A recent article on LinkedIn tells how the author, Michelle Chaffee, experienced extreme dissatisfactions in a “state of the art” cancer treatment facility. (1) She references something continually lacking in a culture fixated, devoted in attention to what magnificent modern devices and excellent organization can do. In an age where we subscribe increasingly to the idea that all is ultimately knowable, we are only in the beginnings of discovering that discovery is not divinity. There is always still so much more to know.
In 1998 I met with ministers in New Jersey many times to discuss the specific issue of the death penalty. (New Jersey has since abandoned the death penalty, as has my own state, New York.) One of our discussions was about the “pain” involved in putting someone to death by lethal injection. The ministers seemed very concerned that a person was being “pricked” over and over again with a needle in order to find the vein they needed. I pointed out to them that the most extreme sufferings caused by this sort of procedure were surely not physical. So fixed on that which can be seen with the eyes, we forget that humans are creatures that can feel things not just physically, but emotionally.
With some uneasiness, I have to here relate an intensely personal story. In 1977, when I was eighteen, I joined the United States Air Force. I was sent to a training base near San Antonio Texas. In training for about two weeks, I lost dozens of hours of sleep and began to suffer a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the base hospital. About two days later, in the very scary depths of the breakdown, I suffered many grievous worries and conjurations. I sat on a sofa in what was called the “day room” and noticed that all those who had been in the room twenty minutes earlier had left. A few departures could easily be explained, but all of them? All ten? I was strangely alone. It was about 9:00am, and I had no way to explain why there were no people present when the waking day was then in full swing. In my peculiarly degraded mental state, I began to think that the people holding me captive on the psychiatric ward were preparing to kill me, and I thought they had schemed to remove everyone from the room because they didn’t want any witnesses.
Two hospital workers came into the day room and removed two chairs near the entry hallway. This only confirmed my thinking; they were removing the chairs because they figured there’d probably be a scuffle when they tried to overpower or kill me (I just guessed their method was a bludgeoning), and they just wanted more space to do their gruesome work.
Then I thought to myself, But why? What have I done to anyone to warrant being killed? What’s their motivation?
And I thought – since there was nothing I had done, no one I had remotely harmed, and any rule that was broken was surely minor – that it must be because I did not fit with humankind. But again, I had to ask the relevant question, why? As my thoughts proceeded, I figured that they must be killing me because I do not belong. But not belong how, I puzzled? And came to me reluctant answer that my very condition of not belonging to humankind was intrinsic to the reason I could not apprehend their motivations. They know their reasons because they’re human, and I don’t know because I am not. There was something mysterious an unknowable about the nature of humanity from my nonhuman perspective, an essential of what it was to be “human”. For thirty or forty minutes I suffered indescribably, yet was in utmost comfort physically. I thought about all that I’d hoped to achieve, that I believed I was a good person, and that I had fallen deeply in love at the age of eleven – very unfortunately, with a human. And recall I envied the worm and the ant; they had a species to which they belonged, and suddenly having an existential identity meant everything. Words fail me as I try to explain here how dreadful was the feeling that I was not human, that the distance between me and that little girl was a chasmic and unbridgeable universe. It reduced me in an abject grief I have not known before or since, and tears flowed from my eyes in abundance.
A person’s emotional suffering is much more significant to me than it is to others who have never had such an experience as this: a full-blown crisis of identity.
A few years ago, in a public library here on Long Island, a patron in the computer Internet area where I was complained that the person next to her was emitting an intolerable odor. The lady seemed unaware of how the person might feel in such an extremely embarrassing circumstance, others nearby complaining of a smell. She seemed to possess no consciousness that the other human being could feel emotionally. That person might be very poor and homeless, I thought. How humiliating it must be for a person to be both homeless and further degraded in that situation!
The 1980s were a political and religious evolution for me: I began early in the decade working against nuclear weapons and ended learning more and more about human rights. My human rights study led me to the seminal issue of the death penalty.
It is obvious that there are no human rights at all when people are deliberately killed by the official legal system (or, for that matter, killed in any circumstances!). This seems unarguable, for what sort of educational or health care or religious rights, or any other rights are the deceased ever capable of claiming? And what rights then do any of us have? The fact is, the whole concept of rights is stymied, stultified and nullified where the death penalty is concerned. The gravest wrong of murder, it seems to me, is that the crime (definitionally) cannot be undone; no appeasement, contrition, atonement, or redress avails. Killing is the the tossing of the leaden object off the deck of a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night. The wrong of murder is not so much summed in the “taking of life,” but in the absoluteness of the crime; life is never re-given. The murderer and executioner, in absolute unmitigatedness of action, has mistaken their estimation with that of an infallible God. Around 1992 I realized that my keen opposition to the death penalty derived in part from my experience in that Texas military hospital, of knowing what it is like to believe that those around you are preparing to kill you. I knew the emotional agony of being in the electric chair: “I don’t belong with humankind, and that’s why they are killing me,” is certainly what the person there situated sometimes thinks. In the early 1990s, as I grew in religious (Christian) thinking, and I began to believe very strongly that we cannot ever know the full mind and intentions of God. How can we know without the taint of haughty ignorance? Indeed, isn’t this the central error of fanatical Islamic terrorist? And if we cannot know the full and perfect mind of God, how can we do things that are by their nature irreversible? Might such assessments appear differently in the mind of the Arch God of All Goodness and Mercy?
