The Equality of Opportunity to Die

How far does the slope descend?

Suicide must not be left to unhappy people who might bungle it or make a mess of it….Make something of it, something fine…

-Michel Foucault, ‘The Simplest of Pleasures’

Sometimes, an event can be important both in terms of its immediate consequences and as a harbinger of what is to come. The passage to the Committee Stage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill here in the UK last Friday is one such event.

The Bill, if it becomes law - which now seems likely - will legalise ‘assisted dying’ along the lines of Canada, the Netherlands, and so forth in the UK, and thereby bring us to liberalism’s very zenith. Here, the final promise of the liberal polity - that the State exists to liberate all individuals equally and totally, even in respect of the manner in which they die and the timing of their deaths - will be realised. The Bill is therefore naturally going to have radical consequences for people who fall under its application, but it is also indicative of something truly epochal - the final unmooring of liberalism from religious constraint, such that its true nature will be revealed as it floats untethered into the heavens.

It is important to be clear about the import of this. So-called ‘slippery slope’ arguments are familiar in respect of debates about assisted dying, and plenty of them were made in the House of Commons in the debate last week. Typically, we imagine said slope ending somewhere undesirable, but recognisable - the scenario most often depicted by those opposed to assisted dying is that of the elderly or terminally ill person feeling pressurised into taking his or her own life so as not to be a ‘burden’ on loved ones (or the health service).

But we will learn in the coming decades that the slope extends much more steeply downwards beyond that point. If we accept the basic premise of modern liberalism - that the State exists for the total and equal liberation of all human beings - then we have to recognise that assisted dying for the terminally ill is really just the first step towards a final outcome in which the ‘right to die’ is absolute. It is inevitable, given liberalism’s imperatives, that sooner or later the distinction between the terminally ill and the merely ill will break down; and it is inevitable after that that the distinction between the merely ill and the healthy-but-depressed will likewise collapse. And from there matters will descend to darker places yet. Good liberals, gesturing always towards equality of opportunity, will come to insist on the equality of opportunity to die. This may take years or decades. But it will happen. And from there, all bets are off - the slippery slope will be shown to be like the side of a great mountain.

In Jack Vance’s most disturbing novel, Wyst: Alastor 1716 - the inspiration, incidentally, for News from Uncibal’s title - we find a bleakly humorous forewarning of what is in store. The first half of the story is set in the city of Uncibal, a place in the grip of a ‘novel philosophical energy’ known as ‘egalism’, which aims to achieve ‘human fulfilment, in a condition of leisure and amplitude’ through the doctrine of ‘mutualism’.

Central to this project is ‘a drastic revision of traditional priorities’ so that the conditions of genuine ‘mutualism’ can be assured; the result is the complete emancipation of every individual from familial, sexual, romantic or societal bonds, in order that they be made both equal and free. Nobody may own property and all must share everything with whoever asks. Equal access to sex must be enjoyed, so that ‘copulation’ is to be performed on demand even while nobody is permitted to try to make themselves more sexually appealing than anybody else. Children are brought up separately from parents. Almost nobody bothers to work; anywhere one finds something productive being done it is being performed by an immigrant.

Naturally enough, the results are anything but ‘human fulfilment’. Indeed, one of the favourite pastimes of the populace is the performance and observation of suicide. This takes place at the so-called ‘Pavilions of Rest’, of which we are told there are currently five, lying within a grand bazaar known as Disjerferact.

‘The most economical operation is conducted upon a cylindrical podium ten feet high,’ the main character, Jantiff, writes home to his family:

The customer mounts the podium and there delivers a valedictory declamation, sometimes spontaneous, sometimes rehearsed over a period of months. These declamations are of great interest and there is always an attentive audience, cheering, applauding or uttering groans of sympathy. Sometimes the sentiments are unpopular, and the speech is greeted with cat-calls. Meanwhile a snuff of black fur descends from above. Eventually it drops over the postulant and his explanations are heard no more.

