The euthanasia of the West Assisted dying is indefensible

It is said that when Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he paused for a few seconds before replying: “I think it would be a very good idea.” It was an amusing response even if it was a bit unfair. There was once such a thing as Western civilisation; but the fact is, it is more or less behind us now. To speak of “civilisation” in the context of modern Europe is to hide behind a fancy word. Deep down we all know it, even if it’s hard to admit: the game is up.

Our future replacements, should we have any, and should they happen to think of us at all in a few centuries’ time, will feel neither indignation nor anger; they will not care. They will probably feel a vague sense of disgust, and above all, immense confusion. The more learned ones will try to dispel the confusion by writing enormous books, of which The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the classic example. A simplified summary of Gibbon’s thesis — that the Roman Empire fell due to the rise of Christianity — besides being convincing and clear, has the advantage of extending naturally into Auguste Comte’s theory of humanity’s passage from the theological stage to the metaphysical stage, whose sole function is destruction. And so, the decline of the West finds its natural explanation in the collapse of Christianity, initiated by Protestantism and completed during the Enlightenment. Nietzsche says much the same thing, adding some amusing special effects involving acrobats and eagles.

The thing that doesn’t fit this explanation, however, is the fact that things aren’t going any better in Asia. Demographic decline is even more rapid in the world’s most technologically advanced countries — Japan, South Korea, and more recently China — to the point that their populations risk disappearing in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, it is modernity itself, in its entirety, that is destroying itself before our bewildered eyes.

It is said that when Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he paused for a few seconds before replying: “I think it would be a very good idea.” It was an amusing response even if it was a bit unfair. There was once such a thing as Western civilisation; but the fact is, it is more or less behind us now. To speak of “civilisation” in the context of modern Europe is to hide behind a fancy word. Deep down we all know it, even if it’s hard to admit: the game is up.

Our future replacements, should we have any, and should they happen to think of us at all in a few centuries’ time, will feel neither indignation nor anger; they will not care. They will probably feel a vague sense of disgust, and above all, immense confusion. The more learned ones will try to dispel the confusion by writing enormous books, of which The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the classic example. A simplified summary of Gibbon’s thesis — that the Roman Empire fell due to the rise of Christianity — besides being convincing and clear, has the advantage of extending naturally into Auguste Comte’s theory of humanity’s passage from the theological stage to the metaphysical stage, whose sole function is destruction. And so, the decline of the West finds its natural explanation in the collapse of Christianity, initiated by Protestantism and completed during the Enlightenment. Nietzsche says much the same thing, adding some amusing special effects involving acrobats and eagles.

The thing that doesn’t fit this explanation, however, is the fact that things aren’t going any better in Asia. Demographic decline is even more rapid in the world’s most technologically advanced countries — Japan, South Korea, and more recently China — to the point that their populations risk disappearing in the not-too-distant future. Indeed, it is modernity itself, in its entirety, that is destroying itself before our bewildered eyes.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”, wrote WB Yeats in 1919, sensing that, for Europe, the war that had just ended was merely the herald of even greater catastrophes to come. War gave birth to war, Nazism opened a dark door that has never fully closed, and both world wars merely hastened the breakdown of the countries foolish enough to get involved. A century after Yeats’s poem, the centre has indeed failed to hold — and nowhere is this more obvious than in the political centre of Europe itself: Brussels.

In Belgium, euthanasia, available to those suffering from “psychological distress” since 2002, has been extended to minors since 2014. A few barriers still stand, but one after another the levees are breaking, and we are being engulfed by the “blood-dimmed tide” of which Yeats speaks in the following line.

France is likely to be the next place whose defences will be swept away by that tide. It is still possible to prevent it, but hope is dwindling. For several years now I have fought against euthanasia, even as my conviction has steadily grown that I am fighting a battle already lost. I feel as if I have played every card in my hand — and now, perhaps, I am beginning to cheat. But for one last time, I do not think it futile to urge those whose votes will carry the force of law to reflect on the tiny number of philosophers who, over the centuries, have approved of suicide. It is indeed rather astonishing how so-called progressives can dismiss out of hand not only every existing religious tradition — but also pretty much everything that earlier philosophers were able to come up with too. I don’t think human history has ever known such arrogance. But philosophy, unlike religion, speaks above all to the human intellect, and struggles to reach into the core of our being. Catholicism — despite a few alleged recent stirrings — has long since lost its grip in Europe, and I am not at the point of preferring Islam simply because secular society deviates from moral law. But neither am I certain that I want to belong to a society that legalises euthanasia. By all means defend the West — but only so long as it deserves to be defended.

