My last post, you may have discerned, was really a combo of a post responding to Helen’s piece with an abortion post I was already planning to write. As a result, the disability part of it kind of got short shrift. But I’ve been thinking about it further and wanted to add a few more thoughts specifically related to disability.

One, I’ve been out and about many times with my brother-in-law, who’s in a wheelchair due to an injury, and I thoroughly approve of ramps, curb breaks, lifts, etc. To my mind, they never represented an illusion of independence so much as simple infrastructure. I’m not up on the details of the ADA, but I don’t have a conceptual problem with the government getting involved in their building either. By building the highways and such for cars the government helped create a society where even basic socializing requires a greater level of mobility than ever before, so it seems a bit churlish to say that it’s special treatment to help the disabled get around on wheels, when everybody else gets around on wheels so much of the time.

I also noticed that Joe Carter made the same point that I did about Jesus’ going around healing people, only more forcefully. Actually, I’m a bit uncomfortable with making it that forcefully, because I think we have to recognize how contextual the definition of disease itself is, especially when it is mental. One country’s madman is another one’s shaman; homosexuality used to be a mental illness, and now it’s not. This is not to say it’s all relative, but I think any Christian who has reason to suspect the post-Enlightenment medical model of humanity (which includes everybody at First Things, I would say) should stop and discern before accepting all pronouncements on the subject. Jesus may have made the blind see and the lame walk, but it’s difficult to picture what his healing an adult with the mind of a 10-month-old would look like.

When it comes to persons with diseases of the mind, I invariably find myself thinking of Oliver Sacks. Unfortunately I don’t have a book on hand to quote from directly, but his recurring thesis is that doctors should consider neurology patients, even severely disabled ones, as whole people. In his case I think that’s different from either defining a person by their disability, or imagining the person without it. Rather, it’s saying that every person who has a disability is unique, and will incorporate it into his or her life in sometimes unpredictable ways. In some cases, that means they incorporate it so well that healing it may cause disruption (as blind people whose sight has been suddenly restored often find the experience more frightening and confusing than liberating). However, there are few generalities one can make in that regard, which is why Sacks tends to structure his books as collections of case studies. Before making broad philosophical claims about autonomy and eschatology, that might be a good thing to keep in mind.

Eve asked what people think of Helen Rittelmeyer’s article making a conservative argument for disability activism. She says that if someone offered a cure for her severely disabled sister her family probably wouldn’t take it, because they love her the way she is. Helen goes on to argue that loving the disabled this way is better to them than pushing them towards independence and autonomy; many of them will never achieve it, and it encourages the view that a dependant is somehow less human. She also urges us not to be so afraid of the fact that this means suffering. Although she shies away from shallow “suffering builds character” formulations, she says that taking the harder path can bring other benefits, and “When the compensating benefit is love, the answer is easy.”

This post intersects with another line of thought I’ve been having lately, brought along by the renewed focus on abortion in the media and the blogosphere. I’ve been nagged by a memory of a time when I was about eight years old, and my mother first explained the whole abortion debate to me. My mother is pro-choice, and so she explained it from that point of view; but I asked her why, given the contention over the life of the fetus, a woman who didn’t want to raise a child couldn’t just put it up for adoption. My mother said something like, “But when you have a baby you feel such a strong attachment, it’s just unbearable to give it up.”

I think this has stuck in my mind all these years partly because, for all the abortion debates I’ve heard or read, I don’t recall anyone else addressing this problem quite so directly. Most pro-choice arguments seem to focus on rights, and thus wheel off into ungainly analogies about dying violinists and whatnot. And some feminists seem suspicious of the idea of a strong innate mother-love to begin with. But it seems to me that without it, the argument for total free choice is actually harder to make. Most pregnancies entail some physical hardship, but in the modern world it is generally not greater than some of the other hardships that obeying the law inflicts on us, like military conscription, lengthy jury duty, paying taxes for undeserving causes and not being able to steal when you have no money. Some intangible emotional hardship, therefore, seems required in order to put unwanted pregnancy up there with torture and rape as experiences that any person has a natural right not to suffer.

But I think the other reason the comment stuck in my mind is the picture of mother-love that it offers — a picture that is not, when it comes to it, entirely positive. It makes getting pregnant at the wrong time sound sort of like falling in love with the wrong guy: you can’t live with him and you can’t stand to see anyone else live with him, so you feel a dark temptation to rub him out. In that way, some abortions may actually be crimes of passion.

But a more benevolent way of looking at it, which is probably more the case with my mother, is that mother-love entails a profound fear of the child suffering. If you give it up for adoption, you certainly run the risk that it will suffer badly: it might never be adopted, or it might be adopted by crazy people. Moreover, a mother who decides to keep the baby because of the tortured I-don’t-want-it-but-I-do feelings described earlier may be setting it up for a pretty difficult childhood also. I think my mother’s point of view, based on some other comments she’s made, is that some people are better off aborted than being raised by certain parents.

