Privacy in Human Intimacy about Morality, not Evolution
Recently, anthropologist Yitzchak Ben Mocha theorized on why human beings, alone among mammals, prefer to “mate” in private. From the Phys.Org story: He found that virtually every known culture practices private mating — even in places where privacy is difficult to find. He also looked for examples of other animals mating in private, and found none, except for the babblers [a bird species]. He also found that there were no explanations for it, and in fact, there were very few other people wondering why humans have such a proclivity. And, not surprisingly, he was unable to find any evolutionary theories on the topic. But evolution must be made to explain all! Ben Mocha concludes his paper by introducing a theory of his own — he believes that the reason humans (and babblers) began looking for privacy during sex was because the male wanted to prevent other males from seeing his female partner in a state of arousal. Such a state, he suggests, would likely have encouraged other males to attempt to mate with her. Thus, privacy, or perhaps more accurately, seclusion, allowed the male to maintain control over a sexual partner — while also allowing for continued cooperation within a group. This approaches the question from the wrong angle. There is much more to human life than biology. We are not just a collection of carbon molecules and the sum of our genes expressing. We are more than intelligent apes. There is a deeper side to us, something that can neither be measured nor fully explained from exclusively materialistic analyses. We transcend the strictly material forces that spur natural selection. We, alone in the known universe, are moral beings. Sex is profoundly consequential morally. We are not just animals yielding to an irresistible biological imperative when the female goes into estrus. For us, intimacy isn’t — or ideally, shouldn’t be — mere rutting. Moreover, sex is something we can choose to refuse based on moral considerations. Animals do not have that ability. Indeed, sexual morality is one of the most important factors in creating culture. That is the reason those who wish to destroy existing paradigms subvert cultural status quos through transgressive sexual advocacy and/or behavior. Bottom line: Evolution doesn’t explain everything in human nature or the development of culture. It can’t. We have stepped beyond subjugation to the immutable forces of natural selection. We are self-directing, and that includes our approaches to sex. Abandon human exceptionalism in anthropology, treat us as if we are just another animal in the forest, and the discipline misses the forest for the trees.
Racism Violates Human Exceptionalism
What If We Ignored Those Most Vulnerable to COVID-19?
“We locked down America with relative speed in March and we avoided all the worst predictions of the potential impact of the coronavirus, but we struggled to reach consensus anywhere on how to responsibly open back up.” If we had to write the one sentence history of the COVID-19 pandemic today, that would be something like America’s version. We don’t know how things will continue to play out, but what’s clear at the moment is that state and local leaders appear to be paralyzed. Unfortunately, those bearing some of the greatest costs of this ruling class paralysis aren’t likely the first to come to our minds. Their story is not told in the TL/DR history of this time. We’re witnessing the failure of the managerial bureaucracy when leaders like New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo direct that COVID-positive patients be placed amongst not-yet-infected vulnerable populations. This failure to protect our elders, owing at best to incompetence and at worst to willful indifference, is not limited to New York. Gregg Girvan and Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FROEPP) report on the truly grim national impact of COVID on our elders: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5.1 million people live in nursing homes or residential care facilities, representing 1.6% of the U.S. population. And yet residents in such facilities account for 40 percent of all deaths from COVID-19, for states that report such statistics. … On the flip side, it would appear that elderly individuals who do not live in nursing homes may be at a somewhat lower, while still significant, risk for hospitalization and death due to COVID-19. States and localities should consider reorienting their policy responses away from younger and healthier people, and toward the elderly, and especially elderly individuals living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. FROEPP is providing vital perspective on a policy failure that risks becoming an elder abuse crisis, insofar as our political leadership continues to fail in repurposing resources to protect those populations most at risk. On Twitter, Avik Roy addresses New York’s apparently low numbers: “A lot of people are speculating that NY state’s numbers are so low because NY counts as a hospital death a nursing home resident who dies in a hospital. We haven’t confirmed that this reporting approach is unique to NY. … But for those who are debating the merits of continuing full lockdowns, it’s worth considering the fact that 39% of #COVID19 deaths are occurring at self-contained residential facilities that host 1.6% of the U.S. population.” It’s worse when looking at the city level rather than the state level. ABC7 in Los Angeles reports that “51% of COVID-19 deaths in LA County were residents in ‘institutional settings’”. Instead of focusing like a laser on this aspect of the pandemic and how