What if there is only one ventilator available and you have to choose between a 21-year-old African immigrant and an elderly member of a Maltese family? This was the question raised by somebody a few days ago, via Facebook. This somebody’s friends advised him it would be wiser to remove the post, he followed the advice, but it was too late... the faux pas had already caught the media’s eye.
I think there are two aspects to the question. One is obviously the racist aspect... and this is where a serious mistake was made with the grave implications. Did the question imply a different treatment for any other 21-year-old immigrant? Would the question be different if the choice were to be made between a 21-year-old English worker working in Malta and an elderly Maltese? If we think that a white 21-year-old should be treated differently than a black 21-year-old (I am sure that “African” didn’t mean white South Africans), then the problem is huge.
The other aspect is more important, and the question has already been raised elsewhere. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, say, has been reported to have argued that he would rather die than see public health measures damage the US economy and that he believed that “lots of grandparents” would agree with him.
I think this is the real question that should be asked. What has more value? The life of an elderly person or the life of a 21-year-old?
How do you determine the value of a life? Aren’t all lives equally valuable?
I’m not talking about the life worth living, and all that.
Neither am I referring to happiness and misery. Incidentally, in his Histories, Herodotus tell us about Solon, the Athenian statesman, lawmaker and poet, who strove to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in archaic Athens and wrote poetry for pleasure, as patriotic propaganda, and in defence of his constitutional reform. Herodotus recapitulates what Solon said about human happiness. One, that any human life is filled with change, so a person’s happiness cannot be evaluated properly until he or she has died. Two, that the rich and powerful are as subject to change as anyone else.
The American founding fathers believed in the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental right. In the Declaration of Independence, there is the right freely to pursue joy and live life in a way that makes you happy, as long as you don’t do anything illegal or violate the rights of others. The American Republic therefore has the obligation to respect the right of its citizens to live life in a way that makes them happy. If there was the need to say it explicitly, does it mean that this right is not implied in a constitutional system? Does our (the Maltese) constitutional setup acknowledge that each and every one of us has the right to live life in a way that makes us happy?
We all assume that we have the right to live a happy life. How does this fit in with Solon’s ideas on life, namely that life is filled with change, which means that there are moments of happiness (probably few) and moments of misery (probably many... in the Christian worldview, life is a “vale of tears”...). Because of this incessant change, we can evaluate whether a life has been happy only upon the person’s death. This necessarily means that we cannot evaluate our own lives, because the evaluation has to be made post mortem, and by others. This part escapes most liberals and others, and they decide to evaluate their own lives (and the lives of others still alive), even though they actually lack most of the tools for a proper evaluation.
Because of this lack, of the inability to (self-)assess an ongoing situation, it follows that we cannot decide which life is more valuable than another, and therefore all lives are valuable.
Even the lives of African immigrants, who leave their countries to pursue happiness elsewhere. Unfortunately for them, it’s all an illusion. I was reading (again) in Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity the chapter called “Why friendship between men and women has been so fragile”. Zeldin builds his arguments using anecdotes; the stories he narrates – stories of real people, some common, some notables – are representative of situations. In this chapter, he narrates the story of a Senegalese woman and her husband who migrated to France, he in 1976, she in 1983. He works in a factory, and goes back home in the evening exhausted. They barely talk. She is desperately looking for work, but can’t find any. They are six in the family and live in a three-room apartment. Their neighbours never talk to them. When she once called the Fire Police because a neighbour got stuck in the lift, he merely said “Thank you”, and never spoke to her again. But her biggest tragedy is that she and her husband never talk. And that she knows nobody in France. She cries often during the day, when her husband is at work and her children at school. And she dreams of going back to Senegal, where there’s her family and an entire structure in which she fits.
It is probable that the story of this Senegalese woman of two generations ago is the typical story of the black African immigrant? That they seek El Dorado in their pursuit of happiness, only to be reduced to modern-day slavery?
