A simpler lifestyle for a joyful world

Pope Francis on the courage of young activists (From video here)

The Covid-19 pandemic has made us aware the "no one is safe until everyone is safe, that our actions really do affect one another, and that what we do today affects what happens tomorrow". That is a lesson that must stand us in good stead in dealing with the crisis in our use of the world's resources and care of the global environment, our common home.

We are fortunate to have as motivation to transform our lifestyle some recent statements that express the urgency of our inescapable situation arising from overuse and misuse of resources and, at a personal or family level, an overconsumption that brings us not happiness but a poverty of mind and spirit. 

There are clear steps that we - each of us - can take now that will contribute to a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases, which make the planet warmer, and reshape our communities in such a way that relationships will be more important than possessions.

Why bother?

The world's political leaders going to Scotland for this year's summit on climate change are dependent on each of us in order to make commitments that will affect their nations and the world. We members of the public must be ready to support the promises made in good faith by leaders.

Let's hear some reasons why we must commit ourselves to the global effort to restore balance to the world we share. 

Some of the most powerful calls for action come from religious leaders, whose universal perspective enable them to easily embrace the concept of Earth as "our common home".

In our common Christian tradition... the concept of stewardship—of individual and collective responsibility for our God-given endowment—presents a vital starting-point for social, economic and environmental sustainability. In the New Testament, we read of the rich and foolish man who stores great wealth of grain while forgetting about his finite end.

We learn of the prodigal son who takes his inheritance early, only to squander it and end up hungry. We are cautioned against adopting short term and seemingly inexpensive options of building on sand, instead of building on rock for our common home to withstand storms. These stories invite us to adopt a broader outlook and recognise our place in the extended story of humanity.

But we have taken the opposite direction. We have maximised our own interest at the expense of future generations. By concentrating on our wealth, we find that long-term assets, including the bounty of nature, are depleted for short-term advantage. Technology has unfolded new possibilities for progress but also for accumulating unrestrained wealth, and many of us behave in ways which demonstrate little concern for other people or the limits of the planet. Nature is resilient, yet delicate.

We are already witnessing the consequences of our refusal to protect and preserve it (Gn 2.15). Now, in this moment, we have an opportunity to repent, to turn around in resolve, to head in the opposite direction. We must pursue generosity and fairness in the ways that we live, work and use money, instead of selfish gain.

This is from a joint message on the protection of creation from Pope Francis, Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, and Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby issued in September, looking toward the summit in Glasgow.

To enter into the vision they have of the world burning up and the poor of the planet being harmed most by the lifestyle of the people of the wealthiest nations it's worthwhile to look at more from their message to the world:

The current climate crisis speaks volumes about who we are and how we view and treat God’s creation. We stand before a harsh justice: biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and climate change are the inevitable consequences of our actions, since we have greedily consumed more of the earth’s resources than the planet can endure. But we also face a profound injustice: the people bearing the most catastrophic consequences of these abuses are the poorest on the planet and have been the least responsible for causing them....

Accordingly, as leaders of our Churches, we call on everyone, whatever their belief or worldview, to endeavour to listen to the cry of the earth and of people who are poor, examining their behaviour and pledging meaningful sacrifices for the sake of the earth which God has given us.

Today, we are paying the price. The extreme weather and natural disasters of recent months reveal afresh to us with great force and at great human cost that climate change is not only a future challenge, but an immediate and urgent matter of survival. Widespread floods, fires and droughts threaten entire continents. 

Sea levels rise, forcing whole communities to relocate; cyclones devastate entire regions, ruining lives and livelihoods. Water has become scarce and food supplies insecure, causing conflict and displacement for millions of people. We have already seen this in places where people rely on small scale agricultural holdings. Today we see it in more industrialised countries where even sophisticated infrastructure cannot completely prevent extraordinary destruction.

Tomorrow could be worse. Today’s children and teenagers will face catastrophic consequences unless we take responsibility now, as ‘fellow workers with God’ (Gn 2.4–7), to sustain our world. We frequently hear from young people who understand that their futures are under threat.

For their sake, we must choose to eat, travel, spend, invest and live differently, thinking not only of immediate interest and gains but also of future benefits.We repent of our generation’s sins. We stand alongside our younger sisters and brothers throughout the world in committed prayer and dedicated action for a future which corresponds ever more to the promises of God.

Here, then, are the most important words for us:  "We must choose to eat, travel, spend, invest and live differently, thinking not only of immediate interest and gains but also of future benefits."

The three leaders point to the various crises confronting us at present and urge cooperation:

We are in a unique position either to address them with shortsightedness and profiteering or seize this as an opportunity for conversion and transformation. If we think of humanity as a family and work together towards a future based on the common good, we could find ourselves living in a very different world. Together we can share a vision for life where everyone flourishes. Together we can choose to act with love, justice and mercy. Together we can walk towards a fairer and fulfilling society with those who are most vulnerable at the centre.

But this involves making changes. Each of us, individually, must take responsibility for the ways we use our resources. [...] Together, as communities, churches, cities and nations, we must change route and discover new ways of working together to break down the traditional barriers between peoples, to stop competing for resources and start collaborating.

They end with a call for each and every individual to take part  in a united effort:

All of us—whoever and wherever we are—can play a part in changing our collective response to the unprecedented threat of climate change and environmental degradation.

Caring for God’s creation is a spiritual commission requiring a response of commitment. This is a critical moment. Our children’s future and the future of our common home depend on it. 

What to do?

Most people now understand that the gross exploitation of the planet in order to support one particular kind of economic system, which entails pushing consumers to desire more, truly poses a threat to human existence on Earth. It has taken disaster after disaster to wake us up to this. How to respond is the question that is getting increased attention.

In the message above, we saw the call to change the nature of our choices, to live differently, to give more regard to the future. We were urged to commit to setting or accepting limits, to restrain our desires and to fucus on our needs; instead of selfish gain, to share and colloborate, and "pledging meaningful sacrifices".

This is hard, but it can also be joyful as we join together as a family to transform our lives, joining with others who are doing likewise.

This is what Pope Francis said in a video message earlier September asking for prayer and personal action on the care of creation. He identified where we can transform our lifestyle. This is what he said:

Let us choose to change! Let us advance with young people towards lifestyles that are simpler and more respectful of the environment.

Let us pray that we all will make courageous choices, the choices necessary for a simple and environmentally sustainable lifestyle, taking inspiration from our young people who are resolutely committed to this.

And they aren’t foolish, because they are committed to their own future. This is why they want to change what they will inherit at a time when we will no longer be here.

Let us reflect on how the way we eat, consume, travel, or the way we use water, energy, plastics, and many other material goods, is often harmful to the earth.

So each of us can make a start, using these items as a template for action:

Fill in your own details, with a focus on sustainability, avoiding waste, and reducing the amount of the earth's resources used, for a lifestyle that is "simpler and more respectful of the environment".

We commit to these changes in our lifestyle:

In what we eat — We will:

In the form and amount of goods consumed — We will:

In the form and amount of our travel — We will:

In the way we use water — We will:   

In the way we use energy — We will:

In our use of plastics —  We will:

In ...                             —  We will: 

In ...                             —  We will:

Can stuff make us happy? 

Matt Fradd has advice on making our life simpler. He's written a book that explains why it is one of the most common traps we fall into is thinking that earthly possessions can make us happy. 

When we’re incapable of possessing things, we can mistakenly believe that, if we had them, they would make us happy (be it a thing or even a person with whom we are infatuated). But when we obtain them, we realize that they can’t fill the void in our hearts that is the root cause of our unhappiness. 