best to mitigate it, and instead of allowing all who feel able to do so to return to their businesses and their jobs, California’s political elite spent a significant portion of this week dealing with Alameda County mandarins attempting to keep Tesla, the state’s only automaker, shut down. We’re wasting this precious time. To the degree that lockdowns remain necessary, this time should be spent formulating plans to protect those populations most vulnerable for the foreseeable future. It should be astonishing that our political and media elite — so eager to lecture, so eager to tout their bona fides, so eager to proclaim the need to “believe science” — are ignoring what we know to be true about the populations most impacted thus far, and thus most deserving of our focused response. Dr. Charlie Camosy, author of Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured People, gets it: How can we credibly speak about human dignity and the rights of marginalized peoples internationally when we fail to protect our own most vulnerable peoples at home? We must do better in living up to our principles. This virus is not going away. If you have a loved one in a nursing home or institutional care setting, consider sitting down at the kitchen table with your family to determine what it would take to bring your loved one home. I’d wager that many persons for whom institutional care once made sense no longer belong there. There likely will come a point at which the burdens and risk of such care will outweigh the benefits. Especially for those who may already have limited time left, wouldn’t it be better to share that time together and as a family, than leave them to die alone? When it comes to the failure of our political ruling class, we can only stare in amazement. But when it comes to the options available to us in our own lives to care for those we know who are most vulnerable, now is the time to act.
Bloomberg: A Patient’s Care is ‘Futile’ if We Decide the Patient Has Little Value
Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is over, but I want to return to something Bloomberg once said that was brought up by reporter Peter Hasson during Bloomberg’s most recent campaign that speaks to a fundamental issue in healthcare issue: Billionaire and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said in a 2011 video that some elderly cancer patients should be denied treatment in order to cut health care costs. He drew on a hypothetical example of a “95-year old” with “prostate cancer” to signal an openness he would have to reform how Medicare provides treatment. “All of these costs keep going up, nobody wants to pay any more money, and at the rate we’re going, health care is going to bankrupt us,” said Bloomberg, who was then New York City’s mayor. “We’ve got to sit here and say which things we’re going to do, and which things we’re not, nobody wants to do that. Y’know, if you show up with prostate cancer, you’re 95 years old, we should say, ‘Go and enjoy. Have a nice [inaudible]. Live a long life. There’s no cure, and we can’t do anything.’ If you’re a young person, we should do something about it,” Bloomberg said in the video. “If those of us in positions of power, from our perspective, decide your life isn’t very valuable, then we’ll lie to you and let you die from a curable ailment,” to put Mike Bloomberg’s point more directly. I’m grateful for Bloomberg’s candor, even as I abhor his moral indifference to distinctly vulnerable persons, because he’s saying what no other politicians can say so bluntly: their plan is to constrain costs by denying care—even care that works and would save lives. Hello, death panels. When politicians advance rationing in healthcare, and especially when they advance rationing of care that would work, they’re stigmatizing particular types of patients and warping a medical phrase called “futile care”. “Futile care” once referred to situations where specific medical interventions no longer achieved their purpose of sustaining human life. If a person’s body is failing, and, for instance, can no longer metabolize food and water, then the specific intervention of food and water by tube would become “futile” as the patient nears death. No amount of food and water will help a person who can no longer metabolize it. That intervention is no longer efficacious, although the person herself remains equally valuable and retains her basic dignity even as she approaches death from natural causes. To put it simply, care becomes “futile” when it stops working. This is the traditional and medical understanding of futile care. It’s simple and it makes sense. Bloomberg was advocating categorizing certain persons as “futile”—i.e. medical discrimination based on invidious categories such as age. Making matters worse, Bloomberg endorsed lying about it: Tell older patients facing a curable disease, “There’s no cure, and we can’t do anything,” and tell younger patients we can “do something about it”. What would that do to trust in medical professionals? “We have the best healthcare system in the world and simultaneously the worst healthcare financing system in the world.” I’ve heard some version of this from many people. It’s helpful for thinking about the true challenge of American healthcare. We should be working to achieve accuracy and transparency when it comes to the problem of the inflated and inscrutable prices associated with healthcare delivery. The answers cannot lie in sanctioning professional mendacity or creating disposable categories of patients to be abandoned because we think their lives have less value than other patients. Certain cures are worse than the disease.
