If you are like me you make sure the next book you pick up is worth your time reading it.  I’ve found that searching the best-seller Kindle lists is helpful for finding worthy texts.  That is how I came across Jared Diamond’s, “Guns, Germs and Steel,” a 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner.

Diamond is a University of California sociology professor who asked this question: why were some civilizations able to develop steel weapons and other technology such that they were able and destroy or conquer others societies that remained agrarian and utilizing stone tools and weapons?  Do you see where he is heading?  From a big picture view, his pondering is a sub-heading of a greater question: what does it mean to be human?  And both are relevant to hospice.

But let me unpack some of his arguments, many of which are fascinating.   I learned a lot about how societies may have developed.

He points out that Europeans enjoyed the natural advantage of indigent beasts of burden, such as the donkey.  Whereas in Africa, the only domesticated animal that could carry large loads is the elephant, which doesn’t reproduce well in captivity.  Apparently, humans can’t domesticate zebras.

Also in Europe, the natural foodstuffs were barley and wheat, easy to broadcast plants that grew well in European climates.  In North America, corn provided most of the nutrients and calories.  But corn doesn’t have near the nutritional value of barley, and it is comparatively difficult to plant.  One by one as opposed to seed broadcasting.

In and through the pages of his book Diamond reinforces the notion that differences in technological advancement between societies was not a result of differences in intellect or ability.  He makes a good case.  And on that point, I agree with him.  If you have read these blogs over the past three years, you know that I have spent a fair amount of time in Kenya.  What I observe among my African friends is that they value and live community more than Americans do.  They also operate with a different understanding of time and time pressures.  Once, after a long ministry meeting in Nairobi, my friend George, who had seen my looking at the clock during the meeting, said to me, “Brian, you American have your watches, but we Africans have time.”  Love it.  George and I are culturally different but our differences do not rank us intellectually.

What I do disagree with Diamond on is the affect that Christianity had on the development of modern science and European technology.  Let me put it this way.  If a person believes that a rational God made the universe, that person could easily conclude that events in nature could be explained rationally.  That person would eventually begin to experiment and draw conclusions from experimentation, which is the foundation of scientific process.  You see, onlyl if you believe in a rationally ordered universe will you conclude that what happened to a small piece of the universe in your laboratory applies to the rest of the universe.

On the other hand, if your and my view of the world is animistic, we might conclude that events occur because the gods will it, or because they are angry, or happy.  Scientific experiment wouldn’t make sense to us.

That is why I believe it no accident that the scientific fathers were theists.   I am thinking of Isaac Newton, Galileo and Copernicus (one could argue that these dudes disagreed with Church dogma, but it is difficult to conclude they were not Christian).

Let me get back to how all of this relates to what we do in hospice.  What Diamond is attempting here to do is describe who we are as humans, given the backdrop of our significant differences.   Determining who we are as human beings is our first job in hospice care.  If we are merely atoms and molecules, killing the weak among us makes sense.  If there is no Giver of value to human life, then euthanizing the old and sick is the best route.

Fortunately for you and me, few people in our country really believe that we are alone in the universe, that our lives have no eternal purpose, and that we have no value outside of what we can produce economically.  The atheist and the skeptic must deal with the reality of the voice within telling them they are loved and valued.  They must also come to terms with the logical outcome of their worldview, that being that their lives have no purpose, that meaninglessness is their ultimate outcome.

For us at Texas Hospice, we will continue to try to treat our patients as humans bearing the image of the Creator, valuable and precious, regardless of their health or standing.  For us, “death is only the beginning,” as Gandalf said in Lord of the Rings.  Or as Caspian told the kids from England after his death, “really, most people have died.”  How is that for perspective?

Thank you, Professor Diamond, for a new way of looking at who we are.