"Make it plain [to children] from the very beginning that all living is relationship." - Aldous Huxley
What do you want from medicine? What if doctors could cure everything - including mental illness. Who could turn down such a Faustian deal?
"There are people today who will live to be one-hundred-fifty years old," my son-in-law told me awhile back. If he's right, won't there be people living to be two hundred and more in the generations beyond? My century-old mother (pictured with her "little" brother) would be a youngster in such a society.
It's fun to imagine a promised land of perfect health in which everyone is free of pain and lives a long time. The pathway to that, however, is strewn with deep threats to our humanity.
In Brave New World (1932) Aldous Huxley created a frightening vision of our life five hundred years from now. It turns out, many of his imaginings are already foreseeable including human cloning and the development of tranquilizers (he called his "Soma.")
His story is of people programmed into different classes from drones that handle drudgery to an over-privileged elite. His vision is deeply pessimistic. The protagonist, depressed by the absence of humanity, commits suicide.
The only pathway to "curing everything" is through medicine's ability to replace all broken body parts and eliminate all diseases - systemic or localized. Our only remaining threats would be murders and natural disasters. Perhaps those risks will be reduced as well because the difference between us and robots would be nominal.
What a life.
In an earth free of pain what happens to compassion? If no one is suffering or grieving where is the need for it? Nobody would need a compassionate caregiver since medicine would be reduced entirely to mechanics.
Similarly, when drugs can alter our brain chemistry so that everyone is "happy" what is to prevent us from becoming a population so self satisfied and egocentric that we just sit around? In that kind of society who would care?
Compassion lives at the heart of humanity as we know it. It is the gift of being alive and the core of Love. It is the source of our creativity and our ability to appreciate the arts.
The Promised Land is not perfect health. Instead, it is a life wrapped in the arms of a Love - a Love that enriches life and informs its most sacred expressions - our relationships.
-Erie Chapman
