An age that rejects God ends up killing its old

Thank you, Matthew Parris! Since Esther Rantzen bravely went public with her stage four cancer, I’ve been invited onto several shows to put the case against assisted suicide – and, frankly, I’ve failed. The argument for relief from pain is so strong. The current proposal – that two doctors sign off a self-administered poison – is so limited that it seems hard to object.

But then Matthew endorses assisted dying with such enthusiasm, eloquence and boundless insanity that one’s doubts are confirmed. Yes, he wrote in a weekend essay, this will be the thin end of the wedge – but good! In a society where we’re having fewer babies, a smaller working population is being left to care for a feeble army of expensive old crocs. I make no apology for treating human beings as “units”, said Parris, or calling upon Britain to make a cold calculus of “input” vs “output”. For the sake of national self-preservation, we must drop the “taboo” around elderly suicide.

Yikes.

Reading between the lines, Parris implies that our moral code is already changing thanks, in part, to the weakening grip of Christianity. This is correct. Ours is a post-Christian society haunted by its historic ethics, including that punchy passage from Corinthians: “Your bodies are temples of the holy spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God.”

The Bible’s logical conclusion that “You are not your own” – that my body belongs to God, not to me, so I can’t do with it as I wish – sounds so anti-choice as to be inhuman. Yet it is the basis for our inherited concept of universal human rights. Life is the Lord’s gift to me, ergo I have no right to murder myself – and nor do I have the right to murder anyone else, even if I hate them or they weigh me down; for, as God said to Moses that magical night on the mountaintop, “Thou shalt not murder.”

With those words, Judeo-Christianity helped to elevate the rights of the individual above the collective. If, say, a person is severely disabled, a crude cost-benefit analysis might persuade their community that it would be better off without them.

But killing that individual becomes inconceivable if they belong not to man but to God. We pour money into keeping desperately sick people alive out of innate human sympathy, of course; but also because we have been raised in a civilisation that regards life as sacred.

But what happens to a society, many of whose laws are based upon the Ten Commandments, when the vast majority of citizens no longer believe in the teachings of Moses or St Paul? 

The evolution towards a new, secular morality began a long time ago. The 1967 Abortion Act, for example, opened a realm of possibilities: if a doctor can kill a healthy baby in a woman’s womb, it becomes harder and harder to argue against a mature adult taking their own life weeks from an inevitable and painful death.

Without theology, or even really philosophy, to put limits on human behaviour, British attitudes towards death have been gradually reframed by the cruder concerns of utility and freedom. 

Am I of value to the economy? Am I a burden upon my family? Not just “Is my life worth living?” but how does it look on Instagram? For modern man is obsessively goal-orientated, and many of those goals – promoted by a consumerism that is openly dishonest (you can’t even trust a royal photograph nowadays) – are unobtainable or unsustainable. With the reality of disease and death hidden behind closed doors, we are liable to catastrophise old age and illness – and demand the freedom, by passing and expanding assisted dying legislation, to hit escape and leave the game early.

But we all know that pure freedom is a myth, that choice is shaped by circumstances beyond an individual’s control. What if the sick person is desperately poor? Has a family that hates them, pressuring them to die, or no family at all – with no one to make the case for buggering on? I am also amazed, in an epoch of such cynicism – when doctors leave scalpels in patients and politicians can’t be trusted to keep effluence out of the rivers – that the public is so happy to defer to experts on a literal matter of life or death. 

Let me put the opposite case to Matthew’s as bluntly as he did: at a time when so little cash goes into palliative care, social care has collapsed, we have a well-documented mental health crisis among the young and the elderly are being routinely told (by people like Matthew Parris) that they are blocking their children’s future – is this really the moment to open the door to legalised suicide? It would be like handing a loaded gun to a bankrupt man and telling him he’s under no pressure to use it. If you don’t think this programme of reform leads to an open-ended law that will permit suicide even to end depression, then you’ve not been paying attention – for this has to be the most spiritless, saddest, dumbest age ever to have considered the proposition.

Christ died on Good Friday, but for much of the zeitgeist he has never risen again, setting the context for this debate that is minus the hope that once brightened the lives of Westerners even in war or plague. 

I thank God I am a Christian. I would have to fake it if I weren’t. In an atheistic culture, beyond the here and now, there is little to live for – and when the here and now become unbearable, nowhere to turn but death.