The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

EACH of us brings his favorite examples to the table when the subject of contemporary adult immaturity is raised. From the multitude of news items that, by turns, offend and amaze, I offer the following two as especially illustrative of our postmodern, postindustrial, indisputably American age.

The first, which captured the attention of nightly newscasts all across the nation, related the story of a white, middle-class, Midwest couple, an engineer and a homemaker, who decided they needed a winter vacation and so flew south to warmer climes, leaving their two preteenage children behind for nine full days, including Christmas, unattended. When their daughters, ages four and nine, accidentally set off a smoke alarm in their suburban home, a neighbor notified the police who then arrested the parents when they finally deplaned from their Acapulco getaway. This so-called "Home Alone" case was especially troubling to the national conscience, I think, because it seemed to exhibit a purely hedonistic motivation for offensive behavior, absent any apparent pathological or political substrate, such as drug addiction or an attempt to manipulate welfare rules. It was even more troubling, perhaps, in that all the various ways of categorizing the offending couple refuted our easiest, self-exculpatory presumptions about antisocial behavior: that the desertion of America's children is primarily a problem of single-parent families, or of men, or of a mostly black and urban underclass, or of a corrupt liberal cultural elite that has taken up residence on the two coasts.

The second example is even stranger but no less troubling to our easy presumptions about the origins of irresponsible behavior. Back in 1990, a terminally ill Californian was involved in an unusual legal suit. Credentialed in precisely those ways we now soberly respect, this Silicon Valley computer consultant, with a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, wanted the court to permit doctors to fulfill his final wish, which was, grotesque as it seems, to have his head cut off before his disease actually killed him. His intention was not some bizarre form of euthanasia (Dr. Kevorkian meets "Chain Saw Massacre") but its opposite: He didn't want to die in peace so much as live forever. The plan was to have himself instantly frozen "alive," in hopes of being revived when the advances of science might cure his disease. And because he believed his true self to reside in his brain (recall his profession), and because the private companies that offer cryonic deep-freeze charge far less for preserving a head than a whole human body ($35,000 versus $100,000 at that time), he was requesting decapitation so that he could afford a procedure which he had come to believe might eventually save him.

The great naturalist Louis Agassiz is said to have commanded a graduate student to study a single dead fish for weeks to make him intimate with the form (and deformation) of animal anatomy. What I would suggest is that the computer consultant's judicial request might serve as an equally instructive specimen. I would suggest that if we think, and think hard, about a justice system that would entertain such a suit, about an economy that would spawn such a company, about the philosophy that predicated the man's reasoning, and about the ethical implications of investing one's resources in such a way, we might achieve an intimate comprehension of our culture's anatomy, its current form and deformation.

Let it be noted first that this man's decision making was rooted in the basic premises of the prevailing practical philosophy of our day-which is, I would assert, a form of rational materialism largely stripped of Judeo-Christian values. Although his request seems extreme to the point of absurdity, he was not being rash; his reasoning, to the contrary, was highly methodical, rational, and (some might even say) brave. After studying the medical evidence, he had accepted the terrible truth of a terminal diagnosis, researched his options, and made a kind of cost-benefit analysis. Unlike so many today, he wasn't asking for a government handout, only for the right to exercise a unique opportunity offered to him by the combined creativity of science and the marketplace. One could argue, in short, that the man was a good capitalist consumer, acting out of precisely the kind of enlightened self-interest thought to produce both economic prosperity and social progress, and that he was a model democratic citizen, using the peaceful means of the law to pursue his constitutional right to direct his own destiny.

Is it fair to call such a request immature? If maturity can be defined as those character traits necessary for the sustenance of a harmonious society, and if the sustaining of such a society depends on adults who have adapted to the realities of the human condition, including the reality of death, and who are willing, therefore, to bequeath both their wisdom and their wealth to the next generation-then, yes, I believe it is fair. Although opposite in apparent temper, this "rational" request for decapitation is no less self-centered in its own way than the rash desertion of the vacationing couple, and, as a model for adult decision making, no less destructive to society.