©2005 UrbisMedia
I feel a twinge of guilt using Terri Shiavo as my lead in this piece. The poor woman has been exploited by the Republicans, the anti-abortionists, lawyers, clerics, and people who have just plain forgotten what it means to mind their own damn business. They have made this helpless person an icon for their own misguided and crassly political ends, amounting to an individualized version of the Vietnam military adage –“we had to destroy the village to save it.” It has been a reveille for hypocrites, the biggest of which is the man who led the congressional sideshow to intervene in a personal and medical matter.
I hope thaI I can avoid any association with these sleazy opportunists in this essay. One thing I will not do, and that is run a photo of poor Terri’s smile, that sad, ambiguous visage of vacuous surprise behind which is an irrevocably damaged brain. Must the opportunists and the media make this picture the poor woman’s visual legacy? Must they strip her of the last of her dignity? The same expression can be seen on countless men, women, and children, ravaged by AIDS, or starvation, in Africa and elsewhere, but there are no late night congressional sessions and presidential flights for them, little political payoff.
What I do wish to do is to try to find a positive vein in the political furor and media circus that has swirled around Mrs. Shiavo’s fate, because it bears upon how this country is going to deal with matters so central to what the Enlightenment brought to the fore in philosophical and political discourse – the right of self-determination. Because, in America today, Terri Shiavo’s case highlights the connotative interrelationships of what we mean by “right.”
Right = Correct: There is the issue in this debate as to whether the physicians havecorrectly diagnosed Terri’s medical condition. Numerous neurologists have observed, conducted tests, and applied the fund of experience they have with similar symptomatic presentation to pronounce that she is in what is called a “persistent vegetative state.” In terms of her cognition, her awareness, her self-consciousness, Terri has, for nearly a decade and a half, been like a computer whose hard drive has irrevocably crashed. The work of physicians is science, not supposition and, while anyone might maintain that there is some faint chance that something miraculous could intervene, it is not for others to impute hope upon anyone else’s fate.
But we know that science is on the defensive in these days of “creationism” and revival meeting “healings.” (Notice that faith healers have carefully avoided Terri? C’mon guys, show us your stuff!) The national science endowments have their funding cuts, but “faith-based organizations have received over $8 billion. So we have curb-side pseudo-neurologists offering their diagnoses, and even Sen. Bill Frist, a cardio-surgeon, offering a less severe diagnosis, based on his viewing of a videotape.
According to every cannon of rationality these people are not right, not correct; they are wrong!
Religiously Right : Neither necessarily right, or wrong, are the righteous, who take their guidance in such matters not from science, but from faith. They claim to know “what Jesus would do,” in such circumstances, what the “will of God” would be. This is when they conveniently tuck away the way “the Lord works in mysterious ways”; why the Lord would allow a woman’s brain to be all but completely destroyed. They need no evidence, nothing substantial, to make their case, because in their world, revelation trumps research every time.
They will gather in the streets in Florida and announce that they are the minions of the Lord, as many will gather in St. Peter’s Square and supplicate the Lord on behalf of their Holy Father (does he have a durable power of attorney?). But the Angel of Death will call in due course; he is a product of creation and he does the work of the Lord.
No, they do not know the ways of the Lord; but we do know that we have been given bothReason as well as Faith. They claim to know what is divine , but have no sense of the humane. To be righteous is not to be correct, these days only “politically correct.”
Rights: And then there is that ineluctably secular domain of the word “right”: the right to live, the right to die (if one chooses); the right to control our own bodies, the right to the truth, the very right to demand our rights. This is neither the realm of the scientist, nor the cleric, or the purely rational or purely faithful; it is the realm of political and philosophical discourse . Such discourse may apply to faith and rationally for guidance, but in the end it is the domain of reason and reasonableness —its is the province of doing our best to strike and balance between individuality and community, to stay true to our constitutional principles, and to maintain the right of self-determination. It is no easy place to be, and it is a cop out to cloak oneself in pure rationality, or pure faith, and it is greatly sundered when the process of reasonable discourse is tainted with partisanship and opportunism.
In the end, for Terri Shiavo, science can make a diagnosis, but not a choice; religion can claim it knows the proper choice, but it must be a prayer, not a command. The guardians of reason and reasonableness have, through twenty-five judicial reviews, been in accord that a husband, this husband, might best know what his stricken and voiceless wife would have wished, what right of self-determination she would have asserted. It is the best, in the uncertainties of life, that reasoned discourse can do. Who can gainsay that. Wherever the consciousness of Terri Shiavo may be, I’m betting that she already knows that.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.29.2005)