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Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

4 October 2024

5 min read

Assisted dying and the cult of kindness

I witnessed an assisted death. We need to be honest in the debate about it.

Matthew Hall

Matthew is an author and screenwriter.

A tableau shows minature figures of two people, one sitting on a life size syringe and the other stands

Etactics Inc on Unsplash.

The Assisted Dying Bill is likely to be passed into law this autumn, the government having promised to ‘rush it through’. The debate will invariably be conducted in a fog of euphemistic language in which ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ will feature heavily on both sides, while the main point is likely to be missed: the legalisation of euthanasia or AD, marks a tectonic shift from a Christian to a post-Christian society and should be a wake-up moment for dozing Christians.

I was recently present when my aunt, an artist who had become a Canadian citizen, died by euthanasia in her own home while in the very early stages of motor neurone disease. She was 72, divorced, living independently, fully mobile (although she had lost the use of one arm) and was laughing and joking up to the moments before the doctor (or ‘The Killer’ as her son called him) injected the first dose of the lethal cocktail. It happened at 7pm on a Tuesday evening. She had made the phone call requesting her death at 3pm the previous Sunday – yes, a Sunday. Service of a kind our NHS can only dream of.

As a reluctant witness to what I consider a murder-suicide, I was nevertheless beguiled by the relatively clean ending (although there was some disturbing gurgling that apparently occurs as a result of the lungs filling with fluid) to a life that was about to become very difficult. Her two older siblings, including my mother, are each currently several years into slow deaths from combined Parkinson’s and dementia.

I am an almost daily visitor and a secondary carer to my mother, and while she is mute, benign and seemingly contented, the toll on my stepfather and on me is enormous. I often pray for it all to be over – it’s an endless grind and her former self would be utterly horrified to see herself this way! – and yet, as a Christian, I have to see purpose in it. One thing it certainly does do, is force carers to be selfless and compassionate in the strict sense of the word, which is ‘to suffer with’.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible.

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My aunt didn’t want the trial of becoming ill and dependent, and the Canadian government gave her an opt-out which she grabbed the instant she received her diagnosis. Confirmation by two doctors that she was terminally ill and of sound mind – almost a trifling formality – got her immediate approval. She was, to use her kind of language, ‘out of here’ a mere three months later.

How could she have been so cavalier and determined to die, despite the protests of her son, nephew and granddaughters? She was, in hindsight, a perfectly minted product of the 1960s who believed above all in doing her own thing - whatever felt right. Such notions were anathema to her Christian parents and their dutiful wartime generation but are now the norm.

Like many who came of age to the sound of the Beatles, she toured the spiritual supermarket and picked out the nice bits from Christian, pagan and Eastern religions – predominantly those that allow you to think that life is about ‘being in tune’ or feeling good about yourself. This did most definitely not include becoming immobile and having strangers change her nappy. She believed in an afterlife, ‘love’, aliens and reincarnation but definitely not in judgement or consequences for her suicide.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible, with the added bonus of leaving her assets to her family.

The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge.

Polls in Canada and the UK show that the vast majority would consider this a win all round. According to Opinium, 75 per cent of British adults support AD. In political terms this a ‘bridge issue’ almost without comparison, uniting 78 per cent of Conservatives with 77 per cent of Labour supporters, yet no issue should more starkly dramatise the unbridgeable chasm between Christian and secular world views.

The sharpness of this divide has, however, been successfully obscured by the insidious (and to my mind, diabolical) Cult of Kindness that has inveigled itself into both secular and Christian space. Imitating Christian virtues, it subverts them by subtly perverting language - by using ‘compassion’ when what is meant is ‘convenience’, for example – and by making ‘happiness’ rather than self-sacrifice the highest good. This leads both sides into dishonesty and self-delusion.

The biggest pro-AD lie is that it is merely an escape route for the tiny few facing the most intolerable suffering with no additional consequences. The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge. It is now the fifth most common cause of death and climbing by 30 per cent each year. Every seriously ill Canadian now feels some pressure to address the option. Cases of people choosing AD out of despair, depression or at the suggestion of a lazy or uncaring State official are already numerous. Those who have signed an advance consent waiver setting a date for their euthanasia in the event of their mentally incapacity, are now being terminated. In some cases, the demented refuse to cooperate and are euthanised under forced sedation. The State is already saving money and families are saving their inheritances. Life itself has been downgraded.

The Christian side indulges in even bigger untruths. Windy episcopal speeches about advances in palliative care avoid the hard fact that denying AD involves many suffering prolonged and painful deaths while family finances are destroyed and carers worn down to a husk. The pill can’t be sugared: thou shalt not kill is absolute, not an invitation for an ethical discussion. The point is so fundamental that to avoid it and be drawn into discussing the minutiae of legislation is a betrayal of the faith.

Christians won’t save the secular world from AD and its consequences, but the current debate is an opportunity for honesty and for Christians to save themselves from the delusion that the true virtue of compassion can be inverted to justify killing.

The Christian religion began with an agonising death of a kind which its scriptures exhorts its followers not to fear. It’s a tough message: God doesn’t promise the comfort we would like in this life. We do have the means and the duty to alleviate much suffering, but death as a consumer choice is simply off the table.

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Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.