Death and Society: A Book of Readings and Sources

by James P. Carse, Arlene Dallery (Editor)

Death and A Book of Readings and Sources (View amazon detail page) 0155172115

472 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1977

About the author

James P. Carse taught at New York University for thirty years as the Professor of the History and Literature of Religion, and Director of the Religious Studies Program. He retired from the University in 1996. He is a writer and an artist, and lives in New York City and Massachusetts.

James Carse was the Director of Religious Studies at New York University for thirty years. He was a member of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the recipient of numerous teaching awards. He is retired and living in New York City.

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, if dated book confronting topics for society that are well, really timeless. Abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, suicide, legal determination of death, aging, hospice and more get essays from various aspects.

On the topic of institutions, such as "old age homes" and other long-term care such as for the mentally incapacitated I found this observation on how these express a dilemma in desire for human nature:

Foucault was aware that this impulse to banish is not a simple expression of brutality. He recognized the philanthropic element in the move to sequester: "Interest in cure and expulsion coincide. "16 But it took David Rothman's recent Bancroft Book Award winner, The Discovery of the Asylum, to show the intimate historical connection between the impulse to rehabilitate and the compulsion to segregate. Rothman has documented the drastic change that occurred in the 1820s and afterward in the U.S. in the handling of crime, madness, and indigency. Until the early nineteenth century, criminals were either whipped, pilloried, driven out of town, or hung. Jails were no more than temporary lock-ups until decisions about punishment could be reached. Not until the 1820s did this I upon the strategy of incarcerating, and then isolating....

....

In my judgment, however, Slater's attempt to locate the toilet assumption uniquely in the American immigrant experience and Foucault's effort to blame the impulse to banish exclusively on classical rationalism are equally dubious. Solving problems by dodging them is as old as the parable of the Good Samaritan. "Passing by on the other side" was simply an early version of achieving some distance from the distressed. The impulses both to sequester and to devour are within humankind and not just an idiosyncracy of the American experience or the Enlightenment.

....

Perhaps the lesson to be learned, however, from the eighteenth- century European and nineteenth-century American experiments with total institutions is that an ethic defined by resistance alone usually imposes on others what it seeks to depose. The total institution failed and failed brutally because it operated reflexively against negativities, the absolute negativities of madness, crime, dependency, and decrepitude. Society proceeded on the assumption that the negative absolutely had to be eliminated (through the ministrations of the professional) and when it could not be eliminated it had to be sequestered or eliminated by being sequestered.

It may be a good deal healthier to begin with the assumption that the negative is not absolute and therefore that its elimination is not the pre-condition of a truly human existence. Once the negativities of suffering and death are not treated as absolutes, then one may be less tempted to lay upon professionals the fatal charge to eliminate negativity or to banish ruthlessly its host.

[CD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for an ethics class years ago. Will be on my 'to re-read' shelf again. Sits next to Finite and Infinite Games which is a favorite of mine.