MY PERSONAL VIDEO LIBRARY 2 PART 2

Today I will conclude on the TV series House (2004-2012), a series about the Diagnostics Department of a fictional US hospital led by the fictional Dr Gregory House, M.D.

For a while, House was the most watched TV series in the whole world; it was so popular that the Los Angeles Times published articles explaining the medicine behind it.

But it interests me not so much for the medicine as for the ethics. Part of the show’s allure derives from the constant discussion on the ethical challenges doctors have to face, and the desperate need to find the meaning of life. The task that, in his god-like delusion, Dr House imposes upon himself is to understand nature and the ethical problems it gives rise to: essentially, reproduction (life) and death. The show seems unaware of Max Planck’s observation in Where is Science Going? (1932): “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” If Science cannot solve the mystery, the solution must lie elsewhere. But House espouses a materialist world-view, and keeps despairing at the fact that living matter cannot solve the mystery behind itself.

The world of House is based on a paradox that seems incapable of resolution: doctors try to save lives but, at the same time, they labour under the notion that, ultimately, lives have no inherent worth. The show is replete with abortions, all performed remorselessly. In the episode “One Day, One Room”, Dr House convinces a rape victim that whereas her child is indeed a human being, killing it is more practical than keeping it.

This is why House is important. It’s a lucid reflection of (and on) late-20th-century/early-21st-century ideology (for which killing unborn babies is normal).