Exposing the Language of the Culture of Death

Exposing the Language of the Culture of Death | An Interview with William Brennan, author of John Paul II: Confronting the Language Empowering the Culture of Death | Ignatius Insight | July 10, 2009

William Brennan, Ph.D., is a Professor of Social Work in the Saint Louis University School of Social Work. He has written and spoken extensively on how euphemisms and dehumanizing language facilitate massive oppression. Hisbook, Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives (Loyola University Press, 1995), was a Loyola bestseller. Professor Brennan is currently working on a book-length manuscript tentatively titled, Killing in the Name of Healing: Technology, Rhetoric, and the Medicalization of Destruction. Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, recently spoke with Dr. Brennan about his most recent book, John Paul II: Confronting the Language Empowering the Culture of Death (Sapientia Press, 2008), and current events relating to that book's focus and arguments.

Ignatius Insight: How did Pope John Paul II define the culture of death?

Dr. Brennan: He defined the culture of death as a lethal mentality possessing an unlimited  capacity for engulfing a wide range of victims and employed an inclusive perspective for highlighting "whatever is opposed to life itself," such as genocide, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, experimental exploitation of human beings, slavery, torture, mutilation rituals, and a host of other infamies. An ominous feature of this increasingly monolithic mindset, the pope revealed, is "a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which requires greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another." He called this phenomenon "a truly alarming spectacle, if we consider not only how extensively attacks are spreading but also their unheard-of numerical proportion, and the fact that they receive widespread legal approval and the involvement of certain sectors of health-care personnel."

Besides the numerous forms of devastation brought about by the death culture, John Paul singled out another casualty—the demise of conscience itself. Through the manipulation of language, the forces of death have proven extraordinarily successful in numbing the moral sensitivities of many to the horrors actually taking place. This process leads to an "extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense" in which conscience is rendered increasingly indifferent, blind, and impotent in the face of the evils being perpetrated.

Ignatius Insight: What are some of the most influential and significant ways that language is misused, manipulated, and abused in the field of medicine on behalf of the culture of death?

Dr. Brennan: Doing away with unborn humans is routinely portrayed as simply the removal of nondescript "tissue" or "material" from the womb. According to sociologist Amitai Etzioni, "the dominant scientific and public view is to view the fetus" during the first four and one-half months as "subhuman and relatively close to a piece of tissue." Aborted remains at the Oregon Health Sciences University are called "suctioned or curetted material" and "cellular material." Abortionist Dr. Warren Hern characterizes the post-abortion task of re-assembling dismembered body parts as "the tissue examination."

Read the entire interview...

Comments

[Ed Peters]

Brennan has done some fine work over the years. He was one of the first people I read on all this back in the late 1970s. Really good stuff.