Disease as Metaphor

A distant but genuine second to enjoying a meal with my wife is enjoying a meal with a book. The other day, I took a rather somber book to lunch with me and noticed raised eyebrows from the restaurant's manager as I pushed my tray to the cashier's station. With a twinkle in his eye, he queried, "A little light reading, huh?"

The book was written by Sherwin B. Nuland, a noted surgeon and historian of medicine at Yale. Its title is what caught the attention of the lunch crowd: How We Die. I'm on at least my third reading of it. For one thing, it helps me sound more knowledgeable than I really am when I get into discussions on the golf course with my medical ethicist playing partners.

Over this particular lunch and reading, what especially caught my eye were two passages in the author's discussion of cancer. Brace yourself.

Cancer, he wrote, is a foe "berserk with a malicious exuberance of killing. The disease pursues a continuous, uninhibited, circumferential, barn-burning expedition of destructiveness, in which it heeds no rules, follows no commands, and explodes all resistance in a homicidal riot of devastation. Its cells behave like the members of a barbarian horde run amok --- leaderless and undirected, but with a single-minded purpose: to plunder everything within reach."

A couple of pages later, the author offers a second lurid metaphor: "A cluster of malignant cells is a disorganized autonomous mob of maladjusted adolescents, raging against the society from which it sprang. It is a street gang intent on mayhem."

What Dr. Nuland had been searching for were metaphors by which to make the insidiousness of cancer more readily understood and respected. What I started searching for was a way to use his depiction of cancer as a metaphor for insidious processes in present-day society that we tend to deny as much as we tend to overlook early warning signs of cancer in our bodies.

Of all the worrisome things going on in our country these days, three ought to be throwing us, as Americans, into panic, and as Christians, into crises of conscience. One is the widening economic gap between those among us who are getting richer and those who are getting poorer. It would seem that this gap is no respecter of ethnicity, gender, or age. Parts of our economy are like a rising tide all right, but not the kind that raises all the other boats. They're more like a tidal wave in which most boats get sunk.

The second is our outrageously disproportionate consumption of the rest of the world's resources. It would seem that the consuming is no respecter of anybody else's needs, wants, or rights, but is an admirer of our power to grab things, anywhere, before they are gone. There's really enough for everyone out there? In your dreams. Be sure to get yours first.

The third is the squandering of our children's future --- and their children's --- for the sake of maintaining a standard of living enjoyed by only a few in the present generation. It would seem that the rush to spend now is no respecter of political party, ideology, or family values. Tax more and spend more; tax less and spend even more. Is there any real difference?

Running amok, plundering, bringing about mayhem --- yep, that's just about got it.

Alexis de Tocqueville's greatest fear about democracy in America, about which he wrote in the 1830's, was that our spirit of individualism would lay waste to our spirit of cooperativeness and community. What he could not have envisioned was that the process by which the disease would spread --- e.g., through uncontrolled self-assertion, paranoid perception of others as competitors only, ruthless exploitation of anyone and everyone capable of doing our bidding, and terminal addiction to adrenaline and endorphins --- would be very much like a cancer. Having already failed to prevent the disease, we may also be beyond the point of cure. And there are not many societies around the world willing to provide us hospice care.

Over the years, I've pastored a lot of people struggling with cancers of the body. Most of them coped better with the disease, even though they did not recover from it, when they were surrounded with folks who loved them. Maybe there is a metaphor here, too. What if we could surround our social malignancies with a renewed love for our country as a commonwealth of equally important, mutually respectful and supportive individuals with a commitment to the integrity of the whole that matches commitment to the well-being of the parts? Then, we would no longer be restricted to palliative care for a dying democracy. We would be on the track of curing it.

Hope you had a happy Fourth.