Column

Assisted dying

Comment

31 July 2024

4 min read

Polly's pop at a "pitiless God" distorts my argument

There’s more than one argument for opposing assisted dying.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A hand rest gently on another outstretched hand.

Alexander Grey on Unsplash.

I hesitate to have a pop at the venerable Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, partly because I like and admire her work. And partly, in this new media environment in which my enemy’s friend is my troll, I fear aligning myself with foam-flecked righties who use words like “Guardianista” and “wokerati”.

But she wrote a column late last week about assisted suicide that was just plain wrong. And, actually, I think she’s being profoundly illiberal on the subject, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

Assisted suicide – voluntary euthanasia, assisted dying, call it what you will – was a hobby horse of mine some 15 years ago when I wrote a book against it. Slightly more recently, Toynbee and I were on a broadcast interview together on an entirely unrelated subject when, to the bemusement of the presenter, she suddenly raised assisted dying to have a go at me. It was quite flattering.

Anyway, last week’s Toynbee column was of a kind, dismissing the anti-euthanasia case as the province of religious nutcases (presumably like me). Consider this massive straw man of a sentence: “Only God can decide how long we should suffer before death comes at a time of his pitiless whim, they say.”

I’m used to this, though not from Toynbee. Debating assisted suicide, it’s only a matter of minutes before someone will say that I shouldn’t impose my “sanctity of life” beliefs on other people. Eh? I’ve never used that phrase in this context (whatever it may mean). In fact, my views on assisted suicide are entirely secular, though informed by a faith that respects the primacy of compassion for and defence of the most vulnerable in our society.

I believe that a jurisdiction that enshrines in its legislature the principle that some lives are more worth living than others takes us into very dangerous moral territory. Related to that, a two-tier structure for the value of human life in the medical professions is abhorrent. That’s why I say that to despatch the weakest and most vulnerable among us is unacceptably illiberal.

The terminally ill, the disabled, the profoundly depressed and the aged and vulnerable really shouldn’t be treated as a nuisance to be helped on their way.

A bill will come back to parliament to change the law to allow assisted suicide this autumn. With new PM Keir Starmer in favour and a very different configuration of the House of Commons post-election, its chances of passing are said to be high.

But even Lord Falconer, the parliamentary poster-boy for assisted suicide, who convened a ludicrous “independent” commission in 2012 stuffed with euthanasia enthusiasts and useful idiots, has accepted that no so-called safeguards can entirely ensure that no lives will be lost to malfeasance or malpractice.

So, my question to Falconer and Toynbee is this: How many unnecessary lives lost to assisted suicide is enough to have what you want? 100? 50? One? Another number?

It’s commonplace for deeply distressing accounts of agonising deaths to be rehearsed in support of assisted suicide. Toynbee did so last week. But as Falconer must (or should) know, hard cases make bad law. The only focus here should be on how best to ensure that no one need die a bad death.

For Falconer and his supporters the solution is to legislate so that terminally ill patients can be helped to kill themselves. But speaking to end-of-life medical professionals, such as Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, many of whom claim that advances now mean that bad deaths are vanishingly few, it’s clear that the UK’s world-leading palliative care has in sight the day when no one need die a bad death.

That’s no comfort to someone who is suffering at the end of their life right now. But assisted suicide puts that palliative care target in jeopardy, when it makes death a form of medical treatment. Look at the record – the Netherlands now allows assisted suicide for those who are simply “tired of life”. That’s not where end-of-life care should go.

The burden of proof under the Suicide Act (1961) lies with the defendant, who currently faces a maximum jail sentence of 14 years for assisting or encouraging a suicide. Those who have demonstrated that they have acted with compassion and consent have in turn been treated with compassion and leniency in the application of the law. Invert that burden of proof, with the Crown needing to prove that an unscrupulous relative or friend coerced a victim into suicide, and we’re into a fresh hell of moral jeopardy.

The law works as it stands. The terminally ill, the disabled, the profoundly depressed and the aged and vulnerable really shouldn’t be treated as a nuisance to be helped on their way. Again, as we might expect Toynbee to know, that is wholly illiberal.

It looks like the assisted suicide lobby will get what they want this year. It will be hailed as a great liberal social reform. Doubtless they will find it in their hearts to forgive me if I continue to demur.

Essay

America

Comment

Leading

Politics

31 October 2024

6 min read

Democracy, hypocrisy and us

A deep dive into the pitfalls of political vision and our response to them.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

Donald Trump holds his arms out to his side while speaking.

Trump addresses a faith leader event.

x/realdonaldtrump.

Coverage of the Republican candidate for Vice-President, J.D. Vance can't help but return again and again to his Christian intellectual influences. Whether it's an interview with Rod Dreher or an analysis of Patrick Deneen and other 'New Right' thinkers, many US political journalists are having to give their readers a crash course in some of the most controversial ideas in contemporary theology. One recent Politico article stands out because it didn't just introduce an unsuspecting audience of political obsessives to an obscure theologian, it also told them (us) about contradictory ways one might read said obscure theologian. And yet these contradictions force us to confront a difficulty facing anyone engaged in democratic debate.