So in settling on love as a basis for bioethics, Helen is certainly hanging her position on one of the most complex and contested words in the English language. But for all that she talks about suffering, Helen still doesn’t quite directly address the question of the suffering of the disabled person — whether disabled physically or by a lack of a functioning family. Doesn’t love at least entail some aspect of not wanting to see a person suffer? Is every person who wishes to die really suffering from inadequate love, or does the natural instinct to end suffering sometimes overpower even that?

I also wanted to make a couple of theological points about the piece. In her link to it, Eve notes that “when Christ appeared to the apostles in His glory, the glorified body still bore the wounds of crucifixion.” True, but weighed against that is the fact that Christ spent much of his earthly ministry curing disabilities, including blindness, deafness and paralysis. Granted, there’s a pretty big difference between that and the modern ministrations of medical science, but it does seem to challenge Helen’s claim that disabilities are essential to a person’s self. Seeing “an imaginary version of that person minus his disability” actually seems to be a pretty big part of the Kingdom vision.

The question of a person’s ultimate condition gets even knottier when it comes to abortion. Certainly a materialist view of death as being simple non-existence can make it seem preferable to a life of suffering, and indeed, makes it not seem all that different from the state of being a barely-existent embryo. But a Christian view of the afterlife doesn’t necessarily help define what it is that’s so bad about death. I recall back when the Slacktivist was starting through the Left Behind novels (amazingly, he’s still at it!), the Rapture was described as taking unborn fetuses from their mothers’ wombs. The Slacktivist pointed out that this was making an anti-abortion point by asserting that fetuses do have souls. But a commenter pointed out that this makes abortion seem like doing a baby a favor: after all, they get straight to heaven this way, while letting them grow up just gives them an opportunity to damn themselves.

It is perhaps a measure of how much we are all Baptists now that I’ve never heard a pedobaptist make the obvious rejoinder to this, which is that a baby probably isn’t going to get to heaven without being baptized. To be fair, last I heard the Catholic Church itself is unclear about what happens to unbaptized infants, so that may be speaking out of turn. But it does seem that, in order to make a truly pro-life argument, one has to see life as more than a booby-trap on the road to heaven.

I noted in an earlier post — which, not coincidentally, also brought up mothering — that there is a strain of thought in the New Testament to the effect that living, suffering and dying are necessary steps toward the next phase of existence, one closer to God. And yet at the same time, it still generally regards the infliction of suffering as a sin and an outgrowth of a fallen world. And even less helpfully, despite the fact that infant mortality was extremely high back then it never brings up the question of whether a dead infant has, once and for all, been deprived of the opportunity to go through that process.

I should say that the fact that there are many people living difficult lives, who nonetheless assert they are worth it, gives me pause about the whole “abort to preempt suffering” idea. It does seem like going overboard with the whole children are horrendously fragile concept that has grown in the last 150 years or so. So despite my criticisms, I think Helen makes some valuable points here. It does, however, feel like it needs some filling out (which I guess the “towards” in the title is pretty much admitting).

Though you wouldn’t know it now, for most of the modern era apocalyptic Christian thought has been intertwined with a scathing critique of capitalism. In the 1890s one premillennialist writer declared that America was controlled by “iniquitous business combines,” and in the 1930s another declared flatly, “God hates Big Business.” It was the strategic alignment of the Christian right with the Republican party since the 1970s, I suppose, that toned down such talk.

But the idea that God will punish the nation for its economic greed has gained a sort of rebirth with the advent of global warming. Witness this article (via Lee) in which Bill McKibben points to the increased frequency of hurricanes and writes, “This is the way God used to deliver messages back in the not very subtle day of plagues and floods.”

To stop this, he says, the world needs to reduce fossil fuel use by 70 percent. Immediately. This is not impossible, he asserts, if we are willing to improve our moral character:

Mandatory, too, because taking on climate change would mean taking on the central unchristian element of American culture: its wild individualism. More than anything else, fossil fuel has allowed us to stop being neighbors to each other, both literally—we move ever farther into ever emptier suburbs—and figuratively—we depend less and less on each other for anything real. (The SUV, with its almost invariably single passenger, is the symbol of this trend.) This is what makes the politics of real change so difficult. Politicians are not willing to ask anyone to change. Not when three quarters of American Christians tell pollsters that they think the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” can be found in the Bible.