In fact, there’s a whole movement of people who understand this and try to live a life of minimalism. They know that as we accumulate more stuff, we accumulate more worry about our stuff. We worry about it breaking, being stolen, or eventually fading in quality over time. We worry that other people won’t be impressed by our stuff or that we need newer stuff to make us happy because the old stuff is now inferior or obsolete in comparison. 

Fradd cites a study of people who had won the lottery. The happiness felt at the time of their win soon fades:

Thus, as lottery winners become accustomed to the additional pleasures made possible by their new wealth, these pleasures should be experienced as less intense and should no longer contribute very much to their general level of happiness. 

There's also the matter of how we should think of money: 

Don’t get confused, however, in all this talk about money not making us happy, to think this means money is evil. In 1 Timothy 6:10 St. Paul says, “For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs.” 

Paul doesn’t say money is the root of all evil. He says, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”. St. Thomas Aquinas defines sin as the result of loving creatures more than creator. Money (or anything) becomes evil when we love it more than God. 

In brief, our putting into effect the simpler lifestyle that is being urged on us by our religious leaders, who are at the forefront of the environmental movement, means that we will be living more closely to God's will, we will be happier - with fewer worries about the security of our material posessions or what our neighbours think about what we own - and planet Earth will be happier, sending fewer natural disasters across our path. That commitment to more care for our small blue planet seems to make for a pretty good outcome all round.

See also:

💢 ENCYCLICAL LETTER LAUDATO SI’ OF POPE FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME

💢 ENCYCLICAL LETTER FRATELLI TUTTI OF POPE FRANCIS ON FRATERNITY AND SOCIAL FRIENDSHIP

💢 Patriarch Bartholomew on creation and the ecological crisis - here 

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Science is a process not an endpoint

Photo by Willy Arisky from Pexels

The Covid-19 pandemic has provided us with almost daily observation of science at work. It has very much been an ugly affair with uncertainty being the key feature. But this is the nature of the beast, so to speak. 

Yes, science can be characterised by its dealing in uncertainty, as we have seen by the variations in the daily proclamations of what we should do or should not do to avoid the grip of the Covid virus and return to some semblance of normality. All this is expressed well by an Australian commentator viewing the changing advice of scientific experts on how to escape the ravages of the pandemic:

To the casual onlooker, this flip-flopping may indicate that the so-called experts have no idea what they’re doing. If you’ve spent any time in a comments section on the internet, you will have seen how this changing advice led to doubt and scepticism among the general population, evidence that scientists and public health officials have lost the plot. But instead, what is actually happening is that we are seeing the proverbial sausage of science being made in real time through our public health discourse.

The pandemic has been a clear demonstration that science is a method, not an endpoint. It is an ongoing process of hypothesising, testing, and interpreting the results of those tests through public policy. Though the hypothesis may be accepted or rejected, these interpretations are unlikely to be absolutely definitive statements or recommendations and are usually made with varying degrees of certainty.

The changes in advice have fed into the anti-vax logic. However:

Does this mean the science was wrong and that we can’t trust it? No. It means the science is working exactly as it should: our knowledge was incomplete, and we did more research, and adapted public health advice as a result. The fact that our institutions are paying attention to the constantly updating science and changing recommendations based on this information should be a comfort to us, but instead it tends to breed uncertainty. 

Trusting in the process of science, as it plays out in public health policy, sometimes involves uncomfortably abandoning ideas that provide a false sense of safety. This discomfort is one of the reasons many struggled to let go of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as miracle treatments, after both these drugs showed some early promise in managing COVID-19.

Unfortunately, as more research has been done, we have seen contradictory evidence for their efficacy and we cannot responsibly say with any substantial degree of certainty that these drugs are appropriate for the treatment of COVID-19 (at least at the time of publication). 

The writer urges an empathethic response to those skeptical of the generally accepted scientific findings:

The cold, hard hand of science is good at giving the answers we need, but not necessarily the assurances we want. This is where the human element can come in to bridge the gaps. We can’t promise our friends and family absolute safety in an uncertain world, but we can remind them there are steps we can take to improve our chances and help others who are more vulnerable than ourselves. Hopefully, we can all be communally minded and listen to the ongoing recommendations of those with expertise in this area, even when they can’t promise us the certainty we seek.

Scientists, too, will have been reminded through this pandemic experience that science is, indeed, a process and that any one finding is only as solid as the next one allows. They have to accept that their proclamations cannot be couched in terms of inevitability or certitude, but must be presented as evidence pointing in a certain direction. That takes humility, but it reflects the reality of the situation.  

Compassion exploited as a mere rhetorical tool

                                                                                                                                 Photo by Shvets production from Pexels

Both at the beginning of life and at its conclusion the forces of death exploit the rhetoric of compassion. 

The secular French writer, Michel Houellebecq, has said: 

Partisans of euthanasia like to gargle on words whose meanings they distort to such an extent that they should no longer even have the right to utter them. In the case of “compassion”, the lie is palpable.

He would argue that instead of building a healthcare system that supports and advocates for the sick, the disabled, the mentally ill, so that they get the care due to a person with innate dignity, the non-rational, specifically, the sentimental approach to existential questions comes into play so that activists substitute the human capacity for dealing with reality "with a shallower more animal concept of good health".  

Another comment of this kind comes in a column by Andrew Hamilton on how the central argument of those advocating abortion and those supporting euthanasia is that death will improve the "lives of people who were already heavily burdened", whether poor or unsupported mothers, or the sick and disabled:

Public awareness of such suffering has fed the compassion that underlies the popular support for legislative change.

Hamilton foresees the time when governments will have taken on the task of directing the application of euthanasia, perhaps in the decades ahead when there will be a deluge of elderly in a swiftly fading economy. Such aggressive decisions could easily entail...

[...] an appeal to compassion for their [the 'patient's'] diminished condition and for their relatives who must observe it.

The focus on compassion as the foundation for legislation that involves life and death situations is fraught with danger for society because it tends be myopic over long-term implications.

To examine this aspect of social re-engineering,  British writer Mary Harrington has compiled a  list of unexpected outcomes of the "feminist" push to widen access to contraception and abortion.

One US study shows that the availability of oral contraceptives so increased demand for extra-marital sex that — because the method wasn’t 100% reliable — it also increased the rate of extra-marital pregnancies by around 15%. 

Linked to this statistic is the one involving the introduction of legal abortion in that the number of "shotgun weddings" fell by a greater percentage than that of the extra-marital pregnancies, meaning that the male party was given license to walk away scot-free of any responsibility for the child when the mother opted not to abort.

Thus, while advocates of legal abortion believed that it would reduce instances of single motherhood, its paradoxical effect was the opposite. By relieving social pressure on men to step up after impregnating a woman, legalising abortion accelerated the prevalence of single motherhood — a phenomenon now widely recognised as a central to the feminisation of poverty.

Compassion is powerful as a rhetorical tool, but it can quickly fade. Harrington sees a case in point with the introduction of legalised abortion in Britian. She goes on "to draw out a more general implication: that when a previously unavoidable life experience becomes avoidable, wider attitudes to that experience will change. And for some, it’ll stop being a matter for sympathy."

Therefore, unmarried mothers came to be seen by some in the political realm as "lazy, parasitic 'welfare scroungers'”:

[T]hose who took this position assumed that because such women could have terminated a pregnancy, the duties following on having not done so should be wholly on their shoulders. In other words: if suffering is avoidable, the choice to suffer comes to be seen as wholly private.

This could be carried over into attitudes toward the disabled - if parents did not abort a child who would be born with disabilities, or if disabled people themselves choose to not kill themselves, then they should accept the financial - and all - burdens of their decision.

