Religion & Law

Glendon on dependency

By Patrick Brennan

I'm not sure whether, for Rob Vischer's purposes, Mary Ann Glendon counts as a "conservative" (she's marvelously hard to pigeonhole), but there's little doubt but that she speaks with a Catholic voice.  And here's what she has to say about independence: 

"To state the obvious: If the outlook for dependents is grim, the outlook for everyone is grim.  Despite our attachment to the ideal of the free, self-determining individual, we humans are dependent, social beings.  We still begin our lives in the longest period of dependency of any mammal.  Almost all of us spend much of our lives either as dependents, or caring for dependents, or financially responsible for dependents.  To devise constructive approaches to the dependency-welfare crisis will require acceptance of those simple facts of life.  And it will require a certain tragic sensibility, for there is no solution that will not entail striking balances among competing goods."

Except for the linkage to a "tragic sensibility" (for Christians, the Greek concept of tragedy is superseded by God's antecedent will that all be saved and come to knowledge of the truth), I'm with Glendon on this one. 

Full post as published by Mirror of Justice on January 16, 2008 (boomark / email).