RUTHFULLY YOURS

The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom“:

We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh?

Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny:

Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment to this, teaches us that freedom is negative, a matter of being at liberty to oppress other bodies.

In that way of regarding the world, fear replaces care: the fear we believe we must instill in others, and our own fear that we will lose our dominion. And, of course, most people are not free at all, even in this fearful sense. If we understand what is wrong with this philosophical tradition and this history, the right to health care becomes undeniable.

I don’t try to instill fear in others. And I see people caring for each other all around me. How about you?

Snyder reminds us, in his fashion, that we are not islands. True. But really — this?

No one can become an individual without help. And in order to remain free, we must know ourselves—the task, par excellence, that cannot be achieved in solitude. We all go through life with a piece of metaphysical spinach between our teeth. If we think we know everything we need to know about ourselves, we are wrong, and therefore vulnerable to those who see how we can be manipulated. And, of course, the most tempting error is precisely the belief that we did it all ourselves and will do it all ourselves.

And that leads us to . . . slavery!

People who make this mistake tend to think that they do not need health care, and deny that it is a right. This particular illusion of self-sufficiency, at least in the USA, has everything to do with slavery. It is therefore not only morally indefensible, but entirely out of date . . . And so, even now, racism in the USA takes the form of the belief that the government acting in a way that might benefit African Americans must somehow hurt others, and must somehow violate freedom.

But then, what is “freedom?”

Freedom is development, the development of the very young, as they become sovereign over themselves. Then freedom is transcendence, the unpredictability that sovereign people can bring into the world, once they have their own sense of what is right and good. The Leib, to use Stein’s term, is not just one more object reacting to other objects; it is a subject, like other bodily subjects, capable of recognising them, and of altering the world around it by emanating values through actions. And freedom is movement—the path of life that people can choose as they mature, rebelling as they can and should against the very institutions that brought them to this point. Yet at every stage, from birth to rebellion, the creation of that individuality depends upon the work of others. No child can create the family that enables sovereignty. Teenagers cannot create all the culture they need to imbibe the values that they will alter, combine, and make their own. And young adults cannot build the schools (or for that matter the roads) that will take them where they need to go.

And the point of all this?

The thing I understood when I was very ill is the point that I am trying to make in this essay. All of these images, the cave and the slave, all of these thinkers, Socrates and Stein, all of these apparent paradoxes of the individual and the collective came together for me over a few days, when I nearly died of sepsis. I saw for myself how my own choices, my own overgrown stubbornness about my body, had helped get me into trouble. But it was also evident that a country where health care was not a right, where medicine is commercial, had guided me out of hospitals when I should have stayed in them. And with a Black friend at my side, I could not miss how racism runs through our national bad choices, and how slavery is at the bottom of everything.

Okay. Enough. I can’t stand anymore.

A prime purpose of venerable medical journals like The Lancet, and a crucial role that is supposed to be played by our most elite university professors, is to feature and to be informed and wise leaders of society. And certainly, helping people get access to medical care is an important topic worthy of informed discussion and effective advocacy.

But this isn’t that. To the contrary, a profound shallowness has taken over some of our most important institutions that are no longer serving us well because they don’t seem much interested in actually engaging society effectively. Until that changes, the people’s trust will not be restored.