This is where I start getting irritated. Yes, we Westerners consume way more than we really need. Yes, modern technology, much of it fossil-fuel-driven, has helped make society more impersonal. But I think that casting the stoppage of global warming as perfectly congruent with fixing the flaws in our moral fiber is way too simplistic.

Take what I am doing now, for instance: blogging. Much of the increase in energy use in the last 20 years has been driven by communications technologies, and as I can tell you from my last computer upgrade, they are hogging more energy all the time. In fact, much technological innovation of the last decade hasn’t been in the service of isolating people but of connecting them. To some extent, of course, this is solving a problem that technology itself created, but it is also connecting people with distant folk who would have been totally Other back in the days when people huddled in the villages where they were born.

My boyfriend and I were talking about global warming recently, and he raised a couple of other problems he’s still chewing on. One is that he burns up a huge number of miles on his car precisely because he loves nature. His ideal way to spend a day off is to drive for three hours to some remote spot and wander around taking pictures. As far as nature is concerned, I suppose it would be better off if we didn’t love it but feared it, the way premodern folk used to tell stories about the terrible things that would happen if you disturbed the forest spirits too much.

A larger problem he brought up, however, is one that McKibben mentions in passing but promptly drops. Even if Westerners manage to drastically cut back their energy use, there are huge emerging economies like China and India that would probably be happy to use the oil that we don’t. John remarked that there’s a huge political problem with telling these countries that, after we’ve enjoyed the fruits of industrial prosperity for 150 years, we’ve now discovered that if they do they same they’ll wreck the planet. If I were an Indian, my reaction would probably echo the Church Lady: “How convenient.”

We are not just talking about fruits like TVs and cell phones, either. Modern medicine requires a lot of energy, too — the running of hospitals and their equipment, the research involved in creating drugs and in mass-producing them, all take lots of juice. Furthermore, it is well known that one of the big problems with medicine in the poorer parts of the world is physically getting it to people living out in trackless villages; building and running such an infrastructure would also take lots of energy.

The fact is, Christian fundamentalists and Republican congressmen aren’t the only people in the world who fail to place their trust in Western scientists. From what I’ve seen many Africans aren’t even sold on the accepted scientific understanding of HIV, and that’s certainly had a bigger impact on them so far than global warming. It’s painful to watch, but I also don’t see it as an unmitigated character flaw. The Western world has earned its mistrust.

Another phenomenon I have seen is what happens if something is successfully prevented. Often as not, the non-event causes a lot of people to wonder if the whole thing was worth the cost, or maybe even a big con, because, you know, nothing happened. I’ve seen it with the Y2K bug, with some averted African droughts, with recent terrorists plots that the feds said they foiled. This quality of the human character is not uniformly positive, but on the other hand, prevention always looks better in hindsight. In the present, it involves a weird state where nothing is actually going wrong, but everyone is maximally afraid of what could go wrong. In the English language, that state is generally called paranoia.

That is largely why, in my gut, I don’t think global warming can be indefinitely put off. It can be slowed, which would certainly help people to adjust to the changes. But the sort of dramatic, instant and permanent conversion of the world that McKibben envisions would take a miracle. I cannot rule out miracles, of course, but neither can I plan them. And trying to force miracles certainly has its own hazards. Another thing that bothers me about solutions to global warming is that they seem, by necessity, to be so authoritarian. In James Burke’s After the Warming, a sci-fi documentary from an imagined future, Burke says that in the 21st century a planetary authority took charge of the matter, enacting sweeping reforms such as outlawing beef. Nasty issues like how this was enforced were, to my memory, left unexplored.

I think the issue underlying all this is that, even on the Christian left, there still is a certain conflict between science and religion. The predictions of climatologists are mechanistic. The weather, in their models, doesn’t care what your reasons are for putting carbon dioxide in the air, nor does it care what means you use to lower them. It responds the same regardless. Only a personal God cares about motivations, or has mercy on sinners. So while the hand of God may indeed be in all this, I am not comfortable with turning climatologists into prophetic interpreters of natural events. Ultimately, their assumptions come from different premises.

In many ways, this whole discussion really reminds me of the last chapter of The Politics of Jesus, which I blogged about here. At the beginning of it Yoder discussed various efforts to discern the direction of history, and to manipulate it for certain desirable outcomes. The Bible, he says, rejects such approaches as human hubris; God knows where history is headed, and so his commands, even if they don’t seem practical in the short term, will lead us to the right place. There is something in that to be applied here, I think. Certainly Christian mores like supporting local communities and rejecting materialism can help fight global warming; but on the other hand, anointing scientists as prophets, making utilitarian calculations about what solution will kill the fewest people, and justifyng the power of government as a means to an end are actions that might combat global warming but aren’t exactly Christian. As with premillennialism, a little less grand theorizing and a little more trust in God might be in order.