Harrington:

And notwithstanding cruel conservative stereotypes, it’s overwhelmingly scarcity that drives the “choice” to end a pregnancy. In the US, the poorest 12% of women account for almost 50% of abortions. And a glance through women’s stories swiftly illustrates just how far the individual “choice” to end a pregnancy is often far from free, but rather a reluctant decision driven overwhelmingly by poverty.

In a world where dwindling welfare resources are ever more grudgingly funded by a shrinking working-age population, it’s easy to imagine the arguments from scarcity that will follow, ever more explicitly, upon the transformation of terminal illness into a “choice”. Indeed, they’re already foreshadowed by an assessment of assisted suicide by the Canadian government, which noted that legalisation “could reduce annual health care spending across Canada by between $34.7 million and $138.8 million”.

Those individualists now pushing to extend “choice” to the end of life are still wedded to a hyper-individualist twentieth-century mindset that relies on an ever-expanding welfare state to underwrite its freedoms. But they’re not paying attention: the age of abundance that shaped that dream of endless choice is already over.

And yet they push on. If they succeed, many people now healthy will face terminal illness in a “care” landscape created by individualists, for a society that’s enshrined “choice” over any public duty of compassion — and that can no longer afford a publicly-funded care infrastructure to pick up the pieces. I don’t want to live in a world where ‘tough-minded’ right-liberals write op-eds implying that those with terminal illnesses who refuse the Socratic way out are selfish parasites.

A cynic might argue that given all this, adjusting the statute book to allow for a 21st-century “lapot” [ritual killing of elderly]  is merely sensible. But if this is so, we should drop the rhetoric about freedom and compassion. We should be under no illusions about what [assisted-dying legislation] is for, or about the callously neo-Roman attitude to human life that will follow in its wake.

So all of this can be seen as "sentimental homicide". As one scholar put it:

We should not think that the Dutch or Nazis were terribly different from our contemporary suicide advocates, for part of their propaganda was the call to allow self-killing as a means to avoid profound and intractable pain and suffering. In their misguided attempts to do this, their movement was driven by the logic of its principles to permit deliberate and unconsented killing of the incompetent.

Diana Johnson, who this year introduced to the British parliament an amendment to decriminalize abortion, that is, removing all oversight of the removal of members of the next generation, received a letter from more than 800 medical professionals asking her not to take her proposal to the vote. Such was the response, the proposal went nowhere. What the medical people told her was:

Your proposal to allow abortion up to birth in this country would be to attack the heart of the medical profession — our core duty to protect life whenever and wherever possible. Such an extreme and radical abortion law has no place in the United Kingdom. 

The insight that such a death-promoting law struck at life-supporting principles at the heart of the national character is also seen in the concluding thought of Houellebecq in his article quoted here but which first appeared in Le Figaro newspaper in Paris at the time of a planned euthanasia law change in France. Houellebecq wrote:

The honour of a civilisation is not exactly nothing. But really something else is at stake; from the anthropological point of view. It is a question of life and death. And on this point I am going to have to be very explicit: when a country — a society, a civilisation — gets to the point of legalising euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else — another country, another society, another civilisation — might have a chance to arise.

The hedonistic spirit abroad among the elite of many societies and so among the general public is that freedom of individual behaviour is of the highest value. The discipline needed for a rational ordering of personal life and society as a whole has been lost for the most part. That is because darker psychological forces have been allowed to overwhelm the rational. Foremost among those dark forces are passion, guilt, fear, revenge, self-hatred, and despair - and one can add a compassion untethered from moral principles of the highest order. 

Resources linked to euthanasia:

What is the Church's teaching on suicide? See article here

The development of the Catholic Church's teaching on suicide - See here

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Covid crisis and fresh beginnings: Pope Francis

Lockdown crisis ... artist Luke Adam Hawker (Source)

To gain from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic rather than believe it a lost time people should try to see the future shape of their society with fresh eyes, especially in overcoming "the social inequalities that afflict our peoples", says Pope Francis. "Seeking neither permission nor forgiveness, [the virus] has exposed the heart-breaking situation of so many brothers and sisters," he says. 

Speaking by video to an online meeting of international popular movements - groups that aim to defend the poor and support action for decent work and housing, and care for the land - Francis said the world needed an invigorated search for alternatives that centre on human needs whereas the world system promotes "the throwaway culture, and it is part of the technocratic paradigm" within "capitalist globalisation". 

Before taking an extensive dive into the rich vein of the Church's social teaching, Francis used the occasion to make a plea for immediate action to overcome some of the most glaring global inequalities:

I ask all the great pharmaceutical laboratories to release the [Covid virus vaccine] patents. Make a gesture of humanity and allow every country, every people, every human being, to have access to the vaccines. There are countries where only three or four per cent of the inhabitants have been vaccinated.

In the name of God, I ask financial groups and international credit institutions to allow poor countries to assure “the basic needs of their people” and to cancel those debts that so often are contracted against the interests of those same peoples.

In the name of God, I ask the great extractive industries - mining, oil, forestry, real estate, agribusiness - to stop destroying forests, wetlands and mountains, to stop polluting rivers and seas, to stop poisoning food and people.

In the name of God, I ask the great food corporations to stop imposing monopolistic systems of production and distribution that inflate prices and end up withholding bread from the hungry.

In the name of God, I ask arms manufacturers and dealers to completely stop their activity, because it foments violence and war, it contributes to those awful geopolitical games which cost millions of lives displaced and millions dead.

In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.

In the name of God, I ask the telecommunications giants to ease access to educational material and connectivity for teachers via the internet so that poor children can be educated even under quarantine.

In the name of God, I ask the media to stop the logic of post-truth, disinformation, defamation, slander and the unhealthy attraction to dirt and scandal, and to contribute to human fraternity and empathy with those who are most deeply damaged.

In the name of God, I call on powerful countries to stop aggression, blockades and unilateral sanctions against any country anywhere on earth. No to neo-colonialism. Conflicts must be resolved in multilateral forums such as the United Nations. We have already seen how unilateral interventions, invasions and occupations end up; even if they are justified by noble motives and fine words.

This system, with its relentless logic of profit, is escaping all human control. It is time to slow the locomotive down, an out-of-control locomotive hurtling towards the abyss. There is still time.

Together with the poor of the earth, I wish to ask governments in general, politicians of all parties, to represent their people and to work for the common good. I want to ask them for the courage to look at their own people, to look people in the eye, and the courage to know that the good of a people is much more than a consensus between parties (cf. Evangelii gaudium, 2018).

Let them stop listening exclusively to the economic elites, who so often spout superficial ideologies that ignore humanity's real dilemmas. May they be servants of the people who demand land, work, housing and good living. This aboriginal good living or buen vivir is not the same as la dolce vita or “sweet idleness”, no. This is good human living that puts us in harmony with all humanity, with all creation.

I also want to ask all of us religious leaders never to use the name of God to foment wars or coups (cf. Document on Human Fraternity, 2019). Let us stand by the peoples, the workers, the humble, and let us struggle together with them so that integral human development may become a reality. Let us build bridges of love so that the voices of the periphery with their weeping, but also with their singing and joy, provoke not fear but empathy in the rest of society.

A time to dream together

Rather than continue along the road of "indifference, meritocracy and individualism", we should reject the "narratives [that] only serve to divide our peoples, and to undermine and nullify our poetic capacity, the capacity to dream together". On this poetic theme, Francis said:

Sisters and brothers, let us dream together. And so, as I ask all of this with you as well as of you, I want to add some reflections on the future that we must dream and build. Although I say reflections, perhaps I ought to say dreams, because right now our brains and hands are not enough, we also need our hearts and our imagination; we need to dream so that we do not go backwards.

