3. A new approach to therapy: If there is a God as Christians understand him, who is a God not only of the mind but also of the body, a God not only of the healthy but also of the sick, not only of the young but also of the old, a different attitude can be adopted not only to man's eternal salvation but also to his temporal healing, then it is possible to justify indisputably for a medical ethos . . .
I am going to break in here and note how this observation, that God is the God of the sick, the old, is so at odds with the current American Republican, I say fascist propaganda around the Covid-19 pandemic in which it is explicitly being advocated that the sick, the old be sacrificed to their real god, the god of Republican-Mammonist-"christianity" the economy, profit making, a politically advantageous stock-market. That so many nominally Christian ministers, priests (though more Cardinals and Bishops) self-ordained TV and radio based hallaluliah peddlers, the rich brats of the same in inherited leaderships of entirely worldly empires of pseud-Christian corporations is proof that in the United States, in 2020, Christianity is often, and as almost always presented by the media, is anything but Christian. As they will demand that the schools be reopened prematurely, they recreate even the cult of Baal in their . . . well, apostasy isn't the right word because they never were followers of Jesus, no one who does to others as they would not have done to them, who do what all of the above do can be said to follow the teachings of Jesus.
continuing on:
. . . it is possible to justify indisputably for a medical ethos
- that a human being may be understood neither materialistically merely as a mindless body nor idealistically as a mind dominating the boy, but must be taken seriously as body-soul unity, totally, person;
- that every human life is meaningful and remains meaningful and consequently all care for human life is meaningful and remains meaningful, that every human being therefore - even the poor, underprivileged, aged person unable to cope with life - has a right to appropriate care;
- that the doctor has to treat, neither merely the illnesses that the person has, but the person who is ill;
- that every form of therapy has to be based on pathophysical knowledge, experience and prognostic assessment, but has to be oriented at the same time to moral norms;
- that highly techicized medicine with its therapeutic apparatus must not be allowed to lead to the isolation of the person who is seriously ill and the perfect clinic in particularly must not become merely a service station for the best possible biochemical provision;
- that on the contrary a halt must be called to the lack of consultation in our consulting rooms, to the depersonalizing of our hospitals, to the everywhere threatening dominance of apparatus, by means of a renewed dominance of the human person.
All this presupposes an appreciation of the fact that the person is healed only by a total therapy, comprehensive aid to body and soul, a humane atmosphere in the clinic and especially by human conversation, which is an absolute prerequisite for the patients's trustful collaboration with the doctor. There must certainly be a necessary therapeutic disassociation, but always combined with empathy; certainly an unavoidable objectivity, but always sustained by human concern - even to the point of dying.
All of this is something that corporate medicine totally rejects, Hans Kung may not have stressed it in 1982 Germany, but in the United States and elsewhere, what he warned about as a result of a purely physical, physiological, technical and scientific treatment of human persons is even more dangerous when the basis of doing that is profit. In the United States in 2020 and for the entire period, the greatest danger isn't that sick people will be treated as physical objects without minds and souls under a regime of scientism, it is that they will not become patients or won't in time to help them because they cannot pay.
Capitalism has always had that tendency, it is a product of the same scientism that gave rise to materialist-atheist-scientism. As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out in The Irony of American History
On the other hand, the liberal society never achieved the perfect harmony of which it dreamed because it overestimated the reciprocity of the free market and also equated economic competition with all encounters in society. It overestimated the reciprocity of the market because it was oblivious both to the elements of power in society, and to the disproportions of power in economic life. Power, in the thought of the typically bourgeois man, is political. He believes that it must be reduced to a minimum. The earlier bourgeois man wanted to eliminate political power because it represented the special advantages which the old aristocracy had over him. The present bourgeois man wants to reduce it to a minimum because it represents the effort of a democratic society to bring disproportions of economic power under control. In the shift of motive from earlier to later bourgeois man lies the inevitable degradation of the liberal dogma. Marxism was bound to challenge the dogma, and to find the later form particularly vulnerable.
The reciprocity of the market was too simply equated with the social harmony of the community because self-interest was restricted to the economic motive. The false abstraction of "economic man" remains a permanent defect in all bourgeois-liberal ideology.
Two things to remember in that is when Niebuhr talked about "liberal society" he didn't mean in terms of traditional American style liberalism, he mean in the later European meaning of the terms of laissez-faire libertarian economic activity. The assumptions he refers to in this passage are not those of reality but of academic and philosophical abstraction, the reality was anything but admittedly a matter of free reciprocity.
There are a number of extreme circumstances in which the things pretended in order to uphold that view of society vanish, being arrested, being the victim of a crime, being the victim of an official injustice, being a social outcast, being seriously ill and in need of medical care ESPECIALLY IF THEY CANNOT AFFORD IT!, or being a witness to those or someone who is driven to stop pretending what is the required pretense to retain your passive acceptance in the general society. Being a member of a beleaguered minority is also such an extreme circumstance in the United States which accounts for why members of minorities in such large numbers are not deceived as are privileged white people, especially white men. Though women, members of beleaguered minorities, even the imprisoned and sick and dying can choose to uphold the pretense and cling to it in hopes of improving their lot.
What Hans Kung has said in the excerpts I've posted in the past few days is saying is that none of that is consistent with the absolute requirements for believing in the understanding of God of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, the later Prophets, Jesus, James, Paul, etc. If you really believe in their descriptions of God, you cannot possibly make that consistent with the alternatives to those things Kung presented as a necessary consequence of that belief in regard to sickness.
Without that framing, the framing of the Jewish-Christian understanding of God, all of that which should have always been seen and practiced as required becomes merely optional, arguments against it as have been made since before Malthus declared war on the poor and even before then as the Tudors made poverty a crime and which have become only steadily worse as a pretense of Christianity has given way to scientistic modern Mammonism.
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