I think the problem is resolved if what we consider sacred in the individual is not his/her life and well being, but his/her freedom. Any individual always transcends whatever “value” we could place on him or her, any knowledge we could have, anything we could predict they might do, etc. And so we don’t impose our sense of possibilities on any individual. That doesn’t mean we track them every day of their life to make sure nothing bad happens to them; quite to the contrary.

I don’t think I disagree with you about the historical nature and intelligibility of the sacrality of the individual, and of all sacrality. Insofar as we do our rationalizing within language, though, we are presupposing the minimal sacrality constitutive of language–giving reasons is a gesture towards the other which constitutes the joint attention intrinsic to all understanding, and it is a gesture which makes sense, as the reasons we give only make sense, within particular traditions and disciplinary spaces, themselves founded upon some form of joint attention. GA illuminates this circularity but doesn’t get out of it–maybe part of the accomplishment of GA is that we can stop trying to get out of it.

In political practice, the value of an individual is always relative. We admit that a certain number of individuals killed each year as the price allowing car traffic; not to mention war and other examples. Some Girardians have focused on such social calculations to argue that our social order is reprehensibly “sacrificial.” But the point is protect rights, not eliminate suffering or inequality. “Rights” articulate a minimal valuation of the individual. Each individual cannot be given “infinite value” (as a philosophy professor once put it) because values inevitably conflict; what’s “valuable” for me (having the best available health care for example), might be costly for you, such that you can’t afford the best available health care.

Second, GA, as I understand it, provides a hypothetical narrative of how the individual becomes “sacred.” The sacrality of the individual is not a given, not universal, not atemporal, but a contingent event of history. Humans exist, but they don’t have to exist, and before our origin, humans didn’t exist. Insofar as we motivate the individual’s sacrality through a narrative hypothesis, we can say that the sacrality or rather value of the individual is rationalized. In general, if one gives reasons (without appealing to God or the equivalent) why one regards the individual as sacred or valuable, then we’ve rationalized individual value/sacrality. To that extent, GA has better rationalized the value of the individual better than any other thought-system of which I’m aware. Human rights advocates simply assert a priori that rights are universal. GA tells us why. That’s a great advance to my mind.

I should also say that I’m not nearly as confident as you are of the sturdiness of the sacralization of the individual in today’s world. There’s a very big difference between allowing social differentiation (and inequality) to play itself out in health care outcomes and appointing people to allocate life saving or denying health care on the basis of bureaucratic criteria. Paradoxically, the former approach would be the one that genuinely sacralizes the individual (because it allows everyone to match their resources to their needs as best they can, and to solicit help from others who donate voluntarily), and the more difficult approach–the one that would confront far stronger political headwinds. I’m not at all sure that the sacrality of the individual is deeply enough embedded for us to go in that direction.

I don’t deny that discourses of “health” can be dangerous–I’m just exploring various directions one might go with it, especially if it gets imposed upon us whether we like it or not. To follow up on your question here, the way we could designate responsibility in terms of “health/sickness” would be by treating “health” as a source of metaphors for discussing social relations. Of course, this is what the totalitarians did (the Jews as a “virus,” etc.) but I don’t think we need to let the argument “ad Hitlerum” frighten us so much anymore. I don’t think there is anything inherently totalitarian about speaking of a “healthy” or “sick” social order, or in talking about beliefs or practices that “infect” institutions, with the corresponding use of terms like “inoculate” or “heal” to speak of protecting and restoring those institutions. If you could ask someone whether their proposal for social change or even their own individual choices will infect a weakened system or inoculate it against infection, we could then speak about responsibility. And the descriptive power of the vocabulary would have to be judged on its own terms.

I would have to agree that sin and guilt are not necessarily more rational terms than health and sickness (in fact, just the opposite). They do have the advantage, however, of designating responsibility. Sin and guilt don’t have any currency in public discourse anymore, so that’s not an issue. Those designations only come up in more or less private religious discourse. I can see your point that “health and sickness” don’t have to be tied to an entitlement culture, and they are not always antithetical to personal responsibility. But they do lend themselves to that culture; grammatically, we tend to use the passive voice with sickness, something we “suffer.”

So, I don’t see modernity in terms of a “rational” vs. “sacred” distinction. I’ve never understood how we can speak about meaning outside of the sacred. We can sacralize rationality in certain circumstances (and in terms of certain understandings of rationality) and we can and, I believe, have, sacralize the human individual who cannot be coerced into any belief or action. We are free and therefore must persuade each other if we seek exchange or cooperation, but there is no obligation to do so in accord with any version of “rationality.” I don’t assume that a therapeutic culture must be linked to an entitlement culture–at any rate, this post is an attempt to think through some of the implications of their de-linking. The “therapeutic” provides us with a vocabulary: we can speak of a “sick” culture, of social “pathologies,” of relationships and personal wounds that need to be “healed.” This vocabulary might in part supplant, in part supplement, and in part continue, some of the more traditional vocabularies, organized around terms like “sin,” “guilt,” “virtue,” and so on. I’m exploring the possibility that it might do in ways that support the privatizations we need, economically speaking–especially in health care. As I suggest here, one important element of the therapeutic is the refusal to accept “offical” and “establishment” cures, and an insistence on one’s right to seek out unlicensed cures and treatments. In the end, it will be impossible to ask others to pay for it.

At rate, I don’t see any reason why thinking in terms of “health,” “treatment,” “recovery,” etc., is necessarily any more or less rational than speaking in terms of “good and evil,” “guilt,” or even “rational vs. irrational.”

On a technical issue, I’m interested in Gnosticism, and I wonder why you characterize as Gnostic our insistence that the “challenged” can and should do everything that others can? I’m guessing that this is the tendency to see “knowledge” (specifically technology) as the answer to every problem, and that progress should be unlimited. But I wonder if technology is really a side issue here. True, prosthetic limbs and various accomodations help the disabled to function more effectively; but this also involves attitude perhaps more importantly. A deaf and blind person who decides to take up rock climbing or even skiing doesn’t depend so much on technical advancements as historical changes in attitudes going back to Helen Keller among others. Is Helen Keller’s optimism about the potential of the deaf/blind usefully characterized as “gnostic”?

If I’m not mistaken, it’s Voegelin who has influentially characterized the modern world as gnostic, as trying to realize the kingdom of heaven on earth, relying on knowledge as deployed by elite experts. His characterization of the modern world is insightful in many ways; but calling it gnostic seems rather unfortunate to me. I see gnosticism as concerned with a cosmic battle between good and evil, the appropriation of power through magic, and the absence of any monotheistic, beneficent providence. Is technology really a modern form of magic? I’m not sure about that. Technology at least works. As I recall, Blumenberg makes an argument not too dissimilar to Voegelin; that gnosticism effectively means the absence of any omnipotent providence, so that moderns are driven to “self-assertion.” But I think Blumenberg sees gnosticism as more of a transitional stage rather than as characterizing the end result, except in the atheism implicit to both. Blumenberg argues against the “secularization theory” of modernity (i.e., modernity is simply Christianity without the sacred), and Voegelin seems to advocating a version of it: that a heretical form of christianity underlies modernity.