pete moore being me what it means to be human

being me

Published in 2003 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England Phone (þ44) 1243 779777 Email (for orders and customer service enquiries): cs-books@wiley.co.uk Visit our Home Page on www.wiley.co.uk or www.wiley.com Copyright # 2003 Pete Moore All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England, or e-mailed to permreq@wiley.co.uk, or faxed to (44) 1243 770620. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Pete Moore has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Other Wiley Editorial Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741, USA Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, Pappellaee 3, D-69469 Weinheim, Germany John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd, 33 Park Road, Milton, Queensland, 4064, Australia John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd, 2 Clementi Loop #02-01, Jin Xing Distripark, Singapore 129809 John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd, 22 Worcester Road, Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada, M9W 1L1 Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-470-85088-4 Typeset in 10.5=13.5 Photina by Mathematical Composition Setters Ltd, Salisbury, Wiltshire. Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall. This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestry in which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production.

Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 An embodied being 17 2 A conscious being 47 3 A genetic being 83 4 A historic being 107 5 A related being 133 6 A material being 157 7 A spiritual being 181 8 A sexual being 211 9 A social being 237 10 Free to be me 259 Bibliography 273 Index 275

Acknowledgements The best way to look at what it is like to be a human being is to study individual people, to look at people s lives. This moves us away from theorising and into the real world. Doing this, however, means that you need to intrude into some of the more curious corners of an individual s history and personal stories, and talking to an author therefore calls for a mixture of courage and trust. The book owes its life to the people who have been prepared to expose their lives to gentle scrutiny, to the people who have revealed critical aspects of what makes them tick. Without the likes of Edward Bailey, Paul Bakibinga, David Barker, David Bird, Ann Jeremiah, A. Majid Katme, James Lovelock, Eileen Piddock, Jo Rose, Judy Tabbott, Christine Whipp, Arthur White and Rowan Williams the book would have been yet another polemic. At the same time I m grateful to those who gave me time and inspiration with various parts of the book. These include: Ann Broad, Paul Farrand, Mike Hawkins, Jane and Martin Hiley, Mike and Caroline King, Kenan Malik, Alexina McWhinney, Paul Sandham, Tom Shakespeare and Mary Warnock. The charity Changing Faces also very helpfully put me in touch with David Bird and Eileen Piddock. As with all my books I have been supported, encouraged and goaded into action by Ade' le, and the book owes much to the time given me by my commissioning editor Sally Smith ^ many thanks.

Introduction

Being yourself There is nothing easier than being yourself, until, that is, you think about it. Few children running around a school playground would ever pause to ask what it is that makes them what they are. And on the whole, even fewer adults give it much thought, but every now and then through history there are explosions in interest. Writing towards the end of the Renaissance, a time when the meaning of life was under constant debate, William Shakespeare placed the following lines in the depressed Hamlet s mouth. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? 1 It is as if Hamlet starts with the list of things that he thinks define a human being and then runs out of faith in his own judgement. As many people before and after have discovered, the simple categories that we try to use to define day-to-day existence soon become dangerously thin when exposed to careful scrutiny. Using some physical description of who we are is problematic if a person is physically disabled, because it begs the question whether a human being could ever become a non-person. Using mental capability has similar perils ^ a brain-dead person could become defined as non-human, and therefore legitimately the subject of scientific experimentation. As far as day-to-day living is concerned, the question of what it is to be me has no particular relevance. Quite obviously I am me, you are you and, who knows, one day we may meet. But probe only a little beneath the surface and you soon encounter troubling indicators that the apparent simplistic certainty may 1 Shakespeare W. (1601), Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene 2. 3

BEING ME have a little to be desired. One of the classic pairs of questions that occupied much thought during the twentieth century was: When does my life start? and Can we define a moment when it ceases? Both of these demanded that we have a definition of what life is. Neither question was answered by arriving at universally agreed definitions, although politicians and lawyers did manage to create a few laws setting out boundaries in an otherwise poorly marked out and all too often earthquake- and volcanostrewn landscape. I can remember as a mid-teen A-level student staring down a microscope in the school biology lab. In clear focus was the regular matrix of cells that makes up a section of a thin slice of onion skin. The specimen was stained so I could see various elements of the inner structure of each cell. These were complete cells that at one point had been alive, but now were dead. I stared at them for the best part of an hour and a half, trying to see if I could spot why these cells were dead. It seemed to me such an important question, but I felt that I would be laughed at if I raised my hand and asked it. So rather than submit myself to ridicule I just stared. The overall structure appeared to be there, and I squinted my eyes, racked the focus up and down and adjusted the light in an attempt to spot all the cell contents that my text book claimed should be there; few of the books being honest enough to point out clearly that many of the features could only be seen with an electron microscope ^ not a school toy. What would a living slice be like? I pondered. Would I be able to spot the difference? The label on the microscope slide told me that this material had been dead and sandwiched between glass for a decade, so clearly all biochemical processes had ceased to occur, but there was no apparent loss of life to see. A bell sounded in the corridor marking the end of the lesson and I was no further forward ^ neither had I got around to drawing the blasted thing. Moore had once again failed to complete the task set before him. In previous centuries, the solution to the issue of death seemed obvious. You watched someone. When they hadn t breathed for a few hours, their heart had stopped beating, and their body 4

INTRODUCTION was becoming inflexible with rigor mortis, there was a strong indication that they were dead ^ in popular parlance, a stiff. Tests like holding a cold mirror above the person s mouth and nose to see if there was any trace of condensation caused by the shallowest of breathing could help spot the faintest traces of life. And in the eighteenth century doctors would slice into an artery to see if any blood came out ^ no blood, no life. Blood after all was believed to contain vital spirit, the very essence of you, so much so that early ideas of blood transfusion were frowned upon because they were assumed capable of transfusing one person into another s body. 2 In short, you were your blood, and when blood stopped moving you were no more. This assessment of human life was very straightforward, but it wasn t enough once medical technology had generated the possibility of transplanting organs from one person to another. For an organ, such as a kidney, to be donated it must still be alive when it leaves the original body, or the donated organ would be useless. Likewise a heart in a heart transplant, or a liver, lung, hand or ^ maybe soon ^ even a face. But it would clearly be unethical to strip people of these vital organs while they were alive. Taking a heart out would effectively mean committing murder. So what happened was that life was redefined and new boundaries were drawn up. The argument was that these new limits were much more scientific in the way they were defined. Life, we decided, ended not when the body completely stopped functioning and started to decay, but instead when the brain ceased to function ^ when you were brain-dead. This is different from the point when the cells in the brain have physically died, but it is the point where their operation has become so weak or disorganised that there is no evidence of any effective function. By defining the moment of death as the time when the brain s functional activity drops to a point that a physician can t detect it any more, doctors managed to create a window of opportunity. 2 Moore P. (2002), Blood and Justice, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. 5