The Wages of Grief

Abstract

We have a gift for making virtue of necessity; our propensity to do this may prove our curse. When we cannot forestall endless successions of pregnancies, we deem them gifts of God or Fortune or nature’s bounty. When we can do nothing to forestall aging and physical decline, we speak in hushed tones of revered elders and their hard won wisdom. When we cannot repel death, we invoke the language of theodicy, assuring ourselves that everything happens for a reason. These bromides, however, have scarcely discouraged our efforts to wrest greater control over our embodiment. To the contrary, as our reproductive practices become more optional, any particular pregnancy become less a reflexive joy or sorrow, and more a matter of individual choice. When we can defer signs of physical decline, by cosmetic surgery or therapeutic or enhancement-oriented medical treatments, aging becomes less a relentless inevitability to be embraced and more itself a medical malady to be resisted. When death can be better managed and timed, it becomes less an inerrant feature of the human condition, and more a matter of individualized, substantive choice. Indeed, this growing autonomy in the face of natural necessity is at the heart of the conflict between the cult of life and the cult of rights. For the cult of life, liberating ourselves from that necessity dehumanizes us, stripping us of our dignity and catapulting us into a Brave New World, a post-human future.