We need to use that sublime human faculty which is the imagination, that place where intelligence, intuition, experience and historical memory come together to create, compose, venture and risk. Let us dream together, because it was precisely the dreams of freedom and equality, of justice and dignity, the dreams of fraternity, that improved the world. And I am convinced when we look through these dreams we will find God’s own dream for all of us, who are His own sons and daughters.

Dreams transcend the narrow limits imposed on us and suggest possible new worlds to us. And I am not talking about ignoble fantasies that confuse living well with having fun, which is nothing more than passing the time to fill the void of meaning and thus remain at the mercy of the world’s dominant ideology. No, it is not that. But to dream of that good living in harmony with all humanity and creation.

... there are many young people who feel hope, but there are many other young people who are sad, who perhaps in order to feel something in this world need to resort to the cheap consolations offered by the consumerist and narcotising system. And others, sad to say, others choose to leave the system altogether. The statistics on youth suicides are not published in their entirety.

In dreaming of a more human future, Francis offers guidelines arising from the social teaching of the Church, "principles useful to Christians and non-Christians alike". He does so with a defensive manner because he knows criticism of past popes, and himself, have flared when they touch upon "social issues". Therefore he cites his source for the teaching he offers, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), compiled under Pope John Paul II (online here). Francis says:

In chapter four of this document, we find principles such as the preferential option for the poor, the universal destination of goods, solidarity, subsidiarity, participation, and the common good. These are all ways in which the Good News of the Gospel takes concrete form on a social and cultural level. And it saddens me that some members of the Church get annoyed when we mention these guidelines that belong to the full tradition of the Church. But the Pope must not stop mentioning this teaching, even if it often annoys people, because what is at stake is not the Pope but the Gospel.

The principle of solidarity: Solidarity not only as a moral virtue but also as a social principle: a principle that seeks to confront unjust systems with the aim of building a culture of solidarity that expresses, the Compendium says, “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”.

Participation and subsidiarity: The common good cannot be used as an excuse to quash private initiative, local identity or community projects. Therefore, these principles promote an economy and politics that recognise the role of popular movements, “the family, groups, associations, local territorial realities; in short, for that aggregate of economic, social, cultural, sports-oriented, recreational, professional and political expressions to which people spontaneously give life and which make it possible for them to achieve effective social growth”.

A time to act

Francis said that even with the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, "I believe we can take the next step from dream to action. Because it is time for action."

He said that he does not have the answer to all social problems but "we must dream together and find it together". In the past he and the popular movements had offered solutions by way of  urban integration, family farming and the popular economy. "We have to go on working together to make them a reality, and now let me add two more: the universal wage and shortening the workday".

A basic income (the UBI) or salary so that everyone in the world may have access to the most basic necessities of life. It is right to fight for a humane distribution of these resources, and it is up to governments to establish tax and redistribution schemes so that the wealth of one part of society is shared fairly, but without imposing an unbearable burden, especially upon the middle class. Generally, when conflicts arise in this matter, it is the middle class that suffers most. Let us not forget that today’s huge fortunes are the fruit of the work, scientific research and technical innovation of thousands of men and women over generations.

Shortening the workday is another possibility: the minimum income is one, the reduction of the working day is another possibility, and one that needs seriously to be explored. In the 19th century, workers laboured twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. When they achieved the eight-hour day, nothing collapsed, contrary to what some sectors had predicted. So, I insist, “working fewer hours so that more people can have access to the labour market is something we need to explore with some urgency”. There must not be so many people overwhelmed by overwork and so many others overwhelmed by lack of work.

I believe these measures are necessary, but of course not sufficient. They do not solve the root problem, nor do they guarantee access to land, housing and work in the quantity and quality that landless farmers, families without secure shelter and precarious workers deserve. Nor will they solve the enormous environmental challenges we face. But I wanted to mention them because they are possible measures and would point us in the right direction.

The key point that Francis made in his conclusion is that all leaders should agree "to place the economy at the service of the people". For sure, that is not the mentality at present. But if that re-orientation were achieved there would more likely be "a lasting peace based on social justice and on care for our Common Home". Before he ends, Francis is moved to say: 

Let us ask God to pour out His blessings on our dreams. Let us not lose our hope. Let us remember the promise that Jesus made to His disciples: “I will be with you always.” [...] The important thing is to realise that He is with you.

In those words there is an echo of those magnificent words that open the Vatican Council's Document on the Church in the Modern World:

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and axieities of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. 

We cannot squander the global Covid-19 crisis by escaping from all the tribulations of this pandemic without finding fresh impetus to implement changes in society that reflect the importance of every person and of the family. From those two focal points will come, as Francis declares, changes to the way economic resources are shared, and to the organisation of work allowing more flexibility for individual workers. The environment will also benefit, as harmful pollution levels will no longer be tolerated. Human society is a project of continual renewal. Let's hope we do not fail in our responsibility. 

Pope Francis's message to the global meeting was aired on October 16, 2021. The link is here. 

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Life in the womb matters to these women

Myleene Klass...has three children but is mother to seven Photo BBC screenshot

Britain has just held Baby Loss Awareness Week. The BBC built up a series of videos and stories providing interviews with the mothers who have suffered a miscarriage or whose child died at birth. 

For Claire Dalles, the pain was still raw three months after losing twins in early pregnancy:

"We went from being told we were going from a couple to a family of four and within 21 weeks going back to just being the two of us," she said.

"It was devastating. I felt numb, like someone had put me in a boxing ring and knocked me out.

"It's your baby and it exists the minute you see on the pregnancy test that you are pregnant. It's the imagination, the fantasy of that life, what you will do, how much you will love that baby, what will become of it, how much your life will change and whether it is one week or 24 weeks the loss is just as horrible."

Claire lost both her babies within 21 weeks. She said that since the loss was classed as a miscarriage, she felt like her babies didn't matter and were not seen as real people. 

One of the twins disappeared about week 12. Around week 21 the other was found to be lacking several organs and the parents were advised to abort that child.

"My biggest concern was if my baby was feeling pain," said Claire. "We were told at this stage he was not feeling pain because the nervous system was not developed. So we decided to terminate the pregnancy while the baby was not feeling pain, because that was the only thing we could give our baby."

The information that Claire's baby could be aborted painlessly seems to have come from a medical staffer who told the lie (and see here: pain felt as early as 12 weeks) trying to be helpful during an emotionally draining time. Maybe the staffer was well down the slippery slope of disregard for any baby, or did not know that in 2020 Richard Hutchinson was born in Minneapolis at a gestational age of 21 weeks 2 days. His is the earliest birth of a baby who has celebrated a first birthday.

When Sally Thompson's first pregnancy ended at nine weeks she felt a sense of sadness: 

"It doesn't take long to get attached," she says. "As soon as you kind of see the two lines or 'pregnant' on the test, you don't think of a ball of cells, you think of the baby that's going to come in nine months. That's what you think about and it is sad when it happens."

She has been pregnant nine more times, but none of the pregnancies have gone to term.

Laura and Steve Hughes's son Jesse died on 19 October 2019 in pregnancy. He was their second child. Each year they light a candle to remember him. Laura:

"Any baby, no matter at what gestation they were lost, they are still a baby and are part of the family."

Naomi and Ross Coniam's daughter Norah died at birth. Naomi says some people don't recognise the reality of the child who has died:

"You do find some people say things like: 'Oh, you'll make great parents again one day'. But you want to tell them that you are a parent, just not in the way you were hoping to be one."

The BBC interviewed Myleene Klass who "has been in the public eye in Britain as a pop musician, broadcaster and classical pianist for two decades". The report goes on:

But last October she broke her silence about a matter that had redefined her life. In an Instagram post she talked about her miscarriages - not one, but four - and the agony she had experienced as a result of the loss.

