week twelve_law and emotion

Laws, to most people are equal to justice, but it may also become an obstacle on the way to the justice that the public commonly admit: sometimes the human emotion is against the settled law as can be proved in many cases.

From my understanding of the lecture given this week, laws are created to simply give an answer as well as solution to those actions of offenses, meanwhile no one can make sure if the solution provided by laws is always the best one. Further more, laws are the production of human thinking and consultation, so it is not strange to see people in different countries, or even various areas of the same country hold very different attitude towards the same law-breaking case, and law setting can differ a lot within a country.

In the perspectives of some people, the sword in Lady Justice's hand can be even more horrifying than the bony hand of the Reaper, especially when it comes to situations relative to someone' life, for the force of law is not allowed to be stained, thus it may seem to be quite impersonal. But after all, laws can be improved, and with the effort made by the whole society, definitely the public will trust the force of laws better and better.

Below is a picture I drew inspired by the idea given in this lecture.

Lady Justice and the Reaper

week eleven_about euthanasia

Euthanasia, in Chinese it is translated into 安樂死,means getting dead in peace. This translation may give the public an impression that euthanasia is something positive or at least not so unacceptable as what it really is. However whether to make euthanasia legal is still a rather difficult problem to governments throughout the world, for this is a critical topic concerning life and death and also the limitation of human being, in the perspective of population with some religious belief.

Even in some developed countries, the legalization of euthanasia is still at a very beginning stage. Netherlands is the first country that made positive euthanasia legal, and most countries are still holding a hesitating attitude towards this issue or just making passive euthanasia legal: perhaps out of the reason that passive euthanasia is closer to natural death, and either the hospital or relatives of the one receive euthanasia may feel less guilty of allowing patients to make this decision.

In my opinion, patients with no possibility of being rescue-able should be given the right to decide their life and death, this also fits the situation where people regard their life has been broken due to either diseases or accident. But making decision of euthanasia casually, though not too much influence would happen on the one decide to do so in voluntary cases, trauma may happen on relatives or even medical professionals. Still, to societies without an open enough attitude towards the turning from alive to dead, let alone services like Euthanasia take-away, the legalization of even passive euthanasia should be considered really carefully. Without a solid base of understanding the meaning of death, euthanasia may be modified or even lost its original humanized meaning.

make up post_human and nature

Here are two pictures drawn by me during the Easter holiday. The first can be seen as an extension of my doodle posted before, and the second is a make-up post for week nine, using the connection between human and nature as its theme.

week ten_the changing attitude

In the lecture today, professor mentioned about the so called taboo in Chinese culture that when someone is severely ill, his or her family members usually see breaking the bad news to the patient is a bad thing. Despite the fact that according to the statistic, most people want the truth about their own health instead white lies given by their family out of good wish.

Time has changed, the topic of death is no longer something unspeakable. But  social culture seems still admit the traditional value that death is something bad that can never be broke especially in front of the person him or herself experiencing the process of death. In fact, this taboo is not necessary at all. Just like what we have experienced in the former two interviews, talking about death is not as tabooed as we what may think. Traditional believes also tell us that good people would deserve a good life condition after their death (so to be positive and to consider less, as long as we keep being good persons, we needn't be afraid of death :D). Open attitude towards death like this also act as the same role in terms of this problem in modern society.

Come to the perspective of patients themselves, they should be given fully right to know the health condition of themselves, and only in this way can they then decide how to react and then what to do. Making decision for other people somehow equals to exploiting the basic rights of other people. Now that society and reality have both been open to diseases and death, then why we still want to put it aside from normal life, especially in these vital cases?

week eight_body, spirit and soul

It is interesting to see the idea on lecture held this Monday that human body is consisted by three components: the body, the soul and the spirit. Sure to most people they generally believe in the idea that a person is consisted with both visible as well as invisible parts, but to me it was in fact the first time (maybe it is because of the religious factors) to see the idea of considering a man as a trinity consisted by these three parts.

According to the Scriptures, the word "soul" can be used to referred either a single person or the mind of someone, while the word "spirit" conveys the meaning of the air breathed, non-physical being as well as the same meaning of the word "soul". So there is some overlap of meaning between these two words, but the one raised the idea of dividing the non-physical part of human being into soul and spirit might probably want to express something else.

Why bother differentiating soul and spirit? Maybe people always have the will to divide their mind into rational and instinctive ones. The evil part of mind is soul, and the rationally kind part is spirit, such division can be also seen in Freud's theory, like id and super-ego.

References:

https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/526-soul-and-spirit-whats-the-difference

http://bible.org/seriespage/man-trinity-spirit-soul-body

week seven_to keep or to dump

It is natural that people want to keep the body or even ash of their gone family members or friends, for the reason everyone can understand easily: we want to stay in the time spent with the loved person, leaving the body behind seems as cruel as dumping the family member or even worse,because the one dead won't make any resistance to show his or her anger or sadness, which may probably makes people done so feel terrible about what is done. To most people, knowing the fact that each gone family member / friend is resting in peace in some graveyard or cinerarium is much more relieving than have totally have no idea that where he or she finally belongs to.

