Assisted suicide for the terminally ill was discussed in the
UK Parliament’s (unelected) chamber, The House of Lords, on Friday July 18th.
The debate centred on the Bill, introduced by Lord Falconer, that would
legalise assisted suicide in certain situations.
In the run up to the debate, there was a lot of discussion
in the media about the rights and wrongs of assisted suicide, with plenty of
emotive and rhetorical comments made on both side of the argument. And among
all this, the noted theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking made his own emotional
and subjective input.
I, being as I am, a professional writer concerned about the madness of
the modern world, and making people more aware of this madness and its impact
on future generations, feel obliged to make my own emotive comments. So here
goes …
I will focus on Hawking’s remarks in particular, for in a
few words he well illustrates what is wrong with western (European) culture,
and its products in the form of orthodox (Dawkins) science and the fragmented
scientific mind.
Hawking was interview by the BBC and he said, “We don’t let
animals suffer so why should your pain be prolonged against your wishes.” He
also said that there needed to be safeguards, which one can assume is an
acknowledgement of the potential for assisted suicide to become a form of legalised
murder.
There is another way of looking at these comments. What
Hawking is advocating is treating human beings like animals, and putting them
down (that’s the colloquial phrase that people use when they ask vets to give
animals lethal injections), when terminally ill humans ask for this. Yet the
whole thrust of religion over several millennia, and, in more recent times,
secular movements too (such as socialism), has been a fight to stop people treating
other human beings like animals. That religion in particular has often failed
to do this, and has resorted at times to behaving in an animalistic way, is a
measure of the difficulties and challenges involved in freeing the human mind
from its inclination towards killing and destruction. And socialism has often done no better.
Here I also briefly note that scientists are the one group that
can be singled out as having done more than most to contribute to killing and
destruction. And in orthodox Dawkins science, humans are just another species
of animal, and you will not find in this type of science, any declaration that
human life is sacred, for what differentiates humans from other animals are just
biological characteristics determined by genes, which are themselves just the
result of a mindless chain of cause and effect. And this is what is packaged
and presented in what is called evolution (which is in fact, just another
creation myth – but this is something for another moment).
As for the matter of safeguards; have you not noticed over
the past ten years and more, all those news items involving failures of
safeguarding systems: Example 1: The serial killer GP Dr Shipman (we still do
not know how many patients he killed – no doubt he would have liked assisted
suicide!); Example 2: The Financial Services Authority and – here the list is
quite long so I mention only few – the failure of Equitable Life; The Royal
Bank of Scotland affair and the damaging actions that contributed to the Global
Financial Crisis …; Example 3: All those cases where vulnerable children known
to be at risk from their families and placed on local, Social Services at-risk
registers, who were, despite this, abused and killed by family members; Example
4: elderly people in care who have been abused by their carers; Example 5: The
abuse by Jimmy Savile at the BBC over an extended period … Need I go on? There
are no safeguards other than not allowing assisted suicides. And I add here
that I have personal experience of the psychological bullying tactics of
relatives in dealing with elderly people, and I know too that the caring
professions, who are working under pressure and short of resources, are not
able to give the time that is needed to deal with such matters.
Yet again I ask the question why scientists are so smart yet
so dumb? It seems to be a defining characteristic, the product of a mind that
is no longer able to see matters in the whole, to recognise that science is
just one very limited way of seeing the world, and also one, no more worthy of
special emphasis than any other. And I add, one that has little worth saying
about matters most important to humanity. And the more science moves towards
being an instrument of government and business interests, the more this will be
so. So, as I say in my book, A Tale of Two Deserts, “whatever you may chose as a name for yourself, you are
Epimetheus and are indeed well named.”
And as for the matter of assisted suicide what can be said?
We live in a very dysfunctional society, where alcohol and
drug abuse are rife, where the making on money has dominance over respect for
people and the environment, where family breakdowns are endemic, and where
disparities in wealth and opportunities remain as a sore on the body of
society. It is also a society where it is becoming increasingly apparent that
child abuse is widespread, where there is little respect for the elderly, and
where the emphasis is on the image of being fit, young and healthy. And
anything that does not fit with this image needs to be placed out of sight,
removed, and disposed of. Some might say that assisted suicide is just a mirror
of this attitude and the perverse nature of the society that we live in. They
are probably correct in taking such views.
What I would say is that assisted suicide is a form of
convenience killing. It is a personal final
solution. And the road from optional convenience killing to compulsory
convenience killing, from the personal final solution to the collective final
solution, is shorter than many might think. All it takes is the creation of the
right social, economic, environmental, and political conditions. The very
conditions that the modern western world is well on its way to creating. Yes
you may well convince yourself that assisted suicide is acceptable. You will
ensure that it appears to be so by making it a medial procedure, as has been
done with abortion. Yet both are examples of the normalisation of evil, and in
a future blog I will explain what this means in terms of behavioural
characteristic (it has nothing to do with religion) of human beings. And this
is part of the hell on earth that I mention towards the end of my book Encounter with a Wise Man.
To conclude, I also note that, in some versions of The
Bible, in the Old Testament, there is a commandment that says “Thou shalt not
kill.” In other versions of The Bible, it looks as though the absolute command has
been found to be too inconvenient and the wording has become “Thou shalt not
commit murder.” It could be said that contemporary society now finds this
commandment as inconvenient, and is proposing a new wording of the form, “Thou
shalt not kill unless it is convenient to do so.”
Towards the end of my book Enigma,
I write: “All human life is sacred and the taking of a human life is wrong:
there are no exceptions.” Surely as a society we should be embracing this as an
axiom, a self-evident truth requiring no justification, and finding ways to
ease the suffering of the terminally ill through other non-animalistic means,
which of course science can help to deliver. But as long as scientists behave
in a way that is driven by the belief that human life is not sacred, and that
we are just animals, biological machines, the view that convenience killing is
acceptable will prevail and we will not attain the desirable goal of living our
lives according to the aforementioned axiom. And I have also come to understand
that until we change science, and shape a different type of scientist, we will
continue with our dysfunctional way of living, and we will, ultimately, have to
face the consequences, which we have already had a taster of in the 20th
century, through the thoughts and actions of people like Hitler and Stalin.
This is why I work to reinvent science, which is without doubt a most important
of subjects, but so is religion too. And a resolution of the conflicts of minds
between the two is possible, and in ways most surprising. The construction of
new paths does indeed start in the most unusual of places (a reference to a
line in my book A Tale of Two Deserts).
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