A miscarriage and having to have a D&C is "horrific", she says. "It turns your world inside out... It definitely changes how you view the world."

"If you have to sign a form for a D&C you have to decide what you wish to do with the 'products of pregnancy'. Products! And to tick a box... and we hand that form to women just before they go down to theatre.

"I couldn't fill the form in. My partner did it for me.

"You enter hospital still with a baby and you leave just with your paperwork."

Klass is asked: "You say 'I have three children but I am a mother to seven'. Is that how it feels?"

She answers with a simple "Yes", and a firm nod of the head.

The interviewer: "Because you are imagining their lives still?" Klass answers again with a definite "Yes".

Given the statistic that one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage, she says she is unlikely to ask other women if they have children..." because you just know that those questions are loaded...you just don't know what that question, 'Do you have any children?' ... is going to do to that person, that day." 

British TV actress Lacey Turner has had two miscarriages. She has a very graphic way of describing the connection between the woman and the being in her womb.

"I think you become a mother the minute you're pregnant, and for that to be taken away, that's another loss. You grieve the fact that you aren't going to be a mother as well as losing a baby. It was a loss at seven weeks."

Meeting with Lacey is Laura Bradshaw, who has had four miscarriages:

"I think about it every day. It's the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing at night because it's consuming...it's a hard thing to go through."

The apparent lack of support for mothers who have had miscarriages disturbs Laura:

"It makes you feel that they don't take it seriously as they should...it makes it seem as if it's no big deal."

The loss of a baby in pregnancy clearly is a big deal. The BBC adds this information: 

New research published in The Lancet [the British medical journal], reveals that miscarriage doubles the risk of depression and quadruples the risk of suicide.

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Gene editing means culling human beings

 Imaginary yes, but the mind boggles at what undisciplined researchers might produce

With in vitro fertilisation and gene editing we - the human race - are at the point we were at in the 1930s and early 1940s as knowledge grew about the atom and how the energy it held could be manipulated. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the American effort to engineer an atomic bomb, put into words what some have subsequently called the Oppenheimer Principle:

It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. 

While world powers are trying to limit the spread or even to roll back the deployment of nuclear weapons because of horrifying prospect of acts of mutual destruction, and the spread of cell- and gene-mutating radiation, the gene-editing world is eager to press on with its research in order to bolster reputations, please narcissistic parents, and, of course, make healthy profits by offering attractive promises to those who barely understand what is being done to their offspring.

 Alan Jacobs has written:

Those who look forward to a future of increasing technological manipulation of human beings, and of other biological organisms, always imagine themselves as the Controllers, not the controlled; they always identify with the position of power. And so they forget evolutionary history, they forget biology, they forget the disasters that can come from following the Oppenheimer Principle — they forget everything that might serve to remind them of constraints on the power they have … or fondly imagine they have.

 Antonio Regalado,  the senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review, who attended 2018's Second International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Hong Kong, tweeted the following:

- holy cow! Harvard Medical School dean George Daley is making the case, big time, and eloquently, FOR editing embryos...

- he is says technically we are *ready* for RESPONSIBLE clinic use.

- he’s basically saying, stop debating ethics, start talking about the pathway forward.

- they are talking about these babies like they are lab rats.

Also from 2018, Professor John Rasko used Australia's Boyer Lectures to explore "Life Re-engineered", covering the power and dangers of biotechnology, gene and cell therapy, as scientists race each other to cure disease, prolong life and change the course of human evolution. 

Rasko is president of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, head of the department of cell & molecular therapies at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and professor of medicine at the University of Sydney’s Centenary Institute. He said in the first lecture:

Nowadays, [...] we know, for instance, that some traits — and some diseases — are directly linked to specific genes. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. Most traits and most genetic diseases seem to involve multiple genes and multiple environmental factors like diet, stress, alcohol consumption and so on. Here nature and nurture combine in dizzyingly complex ways which we're only just beginning to understand.

He uses Down Syndrome to make a point about what might be called "newgenics":

Down Syndrome has no cure, but we can easily screen for it while the embryo is still in the first trimester. And an increasing number of women are having prenatal tests for this and other disorders. If the result is positive for Down Syndrome you're faced with a very difficult decision. Will you or won't you continue the pregnancy? In Europe and the US, about 85% of parents decide on termination.[5] Across Australia, the rates are similar.[6]

Science writer Philip Ball has an article in The Observer on the latest form of human selection that unchecked scientists are making available: 

The birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978 provoked a media frenzy. In comparison, a little girl named Aurea born by IVF in May 2020 went almost unnoticed. Yet she represents a significant first in assisted reproduction too, for the embryo from which she grew was selected from others based on polygenic screening before implantation, to optimise her health prospects.

 For both scientific and ethical reasons, this new type of genetic screening is highly controversial. The nonprofit California-based organisation the Center for Genetics and Society has called its use here “a considerable reach by the assisted-reproduction industry in the direction of techno-eugenics”.

The polygenic screening for Aurea was provided by a New Jersey-based company called Genomic Prediction. The gene-sequencing company Orchid Biosciences in California now also offers an embryo-screening package that assesses risks for common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and schizophrenia.

Genetic screening of IVF embryos for health reasons, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD, is not new in itself. In the UK, it is permitted by the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority, which regulates assisted conception technologies, to look for specific gene variants associated with around 500 diseases, including cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease.

The diseases conventionally screened with PGD are mostly caused by a mutation in only a single gene. They can be nasty but are typically rare. In contrast, most common health problems, such as heart diseases or type 2 diabetes, are polygenic: caused by complex interactions among several, often many, genes. Even if particular gene variants are known to increase risk, as for example with the BRCA1/2 variants associated with breast cancer, such links are probabilistic: there’s no guarantee that people with that variant will get the disease or that those who lack it will not.

Big data arising from access to gene profiling information has allowed this statistically based polygenic engineering to occur. Ball:

So someone’s genetic profile – the variants in their personal genome – can be used to make predictions about, say, how likely they are to develop heart disease in later life. They can be assigned a so-called polygenic risk score (PRS) for that condition. Aurea’s embryo was chosen because of low PRSs for heart disease, diabetes and cancer. PRSs can be used to predict other things too, such as a child’s IQ and educational attainment.

He reports what the father of the first PGD child said about being willing to cull others of his own embryos to achieve a possibly  healthier child:

Aurea’s father, North Carolina neurologist Rafal Smigrodzki, has argued that part of a parent’s duty “is to make sure to prevent disease” in their child. Polygenic testing, he says, is just another way of doing that.

On the ethics of this new form of health science, Ball finds mixed viewpoints. First:

Ethics philosophers Sarah Munday and Julian Savulescu have argued in favour of allowing polygenic screening for any trait that can be shown to be “correlated with a greater chance of a life with more well-being”. 

Yet most regulators and many experts feel that there is not yet any justification for using them to try to improve the health outcomes of IVF children. “It’s not seen as ready for primetime use,” says [bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky of the University of Montreal]. “It’s still at a research stage. So when you start jumping straight into implementation, especially in a reproductive context, you’re in a minefield.”

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in July pointed out that benefits of PRS embryo selection are likely to be very small, all the more so for people not of European heritage, for whom genomic data are less extensive and so less reliable for prediction.

 And once such screening methods are permitted, where does it stop? Already, American couples can screen embryos for gender, complexion and eye colour. What’s to stop a company offering to screen for a non-disease trait such as height or intelligence?

“There’s no reason to think polygenic embryo screening will end with conditions like heart disease and diabetes,” says Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “Screening for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses is already on offer. These directly echo eugenic efforts to eliminate ‘feeble-mindedness’. We are talking about deciding who should be born based on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genes.”