But let's think from another perspective, since the very beginning of human history death has kept a close companion with it. People born and died, nobody knows where the remain of our earliest ancestors' bodies are now, and nobody cares. Just let it be, for nobody cares about it, that is the opinion we hold to death happened long time ago. But we are treating death much closer to ourselves in a quite different way: we hold ceremonies and try to make the dead one feel better without even understanding the original meaning of these ceremonies; we buy some place to store the ash of them as long as possible. Just like the ship mentioned in today's lecture, this ship is designed to carry the ash of dead people to release the active demand of cinerarium in Hong Kong. But why not just simply spread the ash to sea area nearby as many local families have done? Why still bother figuring out a way to keep ash as long as possible? Is this insistance of intergrality of body really unbreakable?

news photo taken in a sea burial

week seven_so called taboo

[drawn / shot by poster]

It is actually right here, and there is nothing to afraid about.

week six_the meaning behind ceremonies

It is natural in a culture to have certain ceremonies functioning as access to gods and ancestors. People use certain ceremony to build as well as revise the connection to the ones they trust in.

At the first time these ceremonies were created, they were certainly complete and fixed sets of actions, but as time goes by, these ceremonies turns into varies of forms, as a result of different culture background and other synthetic factors. Sometimes even in the same country, the process of feting the same god varies in different regions. Meanwhile feting ceremonies varies from region to region, they are also simplified since people's pace of life today are becoming quicker and quicker. So does these alternatives matter?

Why no begin with the reason why people do these ceremonies? Let's let alone the belief arena and just talk about the motivation of such action (in fact religious belief among youth in east Asia isn't very strong today). People in trouble or feel helpless tend to seek help from other strength, and religious or supernatural belief can become one resource of mental support. Ceremonies like burning symbolized paper products can also relief the sorrow and depress of having beloved relatives gone. By being a part of these ceremonies, no matter if perfect process is followed, can make people alive feel they are actually making the person gone live a better life.

Just like what was said in the interview this week, once the ceremony is taken out of a good tendency, no matter how it is held, it works. After all, the original reason why fete is created is to deposit people's good intention.

week five_for the dead or for the alive

Death may has complex meanings in different cultures and situations, but being dead just equals to the stop of human organic operation to a person. All the functions of a body cease sooner or later, without the conscious or so called spirit, a person comes to his or her end and finally turns into a "thing", a stuff. The gone people themselves, if there is no such "another world" or things like soul or ghost, surely cannot feel anything about how their bodies are treated (Though profaning bodies shouldn't be forgiven still. Not because bodies used to be people, but for the behavior itself).

Just like the cases of designing crematories and mortuaries, these places are traditionally considered to be built for dead bodies, but due to many complex reasons, the feelings of people working or visiting there should be taken into consideration. So when we talk about how we treat dead people and their bodies, we are in fact talk about our believes, thought and attitudes. It is kind of reflection of peoples' mind and culture background.

Maybe, we preserve bodies just because we want to pursue ever lasting lives; we cremating bodies just because we fear concepts of getting rotten and hope to cleanse ominous things. Other than results of rational thinking, what we to ceased lives are more likely to be following our wishful thinking.

[photo of Chuck Palahniuk] In his Exodus, Chuck Palahniuk talked about the people's emotion tied on human as well as simulants of human. Things don't think, perhaps it's we that are bordering ourselves.

week four_the each "One" behind statistics

When something is shown as a whole, even it is actually made of a lot of different "parts", we are likely to forget the fact that each single part of the whole thing has something of its own.

Seeing charts and figures day after day making us forget what are the things behind these stats we see: they are dollars lost or earned by different individuals; they are injuries spread over various bodies; they are death of both known and unknown ones. Take the example of lists of victims appear on newspapers after disasters, behind each "one" of the number there is a life, this life has his or her story, and whether catchy or not, this life is worth respect, or at least some thing more than a simple glance.

If you are a blogger, you may have noticed that many blogs you find when browsing randomly (don't tell me you've never done this before) are "dead" years before in fact. People share their photos and experiences and thoughts by blogging, and then just left the little website alone and forgot it at some time. All the limited words and images are our only knowledge about some one we probably will never see in our whole life. What is happening on them now? It's a meaningless question for our lives have no connection to these strangers we see online at all, like every single individual hiding behind the datum shown in disparate conditions every day.

Yes, meaningless, but since these people are also inhabitants on this planet, how can we just don't care?

* Cholera map made by John Snow, each black dot stands for a death caused by cholera. Deaths here are just little dots, through which no further information of the dead can be seen.

week three_life expectancy

Life expectancy is an interesting concept, it means the number of left years of people in certain age. Although in many developed countries, the concept of life expectancy is quite similar to "median life span", but there are still subtle differences. Life expectancy is measured by using life tables, while median life span is calculated from data collected. Now that I'm not really good at dealing with data and charts (and these have been done in the lecture), I'm going to talk about the meaning of life expectancy.

