L’euthanasie de l'Occident La légalisation de l'euthanasie est indéfendable

On raconte que Gandhi, interrogé sur ce qu’il pensait de la civilisation occidentale, aurait répondu après quelques secondes : « Ça pourrait être une bonne idée ». C’est drôle et quand même injuste, il y a eu une civilisation occidentale ; mais le fait est qu’elle est plutôt derrière nous. Parler de « civilisation » pour désigner l’état des choses en Europe donne l’impression qu’on se gargarise d’un grand mot. On le sent bien au fond, même si se l’avouer demeure difficile, c’est plié.

Nos remplaçants s’il y en a, et s’il leur arrive de penser à nous dans quelques siècles, n’éprouveront ni indignation ni colère ; ils ne seront plus concernés. Ils ressentiront probablement un vague dégoût, et surtout une immense perplexité. Les plus lettrés tenteront de la réduire par l’écriture d’énormes ouvrages, dont « Histoire de la décadence et de la chute de l’empire romain » reste un exemple classique. Un résumé simplifié des thèses de Gibbon expliquant la chute de l’Empire romain par le développement du christianisme, outre qu’il est convaincant et clair, présente l’avantage de pouvoir être prolongé sans difficulté par les thèses d’Auguste Comte sur le passage de l’état théologique à l’état métaphysique, dont l’unique fonction aura été de détruire. Le déclin de l’Occident trouve ainsi son explication naturelle dans la chute du christianisme initiée par le protestantisme, accomplie par le siècle des lumières. Nietzsche dit à peu près la même chose, en y rajoutant d’amusants effets spéciaux mettant en scène des saltimbanques et des aigles. Ce qui ne colle par contre plus très bien, c’est que les choses ne vont pas mieux en Asie ; le déclin démographique, dans les pays technologiquement les plus avancés — Japon, Corée, plus récemment la Chine — y est même encore plus rapide, au point que leurs populations risquent, à un terme pas si éloigné, de disparaître. C’est bel et bien la modernité toute entière qui s’autodétruit sous nos yeux incompréhensifs.

« Les choses tombent en morceaux ; le centre ne peut plus tenir / La pure anarchie est lâchée sur le monde » écrit Yeats en 1919, pressentant que, pour l’Europe, la guerre qui vient de s’achever n’aura été que l’annonciation d’autres désastres plus considérables. La guerre a donné naissance à la guerre, le nazisme a ouvert une porte sombre qui ne s’est jamais totalement refermée, les deux guerres mondiales n’ont fait qu’accélérer la décomposition des pays qui ont commis la folie de s’y engager. Un siècle après le poème de Yeats, le centre n’a pas tenu — et cela apparaît avec une évidence particulière dans le cas du centre politique européen, Bruxelles. En Belgique l’euthanasie, ouverte aux « personnes en souffrance psychique » depuis 2002, l’est aux mineurs depuis 2014. Quelques marges tiennent encore, mais l’une après l’autre les digues cèdent, et nous sommes submergés par cette « mer noircie de sang » dont parle Yeats dans le vers suivant.

