Thomas Sowell reflects upon his childhood and suggests that the moral distance we've traveled in the last seventy years or so is inversely correlated to how educated we've become. Here's his lede:
One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have "a duty to die," rather than become a burden to others.
This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.
Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly.
There was a time-- fortunately, now long past-- when some desperately poor societies had to abandon old people to their fate, because there was just not enough margin for everyone to survive. Sometimes the elderly themselves would simply go off from their family and community to face their fate alone.
But is that where we are today?
Sowell goes on to illustrate with a poignant anecdote how we have shifted from a focus on helping others to focussing on living for ourselves. Check it out.
It's a modern conceit that somehow education and technology have, in ways that matter, made us superior to our forebears. This attitude is a naive bit of chauvinistic self-congratulation. Knowing more about physics makes us neither wiser nor more ethical than those who lived prior to the knowledge explosion. Indeed, more people can read today than at any time in history, we can enjoy films, we can surf the web, we can drive cars, but how do we use these wonderful gifts? Much of what we read and watch is junk. For all of our knowledge, wealth, and technology we're certainly no happier than were our grandparents, our families are less stable, and our mental health much more precarious.
Why is that? Perhaps it's because our grandparents knew something that many moderns don't: Happiness is not something that one can obtain through deliberate pursuit. It's not a drug, nor is it the result of the accumulation of knowledge or goods. It is, rather, a by-product of living a life of virtue, meaning, and caring for others.
Modernity, however, scoffs at this. Moderns believe that we should look out for #1 and that when other people stand in the way of our well-being they need to be shoved out of the way. That's why the abortion industry is so lucrative and why there's political presure to limit the care we provide to the elderly. Moderns also deny that there's any such thing as virtue and they hold that meaning can be injected into life by gratifying one's desires, whether sensual or material.
Unfortunately, there's not much evidence to support these beliefs. Surely Shakespeare was correct that, if death is the end of our existence, life is simply "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Sowell thinks the modern world has lost something crucially important to human flourishing. I think he's right.
RLC
