02 September 2009
Is Health the New Morality?
Improved living conditions and advances in medicine have extended average human lifetimes to previously unimagined lengths. There are even dreams of avoiding death altogether through the use of cryogenic technology. As it becomes more common for people to live into their seventies, eighties and nineties, the medical profession has increasingly bifurcated between getting us there and keeping us there. Crisis and chronic care both have youthful and geriatric divisions.
Has the lengthening of life expectancy, at least for those who can adequately support themselves, contributed to the growth of religious faith among wide swaths of society? In some places, like the U.S., it has; in others, where the state has been crafted as a social welfare provider, the trend seems to be less pronounced. Good health is the key to happiness in that environment, for longevity is a tepid substitute for heavenly reward if it is distressed with physical suffering.
A social system that makes good health its new morality values medical professionals as its priests. In the U.S., doctors are still considered, and compensated, as entrepreneurs. The health care reform that many Americans crave really means changing that social structure so that the trustees of their ability to prolong their physical existence are relieved of the need to provide for their own welfare.
Improved living conditions and advances in medicine have extended average human lifetimes to previously unimagined lengths. There are even dreams of avoiding death altogether through the use of cryogenic technology. As it becomes more common for people to live into their seventies, eighties and nineties, the medical profession has increasingly bifurcated between getting us there and keeping us there. Crisis and chronic care both have youthful and geriatric divisions.
Has the lengthening of life expectancy, at least for those who can adequately support themselves, contributed to the growth of religious faith among wide swaths of society? In some places, like the U.S., it has; in others, where the state has been crafted as a social welfare provider, the trend seems to be less pronounced. Good health is the key to happiness in that environment, for longevity is a tepid substitute for heavenly reward if it is distressed with physical suffering.
A social system that makes good health its new morality values medical professionals as its priests. In the U.S., doctors are still considered, and compensated, as entrepreneurs. The health care reform that many Americans crave really means changing that social structure so that the trustees of their ability to prolong their physical existence are relieved of the need to provide for their own welfare.
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