We often think of public policy debates in terms of Democrats versus Republicans, or conservatives versus liberals. In contrast, Dr. C.L. Gray has written, “Our most fundamental political differences are based on different world-views that can be traced back more than 2,000 years.” Gray, the founder of Physicians for Reform, has written a book on these clashing world-views titled The Battle for America’s Soul. He discussed key themes from the book with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: Before we get into how these world-views affect current, important, hot-button political debates, let’s identify them. The two world-views, what are they?
Gray: Well, in the book I really start with health care. My platform is that of a working physician. And in dealing with health care reform and medical ethics, I actually look back into history to see where these world-views — in terms of how they’re applied to health care — come from. And actually, you can find them represented in ancient Greece with two thinkers: Plato and Hippocrates. If you read through Plato’s Republic, you’ll find he comments specifically about the role of the physician, and behind that you see Plato struggles to find God but can’t find him, and settles on the good of the collective, the good of the state. And the physician’s role is to look out for the good of the state. And Plato was born about 427 B.C.
One of his contemporaries — [he] predates him slightly — is Hippocrates, born about 460. Hippocrates is really a Pythagorean, and at the core base of his world-view is human life is a gift from the gods. There’s something special about the human. And as a physician, Hippocrates devotes himself — and physicians that follow him, Hippocratic physicians — devote themselves to the individual patient, the individual person. And that sort of lays out initially, even 2,500 years ago, these two sort of polar opposites where we look out for either the good of the collective — the good of the state — or the well-being of the individual.
Kokai: Over the course of your book, you then trace how these particular contrasting world-views play out through the ensuing history. This wasn’t just ancient Greece. We’ve seen it time and again, up into the present day, haven’t we?
Gray: Yes, we can even look at the mid-1200s with thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant, and how they assumed, sort of like Plato and Hippocrates, that either there is a God who does give a special meaning to the human — so there is a special sanctity of life, to use a common phrase — or there isn’t. And then, based on these world-views of whether or not there is a God that actually exists, then his ramifications into the rule of law and property rights and numerous other aspects of public policy.
Kokai: Moving forward to the present day, these two world-views still exist. How did they affect, first of all, the issue which you started with: health care?
Gray: Before we get there, I’d like to briefly swing through one kind of key thinker in my research: Samuel Rutherford. [He] wrote a book Lex, Rex — “law is king.” And that was the laws of nature and laws of God, which then flows to our Declaration of Independence. There’s a concept that there’s a rule of law with these laws of nature and laws of God.
The question we have for modern society with respect to the rule of law: Is the rule of law fixed? Is the meaning of the Constitution fixed? Or is it moveable? Is it a living, breathing document that means what [we] say it means, not means what it actually says. As it gets applied to health care, if you look at health care policy, really the fundamental debate, which sadly was never discussed, was the nature of who should be making medical decisions — the patient and the physician, or the state, or Washington. And as we follow Plato, power shifts toward the state, shifts toward Washington. If we follow Hippocrates — and that’s what my policy part has been in my nonprofit, Physicians for Reform — is to find policy that moves that power back to the individual, the patient, and the physician.
Kokai: If we look at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or what a lot of people call “ObamaCare,” you would say that this is very much in line with what Plato was talking about 2,400 to 2,500 years ago.
Gray: Yeah, it’s fascinating. The first three chapters of the book, I lay out this transition of thought, beginning with Plato and Hippocrates, and walking through to contemporary policy, looking even at a paper of Ezekiel Emanuel’s — key adviser to President Obama for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In his thinking, if you look in an article he wrote in Lancet in January 2009, [he] reiterates Plato’s thinking almost verbatim. It’s rather uncanny how these world-views cycle back through history.
Kokai: Now, you are a physician by training and are the founder of the group, as you mentioned, Physicians for Reform. But one of the things that’s interesting about The Battle for America’s Soul is that these world-views don’t just affect our policies on health care, but they affect so many other things. How do they affect something like our protection or support for property rights?
Gray: Yes. One of the key concepts that I develop and elaborate in the book is the concept of a fixed truth. And Judeo-Christian thought accepts the concept of a fixed truth, and applied to the rule of law, the fixed truth of our Constitution or the fixed meaning of our Constitution. As applied to, like the Fifth Amendment, for property rights, eminent domain — the government can seize property for public use — those are the words in the Fifth Amendment. A post-modern thinker, where there is no fixed truth, can start to impose their own meaning. Truth is what’s true for you. Truth is what’s true for me. That’s sort of the brief definition of post-modern thought.
So as we get post-modern Supreme Court justices, they start to impose their own “meaning” of the Constitution as they formulate decisions, which become, then, law. And it’s judicial precedent, not legislative law. But that certainly affected, like Susette Kelo in Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court case in 2005 where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Fifth Amendment means “public benefit,” changing the words “public use.” So it does apply very much to something as simple as property rights.
Kokai: How about for foreign policy? That of course has been driving a lot of our debate in recent years — what we should be doing in the Middle East. And you say that these world-views definitely influence how we approach foreign policy as well.
Gray: Well, the post-modern thinker, the sole precept that they really take — the absolute is you can’t form a moral judgment condemning something else. And if we can’t form moral judgments, it is very difficult to approach foreign policy, because a post-modern thinker would have to take a neutral stance in virtually every position.
One thinks of Russia’s invasion of Georgia back during the previous presidential election cycle. One candidate was able to say, “No, this is absolutely wrong.” The other called for neutrality on both sides. We see the same thing in the Middle East. Can we condemn evil as evil? Or do we take a morally neutral position in virtually all countries? And that’s very prominent in the United Nations, where every country has a seat at the table, and no one voice is better or worse than any other.