I Will Not Survive or, None of Us Gets Out of Here Alive

So I recently found out that I am relatively in-the-clear in terms of my cancer. The doctors have decided that I don't need any treatment following the surgery and will only keep me under close observation for the coming years. I am trying to be as grateful for this news as I ought.

This officially makes me a cancer survivor. In fact, I've been told that I'm a survivor from day one. Whatever that means.

I've been saying all along that I never really felt like a cancer-anything: victim or survivor. The diagnosis didn't feel that real when I had it and so the cure doesn't feel that real now that I apparently don't have it. So maybe my ambivalence about the designation 'cancer survivor' has to do with this lack of the news really sinking in but it has also made me reflect on the idea of survival as it is experienced in our present culture.

It has often struck me that our culture is positively obsessed with the idea of survival. Perhaps this emphasis on being a survivor of an illness is but one manifestation of a more general feeling in the air.

We really have a schizophrenic attitude toward life and death. We are at the same time more obsessed than ever with avoiding death and more willing than ever to tempt death out of plain boredom with the shallowness of our lives.

On the one hand, perhaps because death has been pushed back and life expectancies have gone up so dramatically in the West, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that death might just be optional. Believing the goal might be attainable, we become obsessed with avoiding death, even reminders of it. On the other hand, living in a world where day-to-day survival is no longer a pressing issue, members of affluent cultures invent artificial ways to make their survival a matter for their concern again. We see this latter manifested in, for example, the survivalist movement or just your now-everyday extreme sports where the whole point is to flirt with the brink of death just in order to feel the rush that accompanies it. The survivalist or skydiver is then merely inventing a way of replicating the feeling an ancient forbear might have gotten just in the course of trying to bring home food from the hunt.

In the following I will be exploring the former phenomenon of the hyper-avoidance of death and the elevation of the value of survival.

It is now apparent that we will not stop our war against death until we have banished its very countenance from our collective sight. We fight every sign of aging, every wrinkle and gray hair, with the utmost ferocity. Those who can no longer hide their age are themselves hidden away with the rest of their kind in retirement or nursing homes, well cared for, as long as we youth-filled ones don't have to be reminded of their, and our future, existence. When someone inconveniently insists on still kicking the bucket, we keep their body so chemically preserved and make-up caked that they probably look better in the casket than they have for years. By all means, don't let them look like what they really are: dead!

I believe that behind this disturbing emphasis of our culture on survival is the general loss of meaning in our lives. In the not-so-distant past a person had hope for an afterlife. In the new world we comfort ourselves with dreams of a really long life. (I'm ignoring here the theological difference between eternal life and the merely everlasting life-after-death which, though taken to be the default conception of heaven, is not really a Christian notion at all. Christians believe in resurrection not resuscitation. In fact, it may be that the weakness of our religious imaginations in respect to the afterlife is in part a result of the larger cultural shift of pinning all hopes on this life and attempts to lengthen it.) We tell ourselves that this is an improvement. "One life at a time" we call it. We pretend to celebrate living for the moment, or valuing life for life's sake but the truth of our feeling is expressed in the tenacity and anxiety with which we cling to our lives.

Lacking something beyond life to provide the context or substance for valuing life - a spiritual or religious dimension - we have come to grasp after mere survival with all our strength and at any cost. Paradoxically, the more we make life itself the focus, the less weight it seems to carry. Life used to be deemed nearly priceless, but it shrinks under the burden of our attempt to make it into the ultimate value. Our collective existential crisis is but our intellect's realization that without spirit, we really are no different than the other animals. The tragedy of our situation is that we are too smart to ever think that mere smarts can make us any more than a clever beast.

I came across one extreme instance of this attitude in an interview with Ray Kurzweil on NPR's Fresh Air a couple years ago. Kurzweil is the author of, among other books, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. In the interview, Kurzweil came across with an enthusiasm that was truly infectious but it was almost pitiful how much he seemed to have convinced himself that it was a reasonable goal to live forever through careful health maintenance until the day that technology can swoop to the rescue.

