A Life Worth Living by Chuck Colson

A friend emailed me this from townhall.com:

My wife, Patty, and I were reminded of just why truth matters when we visited our grandson’s school one afternoon.

Max, as some of you may know, is autistic. As he showed Patty and me around his special-needs school—a story I tell in my new book, The Good Life—I was more than impressed with his teachers. They get a modest wage and work long hours under intense conditions. Autistic kids are demanding and sometimes aggressive. Yet Max’s teachers radiated joy—and I understood why.

Whenever Max comes to visit, everything else goes on hold as I accommodate myself to his schedule and his needs. Learning to meet those needs has been one of the greatest challenges, but also one of my greatest blessings.

But as I stood that day in Max’s classroom, a troubling thought crossed my mind. Why does the public education system spend as much as $65,000 per year to tend kids like Max? He will never go to college and never get a productive job. I couldn’t help but think of Peter Singer, the famous utilitarian philosopher from Princeton, and his argument that societies ought to spend their resources creating the maximum happiness for the greatest number. Singer’s logic would urge us to think about how many starving children could be fed for the cost of Max’s tuition. A chill came over me as I realized just how natural that argument sounds and how dangerous it is.

Singer and others, as a matter of fact, would argue against letting Max come into the world at all. And that argument has infiltrated our culture to an almost unbelievable extent. Ninety percent of couples who learn that their unborn children have a disability end up aborting them. Singer takes that mentality a step further, however, arguing that it’s ethical to kill these children after they’re born.

So the argument becomes—why should efforts like Max’s school, or taking care of very elderly people, continue if it’s in our power to make it unnecessary?

The person who says, “yes,” to Max now and in the future can reason only on the basis of something completely other than a cost-benefit analysis. In a utilitarian accounting, Max’s life is meaningless. Why, then, does he bring so much joy to his family and his teachers? Max’s autism is not a good thing—it’s part of the world’s brokenness—and yet that brokenness has been used to enlarge our capacity to love. Max brings joy into our lives through our sacrifices for him. Max himself knows a joy and wonder that puts me to shame. How does one account for this?

Looking at Max’s life, I have to conclude that the good life is not about the sum total of what we contribute to the world. It’s about loving. Utilitarianism knows nothing of love—as Peter Singer discovered when he found himself lavishing money and care on his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, something that’s completely against his own philosophy.

Truth matters, and the truth is we are creatures made in the image of a loving God, and life has an ultimate value. So beware of the smooth-talking philosophers in our midst. Their position may seem very appealing and even logical. But it’s a deadly logic.

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While certainly I agree that Max and many like him are amazing, beautiful individuals who deserve life as much as the rest of us, I am continually saddened by the short-sided, fear and ignorance that continues to drive right wing conservatism. By Mr. Colson's logic, put forth in this touching story of his grandson's disability, historically we have been sinfully wrong in conducting all manner of scientific medical research. If we were to follow the advice and wishes of people like Mr. Colson, then we must look at all scientific medical research as meddling with God's loving image. And had we always adhered to this mindset, it's possible that the plague would have ravaged on unchecked. Thousands today would be afflicted with polio - people who in fact today live equally beautiful lives unafflicted. By Mr. Colson's logic we should continue to allow the suffering of alzheimer's and parkinson's diseases. While we are at it, let's just give up looking for a cure for all cancers and for AIDS, as I am sure that anyone suffering from either would much rather discover the joy and increased capacity of their love than live a longer, healthier, life filled only with a normal capacity for love.

While it is true that with any radical new research there is enormous potential for abuse and there are ethical issues involved. But that is why we have in place things like the hippocratic oath taken by doctors. What Mr. Colson's argument sorely misses is that we live in an America where health care costs make living with a disability increasingly more difficult. Spending government money to help eradicate some of these disabilities (not the people afflicted with them) seems prudent in the long run, but in terms of quality of life and its cost-effectiveness.