The Control-Freak Culture

"I Did It My Way"

Charles Moore has written an insightful piece in The Telegraph.  It concerns "assisted" dying. He argues that so-called "dignitas dying" represents an ultimate attempt to be in control of oneself.  The irony is lost only on the purblind.
 

Arranging an assisted suicide is the ultimate in control freakery

The rising calls for 'Dignitas dying' are symptoms of a very modern disease 

Jeffrey Spector, who paid people £8,400 to help him kill himself in Switzerland this week, had an inoperable tumour near his spinal column. He described his own illness as “a walking timebomb”. “The disease could stabilise,” he admitted, “but I do not know that – I can’t take that chance.” He “could not contemplate a future as a quadriplegic”. He said that he “wanted to be in control of the final stages of my life”.

Naturally, nobody wants to say anything unkind about Mr Spector. Few of us know how we would behave if we were in his situation, and all of us know how frightening it must have been. But it does not follow that he was right. It does not even follow that he was exercising what he called “my human right to dignity”. The use of the word “dignity” to describe a modern medical way of being killed or killing yourself is a rhetorical trick which sympathy for Mr Spector should not force us to accept.

Read again Mr Spector’s words quoted above. He says that the disease might not have killed him, but still he wanted to kill himself. He could not bear the thought of being a quadriplegic. This is very understandable, but it is worth bearing in mind that there are many thousands of people who can and do bear not only the thought but also the reality of quadriplegia. We do not think that they are irrational or cowardly because they do not arrange their suicide. On the whole, we think they are brave. We think, indeed, that they show dignity.

The key word in everything Mr Spector said was “control”. That is what he wanted. That is what, indeed, he died for. Supporters of Mr Spector’s action speak of him exercising his “freedom” or “personal autonomy”, but I would argue the words are misapplied. It’s all about control. 

Death is the final assault upon human autonomy.  It is relentless, irrevocable, and certain.  It is the final certitude that Adam was so terribly wrong and God was, has been, and always will be right.  Since death is inevitable, the next best thing is to pass from this world still in control.  

In the modern world - especially the rich western world – people - especially successful people - want control. We are used to owning things and making consumer choices and switching careers and partners and taking out life insurance policies and investment plans and issuing orders instantaneously and remotely via the internet. We feel our peers judge us by how much we control things and people. We judge ourselves in this way.

So what we most dislike is whatever escapes our control. Small examples of this are road rage or people who have a tantrum when their flight is delayed. Big examples are people who cannot accept the mental illness of those close to them, or people who try to prevent themselves ageing. Not for nothing has the phrase “control freak” been invented in our time: it is the disease of power which destroys many a marriage, blights many children’s lives and turns office life into a misery.

The only really uncontrollable thing is death. It is death which, to use Mr Spector’s phrase about his disease, is the “walking timebomb”, the only one we cannot defuse. “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can take nothing out,” it says in the Prayer Book burial service. The mind of the control freak hates this stark fact: it seems to go against all the principles of acquisition and achievement on which he (the condition is much more common in men than in women) has constructed his life. In the United States, indeed, there are quite serious (but quite mad) scientific inquiries into genetically reprogramming human beings to make them immortal.

Unless and until this nightmare vision can be achieved, the control freak’s substitute is to choose his death – its moment and its form. He is used to choosing his foreign holidays, his children’s schools, his second or third car or home or wife. Now he can preserve his “dignity” by booking his death: it is the same mentality which is obsessed with getting the right table in the right restaurant.

The more you want control, the more you end up pushing away other people.  The more self-centred one becomes.  It's my way, or the highway for you.  Human depravity thus gains greater control.

. . . .  my observation of old people, which is now - as my parents’ generation is dying off – quite extensive, is that those who are obsessed with control are the unhappiest. If you are young and strong, or middle-aged and powerful, you can sustain the illusion that you are the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. If you try to maintain that view in old age, you face endless humiliations as the facts prove you wrong. I know that Dylan Thomas advocated that one should “rage, rage against the dying of the light”, but he never grew old. Rage is an awful waste of energy when one no longer has much of it.

Happy old people - of whom, despite everything, there are far more than at any time in history - do not attempt to control. They trust. As they gradually weaken, they recognise how much they depend on the kindness of family, neighbours, friends, strangers. This letting go prepares them for death. However strong their religious beliefs, they cannot know where they are going. The only sane thing to do in the face of this ignorance is to accept it.

The rising calls for assisted dying, however powerful some of the hard cases seem, are symptoms of a pointless defiance of the nature of human life. They attempt to master what cannot be mastered. They are very bad for our peace of mind.

They also affect everyone, not just the person who dies. Speaking of his decision to commit suicide, Mr Spector said, “My family disagree but I believe this is in their best interests.” His family were quoted as saying they respected his decision “one hundred per cent”. To respect a decision is not the same as to agree with it. If a member of your family kills himself, the last thing you want to say is anything critical, but how do the families of suicides live with the dead person’s judgment of their best interests? How could anyone who loved anyone not reproach herself afterwards if that person killed himself? Self-slaughter may seem to solve one problem, but it certainly creates others which, by definition, the dead person will not have to live with.

The more this ultimate defiance becomes the respected and institutionalised, the more the euphemisms will pervert the truth and attempt to make evil an ultimate act of courage, morality, and goodness.  If murdering a defenceless, innocent babe in one's womb has morphed into an act of courage and freedom and a fundamental human right, what do we think will happen when "dignitas dying" becomes an institutionally provided human right?

. . . . It undermines the motive that sustains all medicine. If it becomes the job of the National Health Service not only to assist life but to end it, what will that do to the minds of doctors and nurses? Come to that, how will it affect the minds of all those patients (the great majority) who do not want to be killed? When a vet puts your dog down, he calls it “final attention” on the bill. I wonder what euphemism the NHS will invent when it starts to offer this service: “Would you like the dignity option, dear, or do you just want to wait?” In a state-run service like ours in which one person’s need is always weighed up against another’s in order to apportion spending, it would not be long before those refusing to drink the lethal cocktail could be represented as money-wasting bed-blockers.

People speak of “the right to die”. It is a strange idea to try to turn a certainty into a right. This is not an area of mere personal choice: it is a predicament, the predicament of every human being. We are all in this together.

In all of this madness there is a foundation of truth.  Unbelief is becoming more and more epistemologically self-conscious.  It is showing its true face.  It is unmasking.  God set before Israel the way of life and the way of death.  Since physical death is relentlessly inevitable, Unbelief--in its mature perfection--will turn taking one's own life on one's own terms into a human glory, an inviolable right, the ultimate act of human autonomy.  As the darkness deepens, the light of Christ will shine more brightly. It is His way.

Why do the nations rage
    and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
    and the rulers take counsel together,
    against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
    and cast away their cords from us.”

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
    the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
    and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
    on Zion, my holy hill.”

I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
    today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
    and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
    and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.”

Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
    be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
    and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
    lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
    for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him. [Psalm 2]