Notes from a Family Meeting is a newsletter where I hope to join the curious conversations that hang about the intersections of health and the human condition. Poems and medical journals alike will join us in our explorations. If you want to come along with me, subscribe and every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
Every so often, I’ll share things I’ve been reading with a few words of mine scribbled in the margins. If you have something to share, please do! The comment section is open.
A suicide note from a woman who had dementia. Some say this was “her choice,” something we should honor. Her reasons betray what she thought of people with dementia, and how other people think of them now. That stigma is cultural contagion:
“Understand that I am giving up nothing that I want by committing suicide. All I lose is an indefinite number of years of being a vegetable in a hospital setting, eating up the country's money but having not the faintest idea of who I am. … I can live or vegetate for perhaps ten years in hospital at Canada's expense, costing anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 per year. That is only the beginning of the damage. Nurses, who thought they were embarked on a career that had great meaning, find themselves perpetually changing my diapers and reporting on the physical changes of an empty husk. It is ludicrous, wasteful and unfair.”
The End of Never-ending Progress?
argues that the dream of progress has roots in Christian theology: from creation, through fall, onward to new creation. A secular world wants the narrative arc without the spiritual bits, and so we try, time and again, to lift utopia from the ash and soot left behind by our technologies. We hope that our technology will finally save us. Harrington writes about the impact in the realm of feminism and ecology, but it’s just as rife in the world of medicine, as I recently discussed.Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?
Leo Marx, writing in 1987, pokes at the unbridled optimism we have in technological innovation:
“Does improved technology mean progress? Yes, it certainly could mean just that. But only if we are willing and able to answer the next question: progress toward what? What is it that we want our new technologies to accomplish? What do we want beyond such immediate, limited goals as achieving efficiencies, decreasing financial costs, and eliminating the troubling human element from our workplaces? In the absence of answers to these questions, technological improvements may very well turn out to be incompatible with genuine, that is to say social, progress.”
Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience
Let’s not be fooled into believing that humans are merely “imperfect machines.” Thomas Fuchs provides a warning and a better way.
“I trace Pascal’s ‘greatness and wretchedness of man’ back to our continuous oscillation between feelings of impotence and omnipotence, which ultimately rest on a collective narcissism: we try to compensate for a deep inner emptiness by creating an ideal image of ourselves. How do we do this? We do it when we seek our own reflection in digital intelligence, in humanoid machines, and in virtual images.”