The Value Of (A) Life

Dan Munz takes up the rhetorical question I posed earlier. He quotes me asking why and how the religious right venerates a death---Jesus's---and a life---Terri Schiavo's---and what the two have in common.

He says that I'm focusing too much on consequences (which would certainly be out of character from the previous post). And he says that the common thread is suffering:

Sure, Jesus died materially on one day, but he was later spiritually reborn to live for all eternity - without his suffering, he would have died a simple, mortal death. Terri’s death as an ordinary, mundane mortal occurred some 15 years ago. Now, she has become exactly what Jesus became when he rose back into life: A vessel for society’s aspiration to triumph over itself. The manifest cruelty of a reality that could produce both a beaten, bloodied messiah and a gurgling, drooling, half-alive shell of a formerly sentient woman seems somehow too cruel to be comprehended. If that were all there was to life - a crucifiction or a cardiac arrest, and then an eternity of darkness - life would be simply unlivable. So, we look for something else. For right-wingers, that “something else” is suffering. They valorize suffering because suffering, to them, embodies humanity’s aspiration to rise above the things it does to itself. If you cannot cope with being part of a humanity that would kill Jesus or Terri Schiavo, your only choice is to imagine to yourself that somehow, secretly, you are on the side of the angels, fighting against the cruelty of humanity. Suffering ennobles these people, because it makes this self-delusion seem plausible.

This does sound plausible to me, and thinking of the right's "life-worship" as an actual worship of suffering might be precisely the right conception. However, there is one counterexample that springs immediately to mind. Aside from Terri Schiavo, the other sort of life---the only other sort of life---that the religious right holds in esteem is the life of fetuses. Fetuses, of course, do not suffer. It could be that the Jesus and Terri Schiavo cases have nothing to do with abortion cases, or that Terri Schiavo and fetuses have nothing to do with Jesus, or that Jesus and fetuses have nothing to do with Terri Schiavo---all of these at least in the sense that there are separate religious doctrines governing each grouping. Nor is it terribly unlikely that the religious right's ideology is inconsistent. But if so to either of the above, we at least need an explanation of why.

One conceptual separation that makes some prima facie sense is between cynics in legislatures and the core constituency of the movement. For the former, Jeremy's theory of "culture of life" as a "culture of state power," i.e. an ideology of state control of individual spiritual and material existences, does rather neatly bind all three objects of worship. For the latter, such a conceptualization makes less sense; unless it is the position of the rank-and-file of the religious right that liberty, even negative liberty, is not for the likes of them or any other commoners. I don't want to tread too much on Jeremy's theory, but one helpful amendation/addition might be something like this: The goal of a fascist movement is not to forcefully invalidate the rights of citizenship, but to bring about a state of affairs in which the demos willingly---enthusiastically---relinquishes its own freedoms.