Teaching doctors to kill?

One of the implications of euthanasia is that it involves teaching doctors to take life. Margaret Somerville argues that:

We also need to consider how the legalisation of euthanasia could affect the profession of medicine and its practitioners. Euthanasia takes both beyond their fundamental roles of caring, healing and curing whenever possible. It involves them, no matter how compassionate their motives, in the infliction of death on those for whom they provide care and treatment. ...
Can we imagine teaching medical students how to administer euthanasia - how to kill their patients? A fundamental attitude we reinforce in medical students, interns and residents is a repugnance toward the idea of killing patients. If physicians were authorised to administer euthanasia, it would no longer be possible to instil that repugnance. Maintaining this repugnance and, arguably, the intuitive recognition of a need for it, are demonstrated in the outraged reactions against physicians carrying out capital punishment when laws provide for them to do so. We do not consider their involvement acceptable - not even for those physicians who personally are in favour of capital punishment. What would we lose by legalising euthanasia?

Is this a problem though? The following discussion of the study of the experience of killing in war by Stanley Hauerwas is to say the least thought provoking.

I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill. It may seem odd to call the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill "a sacrifice," but this sacrifice often renders the lives of those who make it unintelligible. The sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill is but the dark side of the willingness in war to be killed. I am not suggesting that every person who has killed in war suffers from having killed. But I do believe that those who have killed without the killing troubling their lives should not have been in the business of killing in the first place.

In On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt Col Dave Grossman reports on General S.L.A. Marshall's study of men in battle in World War II. Marshall discovered that of every hundred men along a line of fire during a battle, only 15 to 20 would take part by firing their weapons. This led Marshall to conclude that the average or healthy individual, that is, the person who could endure combat, "still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility." Lt Col Grossman observes that to study killing in combat is very much like the study of sex: "Killing is a private, intimate occurrence of tremendous intensity, in which the destructive act becomes psychologically very much like the procreative act." Telling the truth about the sacrifice of war

Essentially what euthanasia requires is that doctors will be asked to undertake the sacrifice of overcoming societal norms and undertake the task of taking human life. If we wish to take the step of legalising the taking of life we need to be clear about the human implications of what we are doing and who will bear the burden of this. 

Reflections on Anzac Day

...A few useful reflections on a variety of perspectives that dug through to varying degrees the prevailing largely unself-critical accounts of Anzac Day.

Stanley Hauerwas in The Sacrifices of War though not directly about Anzac Day provided a good many insights into the character and language of Anzac Day. He makes the important observation that... it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill. It may seem odd to call the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill "a sacrifice," but I will argue that this sacrifice often renders the lives of those who make it unintelligible. The sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill is but the dark side of the willingness in war to be killed.


We are, Hauerwas acknowledges ... fated to kill and be killed because we know no other way to live. But through the forgiveness made possible by the cross of Jesus we are no longer condemned to kill. A people have been created who refuse to resort to the sword that they and those they love might survive. They seek not to survive, but to live in the light of Christ's resurrection.

Bruce Skates in a comment piece in the Age, Gallipoli is a global calamity, argues that The futility of war is best acknowledged by mourning the suffering of all nations, not just our own and draws attention to some of the silences in our celebration.

As we approach the centenary of the Great War, we should remember that Gallipoli was a global calamity, one that claimed the lives of soldiers across the British Empire and the world. And we should go further than that. As the Anzac Correspondent knew all too well, battles don't end when the guns stop firing. In the 1920s, and for decades later, Australia and a dozen other combatant nations lived in the shadow of war. It was not just that war visited grief on countless thousands of communities. The trauma of war was not confined to the battlefield or the casualty lists.

Now is the time to broaden our focus and examine the plight of families and communities who cared for the legion of crippled, blind and insane. ''War-wrecked men'' they were called, and they carried the conflict home to their communities. Sadly, (as Marina Larsson's haunting study of repatriation shows) domestic violence, poverty and alcoholism were as much the legacy of war as the legends many celebrate today. Finally, what of the broken promise of Gallipoli? The men and women who served were told the Great War would be the war to end all wars. What a Great Lie that has been.