 'Borderline malpractice'

 To avoid genetic stratification of society, some have suggest governments make this procedure free.

But Hasson believes that this wouldn’t solve the problems of inequality that such techniques could exacerbate. Even if PRSs for smartness, say, have little real predictive value, she says that “belief in genomic predictions can itself be a driver of intense inequalities in society” by reinforcing ideas of genetic determinism.

“Families that invest their money, time and hopes in this kind of screening and selection will have children they believe are genetically superior and those children will be treated as superior by their parents, care-givers and educators.”

Social pressure could make it hard to resist polygenic screening if it’s on offer in our hyper-competitive societies. “Once you do IVF, you feel pressure to use any add-on service or test that the clinic offers you,” says Ravitsky. “Look at what happens today when a woman declines prenatal screening or amniocentesis. Many women feel judged, not just by peers but by healthcare providers.” The idea that it’s all about autonomy of choice can be an illusion, she says.

This is the way Ball expresses his attitude to the process where several embryos of the same parents compete with one another for the highest scores:

Even if [these scores] have little real value in forecasting the prospects of a child, evidently a market exists for them. In countries such as the US where assisted conception is weakly regulated, companies can make unrealistic and exploitative promises. Couples might even elect to have a child via IVF specifically to avail themselves of such opportunities. It’s a gruelling process that carries risks in itself, but women might feel compelled to use it, even though Ravitsky thinks that allowing someone to do so for this reason alone would be “borderline malpractice”. 

“As a society, we’re very far from knowing how we want to use these potential technologies,” says Ravitsky, but, she adds, “we are already living in the grey zone”. 

Regulators of health techniques will seek the views of the public in making the rules or proposing legislation. Therefore, members of the public have to be up with the play. When called upon, we have to be ready to join with the like-minded to make submissions to avoid the Oppenheimer Principle. We don't need to go down every path that is open to scientific research. An equivalent choice, much debated, is whether we should put global resources into finding ways to defeat desertification, and global warming, rather than explore space.

But even within the world of gene manipulation, there is the victimless option of somatic gene therapy, where genetic material (RNA) is introduced into an appropriate cell type or tissue in a patient in such a way that it alters the cell's pattern of gene expression to produce a therapeutic effect. This is the view of David Jones, director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, which serves the Catholic Church in the United Kingom:

 The real promise of 'gene editing' techniques is the hope of ethical and effective therapy of children or adults who were born with conditions that currently have no cure. Research should focus on development of safe and effective somatic gene therapy, not on yet-more-destructive experimentation on human embryos.

How many lives are lost?

One piece of information we need to take on board is the statistic that stories and journal articles about genetic testing don't give readers: How many human embryos will be discarded in pursuit of a single "improved" version?

One answer to this question, though relating solely to in vitro fertilisation, is taken from a dissertation by a doctoral student submitted at Duquesne University in the US in 2017: 

The Church does not condemn persons created by technical procedures. Those born following in vitro fertilization possess dignity and are made in God’s image and likeness.

Of the over 400,000 in vitro fertilization babies born annually [in the United States], the concern is for the human beings created in the laboratory that will die before given a chance to live. 

It is estimated that only one in six embryos created following in vitro fertilization will make it to birth. Some estimates are as high as 30 embryos are created for every child born by in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization treats the new human being as little more than a cluster of cells to be graded, selected, and discarded. The loss of life is ignored and accepted by the in vitro fertilization industry. 

These failures and fatalities are not even recognized for what they are by most physicians who perform in vitro fertilization. Loss of life has become a normal and standardized aspect of the procedure. Additionally, there is significant concern for the thousands, possibly millions of human embryos who are frozen. What will be the outcome and disposition of these cryopreserved embryos? [*]

 A further concern is the lack of understanding among medical researchers that there is a spiritual element to human life beyond the physical. With recognition of the transcendental and the immortal character of the human being it becomes clear that human life is not limited by disease, pain or suffering, though they may be disabling with regard the "normal" lifestyle.

Families with a member who has Down Syndrome have hailed the love those members tend to display  or evoke from those around them.  

Researchers have also found an upwelling of positivity in families with children born with trisomy 13 and trisomy 18 (T13-18). Such children have low survival rates and survivors have significant disabilities. For these reasons, interventions are generally not recommended by providers.

The research finding published in the journal Pediatrics states:

Parents reported being told that their child was incompatible with life (87%), would live a life of suffering (57%), would be a vegetable (50%), or would ruin their family (23%). They were also told by some providers that their child might have a short meaningful life (60%), however.

Thirty percent of parents requested "full" intervention as a plan of treatment. Seventy-nine of these children with full T13-18 are still living, with a median age of 4 years. Half reported that taking care of a disabled child is/was harder than they expected. Despite their severe disabilities, 97% of parents described their child as a happy child. Parents reported these children enriched their family and their couple irrespective of the length of their lives.

The researchers add:

Parents who engage with parental support groups may discover an alternative positive description about children with T13-18. Disagreements about interventions may be the result of different interpretations between families and providers about the experiences of disabled children and their quality of life. 

That parents are able to rise to the occasion and respond with heroism in their care of a special needs child is something that researchers and healthcare providers often fail to understand. That is why those of the "expert class" cull some human beings in favour of what they consider to be an improved version.

Technologies such as those involving the harvesting of foetal stem cells, use of mitochondrial DNA and CRISPR techniques, the making of human-nonhuman chimera, and transhumanism associated with germline genetic modification, all warrant attention within the public arena, and strict supervision by government and professional bodies within the medical community. 

We must not let this area of ethics add to the list of disasters due to undisciplined scientific endeavour,  to overreach, by the scientists among us, as with the atom bomb project, which continues to threaten human existence.

[*] Stock, Gregory and John Campbell, eds., Engineering the Human Germline (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), p126.

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'Sacredness of ALL life' versus the world

It's a strange phenomenon that at the very time that the life of the natural world in all its diversity is being given increased respect, human life is increasingly treated with disdain. The life of trees, of bodies (!) of water on land or in the form of oceans, creatures down to the level of insects, are awarded central place in decision-making for official approval for projects promoted as of great benefit to a local group or the national economy. Conversely, human life at its beginning and at its close are being downgraded in significance in the pursuit of what individuals want.

In the first case, we can see the wisdom of giving regard to the wider picture of ecological well-being and the importance of protecting life as it is. We have come to accept that life as we find it has its own purpose or role in the overall scheme of things. Mostly the battle over respecting life is against corporate self-interest. 

In the second case, the battle is against human life. With abortion, one would expect activists to be pushing the boundary for recognition of human status for the foetus closer and closer to conception because the living material undergoing its transformation is human from the start. Instead, the focus is of the adult (plural) self-interest. As for euthanasia, given the zeitgeist of individualism and incredulity as to the largesse of suffering, the "right to die" is rapidly becoming the "duty to die". As shown by the case studies of Belgium and Nova Scotia, more and more people are being killed as guidelines become more permissive and categories added - children under 12  in Belgium and mental illness in Nova Scotia.  

What to make of this death-seeking activism? An Australian commentator offers some insight. 

First, there is the matter of whether the taking of human life is involved:

Those who defend assisted dying acknowledge that it involves taking a life. Many who defend abortion deny it, seeing the foetus as part of the woman’s own body. That argument recognises in part the unique status of the foetus. It begins and grows in a woman’s body, and so can be seen as part of her body. It is, however, a unique part of her body in that it has and develops the potential for independent life. To that extent it is also a living being in its own right. This double status of the move from dependence to independence of the foetus means that there is a physical difference between removing a foetus early in term, late in term and taking the life of a child after birth.