In the article , Ian Ward sought to explore the impact of Rene Girard's scapegoat mechanism on Vance. In doing so, Ward underlines the importance of Girard's ideas in the intellectual circles around J.D. Vance and his mentor, Peter Thiel.

Girard, a French academic who died in 2015, is remembered foremost for his analysis of the relation between desire and conflict. Girard proposes that desire is ‘memetic, that is to say, it mimics; I want what I see that others want. This naturally leads to conflict, a conflict that can only be resolved by a scapegoat. Identifying a scapegoat, an out-group, is a force powerful enough to create a sense of solidarity between those would otherwise be in conflict over shared desires.

The Politico take considered how Vance's reading of Girard might relate to Vance's defence of his running mate's false suggestion that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbour's pets in Springfield, Ohio. It went as far to suggest that—rather than a rejection of Girard's analysis— Vance could be understood to be applying a pragmatic reading of Girard. Ward writes:

Though Girard never said so outright, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s idea of the Christian ethic — which in theory offers an alternative to ritualistic violence as a basis for social cohesion — cannot in practice serve as the basis for a large, complex and modern society.

Scapegoating is inevitable, deploy it to your advantage. We cannot know how exactly this or any reading of Rene Girard factors into his political tactics. What we can know is that Vance's public fascination with big ideas opens him up to a charge upon which a healthy democracy depends: hypocrisy.

In contrast, there is often a surprising transparency to Trump's appeals to self-interest, Addressing a audience in July, Trump declared:

Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

As much as Vance and others try to change this, there is little ideological content, no substance behind ‘Make America Great Again’ insofar as Trump tells it. It is politics at its most transactional and what Trump offer his supporters, beautiful or otherwise, is so often a scapegoat. Trump tends to be pretty open about this and, as ugly as this kind of politics is, there is a strange kind of honesty to it. But Vance is different. He has big ideas. And however weird you may think these ideas are, and however much tension there seems to be between his love of Rene Girard and his scapegoating of Haitian immigrants, democracy is better for that tension. Constructive democratic debate, in some sense, depends on hypocrisy. Without it, democracy would be nothing more than a negotiation around mere self-interest.

A politician with an ideological vision is one that can be held accountable. Keir Starmer's recent decision to pay back £6,000 worth of gifts is a case in point. Had he not sought to set himself as a contrast to the Boris Johnson of Partygate, the criticism of his accepting clothes and tickets would not have had the same bite.

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact.

The first generations of Christians encountered a similar problem. The law they believed that they had received from God showed them a vision for the good life just as it revealed all the ways they fell short. As the early church leader Paul wrote: “through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.” We might add that through political ideology or aspiration comes the knowledge of political hypocrisy.

Had Vance never publicly explored Girard's theory, if he were only an opportunist more like Trump, we would have one less means by which to hold him to account. Every politician will be found lacking when judged by their public ideological aspirations. And the more ideological aspirations, the greater the charge of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy will always be found wherever we find people debating and aspiring to ideas more perfect than they are. I'm not defending any individual hypocrisy; the residents of Springfield, Ohio and newcomers across the US deserve so much better. Hypocrisy is always disappointing, but it is less disappointing than the alternatives: either a naked pursuit of self-interest or a naïve expectation of ideological purity.

The question for each of us in a democracy is how we live with hypocrisy, expecting it while still expecting more from those who wish to serve us in public office. And a moment's introspection reveals that it is a charge that confronts each of us also: the shaming gap between my aspirations for my life and the reality. To ask how we live with these hypocritical politicians is really to ask how we live with ourselves?

With that we return to Girard. He claimed that Jesus Christ willingly became a transparently innocent scapegoat and in doing so undermined the mechanism. In the Politico article, Vance is quoted as follows:

In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

The exacting logic of the crucifixion prevents us from scapegoating even the scapegoating politicians.

But Jesus’ death is more than an embodied social critique. In coming to us and dying in the person of Jesus, God showed his love for imperfect people struggling under the weight of perfect ideas. He came to give the home and safety we all desire, offered freely to hypocrites. The point of Christ's death is not, at least in the first instance, to inspire me to treat others better. It is God's unconditioned offer to the broken and hypocritical, as the broken and hypocritical, not as he'd rather we be.

Paul puts it like this: "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Yes, God's grace is too dramatic, too strong not to provoke us and empower us to change, but his love comes to us before any change. It comes to us as we are, nursing our pitchforks and that self-righteous sense that it's all really someone else's fault.

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact. We must not excuse this hypocrisy; we should hold ourselves and our leaders to account. And yet we can do so gratefully haunted and gratefully held by a God who came for hypocrites.