But this does not solve the conundrum. If there is one ventilator and two patients (a 21-year-old immigrant and an elderly Maltese), whose life do you choose to save?
The Italians have had to face this choice during this pandemic, and it must have been horrendous for the health professionals involved.
Neoliberal thought has an answer. It is not an original answer, mind you, because it is a mindset that has been around possibly since the dawn of times. The answer is utility. Is the person useful? If yes, then that person’s life has value.
How is the utility of a human life measured? In this mindset, according to the economic productivity of the person. A 21-year-old has at least 40 years of production awaiting. So s/he is useful. An elderly person is only eating up savings or pensions, and therefore not useful. The yardstick is the economy.
According to the neoliberal mindset, the 21-year-old’s life is more valuable. And therefore, the 21-year-old is to be saved. And the elderly left to die.
This is the real question that should have been asked in that infamous Facebook post.
It raises two further points.
One is about modern-day slavery. I contend that the vast majority of African immigrants are used as slaves. In the Middle Ages, slaves were viewed as having descended into their condition on account of sin, and therefore that it was God’s will that they find themselves in such a predicament. Then the idea of “race” was invented, and the blacks were considered as subhuman because of the colour of their skin. Indeed, the black person in America was considered to be 5/8ths of a human being. (How they got to such a precise fraction beats me.) In the current world, slavery has been masked by such neoliberal mantras such as multiculturalism and integration. What “multiculturalism” means in practice is nebulous at best. We are told that we can learn from the immigrants. I have yet to understand what can be learnt, essentially because most wisdom is bound to a circumstance, to a location, to a time period. What about the future? If really the current pandemic will devastate economies, as some pundits are foretelling, then logic dictates that fewer people will want to emigrate toward Europe. Then again, history does not necessarily follow logic.
The other question raised by that Facebook post is the question of resources. The contemporary Israeli philosopher of law Joseph Raz has argued that human rights depend on resources. Human rights are costly in terms of resources. So Raz argues that only rich countries can assure human rights. You have to agree and disagree with Raz, both at the same time. You have to agree with him intellectually, and disagree emotionally. Human rights should be universal, not an entitlement of the rich. However, the “idiotic austerity” (as philosopher John Gray has called it in The New Statesman some two weeks ago) that inspired the dismantlement of health-care infrastructures in the name of savings, has led to the reduction in resources and caused the question raised: if there is only one ventilator and two patients (a 21-year-old foreigner and a co-national elderly person), whose life should be saved?
As I said, there is no easy answer.
It is however easier to go to the root problem, and here I will address the racial element of that heinous Facebook post. Why do Africans (presumably black Africans) need to leave their countries in pursuit of the El-Dorado-like dream of finding happiness in Europe?
A hint could be gleaned in a decision taken a few days ago. The US, China, and other Group of 20 major economies have agreed that 76 countries, including 40 in sub-Saharan Africa, will be eligible to have debt payments suspended, thanks to a debt moratorium. These payments add up to $20 billion.
So let’s take a step backward. By the end of the 19th century, almost all of Africa had been “colonised” by the major European powers. In reality, the Europeans depredated the Africans, but it was all legal, because the Africans had signed treaties ceding their “sovereignty” to the Europeans. Never mind that many of these treaties were signed with cannons pointed at villages. Those phoney treaties, described so vividly in Martti Koskenniemi’s The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2002), served as the basis for European exploitation of African resources.
Decolonisation did not really change much – Africa is still exploited and despoiled by the First World.
Who can champion the African cause in the present day? Who can ask that the injustice of the predatory practices of the past (and the present) be repaired in the future? To my mind, it is only the Pope who has the moral authority to demand that such justice be done. (This makes you appreciate why the Church is subjected to constant attacks.)
My Personal Library (93)
Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) is an all-embracing history of our feelings throughout the ages. It covers topics such as conversations and friendships between men and women, loneliness, forms of love, how respect has become more desirable than power, how it has become increasingly difficult to destroy one’s enemies, and how even astrologers resist their destiny. It’s a great read.