It is time to see Gallipoli for what it was: pointless and obscene. It is time to look beyond that narrow beachhead at Anzac Cove, acknowledge the futility of war and mourn the suffering of nations other than our own. The Anzac centenary offers the opportunity for new forms of remembrance that are balanced and inclusive: ''bigger'' and ''more historical'', as our veteran put it. 

Jeff Sparrow doubts that the new forms of remembrance that Skates suggests is not likely. In Memory and the Anti-Politics of Anzac Day. Sparrow explains why. 

Conservatives, and most liberals, tell us that Anzac Day stands above politics. That’s true, in a fashion. But the event’s not apolitical so much as anti-political.

Where Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means, Anzac celebrates the battlefield as a realm entirely removed from political life. The Great War spurred an unprecedented degree of social polarisation in Australia, and yet the obsessive retelling of the Gallipoli landing never corresponds to any equivalent interest in, say, the populace’s remarkable rejection of conscription in two ballots in 1916 and 1917. The Bush/Blair/Howard War on Terror rendered that period more relevant than ever, since obvious parallels can be drawn between the hysterical patriotism of the ‘Freedom Fries’ days and the jingoism during which most Australian cities renamed their streets (if you live in Victoria Street, there’s a pretty good chance it was once called Wilhelm Road), while the state-sanctioned suspicion of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 corresponds to the widespread persecution of Irish and Catholics in the wake of the Easter Uprising, and the unparalleled freedom granted to security agencies echoes Billy Hughes’ promulgation of the open-ended War Precautions Act.

Yet Anzac Day functions not to celebrate but to prevent that kind of history. It lauds bravery yet allows no room for what Bismarck called ‘civil courage’, a trait that many non-combatants showed in abundance when, against all the newspapers, politicians and mainstream political parties, they opposed the slaughter in Europe.

Discovering Stanley Hauerwas

Hannah’s Child: A Theologians Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas

Published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6487-1

I cannot remember exactly when I first encountered Stanley Hauerwas but it was sometime probably during 1982 when I was working for Zadok as an editor/researcher and had plenty of excuses to range widely in my theological reading.  Aside from his own provoking explorations of what it is to be a Christian I have also benefited from following up on books that he has recommended and from the theological work of many of his students. I have also enjoyed his company at a couple of conferences and events on a couple of his trips to Australia. He was in person a delightfully accessible person open to conversation with anyone who wanted to engage with him, not standing on the dignity of being a famous academic.

This book is memoir of his life as a theologian and how that life in theology lead him to become a Christian. What's the difference between a memoir and an autobiography you may ask?

A memoir is not a sequenced account of life but the telling of stories  that have given a life its internal shape. A biography will have to wait. In the mean time we have a memoir that is powerful in its honesty and truthfulness in its account of how being a theologian has been Stnaley's path to discover what it is and what ite means to be a Christian.

As a long term reader of Stanley's theology what is particularly striking has been the significance of the experience of class for his life and thought. This is a book which is accessible to readers well beyond the theological and academic world. It is a telling of the stories of significant moments in his life and a testimony to friendship and the friends who sustained him through many years of pain arising from the mental illness of his wife.

No explanations no false prophecy

The story in attached link of a "prophecy" from a pastor claiming that the bushfires in Victoria were a judgement from God on Victoria's abortion law regime got on my goat.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/pastors-abortion-dream-inflames-bushfire-tragedy-20090210-832f.html

There are such things in the biblical narrative as false prophets and in my assessment this has got to rank the author as falling into that category.

David Bentley Hart in The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? comments that ...it is impossible for the infinite God of love directly, or positively, to will evil (physical or moral) p.70.