In most Australian states abortion is available for up to twenty weeks when it is conducive to the health of the pregnant woman, and also later though subject to further restrictions. At this stage the foetus can move and hear. It seems reasonable to describe abortion at this stage as taking life [...].

Second, should the focus be on the individual choice - of the person who is pregnant or who seeks assistance to die - or should there be regard to the more complex social picture? The community's  capture by the individualism of our age...

[...] prioritises one of many relationships involved in a person’s life and death. In the case of abortion, these include the relationship to the man involved in the conception, to family and friends, employers and fellow workers, [prospective adoptive parents], and doctors and nurses participating in the abortion. In the case of assisted dying, they also include family and friends, and participating doctors, nurses and hospital staff involved.

More broadly in each case they include the relationship to society as a whole through the effects that individual decisions have on social attitudes. Many people have an interest in the taking of life.  Whether the choice of the pregnant woman and the person who seeks to have their life ended should be decisive, and if so with what qualifications, is the ethical question in dispute in both cases.

Third, where does the sacredness of life, imputed to the natural world, stand with regard the human being? 

In both [abortion and euthanasia] the move in society and consequently in legislation is to privilege individual freedom of choice. The exercise of this right trumps countervailing claims ultimately based on the sacredness of life. By sacredness I mean the conviction that each human being and consequently their life, has such a high value that it forbids them and others from deliberately taking life for pragmatic reasons.

This evaluation of human life underlays the serious penalties against murder, the stigma attaching to suicide, and past legislation against abortion and euthanasia. Such legislation did not prevent abortion. Not did it prevent people who wished to die from arranging it. But it did initially express the shared conviction that murder, abortion and assisted suicide were destructive of society. 

The strong emphasis on the sacredness of life, however, often resulted in a stigma being attached to suicide and to abortion that could cripple the lives of people who were already heavily burdened. Public awareness of such suffering has fed the compassion that underlies the popular support for legislative change.

Therefore, we have seen individualism and an untethered compassion take hold of the public and the legislature:

[T]he sanctity of human life is no longer seen as a value that overrides other values. In certain circumstances individuals may take their own or others’ lives to secure other competing goods. They may choose to be killed rather than to live with dementia or in pain, for example, or to abort a foetus because of the burden imposed by raising a child to financial survival, to career, family relationships or reputation. Society [is granted a role to] ensure that such decisions are free, informed and duly regulated, but has no higher interest or responsibility.

 Fourth, this has consequences: 

The logic of individual choice will result in regulation being loosened or ignored over time. Think of profit-making through financial chicanery, gambling, pornography and drinking [and cigarettes]. 

If this move to privilege individual choice over the claims of the sanctity of life continues and becomes more pervasive, what will be the effects on society? They are unlikely to be immediate or dramatic.

The more significant effects of the emphasis on individual choice on the taking of life, however, lie in the nature of individual choice. Because the choice is individual it is inevitably open to conflict with the choice of others. In the case of abortion and assisted dying, the choice of the pregnant woman to abort a child or of persons who wish their lives to be ended may conflict with the choice of relatives, doctors, nurses and the owners of hospitals not to be complicit in the abortion or assisted dying.

These kinds of conflict then need to be resolved by legislation. In this way the free choice of one group of people will be privileged by the exercise of power that limits the freedom to choose of other groups. This inevitably strengthens the power of the State and of its agents in matters of life and death. 

The dangers of this can be seen in the way in which in Australia and elsewhere the State handles its responsibilities for taking life through its military actions in other nations. The will of the Executive prevails without reference to Parliament, is buttressed by secrecy, has no consideration for the effects of war on the people affected by it during the military action or after it is called off. Respect for reason, for the value of each human being and for the common good is trumped by the exercise of power for strategic and economic interests. 

It is to be feared that in time, the power of the State and its agents to regulate whether people live and die will be exercised in a similarly overbearing way that limits individual choice. The recent switch of the Chinese Government, with its increasing use of technology to control individual lives, from tacitly allowing abortions in support of its one child policy to actively discouraging them in the interests of economic growth, is a straw in the wind. 

For his conclusion, the writer of this valuable commentary, Andrew Hamilton, a Jesuit priest and academic, has this warning:

When individual choice becomes king in society, the groups most vulnerable include people who are deprived of choice by age or by marginalisation. They have no access to power. These include classically the unborn and the intellectually handicapped, but also significantly the increasing number of elderly people who suffer from dementia. 

Once governments have assumed the power to decide matters of life and death, and have in place structures that allow its educated agents to make those decisions, the pressure to assist them  to die unknowing as part of good economic management will increase. This could be commended by an appeal to compassion for their diminished condition and for their relatives who must observe it.

The suicide of the human race is upon us. Is that an exaggeration? There are many signs that it is not over the top. There is the loss of a sense of the Transcendent in WEIRD countries - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic - giving rise to a nihilistic spirit; there is the falling birthrate that signals that the younger generations have lost hope in the future, and that they lack an appreciation of the fact that it is their role to create a future for each community. Finally, there is the impulse to kill, compassionate but in a deformed way, which we have examined here.

For the Christian, however, hope should spring eternal, to paraphrase Alexander Pope's words in An Essay on Man (1732). Pope knew that the complexities of life were nothing compared with God's power to remedy what fails to comply with his loving plan.

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Facebook: What parents can and must do

 – Guardian headline

Facebook has struggled to pick itself up off the floor after the beating by parents and public health experts over its neglect of children, especially neglect of its young Instagram customers. It has managed to offer just a smattering of actions in response to The Wall Street Journal's revelations that Facebook had a wealth of information about how its platforms were harming children but did nothing.

Frances Haugen is to be congratulated for making the Facebook documents available and appearing before the US Congress to highlight the corporate negligence that is devastating young peoples' lives, even to the point of suicide. According to one news report: 

“The patterns that children establish as teenagers stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Haugen said in Senate testimony.

“The kids who are bullied on Instagram, the bullying follows them home. It follows them into their bedrooms. The last thing they see before they go to bed at night is someone being cruel to them,” Haugen said. “Kids are learning that their own friends, people who they care about, are cruel to them.”

The remedies Facebook offered in the days after Haugen's testimony are paltry. It will be "introducing several features including prompting teens to take a break using its photo sharing app Instagram, and 'nudging' teens if they are repeatedly looking at the same content that’s not conducive to their well-being". 

[It] is also planning to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis so that parents or guardians can supervise what their teens are doing online. These initiatives come after Facebook announced late last month that it was pausing work on its Instagram for Kids project. But critics say the plan lacks details and they are skeptical that the new features would be effective.

One of those critics elaborates:

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a watchdog for the children and media marketing industry, said that he doesn’t think introducing controls to help parents supervise teens would be effective since many teens set up secret accounts anyway. He was also dubious about how effective nudging teens to take a break or move away from harmful content would be. He noted Facebook needs to show exactly how they would implement it and offer research that shows these tools are effective. 

“There is tremendous reason to be skeptical,” he said. He added that regulators need to restrict what Facebook does with its algorithms. He also believed that Facebook should cancel its Instagram project for kids.

The use of algorithms, the set of computer instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task, show up in the disturbing experience of parents as related in a Guardian report on how Facebook's Instagram compounds any emotional or mental difficulties a young person might be undergoing:

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Michelle noticed her teenage daughters were spending substantially more time on Instagram.

The girls were feeling isolated and bored during lockdown, the Arizona mom, who has asked to be identified by her first name to maintain her children’s privacy, recalled. She hoped social media could be a way for them to remain connected with their friends and community.