One need only examine the arguments put forward by advocates of euthanasia to be overcome with disgust — and for that disgust to mutate into moral insurrection. In reality, all such arguments boil down to a single argument — dignity. But the word has been used so often, and in such a perverse way, that it has become difficult to grasp what it actually means.

For supporters of euthanasia, the dying person’s desire for dignity — according to those close to them — is generally expressed in phrases like: “He would have hated being a vegetable.” The statement would be more convincing if they were able to complete it as follows: “He would have hated being a vegetable — he would have preferred to be a corpse.” We should also note that the vegetable metaphor reflects a painfully utilitarian idea of a human being. Ideally, a human should move, accomplish things, lead an active life. And if that proves impossible, then they should at the very least communicate, that is, they should be capable of interacting — if only through speech — with the rest of society. Humans are thus reduced to their use-value — that is, their initial value minus a depreciation coefficient. It is hard to imagine a more direct contradiction of Immanuel Kant’s insistence that humanity, whether within oneself or in others, must always be treated as an end in itself and never merely as a means. The first corruption along these lines occurred, sadly, during the entirely justified battle against animal cruelty. The “anti-speciesists” contrived to fight this battle in the name of “animal rights”, always a dubious notion. It would have been enough to listen to the eternal voice of compassion, modest but incandescent. With euthanasia, however, we are no longer dealing in distortions. We are plunging into the abyss.

For Kant — and for the thinkers of more innocent centuries — human dignity was linked, quite simply, to the fact of being human. We no longer see things that way. Human dignity is now something that gradually decays within us; our lives are themselves a process of decay, and we must be prepared to justify our existence at any given moment, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others (if that even makes any difference). For nearly two centuries, the spectre of nihilism has haunted Western Europe. Now it is here — it is among us. But it does not take the form we expected. It is not dark or murky. It is colourful, even cheerful. To picture it, you shouldn’t think of Dostoevsky or Nietzsche, but rather All Is Beauty, an advert produced by a Canadian clothing retailer named Simons, which purported to depict a happy euthanasia. Here was a dignity to make you scream. Filmed beside the sea, it featured waves and cellos and a large, festive meal complete with cheesecake and bursts of laughter. The soon-to-be-dead woman was young, poignant, likeable and an artist — you could see her drawing shapes in the sand with a stick. Simons pulled the video after it attracted too many sarcastic comments online, mocking its use of the visual language of luxury advertising to promote euthanasia. Indeed, it looked less like a meditation on death than a commercial for Chanel or YSL.

Let’s get a little deeper into this question of dignity. Back when I was researching the case of Vincent Lambert — the French nurse whose family dispute over his right or otherwise to die became a cause célèbre in 2019 — I can remember reading a white paper on the operation of the specialised facilities known in French as EVC-EPR Centres (État Végétatif Chronique – État Pauci-Relationnel), established under the wide-ranging healthcare reforms introduced by French Health Minister Bernard Kouchner in 2002. These were the places where Lambert ought to have been cared for had the medical system functioned properly. One particular story struck me, concerning a woman who had remained silent for years and then, quite unexpectedly, began speaking again during an unannounced visit. When a doctor expressed his astonishment, explaining that he had spent years unsuccessfully trying to establish contact with her, she replied: “What you had to say wasn’t all that interesting.” A severely compromised state of health may excuse certain lapses in politeness — but the episode nevertheless offers an important lesson: when people do not speak to you, it is sometimes simply because they have nothing they wish to say to you.

Anyone who has ever written — or even merely attempted to write — knows that however difficult it may be to explain why, it is sometimes possible to express in writing realities inaccessible to speech. And anyone who has truly written knows something sadder still: what one actually manages to write will only ever be the merest trace of what one dreamed of writing. Even someone as monstrously productive as Balzac acknowledged as much: the books we have written are less beautiful than those we imagined writing. Speech is only a fraction of writing, which is itself only a fraction of our inner life. To reduce the human spirit to its capacity for oral communication is, quite simply, dumb.

