‘Suicide of the West’

It’s heartening to see novelist Michel Houellebecq, a leading critic of the West’s decline, speaking out against assisted suicide. “We are plunging into the abyss,” cautions the scribe, whose name is a byword for cynicism, as French legislators move closer toward passage of a law allowing what is euphemized as “assisted dying.” A similar measure is brewing again in Britain’s parliament after the proposal failed in the last session. Advocates of the French measure suggest that “the right to choose one’s death,” per a Le Monde editorial, amounts to “the final freedom.” President Macron simpers that “with respect for sensitivities, doubts and hopes, the path of fraternity that I hoped for is gradually opening up.” The head of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, Jonathan Denis, avers that the law will mean “putting the sick person back at the centre of the decision.”“I don’t think human history has ever known such arrogance,” is how Monsieur Houellebecq dismisses this kind of advocacy. He concedes, in UnHerd, that the law’s backers “dismiss out of hand” the religious arguments against suicide. What startles him, though, is that the left is ignoring, too, the intellectual case for the dignity of human life. Philosophy, he laments, “speaks above all to the human intellect, and struggles to reach into the core of our being.”Under the logic of assisted suicide, Monsieur Houellebecq reckons, humans are being “reduced to their use-value — that is, their initial value minus a depreciation coefficient.” This belies the purported demands for “dignity” by euthanasia advocates. Those who parrot clichés like “he would have hated being a vegetable,” the novelist suggests, would be more honest if they completed the thought with the implausible words “he would have preferred to be a corpse.”French religious leaders warn that the law would “risk exerting pressure on older people and those with illnesses or disabilities,” per Le Monde. It’s hard to ignore the force of such concerns, despite the assurances of a French legislator, Philippe Vigier, who insists “it is the patient who asks,” and “nobody is forced and nobody is encouraged.” Yet similar fears, aired amid a delaying action in the House of Lords, helped thwart Britain’s push for assisted suicide.British lawmakers had warned that the assisted suicide bill had “insufficient” guardrails, the BBC reported, and could “put vulnerable people in harm’s way.” England’s Catholic bishops, citing “human reason, as well as religious faith” asserted that “there can be no safe or limited assisted suicide law.” The disabled are at particular risk, the bishops said, of becoming “disillusioned with their lives to the extent that they see death as preferable.”Monsieur Houllebecq echoes such insights, confounding, he writes, some who deem him “a déprimiste — a prophet of depression.” Yet while “I have devoted myself to examining the symptoms of the suicide of the West and the rise of nihilism,” he adds, “I do not recall ever having rejoiced in any of it.” The novelist laments: “We are entering a world in which it will be easier to die,” but “I would have preferred a world in which it was possible to live.”Le Monde hails the French lawmakers advancing the euthanasia bill for “deliberating calmly on one of the most complex issues and of transcending partisan divides to meet a societal demand.” Monsieur Houellebecq stresses the broader peril to Western ideals reflected by yielding to the demands for suicide. He professes to be unable to shake the idea that “in demanding access to euthanasia for its citizens, France is asking for its own euthanasia.”

‘Suicide of the West’

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