Plague Journal (39): on the "prestigious fetish" known as life

My last post featured a long quotation from an article by David Cayley about the philosopher Ivan Illich. I have to emphasize before I go on that I am not familiar with Illich's work beyond what the article quotes and therefore that what I say here are merely the idle musings of someone who just ran into an interesting phrase on the Internet. That phrase is "the prestigious fetish."

The specific prestigious fetish that Cayley is talking about in this article is life itself, which, if it is a fetish, is certainly the most prestigious one of all.

I think it was Solzhenitsyn (or was it Garcia Marquez?) who said that the problem with novelists in the U.S. was that they couldn't imagine anything worse than death or anything better than sex.

If there is nothing worse than death, then life must become your fetish. You will become increasingly studious about what behaviors increase your likelihood of living longer, decreasing the "risk-factors" in your life. You will put up with whatever you need to put up with (including all sorts of limitations on your liberty and that of others) if it increases your chance of living another year (on average, according to some graph you have put your faith in). Perhaps this is not a modern fetish at all, but an ancient one. Anyway, I take it that the next step of Illich's critique is to say that this fetish has caused us to cede too much power to the systems we have created to oversee our health and extend our longevity. We begin to think of ourselves merely as parts as patients, or as consumers in the longevity industry, not as flesh-and-blood individuals who must one day die.

Sometimes the culture feels like a train that you didn't mean to board, but you did, and now you're headed to the wrong station. There's no getting off. Your destination is inevitable. Pretty much all the people you know, all the people on the train, have adopted this destination as their own by simply having boarded the train (or been born on the train). That destination is their "prestigious fetish," whether they like it or not.

Some on the train don't care where it's going, as long as the view is nice and the train is comfortable. Others are all in: the destination is exactly where they want to go. They paid everything they had for the ticket. Others, the revolutionaries, resent the sense of not having been given a choice, and would like to storm the engine, overthrow the engineer, and steer the train off the track somehow, starting a new life in a wilderness that, at the very least, is NOT the destination to which they had all been headed.

I once knew a man who found out he had cancer, in the very heyday of his life, and decided not to receive invasive treatment. He was a Christian and not particularly afraid of death. He could imagine a fate worse than death, and possibly he thought that ceding his autonomy to doctors in an ultimately fruitless attempt to prolong his life (but not the quality of his life) was one thing that was worse than death.

I do worry (a little) that if life isn't our "fetish," then something else will be, and that might just be power, or comfort, or money, or pleasure, and when "life" takes a back seat to these pursuits, when life is less "prestigious" than these other things, then we have a new kind of trouble. We have a culture of death, instead of life.