If one looks at the matter from the standpoint of manners, comporting oneself with dignity would mean adopting an attitude of calm, restrained stoicism in the face of life’s sufferings and sorrows. In short, dignity would not much differ from reserve or discretion — which is already enough to arouse suspicion. If reserve is already a dubious sentiment, a little too closely associated with shame, then emotional reserve is by far the most toxic form it can take. I’ve heard the media praise the “dignity” of the victims of this or that tragic news story so often, I’ve come to take a strong dislike for the very word dignity. In the face of great suffering, the healthiest response is clearly to weep, to cry out, to groan, to implore the pity of God or of other human beings. The figure of the Stoic is really nothing more than a hollow theoretical puppet — and Stoicism itself is a philosophy that would be best ignored.

I now realise with some surprise that it is not only in sexual matters that we have completely reversed our position from the “free love” era of my youth. When I was an adolescent, it was the done thing to decry the phrase “boys don’t cry”, and, indeed, to encourage boys to express their emotions freely. It should be said that the historical weight of that phrase has been greatly exaggerated. The literary records show that the knights of the Middle Ages shed tears without restraint at the deaths of their comrades. Indeed, it was only from the beginning of the 20th century — and especially in English-speaking countries — that the compulsion to repress one’s emotions took hold, at the same time as the idea that death must be concealed from view, and for the same reasons.

Half a century on from the hippie era, everything has changed. It is no longer only men who are expected to hold back their tears; women, preferably, should do so as well. And as a direct result of this display of dignity, as a direct result of this emotional reserve, others eventually come to assume that one scarcely has any feelings at all — and so, they may calmly return to their own affairs. In the end, then, dignity has only one function — though it is a huge function. It legitimises the constant practice of the most perfect selfishness.

Modesty, the visible manifestation of dignity, has other, still more poisonous effects when it no longer just concerns emotions but attacks the body. This is something far graver, far more deadly and weighty than mere sexual modesty. Let us allow dignity to speak for itself. Is it really so modest and dignified to appear in public when one is so physically diminished — when one is so close to being a vegetable? Even to appear before anyone at all? In the final accounting, is it truly modest and dignified even to exist?

And now the process is complete: you are in the system, you are ashamed of your very existence, and euthanasia is waiting for you around the corner. I have often amused myself by making fun of Nietzsche — and I cannot resist doing so once again, he is so ridiculous with his moustache — but I would nevertheless like to pay tribute to him by quoting these lines from The Gay Science (1882):

“Whom do you call bad? — He who always wants to make others feel shame.
What is the most humane thing? — To spare someone shame.”

We are perhaps no longer entirely human, painful though it is to admit. After a detour of several millennia, the West really does seem to have returned to an ancient animal wisdom. In almost every social species, a sick animal will withdraw from the group in order to die alone, knowing full well that it can expect no compassion from its fellows, and indeed, like the birds in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, is more likely to be pecked to death. For a long time, we thought of ourselves as a tribe of a higher order. We were mistaken, the animalists tell us, and thus this return to animal law of the animal — and here is the strangest thing of all — ought to be regarded as progress. What is certain, in any case, is that progressivism works just like a ratchet mechanism. Once a “social advance” (abortion, abolition of the death penalty, same-sex marriage, medically assisted reproduction, surrogacy, whatever it may be) has been established, there can be no question of going back. No one would even dream of it. But this is anti-democratic, circular reasoning. What one law has done, another law can undo; that, at least, is my understanding of law. But it does allow us to identify progressivism for what it is in reality: a destiny.

It’s possible that I’m right in thinking that there’s no point struggling against destiny — and that every tragedy must run its course. But I still can’t help thinking that, in demanding access to euthanasia for its citizens, France is asking for its own euthanasia. Some have expressed surprise that I should oppose this proposed law, since I have often been saddled with a bizarre neologism: I am said to be a déprimiste — a prophet of depression. Granted. It is true that I have devoted myself to examining the symptoms of the suicide of the West and the rise of nihilism. But I do not recall ever having rejoiced in any of it. We are entering a world in which it will be easier to die. I would have preferred a world in which it was possible to live.