France should be the next barrier swept away by this sea; it remains possible to avoid it, but hope is dwindling. For some time now, several years already, that I have been striving to fight against euthanasia, while the conviction grows in me that I am fighting a losing battle, I feel like I have played all my cards, and even started to cheat. One last time, I do not think it useless to recommend to those whose vote will have the force of law to reflect on the few philosophers who, over the centuries, have approved of suicide — it is even quite astonishing: “progressivism” sweeps away with contempt, with a wave of the hand, not only all existing religious traditions, but almost everything previous philosophers have thought; such arrogance, I think, has never before manifested in human history. But philosophies, unlike religions, speak mainly to the intelligence of the human being, and hardly reach what is essential in him. The Catholic religion, despite apparently some recent stirrings, has long been lagging behind in Europe, and I am not at the point of preferring an Islamic society, on the grounds that secular society deviates from moral law. But I am not sure I want to belong to a society that legalizes euthanasia; defending the West is fine, provided it deserves to be defended. It is enough to examine the arguments of the supporters of euthanasia to be overwhelmed by disgust, and that by force of disgust a moral insurrection is triggered; these arguments are actually summed up in a single one, which is dignity, but this word has been used so often, and in such a perverse way, that it has become difficult to grasp its meaning. Seen by supporters of euthanasia, the desire for dignity expressed by the dying person, as testified by loved ones, is generally expressed by phrases like: “He would not have endured becoming a vegetable.” The assertion would be more convincing if they could complete it like this: “He would not have endured becoming a vegetable, he would have preferred to become a corpse.” Let us add that the vegetable metaphor reflects a painfully pragmatic view of the human being. Ideally, a human being should move, perform acts, in short, lead an active life. And if that is definitely impossible, at least he should communicate, show himself capable of interacting, at least by speech, with the rest of society. The human is reduced to his use value, that is to say his initial value diminished by a coefficient of wear. It is hard to imagine a more direct opposition to human dignity in the sense of Emmanuel Kant, with the Kantian idea that humanity, in its own person as in that of others, must always be considered as an end, and never simply as a means. A first alteration had already occurred, and unfortunately it was on the occasion of the so justified fight against animal suffering, when the “antispeciesists” undertook to lead it in the name of the dubious notion of “animal rights,” when it would have sufficed to continue to heed the modest but incandescent, eternal, voice of compassion. With euthanasia it is no longer a matter of alteration, but of a plunge into the abyss. For Kant, for the thinkers of more naive centuries, human dignity was simply linked to the fact of being a man. We no longer see things the same way. Human dignity is altered in us, our life is in itself a process of alteration, and we must at every moment be ready to justify it in our own eyes, even in those of others (insofar as that makes a difference). For nearly two centuries, the specter of nihilism has haunted Western Europe. Now that’s it, here we are; we were not expecting nihilism in this form, it is neither dark nor twilight; it is rather colorful and cheerful. To picture it, one should not think of Dostoevsky, nor of Nietzsche, but rather remember a Simons store commercial (it is a Canadian clothing store chain) that was supposed to depict a happy euthanasia. It was a dignity to scream about.
Filmé au bord de la mer, il y avait des vagues et du violoncelle, un grand repas convivial avec du cheesecake et des éclats de rire, la chose était titrée « Tout est beauté », la future morte était jeune, émouvante et sympathique, il s’agissait d’une artiste, on la voyait dessiner des formes dans le sable avec un bâton. Simons a retiré son clip, il y avait eu sur Internet trop de commentaires sarcastiques se moquant de l’utilisation des codes de l’industrie du luxe pour promouvoir l’euthanasie. En effet, on se serait cru dans une pub Chanel ou Saint-Laurent.

Let’s dig a little into this matter of dignity. Back when I was researching the Vincent Lambert case, I remember a “white paper” on the operation of EVC-EPR centers, those created by the Kouchner law, and in which Vincent Lambert should have found his place if the medical system had worked properly. One anecdote struck me, that of a woman who had been silent for years, who suddenly started talking again during an unexpected visit. While a doctor expressed his astonishment, because for years he had tried in vain to establish contact, she replied: “What you were saying wasn’t all that interesting”. A very compromised state of health can excuse certain lapses in politeness, but still, it’s a lesson worth remembering: if people don’t talk to you, sometimes it’s because they have nothing to say to you.

Anyone who has written, or even simply tried to write, knows that it is sometimes possible — it’s hard to explain, but it’s true — to express in writing realities inaccessible to speech. And anyone who has actually written knows something else, something sadder: what you’ve written will only be a faint trace of what you dreamed of writing. Even someone as monstrously productive in literature as Balzac admitted it: the books you’ve written are less beautiful than those you only dreamed of. Speech is only a fraction of writing, which itself is only a fraction of inner life. Reducing a man’s mind to his oral communication skills is simply stupid.