The next is known as Halcyon House:

The person intent upon surcease, after paying his fee, enters a maze of prisms. He wanders here and there in a golden shimmer, while friends watch from the outside. His form becomes indistinct among the reflections and then is seen no more.

Then there is the Perfumed Boat:

[The boat] floats in a channel. The voyager embarks and reclines upon a couch. A profusion of paper flowers is arranged over his body; he is tendered a goblet of cordial and sent floating away into a tunnel from which issue strains of ethereal music. The boat eventually floats back to the dock clean and empty. What occurs in the tunnel is not made clear.

This is followed by the ‘convivial’ Happy Way-Station:

The wayfarer arrives with all his boon companions. In a luxurious wood-paneled hall they are served whatever delicacies and tipple the wayfarer’s purse can afford. All eat, drink, reminisce; exchange pleasantries, until the lights begin to dim, whereupon the friends take their leave and the room goes dark. Sometimes the wayfarer changes his mind at the last minute and departs with his friends. On other occasions (so I am told) the party becomes outrageously jolly and mistakes may be made. The wayfarer manages to crawl away on his hands and knees, his friends remaining in a drunken daze around the table while the room goes dark.

The last is ‘a popular place of entertainment, and is conducted like a game of chance’:

Five participants each wager a stipulated sum and are seated in iron chairs numbered one through five. Spectators also pay an admission fee and are allowed to make wagers. An index spins into motion, slows and stops upon a number. The person in the chair so designated wins five times his stake. The other four drop through trap doors and are seen no more.

This is all of course played for sardonic humour, and sure enough it is shortly revealed that the corpses of those who kill themselves in the Pavilions are ‘macerated and flushed into a drain, along with all other wastes and slops’ and then made into a slurry which is ‘processed, renewed and replenished’ at a central plant and turned into food for the city’s inhabitants. But the point is deeply serious: taken to its extreme, if people are to be equal, then why ought the matter of death be an exception? And since the only way to achieve equality in death is to give everybody the right to die when they choose, then why place any restriction on the time of the choosing, or the manner of dying that is chosen?

From those predicates, of course, it is only a very short step to a market in the provision of death, and indeed its transformation into a form of entertainment. And from there it is only a short step to commercial operations relying on the liberalisation of suicide, and promoting its deployment. From there, suicide as spectacle - suicide as pleasure - naturally follows.

Michel Foucault, in many ways the harbinger of the liberal end-state, showed that this is all far from a joke. In an interview he laid the reasoning out very plainly. Since, he argued, suicide is unique to humanity - we are the only animal that does it - we ought to celebrate it, and indeed make it an art:

We should consider ourselves lucky to have at hand (with suicide) an extremely unique experience: it’s the one which above all the rest deserves the greatest attention - but rather so that you can make of it a fathomless pleasure whose patient and relentless preparation will enlighten all of your life. Suicide festivals or orgies are just two of the possible methods. There are others more intricate and learned.

And he extended the thought with a lurid fantasy:

In my opinion a person should have the right not to be rushed, which is very bothersome.

Indeed, a great deal of attention and competence are required. You should have the chance to discuss at length the various qualities of each weapon and its potential. It would be nice if the salesperson were experienced in these things, with a big smile, encouraging but a little bit reserved (not too chatty), and sophisticated enough to understand that they are dealing with a person who's basically good-hearted, but somewhat clumsy, never having had the idea before of employing a machine that shoots people. It would also be convenient if the salesperson's enthusiasm didn't stop them from advising you about the existence of alternative ways, ways that were more chic, more your style.

He even imagined the existence of places like Japanese ‘love hotels’, where couples can rent a room for a few hours to have sex, but which were dedicated to suicide: ‘places without maps or calendars where you can enter into the most absurd decors with anonymous partners to look for an opportunity to die free of all stereotypes’. He continued, ‘There you'd have an indeterminate amount of time - seconds, weeks, and months perhaps - until the moment presents itself with compelling clearness. You'd recognize it immediately. You couldn't miss it. It would have the shapeless shape of utterly simple pleasure.’