Stanley Hauerwas argues that we cannot afford to try and give ourselves explanations for evil - it can become a noisy way of trying to hide the silences that such events as the firestorm in Marysville and Kinglake creates. What we need he says are not explanations for evil, or even someone to blame for the evil, a scapegoat, rather what is required ...is a community capable of sustaining our grief. (p.xi) Naming the Silences: God Medicine and the Problem of Suffering)

The politics of Gentleness

The association of politics with weakness seems strange, n a world where politics is associated with the power of the state, and the activities of political parties. This brief, thought provoking book challenges that association.

Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness By Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier IVP 2008

The exchange between theologian Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier founder of the worldwide L'Arche communitiesexplores how Christians are to live in a violent and wounded world by witnessing prophetically from a position of weakness. The church they argue has much to learn from an often overlooked community--those with disabilities.

Hauerwas has reflected frequently on the lives of people with disability, the political significance of community, and how the experience of disability addresses the weaknesses and failures of liberal society. L'Arche provides a unique model of inclusive community that is underpinned by a deep spirituality and theology and provides an example of an alternative politics. Hauerwas and Romand Coles have already engaged with Vanier as a political thinker in their book Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary.

Together, in one of the first books in the series Resources for Reonciliation, Vanier and Hauerwas carefully explore the contours of a countercultural community that embodies a different way of being and witnesses to a new order--one marked by radical forms of gentleness, peacemaking and faithfulness.

This is a profoundly challenging book that is addressed first to the church in recalling it to its roots through helping it re-imagine the understanding and practice of power within the church as a political community.

What is policy for and why might indigenous Australians be rightly suspicious of policy made in Canberra?

Given the history of Australia, indigenous Australians have few reasons to trust Governments and their agents rocking up to announce trust us, we are here to help you.

Beyond that there are philosophical and theological reasons why there might be an intractable problem in assuming that there will be an easy transition for indigenous communities engaging with agents of modernity such as public servants.

The following quote from Stanley Hauerwas in The State of the University (p.37) gets us close to the heart of the matter.

Hauerwas points out that according to Charles Taylor ... the social imaginary that has shaped the world in which we now find ourselves "starts with individuals and conceives society as established for their sake. Political society is seen as an instrument for something pre-political." Political society is understood to be the instrument to help individuals serve each other for mutual benefit by providing security and by fostering exchange and prosperity. Such societies emphasize the importance of rights which "reflects the holders sense of their own agency and of the situation that agency normatively demands in the world, namely freedom."

Taylor, however suggests that the individual that enjoys such freedom is "disembodied." ... requiring that they choose to be who they want to be. ...modernity names the time when a people are produced that believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story.

But if you do believe that you have a story that is not exhausted by the "disembodied" storyless individual of modernity, what then?

Christianity and Radical Democracy

This is a most amazing and rewarding book.

Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian By Stanley Hauerwas & Romand Coles Cascade Books, 2008

The title talks about conversations and the book really delivers - in a series of lectures, papers and letters in which Stanley Hauerwas, written off as sectarian by many mainstream theologians, engages in a probing exploration with Roman Coles, a political theorist, non-believer and community activist of the possible connections between a radical Christian faith and radical democracy.

This is a challenging exchange that demonstrates an open listening and honest exploration of points of connection and question between the traditions.

I learnt much from Coles sympathetic and open reading of texts from Rowan Williams and Jean Vanier and his sharp eye for the intrusion of Christendom assumptions and languages into our best efforts to get beyond a Christendom mentality. What do they have to do with organising for radical democracy? Go read.

This probing exchange reveals an emerging friendship that does not arrive at any easy synthesis or collapse the tension between the faith commitments of Hauerwas and the political commitments of Coles.

What is important is that they are both talking about a reimagining of politics and the practices that would sustain the practice of a radical politics and both questioning the contemporary shape of political imagination that is shaped by both the denial and the production of death.

Coming into view here are the practices of the early civil rights movement exemplified in the work of Bob Moses and Ella Baker, the local community organising of the Industrial Areas Foundation and the life and worship of the L'Arche communities. In the background is the work of John Howard Yoder, Mennonite theologian and his articulation of what Coles terms a "wild patience".