Light sleepers would do well not to read the three essays in this issue just before bedtime. They leave one, or at least they left me during the editing, wanting to take refuge from the questions they pose. Somewhere there must be a place of serenity, where thoughtful people can absent themselves and the intractable problems of the day can be reduced to the soluble. No such luck here, on first reading.
If Second Opinion were host to utopians, perhaps we could sleep better, or at least could lounge in easy chairs and enjoy distractions. But the writers here are anything but utopians who offer dream-castle versions of the human future. They are not even optimists. Call them realistic hopers, but note how realism has the upper hand.
On the contrary, were Second Opinion hospitable to mere and utter pessimists, serenity would return more readily than it can after a reading of these articles. Now and then I have read such pessimists—the Romanian epigrammatist E. M. Cioran comes to mind—and found it easy to dismiss them. If even the slightest crack of affirmative light comes through their essays, they reach for the shutters or the duct tape and obstruct it. If things are that hopeless, one reasons, the ancient counsels of eating, drinking, and being merry apply. I have a cherished bottle of Chambertin, Vintage 1952, waiting to be opened on the day I succumb to such readings of history.
Suzanne Holland, Cynthia B. Cohen, and Thomas D. Kennedy will not relent, will not let readers avoid the issues they address. Admittedly, none of the issues are new: cloning, as Holland says, is on page one and in prime time outlets these days. Allowing religious belief to show up in the public sector is an everyday issue in a society that debates, with ease, the invention of faith-based ventures. And seeing the dangers that technology, for all its potential for enhancing life, can bring—that is as old as Luddism in the nineteenth century or as warnings by Jacques Ellul & co. in the twentieth.
Read and reread those three essays and look for anything that might legitimate apathy, assure serenity, or allow for ease. I didn't find it. They are realistic, cautionary, and more effective because none of the authors shriek in apocalyptic tones, though well they might. They are calls to reflection and action, two responses that would be pointless were there no hope to go with the realism. That is why we editors found them compelling, valid approaches that merit consideration by readers.
Suzanne Holland joins thinkers from Pope John Paul II, who spent most of his decades fighting Communism and recent ones worrying about consumerism, to critics of Capitalism on the left, who attack the market and all it stands for, from the ground up to the tall towers of international corporations. Her key word is "commodification." Inspired by novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, who always merits attention, she suggests some constructive ways to address the impulse to clone humans, yea the inevitability of cloning, to meet market demands.
How to control the impulse, how live in the face of the inevitable? It is hard to picture even the first stirrings of response without some resort to what she knows is unpopular, even "un-Republican," namely involving government. Well and good; many of us have little trouble with the principle of the thing. But when one comes to the subhead that offers "Incomplete Commodification for Cloning as Assisted Reproduction Technology" and pictures trying to get most legislators today to comprehend what is meant—as well as many in the public to awaken, and anybody in the special interest world to hold back—intellectual and moral paralysis might follow. Still, Holland finds reason to urge readers on, not to despair, but to think and be active. Realistic hope? One hopes.
Cynthia B. Cohen's theme has less immediately drastic consequences if things go wrong. If things go, or stay, or become wrong, we will simply have a culture more ethically impoverished than we now do. She brings up the heavy-hitters whose names start with "R"—Rorty, Rawls, and, less well known, Robertson—respects them but takes them on. They ask whether we should, in political, medical, and ethical debates that bear on all the populace, "allow" the voices of believers to be represented, heard, and reckoned with. "Allow." Who determines such allowings? Shall there be constitutional amendments, legislation, or merely the force of the turned back and the stopped ears as "rationalists" jam religious signals? Cohen catches such thinkers, who currently prevail in public life, in contradiction, in ironic reversals of the liberal culture themes that they profess to be enhancing by their strictures.
If Holland's theme strikes terror, Cohen's inspires bemusement. Why and how did Rortyan and Rawlsian rationalism, for all its splendor and the elegance of their arguments—I join those awed—come to be seen as not only being privileged in public discourse but promoted as a monopoly? How does one square that with the demonstrable fact that most people in the society do draw on their differing religious bases when they argue or converse? But for me the unsettling thought that lingered after I filed Cohen had to do with the obverse of the philosophers' question: Are American religionists ready to speak? Have they something substantive to say? Do they find ways to listen to each other, to "the other," to advance discussion and address problems? She spends no time calling for the homework and development that have to occur in religious circles if they are truly to enrich the talk in the public sphere; one could.
Thomas D. Kennedy takes us back to square one in dealing with what physicians and patients are about. While patients are not only patients (pati = to suffer), but full human beings, doctors, too, are not only the teachers that their etymology suggests they are to be. But patients do suffer in ignorance and, if Kennedy is right, more and more are likely to get inaccurate or inappropriate information about disease and cure from the Internet, that too-convenient point of reference in the homes of the hundred million. They need the doctor-as-teacher.
Many doctors are equipped to be teachers, as Kennedy knows and says. But he has a valid concern: whether the kind of covenanted, circumstantial diagnosis and counsel the physician-as-teacher can offer in a world of perplexing ambiguity can make its way against what Dr.www turns up. Again, his dystopia is not by any means as threatening as is Holland's. But on a different scale and in different ways, if Kennedy is right, hard-to-envision but always strenuous efforts are needed to assure the humanistic, pedagogical side to the physician-teacher.
Along with those three calls to reflection and action, this writer under separate title allows for a bit of relaxation by discussing "spirituality" and "religion," and why they prosper. Are they refuges from the worlds the other three authors would have us face? Or do they help people find resources to reengage the liberal culture of cloning, the silencing of religious voices, or the frequent neglect of teaching roles in medicine? Let the reader decide and register welcomed responses with our senior editor (dbm@prchfe.org).