But as the months progressed, the girls fell into pro-diet, pro-exercise and ultimately pro-eating-disorder hashtags on the social media app. It started with “health challenge” photos and recipe videos, Michelle said, which led to more similar content in their feeds. Six months later, both had started restricting their food intake. Her eldest daughter developed “severe anorexia” and nearly had to be admitted to a health facility, Michelle said. Michelle attributes their spiral largely to the influence of social media.

“Of course, Instagram does not cause eating disorders,” Michelle told the Guardian. “These are complex illnesses caused by a combination of genetics, neurobiology and other factors. But it helps to trigger them and keeps teens trapped in this completely toxic culture.”

This vicious situation was long known by Facebook executives, but was allowed to continue:

Testimony from the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed what parents of teens with unhealthy eating behaviors due to body-image fears had long known: Instagram has a substantial negative impact on some girls’ mental health regarding issues such as body image and self-esteem.

Internal research Haugen shared with the Wall Street Journal found the platform sends some girls on a “downward spiral”. According to one March 2020 presentation about the research, “32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse”.

But parents of teens with eating disorders [...] explained how their children had been directed from videos about recipes or exercise into pro-eating-disorder content and weight-loss progress images. And they said they struggled to regulate their children’s use of social media, which has become inextricable from their kids’ daily lives.

A parent living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Neveen Radwan, said that social media:

[...] “has played a humongous role” in her 17-year-old daughter’s eating disorder. The teen had been harmed not only by content that was explicitly pro-anorexia or weight loss, but also by edited photos of influencers and real-life friends. 

“The second she opens the app, she is bombarded by photos that are filtered, that are manipulated,” Radwan said. “She is trying to attain something that is unachievable.”

Over the past few years, Radwan’s daughter has journeyed down a long road of recovery from a severe eating disorder. At one point, her weight was down to 74lb. Her heart stopped beating and she had to be airlifted to a specialized facility.

To help her daughter avoid the triggers she believes helped send her to the hospital, Radwan tried installing a number of safeguards on the girl’s phone. She uses built-in iPhone tools to keep her daughter from downloading apps without permission and monitors her online activity.

Recently, after a year and a half in treatment, Radwan’s daughter was allowed to have her phone back. But within 30 minutes, the teen had sneaked around the restrictions to log into Instagram from the phone’s browser, Radwan said.

When her daughter had opened the app, her algorithm had been right where she had left it, Radwan said, in the midst of an endless feed of unhealthy eating and diet content.

“Once you look at one video, the algorithm takes off and they don’t stop coming – it’s like dominoes falling,” Radwan said. “It is horrific, and there is nothing we can do about it.” 

The Guardian article continues this valuable reporting by investigating where possible solutions can be found:

Experts say that Facebook, however, could do something about it. There are a number of proven tools that would prevent the spread of harmful content and misinformation, especially as it relates to eating disorders, according to Madelyn Webb, associate research director for Media Matters for America.

She explained that the algorithms recommend content similar to what users have shared, viewed or clicked on in the past – creating a feedback loop that some vulnerable teens cannot escape.

“But they will never change it because their profit model is fundamentally based on getting more clicks,” she said.

Haugen, in her testimony, suggested Facebook return to a chronological rather than algorithmically driven timeline on the platform to reduce the spread of misinformation and inflammatory content.

Facebook has said it works to minimize such content by restricting hashtags that promote it. But a report released in September by the advocacy group SumOfUs found 22 different hashtags promoting eating disorders still existed on Instagram at the time, and were connected to more than 45m eating disorder-related posts.

The report found 86.7% of eating disorder posts the researchers analyzed were pushing unapproved appetite suppressants and 52.9% directly promoted eating disorders.

Read the article in full. It relates other cases and links useful for parents facing this predicament. Read also about the Chinese government's action to rein in its big tech companies by having those corporate giants limit teens' use of video games to only three hours a week (!), from 8pm till 9pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with an extra hour on public holidays. The government has called social media in general "spiritual opium" that turns the young generation into addicts unable to support a healthy society.

What parents can do

So what can parents do immediately to rescue an often intense situation, or to prevent one arising?

Be a parent: Parents must embrace their God-given authority over their children. The permissive style of parenting is a thing of the past given the desperate straits society is in.

Age limit: Parents need to set an age limit for having a smartphone, which is, of course, more than a phone, given the internet link it provides.Whereas US law sets 13 years as the entry point for social media: 

In her testimony, Haugen suggested raising the age limit to 16 or even 18. There has been a push among some parents, educators and tech experts to wait to give children phones — and access to social media — until they are older, such as the “Wait Until 8th” pledge that has parents sign a pledge not to give their kids a smartphone until the 8th grade. 

 “There is not necessarily a magical age,” said Christine Elgersma, a social media expert at the nonprofit Common Sense Media. But, she added, “13 is probably not the best age for kids to get on social media.”

It’s still complicated. There’s no reliable way to verify a person’s age when they sign up for apps and online services. And the apps popular with teens today were created for adults first. Companies have added some safeguards over the years, Elgersma noted, but these are piecemeal changes, not fundamental rethinks of the services.

Talk, talk, talk: Enjoy this effort as a platform for forging close family links.

Start early, earlier than you think. Elgersma suggests that parents go through their own social media feeds with their children before they are old enough to be online and have open discussions on what they see. How would your child handle a situation where a friend of a friend asks them to send a photo? Or if they see an article that makes them so angry they just want to share it right away?

For older kids, approach them with curiosity and interest.

“If teens are giving you the grunts or the single word answers, sometimes asking about what their friends are doing or just not asking direct questions like ‘what are you doing on Instagram?’ but ‘hey, I heard this influencer is really popular,’” she suggested. “And even if your kid rolled their eyes it could be a window.”

Don’t say things like “turn that thing off” when your kid has been scrolling for a long time, says Jean Rogers, the director of Fairplay, a nonprofit that advocates for kids to spend less time on digital devices.

“That’s not respectful,” Rogers said. “It doesn’t respect that they have a whole life and a whole world in that device.”

Instead, Rogers suggests asking them questions about what they do on their phone, and see what your child is willing to share.

Kids are also likely to respond to parents and educators “pulling back the curtains” on social media and the sometimes insidious tools companies use to keep people online and engaged, Elgersma said. Watch a documentary like The Social Dilemma that explores algorithms, dark patterns and dopamine feedback cycles of social media. Or read up with them how Facebook and TikTok make money.

“Kids love to be in the know about these things, and it will give them a sense of power,” she said.

Limits on use: Having a central household security box to hold all devices is one way of breaking the habit. Other ideas: 

Rogers says most parents have success with taking their kids’ phones overnight to limit their scrolling. Occasionally kids might try to sneak the phone back, but it’s a strategy that tends to work because kids need a break from the screen.

“They need to an excuse with their peers to not be on their phone at night,” Rogers said. “They can blame their parents.”

Parents may need their own limits on phone use. Rogers said it’s helpful to explain what you are doing when you do have a phone in hand around your child so they understand you are not aimlessly scrolling through sites like Instagram. Tell your child that you’re checking work email, looking up a recipe for dinner or paying a bill so they understand you’re not on there just for fun. Then tell them when you plan to put the phone down.

Get support:  Facebook has said it would welcome governmental regulation to allow transparency but also, presumably, to protect itself from any advantage companies that are not self-disciplined might have. Write to your representative for government action. Join groups - refer to the non-profit organisations referred to in this post - and go online for ideas on how to be an effective parent in this regard.

Parents, you can do it! In fact, you have to do it, for your family, and for the common good. Obviously, for you to be serious about your parental duty you have to be countercultural on several levels. To sum it all up, the future is relying on you! 

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