Reviewing a Dutch doctor’s book about euthanasia in 1996, the greatest of modern conservative philosophers offered a mordant conclusion. Doctor-administered death sounded quite appealing, Roger Scruton wrote, as long as you could manage it to your own satisfaction. But “given human nature, it is more likely to be managed to the satisfaction of your nearest and dearest. And as atheism, cynicism and the practice of euthanasia spread, your nearest and dearest will be less and less near, and less and less dear.”
That, to some of us, is the authentic voice of conservatism: sceptical, wary of unintended consequences, realistic about human weakness, conscious that the solo individual, making totally free choices in a vacuum, is a liberal fiction. And it came to mind as two of the last remaining Tory intellectuals, the historian Andrew Roberts and the MP Danny Kruger, disputed over the weekend.
If the House of Lords failed to pass the assisted suicide bill, Roberts told his fellow peers on Friday, they would be viewed by posterity as “antediluvian” “monsters,” the defenders of “a medieval and sadistic practice” (i.e. current medical procedure).
The speech, Kruger tweeted, was peddling a Whiggish myth about “the right side of history,” while advocating “the eugenicist ethics of pagan Rome.” Roberts, he declared, could no longer call himself a conservative. To this Roberts replied that many a Tory had preferred pagan ethics to the Christian prohibition on suicide, and that he was no Whig but a true Tory believer in “freedom of choice.” Three days later, out of the blue, Kruger announced he was defecting to Nigel Farage’s Reform, to keep the “flame” of conservatism alive. Roberts, inevitably, asked who was the bad Tory now.
Whether Kruger will be happy in Reform is hard to predict. If anyone can lend some intellectual zest and sophistication to patriotic populism, it’s him; on the other hand, you wonder how this complicated, self-deprecating thinker will get on in a party which at times seems almost to revel in stupidity and bad taste. But on the substance of his last public controversy as a Tory MP, he was right. If anything makes conservatism look shallow, it is support for assisted suicide.
The founding conservative text, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, returns again and again to the phrase “the rights of men.” Rights exist, Burke says, but they only make sense when refracted through history, custom, tradition, society. Outside that context, they are like landmines, with the potential to blow up practically anything.
When Roberts refers to assisted suicide as “a human right,” he is talking about a policy which would redefine medical care as it has been understood since the Hippocratic Oath; redefine the psychiatrist’s role from helping the desperate to facilitating their demise; throw suicide prevention into a state of confusion; tell families they have no right to know about their loved ones’ intention to die; and order palliative care specialists—the people who have devoted their lives to relieving the suffering of the terminally ill—to accept a practice which most of them regard as unthinkable.
Burke would probably not have been surprised by the consequences of this “right,” as witnessed in the countries which have legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia. Young women with eating disorders handed lethal drugs; lonely elderly people dying because they feel like a burden on their loved ones; lethal injections for those with chronic illness or housing problems; waiting lists so long that those stuck on them choose suicide instead; families shaken by secret deaths in irregular circumstances.
“Pythagoras and Aristotle opposed suicide.”
Roberts appeals to “the ancient Greeks and Romans” as having a saner attitude towards suicide than the Christian theologians who prohibited it. Kruger, too, sees assisted suicide as evidence of resurgent paganism. That’s probably unfair on the pagans. Pythagoras and Aristotle opposed suicide, and the Greek tragedians portrayed it as a curse; if the Romans conceived of suicide as a noble act, they probably weren’t thinking of cases like the one recently related in the Atlantic by the Toronto doctor Sandy Buchman,
when a patient, “all alone,” gave consent from a mattress on the floor of a rental apartment. Buchman recalls having to kneel next to the mattress in the otherwise empty space to administer the drugs. “It was horrible,” he told me.
The heart of Roberts’ speech was less paganism than a kind of incipient nihilism. He spoke contemptuously of “the so-called sanctity of life, even when that life has lost any possible meaning,” and said the terminally ill have to “take so many painkillers that they become prey to weird delusions, essentially becoming different people from those whom their loved ones know.” That is the end of life, apparently: no identity, no meaning. Some of us take more comfort in the words of Cicely Saunders, founder of the hospice movement: “You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life.” Partly because if, as Roberts implies, we stop mattering past a certain point, did we even matter in the first place?
Even for those of us who are neither Conservative nor Reform, there is a lot to value in the conservative tradition. But its worst enemies are those who would reduce it to (in Roberts’ words) “autonomy, freedom of choice, the rights of the individual.” Those who see what those slogans lead to may find themselves asking if conservatism, beyond the defense of privilege, actually means anything at all.