And I looked at the emotional and ideational state of the person being led to the gallows, and I thought we surely transgress upon the caring wants of an infinitely benevolent and loving creator when we help to place a lie in someone’s head at that moment when she or he dies. From a religious perspective, it is a grave wrong to produce or participate in the production of the circumstances in which a person dies embracing a lie. When the person is killed, the chance to remedy any falseness or the questionableness is removed. We never allow this as weighing in our decisions because we have (many of us) utterly discounted the thoughts and feelings of the condemned. If a person has his head and leg shaved, is diapered, and is put into the electric chair by several prison guards and strapped into his last seat he may, of course, believe that he is being killed because he is not really human and does not belong with humankind. (That a person is sometimes necessarily separated from opportunities to harm people must not be confused with any equally necessary maltreatment of that person. The cell and the chair are equally available, of course.)
Many Americans like to think, in cases of horrific murder(s), that since the crimes of the condemned were so very shocking, we cannot fail to treat them with commensurate severity, and we fancy crazily that if we do not kill the person we have not addressed the crime at all, or not sufficiently. Incredible, the way the mind works! Imagine a scenario where I am telling others a true story about a person and I include the specific detail that the person “was not wearing black,” and my hearers immediately assume – as ours is a strictly binary world, isn’t it? – that the person was wearing white. This is the untenable logic of the death penalty supporter: he or she believes that killing is the purest and most reasonable method of dealing with egregious crimes, that the death penalty contains some special deterrent magic, that dangerousness simply rendered harmless by incarceration is not a viable assist to justice. And it is actually held in the mind sometimes by such people, that a “murderer” (a person convicted and sentenced to death) receives no “justice” at all if he is not killed by the state; there is only killing and nothing.
As for me, I would much rather be killed than live even a few years in a prison! And there are many others who likewise would prefer death to prison. But such facts are invisible to a person whose thinking has proceeded to endorse every mean and barbarous depravity in the treatment of malefaction.
In the 1990s an American doctor named Jack Kevorkian was much in the news for his scofflaw tactics in assisted suicide. American laws proscribe the practice of physician-assisted suicide, but Kevorkian helped many people kill themselves. At that time (the 1990s), I held no strong opinions on the euthanasia question; I believed it was a very difficult matter for law to treat when a person was suffering awfully and interminably with an incurable illness that rendered life without merit and hellish. But in the late 1990s, I saw a video of Kevorkian doing this “assisting” work. The terminally ill person was in a wheelchair and appeared to be exactly what one would expect: medical devices attached, in a degraded and desperate condition. Kevorkian’s words throughout the video showed the procedure to be both mechanical and exculpating: the doctor could use the video to prove both that the individual committing suicide wanted his death and that he himself pushed the buttons and released the chemicals that would kill him. Nothing in the entire five-minute video shows any attention to the person’s spiritual state. Kevorkian does not tell the person anything like, “You are a human being, equal to all other human beings that live now or ever have lived, and regardless of your present circumstances, you deserve all the goodness and freedom that anyone else deserves. You die now only as a method of relieving your suffering.”
The doctor does not need to say what I say. He does not need to think the way I think. But to treat a person with complete ignorance of his or her emotional experience – to completely ignore the reality of spiritual pain – is to err in any profession whatever, and ever more grievous when the person thus described has accepted the principle to “do no harm.”
Arrogating to ourselves all the infallibility of divinity cannot save us. And neither can our machines. This is our great error. We are, when all wisdom has come to the fore and been patiently, quiescently accepted, faced with the humbling fact that we are always flaw-ridden (not just “flawed”) and must not engage behaviors that are irreversible and are by their nature irremediable. We are not gods, but mortal inhabitants of a very fleshy, gore-infested, corrupt and cruel world. And our stubbornness merely adds to our shameful debasement.
“Get the plank out of your own eye.” Thence one can see! And what is “the plank” but hypocrisy, acting as though our every idea were unimpeachably perfect, and therefore we risk nothing by doing that which is perfectly unalterable?
Whether God exists or not, would it be a mistake to claim permanently and irrevocably that a person was not human and to act irremediably on the claim? Even in a universe with no God, does the human mind and deed, singularly or aggregated, ever err?
Doubtless we used to make mistakes as individuals within our species. When and how did we mortals gain beyond it?
(1) See:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-giant-hospital-systems-might-getting-wrong-michelle-chaffee?trk=eml-b2_content_ecosystem_digest-hero-14-null&midToken=AQFj2y7d-8x7Zw&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=19M2w_HAnr4Tg1