Mehmet Çiftçi, Public Discourse, 5/24
The legalization of assisted dying in the UK is inevitable, according to UnHerd columnist Kathleen Stock. Sheargues that the death of God has created a secular outlook that “paralyzes many of us intellectually” and “means that a selfish mental focus upon alleviating future personal suffering is the only cause we can really get behind.” Without “some deeply felt theological or philosophical principle about the intrinsic value of human life” there remains nothing but “vague intuitions and orphaned remnants of moral reasoning inherited from a formerly Christian outlook.” These will be “no match against the powerful lure of a vision of preventing personal physical suffering in [the] future, or the suffering of loved ones, via the offering of a serene and painless death.”
She does seem convinced that legalization would “wreak more quantifiable havoc than it prevents, in exactly the ways anticipated by critics: guilt-tripping those who feel like burdens into premature endings; tempting the already depressed towards easy oblivion.” And yet, she also thinks that arguing against this would require “positive belief in something.” She notes: “Those who want to see the back of assisted-dying laws had probably better start praying harder, though I wouldn’t hold out any hope.”
But the fight against assisted dying is not as hopeless as she thinks. In fact, there are reasons for hope in recent news that should encourage those in the United States who are looking nervously at what is going on in Canada.
Legalization Is Not Inevitable
First, we need to reject the view that treats the entire matter as a lost battle. Stock is not the only one to say that more and more countries will inevitably legalize assisted suicide. The British journalist Matthew Parris, in an article tastelessly published on Good Friday in the Times, wrote approvingly that societies burdened with too many old people will have to drop an absolute taboo against ending the life of the sick or aged if they want to survive and remain competitive. In 2015, he wrote with an even greater sense of fatalism: “I do not therefore need to campaign for assisted dying. . . . My opinions and my voice are incidental. This is a social impulse that will grow, nourished by forces larger than all of us. I don’t exhort. I predict.”
This is rhetoric intended to weaken any opposition through sheer demoralization. There is something particularly paradoxical about reading Parris, a former Conservative member of Parliament when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, using Marxist rhetoric. I remember when I read the Communist Manifesto as a teenager, being intrigued by its intoxicating language: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” But what I did not realize (until I became a lapsed Marxist years later) is that this would make politics, or even any human action, pointless and superfluous before the unstoppable march of history. In Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist’s torturer tells him: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
That would be a good image of our situation if the course of history were predetermined, and politics set to go in just one direction. But we do not live in an iron cage of determinism, and that is partly what makes 1984preposterous as a novel about totalitarianism. The rhetoric that treats what is wished for as a foregone conclusion is a standard trope of prophetic literature, and there is no shortage of false prophets with us today. It is vital then that we dispel the language of inevitability that misleads and demoralizes us into treating the battle as a lost cause before it has even begun.
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Is the Fight against Assisted Dying a Lost Cause?