Against “Euthanasia”

Plus, the Worrisome Global Acceleration of Gender Segregation

Regular readers will have noticed a general absence here at The Hinternet of unequivocal position-taking on first-order substantive issues of the day. The principal reason for this is that, with very few exceptions, I do not know what my commitments are. “It’s complicated,” I almost always want to say. “I can see it from various angles.” Or even: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” On most issues I maintain what I take to be a lucid ethnographic distance. Should human beings be engaged in practice x? Well, as a matter of fact, my usual response to questions like this runs, some human societies have in fact integrated x into their value systems, and seem to have got by at least as well as we do. So who knows?

But as I’ve said there are exceptions, and one of these is that the state should not be in the business of killing off, or helping to kill off, or approving private initiatives to kill off, its citizens. The truth is even here my convictions waver. I cannot quite convince myself that anyone deserves to be punished for, say, providing overdose quantities of morphine to a terminally ill patient in hospice. Go ahead, I guess, if that seems like the best approach to all involved. The deeper problem arises, I think, from recognition of the fact that we are all terminally ill, mere mortals, born to die, and that this brute fact can be marshaled to make the case that any one of us, potentially, would be better off not just dying someday, but dying now.

This is not an abstract worry about what might happen, but a concrete description of what already is happening. In Canada and the Netherlands in particular, the legalization of physician-assisted suicide has rapidly expanded from offering a solution for patients who are terminally ill in the narrow and usual sense, to “patients” who are terminally ill in the existential and somewhat facetious sense I invoked in the previous paragraph.

That is, people are turning to this legal and newly socially approved option as a solution to the condition of simply being alive. Like Socrates when he calls for a cock to be sacrificed to Asclepius, these people intuit that life, in a fundamental sense, is itself an illness. They are required, by the norms and sensibilities of our era, to come up with more specific designations of their condition than simply “life itself”, and so they speak of “depression”, “borderline personality disorder”, and so on. That the state approves these ad-hoc euphemisms for the death-drive, as if they were as solid and indisputable as actual diseases, is a testament to the magical thinking about social kinds that has surged up in the era of the internet and that has so weakened the fabric of society, as if to name a condition were to have it, and as if to have a condition were to be a person essentially characterized by it. I myself have been diagnosed, with all due beneficence on the part of the diagnosticians, with a rather long list of psychiatric disorders. And I am certain that if the state had ever permitted me to use these diagnoses in order to facilitate my own death, this would have been nothing less than murder.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider the case of Zoraya ter Beek, a 29-year-old Dutch woman who seems mostly to have been suffering from a bad case of spending too much time on social media. Deeply depressed and prematurely certain of the permanence of this condition, she convinced the state to kill her. Now she’s dead. Every time I see news about her I think I must be hallucinating. “This can’t be real!” I mutter. But it is. She’s dead, and the Netherlands killed her. I have absolutely no doubt that the depths of despair Zoraya felt were real, but neither do I have any doubt that these depths were no deeper than the ones I myself have sounded. And yet, and yet: thank God I’m alive! I have so much work left to do!

Notice, too, that when the state begins facilitating the murder of young people who suffer from internet-poisoning, we are already in the prodrome phase of the robot takeover some doomsayers, including myself, have been worrying about. When the machines first make us sick; and then help us to put new names on our sickness, which are subsequently treated as descriptions of things as real as inoperable tumors; and then, on the basis of our hastily reified conditions, our technocracy recommends that we be put down — when all this starts happening, I maintain, we are already past the “singularity”, we are already in that phase of history in which human life, with all its dysfunction, with all its tragic susceptibility to hurt and harm, matters less than the smooth operation of our machines.

By this point you might be saying that my refusal to treat mental illnesses as illnesses in the fullest sense betrays my “dualism”. To this I would reply, first, prove to me that dualism is false, rather than just going along with the spirit of our times in assuming that it is. Second, I would reply that even if you are not a dualist, your understanding of the mental and the physical, of the partial overlap and the partial difference between them, is almost certainly mired in confusion — I know my own understanding is, and I suspect you are not all that much further along in working through this deep philosophical problem than I am. The comedian Mitch Hedberg, dead of an overdose at 37, once observed of addiction that it is a disease, but a strange one: it’s the only disease people yell at you for having. A similar point may be made about depression and other such conditions for which the Dutch state is now prepared to kill you: no matter how diligently we try to adhere to the official line and to speak as if depression were on an ontological par with leukemia, we cannot entirely occlude from our perception of social reality the existence within it of moral agents. And part of what it is to be a moral agent is to be the sort of entity whose thriving or failure to thrive is in part its own responsibility.