“Barbaric” is a word that’s appeared a lot in our pages. Last summer, wrote a whole essay about “our own barbarism only now coming more clearly into view.” Wisdom of Crowds contributor also sees barbarism in our midst. In today’s essay, Gasda pleads against the legalization of physician-assisted suicide, which is trending throughout the world. (For more on the debate concerning physician-assisted suicide, see this week’s CrowdSource.)
Matthew is an extremely prolific playwright and essayist. His last book came out a few weeks ago: Zoomers and Other Plays. His next book, Writer’s Diary, comes out next week. Check them out!
— Santiago Ramos
When British historian Andrew Roberts told the British House of Lords last month that opponents of assisted suicide were “antediluvian monsters” defending “medieval and sadistic practice,” he revealed not only a philosophical schism within contemporary conservatism, but hinted at a larger directional question for the entire West: do supra-rational concerns like the Soul, the Good, duty, honor, love, tradition and community, have any place in the world to come? By framing Burkean and Christian resistance to technocratic fiat as hopelessly antiquated and barbaric, Lord Roberts opened up a line of hyper-rational utilitarian argumentation that equates all suffering with evil, and any policy that permits suffering with historical regression.
Lord Roberts is not only wrong, but the dismissive tone of his rhetoric — the shame he implies should be bound up in belief in these conceptual entities — opens up real, consequential paths for more material, embodied suffering. The ideas Roberts finds “medieval” are actually protective. They protect us from certain kinds of pain.
Assisted suicide isn’t wrong for theological reasons, or because there are no cases where euthanasia is just and merciful (there are). Assisted suicide is wrong because it makes us barbaric: the legalization of assisted suicide requires a collective deadening of our moral senses, de-individualizes us, and makes machine-like the highest and most difficult choice.
The humanness of death, the wrestling that comes with death, entails contact with death; when we are incentivized to die in pods, by appointment, unable to touch or be touched by loved ones, or even a doctor or nurse, then we are incentivized to give up a precious and cosmic form of knowledge; from the perspective of either Stoic humanism or Christian humanism, assisted suicide encourages spiritual suicide — both for the individual and society.
A clinical, government-run death apparatus is not analogous to pain killers or palliative care. A civilization where some have to face a profound choice about the lives of others, and can recognize the profundity of that choice, is healthy; where it happens as a matter of course, a matter of filling out paperwork handled by a death mechanic, it is fundamentally insane.
The assisted suicide regime, at scale, implies machinery (and premiums and liability and profit) rather than mercy. The rise of a professional class of euthanizers (doctors whose specialty becomes legally ending lives — Canada’s MAiD providers now number in the thousands, with some performing hundreds of procedures annually) is repugnant enough — but there’s also a not-unrealistic scenario in which the entire process is automated and AIs make decisions about and control the pods that liquidate the biomass (Switzerland’s Sarco pod, which fills with nitrogen gas at the push of a button, already exists; its inventor promotes it as eliminating the need for medical personnel).
At scale, assisted suicide implies either a death-caste or a euthanasia machine — or both; it implies the erasure of face-to-face contact with death, the witnessing of death, and human care for the dying (in the Netherlands, mobile euthanasia units arrive at homes like delivery services; in Canada, some facilities now have dedicated MAiD rooms, separate from palliative wards).
One does not have to defer to the slippery slope fallacy to organize an argument against assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is dangerous not because it implies an immediate cascade of consequence, but because it represents a changed premise in the social code which inevitably produces gradual coarsening of human bonds.
Assisted suicide is a moral bacillus that entails widespread desensitization, which is inherently contagious; a moral pathogen that slowly pulses into the water table — omnipresent, passive, yet potentially ruinous. Assisted suicide, legalized, will produce a gradual, non-linear maladaptation to an anti-human normal in which the taboo around ending the life of another person imperceptibly dissipates.
Assisted suicide is insidious because it’s naturally appealing to an emerging civilizational calculus: technocratic rationalism; the sci-fi systems update on utilitarianism. Assisted suicide is cheaper than long-term medical or psychiatric care. Under the assisted suicide regime, on a practical and symbolic level, one becomes biomass. We have to use our imaginations: imagine the death doctor, the pod that fills with gas, whatever certificate the state gives you. It says the doctor is permitted to end you.
For Silicon Valley narcissists obsessed with cleanliness, optimization, and control, assisted suicide squares with a larger program of eliminating inefficiency from the world. Moral arguments against assisted suicide are unlikely to move the techno-accelerationist who would like to replace everything natural with something artificial and sees nothing wrong with an artificial, sterilized death and removal from planet Earth; the rest of us must be persuaded instead.
