The Menace of Euthanasia and the Power of Mimesis
Euthanasia is a dark shadow lengthening over our culture.
With his plastic push mower, a little boy follows behind his father as he mows the lawn.
An athlete adopts the workout regimen of a revered master of the sport.
An aspiring painter attempts to copy the brush strokes of Bob Ross.
Human beings are naturally imitative animals.
Mimesis, imitation, is how we experience the reality of the Other.
Mimesis is not, at least not necessarily, a childish activity, or merely a beginner’s activity. Mimesis is one of the most important ways in which we register our love for, and fascination with, the world beyond our head. It is how we take in, enter in, and make sense of, the mystery of the existence we have been thrown into.
Abstract argument is not the only way we see the truth of things. We also see the truth of things by experiencing them, falling in love with them, and conforming to them in acts of mimesis.
These were home truths for Aristotle, who in his Poetics observes that man’s poetic and storytelling activity has its origin in our natural inclination to imitate and to take pleasure in mimetic activity.
And interestingly, Aristotle connects our natural desire to imitate with our natural desire to know. Mimesis is a way of truth.
The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, renowned author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, makes the same point: “Only humans, apart from birds, are thought normally to imitate sounds directly, and only humans can truly imitate another’s course of action. Other species may adopt the same goal as another individual member of their species, and may succeed in finding their own way to achieve it, but only humans directly imitate the means as well as the end.”
Fascinating.
“The enormous strength of the human capacity for mimesis,” McGilchrist continues, “is that our brains let us escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of another being: this is the way in which, through human consciousness, we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person.”
Mimesis, McGilchrist further argues, “is founded on empathy and grounded in the body. In fact, imitation is a marker of empathy: more empathic people mimic the facial expressions of those they are with more than others.”
All the examples of mimesis given so far have been of an individual actively imitating the actions or expressions of another. But another way we human beings partake in mimetic activity is the one to which Aristotle devotes most of his Poetics: the telling of stories. Storytelling is an act of imitation, an imitation, as Aristotle says, of human beings in action, human beings pursuing this or that good or avoiding this or that evil. Human beings in pursuit of their fulfillment, or happiness.
My latest novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, is an act of mimesis in this latter sense. It is a story that imitates particular human beings trying to achieve happiness.
Specifically, my novel is my attempt to empathetically “bridge the gap” between myself and someone suffering from a terminal illness. The “bridge” I built to span the gap is an imaginary character, my protagonist, Kate Montclair, who learns at the beginning of the story that she has inoperable brain cancer. Through Kate Montclair, I enter into the experience of someone confronting imminent death. And in doing so, I fall in love with that experience and take delight in it. Not in the sense that I delight in someone else’s pain. But in the sense that to contemplate the human predicament through an act of mimesis, learning and growing all the while, is intrinsically delightful.
One of McGilchrist’s central claims is that Western culture has forgotten the power of the kind of knowledge we gain through mimesis. Rather than experiential knowledge gained through mimetic acts, our culture prefers acts of analysis, acts by which we break ideas and things down into parts so as better to manipulate them. There is nothing in itself wrong with analysis. However, our cultural problem, as McGilchrist shrewdly detects, is that we have reduced the quest for knowledge—reduced our entire way of viewing reality—to the breaking of things down into parts so as better to manipulate them.
The problem turns tragic when human beings are reduced to manipulable parts. We begin to see ourselves as machines, contraptions. And when the machine breaks down beyond all repair—
What else to do but get rid of it?
Euthanasia is a dark shadow lengthening over our culture.
We need more than one kind of light to drive away the menace. Or, to switch my metaphor (to one that I borrow from G.K. Chesterton), we need to respond to euthanasia with both the sword and the trowel. The sword is the weapon of defense: this is the power of analysis showcased in conceptual argument. But to change a culture, we need more than conceptual argument. We also need the trowel. The trowel is the weapon by which we build the artifacts of a new culture of life. It is the tool we use to build the bridges that will span the gap between ourselves and those who, for example, are suffering from serious illness and may be considering self-destruction.
In brief, we need stories that will help us mimetically experience what it looks and feels like to confront horrible suffering and what it looks and feels like to endure it.
As a novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair attempts just such a mimesis. But inside the story itself, certain characters are given the opportunity of mimetic transformation through story. To say more would be to take away from the mimetic experience of enjoying the novel, so I will leave the rest to your reading.
Have a wonderful Feast of Corpus Christi and a blessed week.
P.S. If you are enjoying The Comic Muse, I would most appreciate if you would consider sharing this post with a friend or otherwise spreading the word.
P.P.S. And if you would like to pick up a copy of The Good Death of Kate Montclair, you can do so here on Amazon.
Daniel: I received Taylor's book this week. It was a fantastic surprise!! Thank you!! It brought a fresh air of nostalgia from my "doctoral" years. He was a student at my alma mater, the University of Kansas, around five years before me. Three of his teachers and mentors were mine, especially Dr. Quinn and Dr. Hillesheim, even though Quinn, in the 1990s, was only teaching "regular" classes. The IHP was already destroyed and gone. He also mentioned Dr. Ivan Barrientos, a Guatemalan whom I met during my first week at K.U. He was assigned to me because my English then was too limited. Alas, he suddenly passed away a year after that. I still have an old "photocopy" of John Senior's paper, "What is really the question," given by Quinn. He asked me to memorize it. When I chose to write my dissertation on Maritain and asked him to be part of my committee, Quinn was thrilled but said: no, I can't be part of the committee. If I am part of it, you will be in trouble and may not finish your work. Please call Hillesheim - continued - who may not be Catholic but is open to the classical mode of knowing. Prof Hillesheim, a Nietzsche scholar, was a soft Nietzschean. Knowledge is not about fact, he often quipped. There are other things, but I will stop now. Nostalgia gives a heavy heart too. Keep musing
Un abrazo
Mario
I did not read Taylor's book. I will now
M