Human Rights Require Knowledge of the Human Heart
I’m excited to join the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Let me share my approach to the issues of human dignity, liberty, and equality and the moral duties that the Center exists to consider and advance. I believe that when it comes to issues of human life we’re generally engaging conflicts that are neither unresolvable nor destined for stalemate. We’re debating issues that matter. We can lose sight of this due to the tendency to throw our hands into the air over the seemingly complex nature of many human life issues, content to “agree to disagree” because “it’s complicated.” For those determined to advance human dignity, liberty, and equality, settling for this false peace is, in fact, a surrender to (at best) a materialist philosophy that prizes autonomy over solidarity, or (at worst) a nihilist relativism that proposes that ultimate reality and truth are unknowable and therefore worthless. We already see the poisoned fruits of accepting that false peace in the degradation of human rights. Human rights were once a shield for the protection of those most at risk to the whims of those with greater power, but as we lose our sense of human beings as possessors of inherent dignity and worth, we also lose a firm basis for universal human rights. As if experiencing a collective dementia, we look upon the face of the human person without recognizing the priceless good we see. And in our forgetfulness we lose our ethical bearings, too often falling for utopian promises for a future that never arrives. When we survey the field, we observe this annihilation across the spectrum of human life: at the earliest and most physically vulnerable period when we most require hospitality and love, in the form of abortion; at the latest and most culturally vulnerable period when we most require solidarity and companionship, in the form of euthanasia and suicide; throughout adult life when we require encounter and friendship, through a “throwaway” culture of indifference; and across the spectrum of bioethical issues from eugenics to human trafficking, from attacks on patient and physician conscience rights to misanthropic environmentalism, from ethically indifferent forms of genetic engineering to stem cell research to cloning, and on it goes. What are we to make of the claims of human rights, amidst all the raw human willfulness and power imbalances that so greatly warp our ability to recognize one another as equals? “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt,” writes Thomas Paine, “is like administering medicine to the dead…” We’re all that man at certain points—that person in any given moment who is likelier to hold humanity in contempt than to properly recognize that to hang humanity is to hang oneself. We’re flirting with that philosophically in many ways—grimly illustrated by the fact that American prosperity has never been greater in absolute terms, yet neither has our suicide rate—but the evidence of our daily lives, our daily experience, confirms that we want as much of the good life as we can get. At the risk of sometimes administering “medicine to the dead,” I think that what makes Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism so valuable is a fundamental concern with reintroducing—or, at least, re-emphasizing—those things which our ancestors knew—or, at least, grasped for—but which some of us rejected and others forgot. As a consequence, we deprive ourselves of a valuable inheritance. A recovery is possible, and it starts with this: the truth is knowable, ethics and morals of human life are inherent to all law that legitimately directs human action, and the good is achievable in our culture and in our lives. If we refuse these realities, then our pursuit of dialogue is a fool’s errand. There is no purpose to dialogue over issues that have no possibility of resolve. All good law has, at its heart, a moral core, and good law can never be neutral with respect to the aims it seeks to encourage or proscribe. Human reason points us to the moral content at the heart of the sort of good law that makes a healthy culture possible. “Laws without morals,” observed Ben Franklin, “are useless.” Franklin was as much summing up classical knowledge as he was reintroducing it to new generations, and the University of Pennsylvania adopted it as its motto for the same reason: “Leges sine moribus vanae.” The law is a teacher. Not every choice (and relatively few choices when it comes to bioethical issues, it turns out) can be made in a life-affirming way without a teleologically informed conscience or the encouragement of a law and policy regime that is concerned with a knowable set of moral and ethical goods. What we most immediately need to recover is knowledge, first of our own hearts. I look forward to contributing to this important cause.