was over mentioning "opt out of medical treatments" right after "we don't have to drag out life" in a way that sounded to me like it was calling them equivalent, and from my perspective, sometimes forgoing medical treatments can itself drag life out longer than someone might want. Ultimately it sounds like we mostly agree that people can make personal decisions for themselves about their medical care; I just found the way you described it above fairly confusing. (edit: I apparently missed that the response was from a different person than I originally responded to)
- XorNot 3y agoThe Catholic approach is economical: it's expensive to keep dying people alive if you need resources to do so, but a religion promising eternal paradise is going to have a real propagation problem if a significant number of adherents commit suicide - and trying to carve out euthanasia exceptions wasn't going to play well to medieval peasants.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- quacked 3y ago> You can also opt out of modernity in smaller ways, decisions like not owning a car, not watching TV, and so on. Sure, if you reduce the effects of "modernity" to only your own ability to consume goods and services. One cannot "opt out" of the degeneration of social will, or the increasing demand for control over each part of our lives by unaccountable bureaucracies.
- Eumenes 3y agoI, too, would like an anarchist time machine
- ciconia 3y agoDoing everything possible to prolong life has consequences beyond the life of the individual: it's a significant cost to the economy and to family members. There's the cost of the medical treatment itself, but people living longer now also have to finance their life with their savings or even keep working instead of retiring, so their kids get a smaller inheritance, and have to compete with their parents in the labour market.