I don’t like using the word evil, but I will make an exception in the face of the horrible developments taking place in Australia. Our regressive leaders are working to make our society less humane and, ultimately, less human.
Their lack of historical understanding is shocking and sad. Do they not know that it has taken millennia for the West to agree that all human beings deserve equal respect, and as a result, those in authority are obligated to ‘restrain evil and protect good’ for all humans?
This is the basis of the Hippocratic Oath and its offshoots. It has been applied progressively to all people, regardless of age, race, wealth, or caste. Opinion has varied over time as to whether this oath (traditionally a covenant) should be taken before gods (as in ancient Greece), God (in the Judaeo-Christian tradition), or before fellow members of society, but now it is shifting.
One of the core principles of all versions has been to ‘First, do no harm.’ Even in the original Greek, there was a recognition that this applied to a generously broad definition of humanity – for example, people whether under ‘bond or free’. But as argued by Larry Siedentop in Inventing the Individual – The Origins of Western Liberalism and by Tom Holland in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, it is only since the creation of the individual and the making of the Western mind that we in the West have been able to conceptualise that all humans, regardless of their completeness, function or status, are deserving of universal respect.
This understanding is not innate to humanity. It has to come from information outside of the natural world where animal-type instincts are reflected in our self-focussed personal and clan-based actions. We come to accept universal respect when we are offered it or we reject it. It does not bubble up and stay put all on its own.
This is why Siedentop starts his book by asking why ‘liberalism has come to stand for “non-belief” – for indifference and permissiveness, if not for decadence’ and if the charge justified?’ Holland’s exploration follows a similar path, but he notes at the start of his book that his thinking changed after reading social history. His first shift was to correct his Disneyfied version of the past and the role of the rationalists of later times. He writes:
It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.… Assumptions that I had grown up with – about how a society should properly be organised and the principles that it should uphold – were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past.
Holland draws on many sources to explain the development of universal respect within the Western mind, but after 450 pages, he turns to Martin Luther King for the expression of this truth, now taken for granted, that we are all equal. As Holland observes, King’s proposition, ‘that every human being possessed an equal dignity’ was not remotely a self-evident truth, and, ‘The origins of this principle lay not in the French revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.’
Greg Sheridan, in his erudite book, God is Good for You, agrees with these authors that the basis of care for all, regardless of who they are, is in retreat because ‘The loss of its connection to religious belief has led liberalism into a sustained nervous breakdown.’
How does an ideology like liberalism have a nervous breakdown? One key indicator is when it loses touch with reality. Take the understanding of what it means to be ‘human’. Our modern self is no longer defined by respect for our soul or our dignity from conception or by a universal commitment to the sanctity of life by all others capable of caring for us. Our modern self is defined by a brand of utilitarianism: ‘Of what worth are we to those around us?’
We see this when adults spend thousands of dollars to create the baby of their choice with any technology necessary rather than caring for the ones already in their world who need help. We see it when adults suggest to others in pain or despair that death is the best (read ‘easiest’) option. Instead of comforting a person when they are dying, they are encouraged to end their life conveniently, all in the name of ‘caring for you’.
Herein lies the evil. For the regressive leaders in the medical field, indifference, permissiveness, and professional decadence is on the rise. Indifference to what it means to be human at the start of life has resulted in being offered a lottery of choices, depending on which physician a woman (and her family) faces. The physician is not to protest the inherent value of the life of the unborn for fear of professional reprimand and media backlash.
A hospital is not to exclude assisting in the killing of those in terminal pain. They are not to promote palliative care. If they do, they run the risk of heartless humans taking them over.
The political masters of the caring professions have given themselves permission to categorise those who are worthy of help and those who are not. A baby born alive after an attempt to kill it (abortion) is left to die without care. Why? They must not be considered ‘enough of a human’. On whose definition? People will not say with any coherence. But letting a baby die without attempting to save its life does not come from the long humane journey described by Siedentop and Holland any more than offering early death to a fourteen-year-old, as mooted in the ACT.
History is replete with examples of people using this ‘thin end of the wedge’ strategy to shift definitions and practice. They disguise their intentions with verbal decadence, a looseness with meaning that moves to meaninglessness, except for those who are taking the rest of us on their preferred, self-serving journey.
And that is evil. It is a perverse reconstruction of what universal respect and care means.
Siedentop described the ground we made in accepting universal respect and care: ‘More than anything else, I think, Christianity changed the ground of human identity.… Christianity changed ‘the name of the game’. Social rules became secondary.’ But now, social rules and roles become the primary determinant of futures, at the pleasure of another. They decide whether your time is up, literally.
Sheridan looked at the consequences of dumping a foundational belief in universal respect: ‘A certain panic at the existential emptiness of liberal atheism impels liberalism to a new authoritarianism. Everyone must genuflect to the same secular pieties… Nothing is more powerful now in Western politics, or more dangerous, than identity politics.’ And it is our feelings about our identity that is so dominant in places of influence.
Thus, we have these twin evils, which are ending uniquely defined life forms that we call human. But if we cannot handle inconvenience, discomfort, and pain as a people, then we are but animals seeking pleasure. But be aware – when the animal comes for you, it will be too late to object, as too many others in times before this have discovered.
Stephen J Fyson, Ph.D., is an educational and pastoral care consultant who previously practiced as an accredited psychologist and teacher.
