Resist the Cult of Death
On assisted suicide and civilizational nihilism.
Our mission at Restoring the West is premised on hope: hope that Western civilization can be saved, and firm conviction that it’s worth saving. Hope isn’t blind optimism, however—it requires an honest look at the strongest arguments put forward by civilizational pessimists. I’ve been haunted by one all week:
What I’m Thinking About
Last Saturday, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq published a devastating lament in UnHerd, arguing that the push to legalize assisted suicide across the West is the ultimate symptom of our civilizational malaise. I’ve been thinking about it all week. Setting aside religious arguments against voluntary euthanasia, there is no denying that a civilization that embraces it—a civilization that legitimizes, sanitizes, and enables suicide, even reclassifying it as “healthcare”—cannot survive. Despite what advocates say, legalizing voluntary euthanasia has nothing to do with “allowing” people to die with “dignity.” Death is an inevitability, and suicide a tragic commonplace. Rather, legalizing assisted suicide means codifying into law the idea that human life itself is value-neutral, and that the value of any individual life is to be assessed by its utility. Once a person ceases to be useful, or ceases to take pleasure in the experience of being alive, they might as well not be.
You need not be a person of faith—Houellebecq is not—to recognize what a disaster this is. Every one of us will eventually fail the test of utility, whether as a result of age, illness, unhappiness, poverty, or some other misfortune. Predictably, in every country that has legalized assisted suicide, access to it has expanded well beyond the original eligibility criteria. In Belgium and the Netherlands, it’s now available to minors. I’m more hopeful than Houellebecq is that the West might be restored. But he is not wrong to question whether a civilization that helps its own children commit suicide even deserves to endure. Our goal at Restoring the West is to try, in our own small way, to help right the ship.
When a civilization can no longer say why the weakest life still matters, it will not long remember why any life does.