Assaults on Human Dignity
In recent years, the troubling question "Is this a life worth living?" has spread from intellectual circles into public discourse. It is directed especially at people in vegetative states and those with degenerative diseases, but increasingly extends to individuals with severe intellectual disabilities—those heavily dependent on others, with minimal autonomy or skills, little prospect of participation or integration. Others are subtly devalued as well. Prisoners convicted of heinous crimes face calls for capital punishment. Poor migrants drown in the Mediterranean, and few weep. The unborn are not considered fully human and can be aborted without restraint—with special vehemence toward fetuses thought to be malformed, justified by a terrible false compassion even from those who claim to defend life. We could cite numerous news stories to illustrate this trend, though many crimes against life occur in silence. The most sensational and heavily politicized recent case was Eluana, in so-called persistent vegetative state. Her father claimed the right to end her life, against the wishes of the sisters who had cared for her for years. The state permitted it and even called it an act of love, respecting her alleged earlier wishes. Yet feeding and hydration are not therapies; they are basic human needs. The language itself was deeply false: Eluana was not a vegetable, but a severely disabled woman—completely dependent on others. Eating and drinking were not medical treatment but survival. We must change our language, medical language included, when it distorts reality and obscures the humanity of the person before us. Our mental schemas can twist what we see. A doctor declared that Eluana "had been dead for seventeen years" while she still lived. He refused to recognize the person in front of him; his ideology replaced reality itself.A Culture of Death
What worldview underlies these renewed eugenic tendencies? John Paul II called it a culture of death. It is a mix of relativism, functionalism, and individualism. Relativism has ended all talk of universal values—the very foundation of civil law. Now there is no true or false, good or evil, right or wrong. Everything is renegotiable based on the interests of the powerful at any given moment. Even human dignity can be questioned, offered various justifications. Relativism removed God and unleashed thought to override reality, to question everything endlessly, breeding superficiality and abandoning true critical thinking—which should be the cultivation of discernment between truth and falsehood, good and evil. We witness the collapse of morality and, with it, of education itself. The result: ethical irresponsibility and the tragic neglect of pedagogy. Economic functionalism insists that a human has value only if he or she meets certain criteria; otherwise, he or she is a burden on society and the state. It introduces a fatal distinction: not all human beings are persons. A human person must possess certain characteristics; without them, there is no dignity, no right to life. But who decides these characteristics? Who can change them? On what grounds? What becomes of those deemed not persons? Are they marginalized? Segregated? Eliminated? The elderly in supposed mental or physical decline are at risk—they become a cost, no longer useful even as grandparents, no longer productive within the economic system. People with intellectual disabilities from birth never were "productive"; when severely limited and "unintegrable," they are pitied as hopeless, their lives miserable. Better they never exist; they are a heavy cost to society and prevent their families from achieving personal fulfillment. Individualism—the motto "the individual and his needs," fashionable in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first—establishes a position with disastrous communal and social consequences: the other becomes merely a means to my self-realization. I am the center of the universe; others orbit me and are welcome only as long as they serve my purposes. Then: gone. There is no more loyalty to community, only to self. This explains, for instance, the devastating crisis of marriage and family. Connected to individualism are narcissism, hedonism, consumerism, careerism, racism. The personal consequences are destructive: loneliness spreads, and with it anguish, depression, despair.The Educative Relationship of Care
What is to be done? We must attempt to rebuild solid foundations for communal life and society. The first inescapable point—without compromise, without sentimentality, without resignation—is respect for human dignity always, at every age and stage of life, from conception to natural death. Otherwise, what foundation? What protection? What guarantee? What rights? Who decides who has value and who does not? Who should live and who should die? The danger of treading new versions of the lethal path of twentieth-century totalitarianism—Nazism and Communism—is not as remote as superficial adherents of certain vapid cultural trends claim. Yet principle alone is not enough. Political and cultural commitment, firm reassertion of a vision of life and humanity—these are necessary but not sufficient to safeguard the dignity of every person. We must also foster recognition of the worth of every human being. How? Through an educational relationship of care. Mere assistance—meeting primary needs like food, hydration, health, hygiene, protection, rest, training within one's abilities—is not enough. This is the assistential dimension, what legislators prize. But it is a narrow approach. Reduced to this alone, we fall into what I call neo-welfarism: mere assistance padded with some medical care. This appears to be the disheartening legislative trend of recent years—services for disabled people reduced to residential facilities that risk becoming chronic wards, hardly a real home for those whose parents can no longer care for them. Nor is it sufficient to move from care to caring—to strengthen assistance with the worthy intention of taking someone to heart through an emotionally significant interpersonal relationship. This is progress beyond mere assistance, but we are not there yet. We need educative accompaniment. I mean education in its three synergistic dimensions: continually striving to build contexts of genuine welcome where the person feels received; discovering and supporting personal potential—motor, relational, emotional, communicative, cognitive, moral—however limited; recognizing that skills and autonomies are not ends in themselves but means, where possible, toward personal fulfillment; integration understood as centering the person in a shared experience of communion and community. What we need is the educative approach and the pedagogical reflection it requires in accompanying those who need support on the journey of life, whether temporarily or permanently, partly or wholly, at any age and stage. This is the guarantee of each person's life project, of integral human development, of the common good, of personal and communal peace, of hope, of meaning and purpose in existence. The educative community—a place of celebration and forgiveness—where those who enter exclaim "How beautiful!" where meeting others awakens joy within, where wonder grows at seeing and understanding the beauty of relationships that reveal, beyond appearances and stereotypes, the true beauty of persons: people who help and sustain each other, who love and are loved, who find solutions to problems and conflicts, who cultivate the dreams of each person and the community itself. Such a community allows us to recognize the dignity of every human being. Vittore MarianiProfessor of Special Pedagogy, Catholic University of Milan
Essential Bibliography(for further reading) AA.VV., Dignità e diritti delle persone con handicap mentale, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, 2007. L. Bianchini — V. Mariani — A. Valentini, La persona disabile: dignità e promozione integrale, Nuove Frontiere, Roma, 2009. M. Cairo — V. Mariani — R. Zoni Confalonieri, Disabilità ed età adulta. Qualità della vita e progettualità pedagogica, Vita e Pensiero, Milano, 2010. V. Mariani (a cura di), La relazione educati va di aiuto nelle diverse condizioni ed età della vita, Edizioni del Cerro, Tirrenia(Pi), 2005. J. Vanier, La comunità. Luogo del perdono e della festa, Jaca Book, Milano, 1991.
