The Culture of Life

There is only one thing that I will say in regards to the political theater that was the vice-presidential debate. It is nothing concerning the policies of the candidates. Nothing about their demeanor or their body language. Nothing about vacuous answers or repeated talking points. What I have to say stems from something Sara Palin said but never elaborated on. At one point during the rambling-more-than-the allman bros.-never-pronounce-g's-on-the-end-of-words response to the question regarding abortion she said "we need a culture of life." Granted, this term is probably politically loaded, like saying you're "for the little guy" or that "Delaware does not deserve statehood" (it's a PA thing) but I also found it a rather interesting notion.

What would a culture of life look like? What constitutes culture such that it is not immediately associated with life, bios, zoe, etc.? If what is needed is a culture of life, are we presently residing in a culture of death? And what constitutes a culture of death?

To make an ambiguous statement like she did is not, in itself, a bad thing. It might be the only thing that I agree with her saying. But what this means, what this relationship between a culture, that is, something we make with others and life in all its permutations and levels seem much deeper than what is intended by making that statement in a debate in the middle of other commonly understood phrases. The ambiguity of the statement and its intention to sound good conceals the radical nature of a statement such as "we need a culture of life." It's that radicality which I am so interested in.

To say that we need a culture of life presupposes that culture is not immediately linked to life and also assumes that "life" is something that is understood (and that "culture" is understood for that matter). Culture, cultus, cultivate...there is a kind of non-natural creating that goes on in culture. It is not self-generating but communally generating. I cannot create culture. Only when I am in relation to the other is culture possible. That other may be the natural world (say a plant or squirrel that is angry at having his park bench occupied) or another being but they are what is essential to culture.

Life, on the other hand, is a bit harder to interpret. I will focus on meanings of life related to physis, or "nature" as precarious, provisional, and narrow as that description might be. Life, as I describe it, here refers to growing and dying, generation and termination, a process of flourishing and floundering. It is a kind of self-generating. More than just a biological (though not excluding this aspect) account of life, we can look to the imaginative, spiritual, social, and emotional accounts to round out this idea of "life".

If it has not yet become apparent, there is an entangling of culture and life at the very core of their meaning. Life is generating AND dying; we can have a culture of life and a culture of death. This has clarified this concept of a culture of life only provisionally. If anything, thinking about "culture" and "life" along these lines has problematized the idea of a "culture of life." However, if there is to be a culture, a creative and creating set of relationships, that is "of life", related to life, valuing life, emulating life, then would it not be one that embraces more than just an anti-abortion stance? Would it not focus on a culture which sees this process of generation and termination, life and death intertwined? Is the life of which this culture is a part directed towards the horizon of its own impending demise?

I find it difficult to understand how a simple phrase like "we need a culture of life" can clarify the present problems with american, or for that matter global, culture at large. If it is to be a culture of life then it will have a culture of death present within it already. It will be acquainted with the dead, with death, with dying and termination alongside birth, becoming, generation and life. I guess, in a practical sense, it is hard for me to accept the idea that an anti-abortion stance is precisely the very thing that qualifies what one might call a culture of life. What if a culture of life were more exhaustive? What if it included cultivating a concern for the biological world we live in, a concern for the emotional health of its creators and participators, a concern for the loss of arts and imagination as an essential part of education and critical thinking, a concern for the "culture of death" which devalues other human beings to the point where they are still sold into slavery, ravaged by famine, disease, and war? What if it included those things? How would that change your policy stance? How would that shape the way that you mobilize the state?

Yes, I think we need a culture of life. But we need one that focuses on more than just one issue, one policy stance, and pretty sounding platitudes that answer nothing. I long for a culture of life that embraces natality and mortality, birthing and dying, arts and sciences, books and movies, music and silence, solitude and friendship, peace and suffering and all the ways that "life" is intertwined.