If you look at things from the angle of morals, to behave with dignity would be to adopt, in the face of life’s sufferings and sorrows, an attitude of calm, restraint, stoicism. Dignity would, in short, be little different from emotional modesty; which already gives reason for suspicion. If modesty is in all cases a rather shady feeling, a bit too associated with shame, emotional modesty is, of all the forms it can take, by far the most toxic. I’ve heard the “dignity” of victims of this or that tragic news story praised so much in the media that I’ve come to take a dislike to the word dignity. In the face of great suffering, the healthiest attitude is obviously to cry, to scream, to moan, to beg for pity from the deity or from other people. The stoic is basically just a theoretical puppet, devoid of all plausibility, and stoicism a philosophy best left unmentioned.

It’s not only, I realize with surprise, on the sexual level that we are the opposite of the baba cool years that marked my youth. When I was a teenager, it was fashionable to criticize the saying “boys don’t cry”, and instead to encourage boys to freely express their emotions. The significance of this saying had, moreover, been greatly overestimated: literary accounts clearly show that knights of the Middle Ages shed tears without restraint at the death of their comrades-in-arms; it was only from the beginning of the 20th century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, that the injunction to modesty took hold, at the same time as the choice to hide death, and for the same reasons.

Half a century after the baba cool era, everything has changed, and it’s no longer just men who must hold back their tears; women, preferably, too. With so much dignity, with so much modesty in showing one’s emotions, others come to suppose that you hardly feel any, and that they can quietly go back to their own business. Dignity, in the end, has only one use: to legitimize the constant practice of the most perfect selfishness. It’s a considerable use.

La pudeur, version plus explicit of dignity, has other even more poisonous consequences when it no longer concerns only emotions, but attacks the physical body — and this is something much more serious, much more deadly and heavier than sexual modesty. Let dignity speak. Is it really modest and really dignified, when one is so close to being a vegetable, when one is physically so diminished, to appear in public? To show oneself, even, to anyone? Is it really modest and really dignified, ultimately, to exist?

Now that’s it, you are in the pipeline, you are ashamed of your own existence, and euthanasia awaits you around the corner. I, who have so often amused myself by mocking Nietzsche — and I couldn’t help myself this time again, he’s so funny with his mustache — I would still like to pay tribute to him by quoting these lines from the Gay Science:

“Who do you call bad? — The one who always wants to make others feel ashamed.

What do you consider most human? — To spare someone shame.”

We are, it’s painful to say, perhaps no longer quite human. After a detour of several millennia, the West seems to have returned to that ancient animal wisdom which drives, in almost all social species, the sick animal to move away from the tribe to die alone — knowing well that it has no compassion to expect from its fellows, that it is more likely to be, like the birds of Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, sent off with pecks. We had long believed ourselves to be a tribe of a higher order; we were mistaken, say the animalists, and this return to animal law, here’s the strangest thing, should be considered as a progress. What is established in any case is that progressivism functions absolutely like a ratchet mechanism. When a “societal advance” (abortion, death penalty, same-sex marriage, IVF, surrogacy, anything) has occurred, it is out of the question to go back, no one thinks of it. This assumption is antidemocratic: what one law has done, another law can undo; at least that’s the idea I have of the law; but it allows us to identify progressivism for what it really is: a destiny.

One may be right to think that it is vain to fight against destiny, and that every tragedy must go to its end. I can’t help but think that by asking for its citizens access to euthanasia, it is its own euthanasia that France is asking for. People have been surprised that I am hostile to this bill, even though I have often been labeled with a strange neologism: I would be a deprimist. Let’s admit it. It is true that I have worked to scrutinize the symptoms of Western suicide, the rise of nihilism; but I do not recall ever rejoicing in it. We are entering a world where it will be easier to die; I would have preferred a world where one could live.