In the world of universally-available assisted suicide, we should not imagine 97-year-olds who have been coupled for 65 years dying together with beatific looks on their faces, or noble Olympians who have lost the use of their limbs deciding to end their lives after noble deliberation. Instead, we should imagine isolated, lonely, depressed, anxious people desperately seeking relief from a faceless state-sanctioned doctor-bureaucrat.
True, ancient philosophers often prepared their own death, embracing death and taking agency over death. But we’re not talking about the death of the stoic or the samurai, who dies as an individual at the height of their strength and power and jouissance and honor. We’re talking about neighbors and friends, grandparents, professors, artists, who are simply excised from the social fabric.
Death is sorrowful, pain is sorrowful, and our condition is sorrowful. These facts cannot be undone, but the spirit can toughen its resistance. Whether from a Christian or pagan or Stoic perspective, passivity in the face of the death machine is a sin, as well as a psychological and social violation.
We must approach the philosophical problems posed by assisted suicide not from a utilitarian point of view, which is too comfortable for the contemporary technocratic and rationalist hive mind. Instead, we must use our literary imaginations and primal emotions. The erosion of taboo, the deadening of moral imagination, and the reduction of life to procedure and legalese forms a disturbing parallel with the darkest moments of the twentieth century while hinting at the darkest possibilities of the 21st.
A superficially admirable liberal-mindedness about pain reduction and situational mercy is not nearly robust enough to engage with the full metaphysical implications of mass global government-assisted AI-run auto-death. Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between zoe and bios is useful here (zoe = bare biological life; bios = qualified life in a political/moral context). There’s an anti-human will masquerading as rational compassion within the logic of assisted suicide: a techno-capitalist desire to sterilize and optimize; a totalitarian political desire to surveil and control human biomatter.
Bring death into a cost-benefit analysis, bring death into a technocratic project, and you drive God out of death, and you drive God out of life; you will no longer encounter the radiant face of the Other in the face of death.
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This is an interesting and rhetorically powerful argument, but I disagree with it for multiple reasons.
First, the author objects to a "government-run death apparatus" without seeing how one might say the same of his argument, namely, the status quo is a "government-run pain-permitting apparatus". That's pretty barbaric if you ask me. But we can leave that aside for now because the author will likely not agree on this point.
Second, having an extra option available to you does not make it impossible to take those other options (palliative care or a painful (more 'human' death?). I understand the thrust of the author's worry though. They think having this option available will lead to a coarsening of our moral senses, lead to a general indifference toward human life and perhaps lead some people to be pressured into assisted suicide so that they are no longer burdensome. These are valid concerns, but they are not unique objections to assisted suicide -- they are worries about badly designed policy without adequate safeguard. Perhaps the author thinks no amount of safeguards could prevent these bad things from happening, but that is an empirical question and no amount of rhetoric will change that. Absent a good reason to believe that having an extra option will NECESSARILY tip the scales toward all the bad thing the author points out, it's hard to see why we should agree with them.
Third, the author should consider the deeply paternalistic nature of what they're saying. The idea that grievous suffering is something worth bearing, individually or on a societal-level, is something reasonable people can disagree about. In the face of that disagreement, we can ask how ought we to accommodate reasonably disagreeing others? Clearly, banning assisted suicide imposes a set of values on others that they could reasonably reject. They are being FORCED to do something here. But there's a crucial asymmetry. Simply having the option does not impose values on others at all because no one is FORCED to take this option. The author’s real problem should be with being FORCED into this option rather than having it all together.
Once the power to kill people is granted to the medical machine, and to the government without due process, it will swiftly become mandatory. Insurance will not cover extended palliative and hospice care and families will be compelled to kill their grandparents and parents to avoid financial ruin.
The idea that this process will remain entirely voluntary, especially where most people approaching death are not lucid and capable of making decisions, is obviously wrong. We will all be on a conveyer belt to the lethal injection or other murder weapon with no options and no exit, based on bureaucratic rules driven by finances.
Killing people because they are inconvenient is the ultimate barbarism. And we are likely to be seeing lots of barbarism in the years ahead, because it will be mean lots of money to the people who run the machine.
Prediction: Within fifteen years it will be unlawful to keep anyone alive if they have certain defined medical conditions, killing them will be mandatory because of the risk that they will impose undue financial costs on the machine.