Friends and foes and the culture of death

Friends and foes and the culture of death
The fact that we now live in a society highly ideologised by social media and rogue journalism makes inevitable that we must ask of each encounter “is this person friend or foe?”, writes John Waters

 

When you stand up to be counted on what have become the era’s most ideologically-mobilised questions, you find yourself encountering disfavour almost every place you go. A certain coolness in a shop assistant, a muttered epithet by a passer-by that you convince yourself you’re not quite sure you heard right – these are just a couple of the symptoms of a condition that gradually puts you on high alert all the time.

No doubt, this leads to over-defensiveness and misreading of signs, but it also allows one to avoid blundering in with an affable word only to be met by a chill sufficient to facilitate a multiple tooth extraction.

In the past couple of years, I have had occasion to present numerous times at hospitals as a patient or out-patient. Here, when this same syndrome rears its head, it is obviously decidedly more worrying than in the great outdoors.

Friendor foe

The fact that we now live in a society highly ideologised by social media and rogue journalism makes inevitable that, on encountering someone in a medical context for the first time, a question will unaided formulate itself to the effect: is this person a friend or a foe? Until recently, such musings would have been self-evidently unworthy.

In other professional contexts, it is increasingly taken for granted that practitioners have a right to be partisan with regard to matters that previously they had a professional responsibility to remain at least outwardly neutral on. Judges, for example, are now widely discussed in terms of whether they are ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’, even though the role of a judge is to be neither – to be, in fact, disinterested, to have no personal view, or at least none that is publicly detectable.

A judge used to be a trained practitioner in the adoption of objective positions, in sifting facts and principles in a manner all but impossible for someone without such training. Before long, such judges will be a distant memory, as the outcomes of contentious issues become a matter of headcounts rather than judicious deliberation.

We are already beginning to look away from old people’s frailty, and therefore their humanity”

As a sometime patient, I feel I already detect signs of a similar shift in the medical profession. This should strike everyone, even the most ideological among us, as disturbing.

There is what I detect as a distantly related phenomenon that, as someone who has twice been seriously ill over the past couple of years, I have observed in conversations with people who have become aware of my infirmity. This I identify as a tendency to glide over illness, to ask after one’s health only perfunctorily, and always in a manner as to suggest that it would be preferable for one to provide assurances that things are at least improving.

Sometimes the syndrome takes the form of someone hastening to assure you that you’ve ‘never looked better’, or to pooh-pooh the idea that you could have been as ill as has been claimed. The net effect is to imply that illness is something that threatens to come between us, that it is the duty of the sick person, in the interests of sensitivity, to pretend to be well.

The net effect is to imply that illness is something that threatens to come between us”

And there is a further related syndrome that I have begun to notice more or less simultaneously, which sometimes strikes me in hospitals when I am waiting to be seen or scanned or x-rayed. I would call it a premonition rather than a mere intuition or feeling. It is, to coin a phrase, triggered by the sight of a gurney being pushed along a corridor carrying an elderly person to an operating theatre or scanning room.

Support

A decade ago, such a sight would have been unremarkable, carrying no ominous portent. Now, however, the duck having been broken on the phenomenon of legalised-death-by-doctor, one finds oneself involuntarily asking: how much longer will such sights be seen? For how much longer will our society continue to support the right of an elderly person to live out his or her days for as long as God and nature decree, and avail of the medical care our society offers those whom it considers worth preserving?

My sense is that our culture is already preparing us for this next phase, by ‘training’ us to see sickness as a form of self-indulgence and the old as a separate category of the human. And, because the old are increasingly hidden away from everyday society – in purpose-built ‘nursing homes’ – when we happen upon such a person, we are already beginning to look away from their frailty, and therefore their humanity.

I cannot predict exactly how all these signs will continue to converge and unfold, but already I can feel a change in the air that tells me that, by the time I myself become elderly (not far into the future), even some of my fellow geriatrics will have been recruited to the mission of breaking down our last taboos in this regard. I also sense that, should I persist in my tendency to oppose what is called progress, our mysterious new culture of death will find ways of ensuring that I become the enemy of my death-desiring fellows.

John Waters will speak on the issue ‘Society, professionalism and the doctor-patient relationship: investigating integrity and trust in ideological public spaces’ at the 5th Annual Conference of the Irish Catholic Doctors Learning Network in the Emmaus Retreat Centre in Swords, Co. Dublin, on October 5. Visit http://www.icdln.ie/