It is a fact that life expectancy of different countries differs a lot throughout the world. Just like what professor said, it is not really fair. Yes, in terms of economic development and social security or some other perspectives, living in those countries whose citizens have shorter life expectancy means they would have poorer life quality, the resources they have access to is much more limited. But let’s focus on the stat, or the number. Is it true that shorter life equals to misfortune? 

There is saying that the number of certain things one can do in his or her life is limited, once the counting comes to zero, people die. Surely it is only a random saying, which is usually told as a joke. But once we shift the idea of “the longer, the better”, we may find out that the years those who have longer life expectancy exceed ones with shorter life expectancy are years in late middle-age and old age, which are mostly considered to be less productive periods (to make the comparison fairer, though it doesn't truly fit the fact, we only make comparison among people in the same land with different life expectancy). There are also lots of examples of great persons with comparatively shorter lifetime, so how long can you live is not really an important problem to those who want to do something big. Of course I don't mean pay no attention on health care or things like that, the point is, live a life you really want to live, and don't be limited by anything.

week two_bloodletting and the path to the truth

  Bloodletting therapy began with the ancient physicians' very subjective understanding of human body: bloodletting is a way to purifying and purging human body in either spiritual or physical way, which depends on the theory taken. Although it is really hard to imagine, ancient people actually took this therapy as a serious medical technique. For example, Greek physician Galen built a series of theories to standardize the process of conducting bloodletting, which is pretty ridiculous to modern people.

the picture of Galen

  However, bloodletting was almost the only solution to those who used or received this therapy, especially to those lived in B.C.: if bloodletting didn't work, then nothing would probably work. Such situation appeared because of the limit of rational understanding of the world. But the weirdest thing is, as an untested and totally subjective therapy, bloodletting has been popular among western world for so long a time and wasn't questioned until 19th century. Why? Is it because people's knowledge about themselves didn't reach a certain level until 19th century to step a further step in this area? What people need are courage and tight logic at that time, which are in fact needed at any time during human history, and the condition didn't completed until a certain time.

  The mainstream power that pushing people to know more about the world is rational thinking and scientific research. Take a look at Galen's early theory of bloodletting, it mentioned that "blood was created and then used up, it did not circulate(Bloodletting, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting#In_the_2nd_millennium )". Though the conclusion was not exactly right, Galen developed his own theory after his new discovery: it's blood instead of oxygen in arteries, just like researchers today. Truth is developed as well as built with joint effort made by generations of devoted people, what we can do now is create and find new things on the given basis of present knowledge.

week one_is embalming still necessary?

One of the after class reading about embalming technique in many countries make me think a bit further about people's attitudes towards their own or others' dead body. In some countries there are embalmed corpse of famous leaders or people considered to be important in the history of this country. It is a bit weird to preserve the corpse of a leader and enable visitors from all over the world to take a look at him, because most people won't do the same thing to their beloved family member, though they may have paid even more love on the family member than on the leader. 

  Egyptian made mummy because they believed there is another world for the dead, people could extend their life by being made into mummy. But embalming a dead leader is another story. People today seldom believe in the saying of another world for the dead, they probably embalm the corpse of gone leader mostly out of respect and pride. One similar solution to this situation is making a statue for this leader, and it is used in much more countries than embalming, despite the factor of huge cost and time to be paid on preserving the body, visiting a statue is more acceptable than visiting a body to most people. Then why bother doing so?

  I don't think embalming is the only suitable way to memorize a leader or other important person. In spite of the meaningless cost, the embalmed bodies are no longer the leaders anyway, they are only dead bodies. If a state of a leader can arouse people's strong emotion of respect and admire, what can an embalmed body arouse in people's heart? Even to those leaders themselves, they may have never thought of having their bodies displayed to huge amount of people either.

week one_the image of death

  People in Victorian era used photography to memorize their beloved family members. They took photo for the dead as if they were still alive. This kind of memorization is kind of strange seen by modern people, but it is still understandable considering the specific time background. To me, it was really hard to tell the dead person from the alive ones in these photos if no further background information was given. The border between the dead and the alive was weak in these pictures.

  Thanks to the development of Internet, information can be easily gained by anyone today, thus many topics which were thought to be some kind of taboo are no longer so mysterious nowadays. The growing acceptance of the appear of death in public media is a great example of this shift. Audience and readers today are harder to be pleased than what they were at any time before, it seems nothing but more blood and more death can attract their eyeballs successfully, so do many information producers do. Sometimes real death in real life is also processed in the same way out of different reasons. But should this phenomenon be stopped or at least limited? Further more, should death and the gone be processed and decorated? What attitude can we hold besides fear and respect? In my point of view, dead people actually have nothing different from people alive in terms of having their image "reprocessed". It is clear to most people that reprocessing or using someone's image for any reason without the permission of the owner of the image is not proper under any situation, and the death of the original owner cannot change this common sense. Even the image is just simply shown in public media, it shouldn't be too violent or scary. But when it come to death itself, it's free for everyone to take any attitude towards both direct or indirect information of death. However, instead of just feeling fear and anxiety to mysterious death, having a deeper understanding to it maybe can make us feel comparatively more comfortable to face death, or even the life.