If this all would have sounded far-fetched a month ago, inhabitants of London were in the days leading up to the ‘assisted dying’ vote treated to a series of adverts on the Tube extolling the virtues of ‘choice’. Each depicted somebody looking forward to their own death and the alleviation of their suffering. These were funded not by a business but a charity (strictly a not-for-profit company) called Dignity in Dying. But they gave us a foretaste of a life to come, wherein public billboards - let’s, in the interests of time, not concern ourselves with targeted ads on social media or TikTok - extol the virtues of dying in particular ways, and at the hands of particular operators for an attractive fee.

The ad at the top of this post has garnered the most interest because it is the one which most nakedly and brazenly gestures towards the future that I have here laid out, but the one which I found most interesting and indicative is this one:

Notice the tagline. ‘When I cannot stay, let me choose how I go.’ Obviously this is supposed to emphasise that ‘assisted dying’ is going to take place in the context of terminal illness. But it also gives the game away, I am sure entirely unconsciously: the point about life is that none of us can stay. We are all in this sense terminal cases. Given this is so, the logic becomes clear - we must all be free to choose how we go. And this is the direction in which matters will inevitably flow. Since it is fair for Jenny, the bass guitarist and mum with terminal cancer, then it will sooner or later become fair for Johnny, the unemployed man who sees no point in going on; fair for Sarah, the lonely old lady living in poverty; fair for Ben, the extrovert attention-seeker with an undiagnosed personality disorder; fair for Geoff, who wants to make a grand political statement; fair for Bethany, who has low self-esteem. Once permitted, there is no principled limit on the scope of assisted dying’s purview, and no principled limit on who will in the end obtain the ‘right’ to it.

This of course foregrounds the importance of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity. Classical liberalism emerged within the context and rubric of a religious society with firmly entrenched moral norms - one of which being that, since life was a sacred gift, suicide was wrong. Over time teaching softened, such that suicide became seen as a desperate consequence of depression or pain, but the central legal prohibition on ‘assisting’ suicide was retained. This was partly because of practical concerns about identifying the circumstances in which ‘assistance’ should be made lawful, but it was mostly because people were squeamish about the idea of the State sanctioning the practice. And that squeamishness derived from a basically religious impulse: the idea that life itself has intrinsic moral value.

Despite declining church attendance and declining importance of religion in public life, this squeamishness has largely endured, even while most people have no real answer for the moral values they take for granted. But we are now (certainly here in the UK, anyway) far into the process of secularisation and particularly de-Christianisation, such that we can begin to see emerging what our culture will look like in a post-religious age. What we are glimpsing is a society that is thoroughgoingly liberal - liberal to the Nth degree, being unconstrained by the moral norms which classical liberalism took for granted. This will be a society deluded into thinking it is governed by reason and the intellect. But what it will really be is a society in which each and every individual seeks from the State what is in his or her self-interest - a true sibling society characterised by an insistent demand for the combination of freedom and equality which every atomised individual necessarily desires as his or her ideal.

There will be absolutely nothing preventing death itself becoming the subject of this remorseless and unfettered liberal drive, and nothing therefore preventing the right to die from becoming universalised, lionised, and ultimately commercialised (though undoubtedly, in the interests of true equality, there will be State-run operations ‘free at the point of use’). The slippery slope will go steeply down and our passage down it will be rapid. Without a basic commitment to the sanctity of life, with the emphasis on sanctity in the strict sense, Foucault’s fantasy - Vance’s parody - is the position to which liberalism will take us. We will live in a world in which the fantasy of equality and freedom in death is a guarantee, and in which the ‘simple pleasure’ of suicide is not merely made available, but marketed and encouraged. This future lies ahead of us; the slope is slippery.