|
there are some very basic problems with much of the eugenics-style arguments above (you know, fuck em for the sake of the gene pool).
first off, there is no human race in general. you can refer to an abstraction like "the set containing all human beings" but it's just an abstraction. in the actually existing world, there are people in particular situations--social broadly construed, personal (however that is understood--and it's a variable) within that. in the broader social contexts, the principal criterion you are talking about through this bizarre-o word "strength" is functionality. it is simply not the case that social groups privilege anything like an optimized set of capacities if by optimized you mean relative to some abstract or general standard. functionality is a relative term. relative to the modes of production. relative to patterns of family organization. relative to a lot of factors. it is ayn rand bullshit to conflate, say, the particular capacities that adaptation to capitalism (another abstraction, really) with some overall notion of "human progress" or its derivatives. adaptation to a particular environment, a particular context, is adaptation to a particular environment or context. thats it. any more general statement is arbitrary.
there is no material perspective informed by a notion of "gene pool"---the notion of gene pool is a theoretical construct, a noun-effect. even the relations between genetic structures and actual capacities is not fully understood. what orienting yourself around this rhetoric leads you to is a cheap spenserian notion--you know, social darwinism. it has the aesthetic benefit of making you feel all pseudo-scientific, as if this notion of "gene pool" gave you access to an extra-social reality. well, it doesn't. it gives you access to a series of rhetorical effects. you use it to rationalize attitudes that neither come from these effects or rely on them for a kind of "proof"--you use them because they're aesthetically appealing.
the idea that the most adapted to a given context are the strongest--the ubermenschen--has a pretty foul political history.
as for why it makes sense to try to prevent suicide---first most follow from transient situations. second because there's a definition of what and equitable society is that contends it's measure lay in how that society cares for it's most vulnerable people. it's no wonder, for example, that so many americans buy into social darwinism and all its fake-scientific trappings--the united states is a pretty shitty place when evaluated by that definition. and it's easier to run away from it than try to think of how it might be different.
it's probably true that if someone really wants to kill themselves that the question of stopping them is moot.
and it's also true, in my view, that folk who are in hopeless, painful medical situations should be able to choose to end their lives.
but in between...i dunno. i think it's better to at least try to help, as a society, than not to. i think it's an ethical imperative. but that's just my view.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|