THERE are so many bad and windy arguments in favour of assisted dying that it’s almost a shock to come across good and compelling ones.
My friend and sometime editor Ros Taylor put her thoughts on the subject up on Substack. She couldn’t face wrangling them through some grisly editorial process on a paid paper because she herself has multiple sclerosis. That would have obliged her to play arpeggios on the readers’ heartstrings, if she were writing for a mass market; but she has no time for sentimentality.
“The call for better palliative care has become a get-out clause that abjures MPs of moral responsibility for their decision. I have heard more about palliative care in the past few weeks than I have for a decade. Once this bill is passed or defeated, it will sink back into obscurity. The questions of why hospices have to be funded through charity, and are now usually only available to people in the last few days of their lives, will be slipped back into the ‘too depressing’ basket. The lack of good enough palliative care — and it will never be good enough — is not a reason to vote against this bill. On the contrary: it is a reason to vote for it.
“We hold human life in so little value in this country that if a poor couple have a third child we withhold any more state support from them. It is thought to be a good thing to punish the child for their parents’ decision to have sex and not abort the result. We bribe people to come here and look after our elderly, because we will not pay Britons enough to do it. We routinely treat disabled people with disgust, impatience and pity. Yet many of our MPs do not want a sick person to avoid an unpleasant death at their own request.”
What I like about this — indeed, what I love about Ros — is that she refuses to take the rhetorical swerve away from reality. She asks what choices are actually available, not which ones might be open to us if only we lived on Big Rock Candy Mountain. Her argument addresses, head on, the concerns of people like me, who say that we live in a heartless world where the weak and poor are not valued, and so we can’t trust that the powerful won’t use this law to abuse them.
Yes, she says: we do live in such a world, and we can’t trust the powerful to change it. The policies that don’t value useless human life are overwhelmingly popular; no one is going to vote to pay care workers properly, least of all with their own wallets. Assisted dying won’t end or alter this unfairness — nothing will — but it will allow some people slightly better deaths.
If I had a vote, I would still vote against this Bill, but not because I can dismiss those arguments.
BACK in the world of knockabout fun, this was the week for reviews of Jordan Peterson’s new book, We Who Wrestle with God (Allen Lane). You could take it seriously, as Rowan Williams did in The Guardian: “A sprawling, repetitive text that could have done with some ruthless editing. Ostensibly a step-by-step guide through the biblical narratives of Genesis and Exodus (and, for some reason, Jonah), with the goal of uncovering wisdom to help meet present-day moral challenges, it in fact returns persistently to some of Peterson’s favourite tropes about modern culture, its flabbiness and confusion.
“Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure?”
Or you could just have fun, as James Marriott did in The Times: “The last time I reviewed a book by Jordan Peterson, a cleverly edited excerpt of my negative opinion (I described it as ‘bonkers’) appeared on the cover of the paperback edition, giving readers the misleading impression that I had endorsed it. So this time I shall have to be clear. The new book is unreadable. Repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad, We Who Wrestle with God repels the reader’s attention at the level of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Sometimes even at the level of the word. . .
“Days after I finished the book I was still shuddering at the memory of a long discussion of which English word might be best for a Hebrew term denoting the pleasing smell of cooked animal fat. Peterson quotes from the King James Version, the Literal Standard Version, the New International Version and the Amplified Bible. If all this was in the service of serious scholarship it might be rewarding. But there is something dispiriting about spending multiple paragraphs agonising conscientiously over different translations only to be breezily informed a few pages later that Jiminy Cricket is the archetype of Jesus Christ” — although this passage is best read in conjunction with Rowan’s observation that Dr Peterson seems to have a very limited knowledge of Hebrew.