By DONALD DeMARCO
It is remarkable how much a single sentence can reveal about the temper of a culture, even when its author is trying to be withholding. Jacalyn Duffin, a historian and practicing hematologist, is the author of History of Medicine (University of Toronto Press, 2000). It is a 243-page tome that was produced thanks to financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. In other words, it has the backing of significant segments of Canadian culture.
From a strictly historical perspective, the book falls short of its stated aim. Doctors Meyer Friedman and Gerald W. Friedland collaborated to produce an excellent work entitled, Medicine’s 10 Greatest Discoveries (Yale University Press, 1998). The names of four of the discoverers are absent from Duffin’s book, while she lists only the name of a fifth and offers but two sentences regarding a sixth. Her book is disproportionately slanted to Canadian history and marred by secular ideology.
On page 270 she introduces Canada’s leading abortionist, Henry Morgentaler, whom she refers to not as an abortionist, but as a “physician.” Morgentaler established abortion clinics in several Canadian provinces and flouted the law by performing an abortion on “live” TV on Mother’s Day. He was convicted of violating the Criminal Code on more than one occasion and sent to prison. He was ultimately released on the questionable grounds that the abortions he performed, despite their clear illegality, were “necessary.”
Morgentaler was certainly a controversial figure, praised by abortionists, rebuked by pro-lifers. When he received the once-prestigious Order of Canada Medal, several previous winners returned theirs. There are still people in Canada who can distinguish right from wrong. Yet, according to Duffin, “Personal philosophy determines whether he [Morgentaler] is viewed as a criminal or a saint.”
So much is revealed about contemporary Canadian culture in this one sentence. First, there is the complete subjectivization of philosophy. Philosophy is no longer a love of wisdom, or, as Plato stated, the communication of the soul with reality. It has become privatized. At the same time, “personal” does not refer to the person who lives by knowledge and love (as in the “personalism” of John Paul II), but to the singular individual who is shut off from reality and relies solely on his subjective whims. “Personal philosophy,” in this sense, is no better than an unenlightened guess or a stab in the dark.
The word “determines” is misleading because nothing is determined. A subjective guess does not “determine” a truth or a fact, and certainly not whether Morgentaler is a criminal or a saint. Duffin blithely accepts that we cannot determine in any objective manner whether Morgentaler is a criminal or a saint.
Such skepticism would have a disastrous effect on medicine itself. A physician is obliged by his profession to distinguish between sickness and health, life and death, science and quackery, comfort and pain. The moral skepticism that Duffin accepts, if extended to medicine, would paralyze physicians and prevent any kind of progress. Yet, her History of Medicine is a historical account of the fact that medicine progressed precisely because it was able to make realistic distinctions.
Dr. Duffin’s single revealing sentence is a model of political correctness. It avoids choosing sides in order not to offend anyone, wraps itself in a blanket of skepticism, while refraining from making any judgments about good and evil. It is political correctness in a nutshell and reveals contemporary Canada’s reluctance to be philosophically realistic about the urgent and critical matter of life and death.
Ironically, the concerted attempt not to offend anyone is bound to offend some. The search for truth is far more practical than the fear of offending.
If education, as Plato and so many of his descendants have maintained, is the passage from darkness to light, the new form of education, Canadian style, is the movement from light back into darkness. If nobody knows anything, then no one is offended and no one can claim superiority over another. Yet, if a society cannot distinguish between good and evil, between Henry Morgentaler and St. John Paul II, it is gravely imperiled.
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(Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth & Charity Forum.)
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