Setting aside the perhaps more profound difference between a person who believes in some kind of afterlife or resurrection and one who doesn't, imagine for a minute the difference between two individuals, one who knows she will die - eventually, and another who thinks there might be a possibility of not dying. I'm picturing these two individuals on their deathbeds each with a mortal gunshot wound, minutes from certain death. Either one might be experiencing any range of emotion: sadness, regret, devastation, fear. But the average person knows they will have had to die eventually. It was just a matter of time. Now contrast that with someone like Mr. Kurzweil and imagine the devastation someone in his position would feel if he were unlucky enough to have had a fatal accident before the fortuitous advent of nano-bots able to repair any possible wound or computers ready to upload our brains to be re-booted into a new body, or whatever the solution to death is that's supposedly right around the corner. The picture of this deathbed scene, much less the life lived trying to avoid it, is actually quite heartbreaking.

Secularists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens argue quite frequently that believers are more dangerous precisely to the extent that they hold a belief in an afterlife. The argument goes that since a believer feels personally immortal, they are more willing to use this life carelessly and thus more likely to take others with them. The obvious example is the modern suicide bomber, who - we can't help thinking - is more likely to blow himself up because of the reward he thinks he's headed for. This argument has a certain logic to it though I was never convinced that since it seemed befitting of the suicide bomber, it was thus appropriate for all believers. One need pay attention to what is being believed.

There is also an argument that cuts the other way which the picture of these two hypothetical deathbed scenes brings to mind. It makes a certain amount of intuitive sense that one who feels this life is the end all and be all would do more, right or wrong, to protect it or prolong it. The Psalmist understood this well when he prayed to be protected "from men of this world whose reward is in this life." [1] The more potentially fearsome is the one with nothing left to lose. Who truly has nothing to lose, the one who is entirely committed to this life or the one who loves life more than everything except the values from which it derives its meaning and value?

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes that "what people want today is not salvation, but health. ... The medical establishment is the counter-salvation-promising group in our society today." [2] I agree that what people are seeking through the new emphasis on health and longevity is a kind of salvation. What is sad is that what so many pursue as their only comfort in life: more life, is in regards to the full-blooded Christian story of death and resurrection a rather pathetic parody or at best a pastiche.

Again, it is not a matter of being against survival, but mere survival. Life is supremely valuable but it is not of ultimate value. Life is like joy, the more it is pursued as an end in itself the more it slips from one's grasp and the more the very goods it contains are corrupted by its receiving misplaced emphasis.

It could be argued at this point that pursuing survival is a matter of believing in the sanctity of life which people, including Christian people, often think of as an obvious conclusion of Christian convictions. To find out why this might not be so I turn again to Hauerwas who proclaims:

"I want to know where Christians got the notion that life is sacred. That notion seems to have no reference to God. Any good secularist can think life is sacred. Of course, what the secularist means by the word sacred is interesting, but the idea that Christians are about the maintenance of some principle separate from our understanding of God is just crazy. As a matter of fact, Christians do not believe life is sacred. I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe that there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in and of itself." [3]

Hauerwas makes clearer than I ever could the difference between life as ultimate value and life as a very important though derivative value.

I don't mean to be overly hard-nosed in any of this. It is nothing if not understandable for human beings to cling to life. We obviously should love life. The difference is between the hopeful affirmation of a beautiful gift and the fearful clinging to what we take to be our only lot. Like so many other differences, like for example between lust and love, it could be said that holding out for mere survival is the worst coming from the corruption of the best.

In conclusion, I leave you with this final thought from Stanley:

"We Christians are people who must learn to live, as we have learned that life is a gift. We thus live not as if survival is an end in itself, but rather because we know that life allows us the time and space to live in the service of God. We should not view time as something to be lived through, nor life as an end in itself, but rather see life as the gift of time enough for love." [4]

To this I can only add an Amen, in the hope that I will myself continually learn this lesson.




1. Psalm 17:14 NIV

2. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 611 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

3. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 614 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

4. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 585 "Reflections: Suicide and Euthanasia"