Michel Houellebecq on Euthanasia
Also: The writer who faked her death, heirloom seeds in South Carolina, and more.
In Harper’s, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq explains why he—as an agnostic—opposes euthanasia:
All the opponents of euthanasia I know are fervent Christians; as the sole agnostic among them, I sometimes feel misunderstood. Not because they doubt my convictions, which I’ve expressed all too consistently, but because my motives escape them, or so I feel. (To complicate matters, I support the right to an abortion, at least under certain conditions, but that’s another subject.)
For Immanuel Kant, human dignity clearly prohibited suicide. But it took an enormous intellectual effort for Kant to disentangle human dignity and the moral law from metaphysics (in other words, from Christianity). Who can take the measure of that effort today? Dignity has become a meaningless word, a joke in poor taste. I even have the impression that for my contemporaries the idea of a moral law has become rather obscure.
Little by little, and without anyone’s objecting—or even seeming to notice—our civil law has moved away from the moral law whose fulfillment should be its sole purpose. It is difficult and exhausting to live in a country where the laws are held in contempt, whether they sanction acts that have nothing to do with morality or condone acts that are morally abject. But it’s even worse to live among people whom one begins to disdain for their submission to these laws they hold in contempt as well as for their greediness in demanding new ones. An assisted suicide—in which a doctor prescribes a lethal cocktail that the patient self-administers under circumstances of his own choosing—is still a suicide. In the unlikely scenario that someone might be able to provide me with a bottle of pentobarbital and a glass to go with it, the first thing I would ask is that he leave the room. When I hear that someone I know has committed suicide, what I feel isn’t respect—I don’t want to exaggerate—but neither is it disapproval, nor derision.
Assisted suicide by one method or another has been legalized in much of the United States and in Switzerland. In France, we are close to approving doctor-administered euthanasia, following Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain. Which is to say, it is becoming the European way to die. We are demonstrating once again our feeble respect for individual liberty and an unhealthy appetite for micromanagement—a state of affairs we deceptively call welfare but is more accurately described as servitude. This mixture of extreme infantilization, whereby one grants a physician the right to end one’s life, and a petulant desire for “ultimate liberty” is a combination that, quite frankly, disgusts me.
It is inhumane, he argues, and contrary to something like natural law.
In other news, read about the South Carolina auto shop owner who saved thousands of heirloom seeds in an old freezer: “As with an archeological dig, each strata was a journey farther into the past, with seeds at the bottom dating to the late 1960s. Once sorted, the discoveries were revelatory, including varieties of beans, melons, and collards that are exceedingly rare or even thought to be lost.”
The men who wrote a 135-year-old message in a bottle: “The 135-year-old time capsule was discovered in November by a plumber who, by chance, opened up the floor at the exact spot where it had been left in 1887. Since then experts and historians from the genealogy service Findmypast have looked up censuses and pored over dozens of newspaper archives to uncover the story behind the men who left the note - as well as those who lived in the house.”
Valerie Stivers reviews Bret Easton Ellis latest novel, The Shards: “At his best, Ellis writes very good prose, and his most influential works have taken an approach of maximum complicity, exposing the worlds he writes about by operating by their rules. Less Than Zero romanticizes its bored, drugged, glamorous children, as our society does. American Psycho’s extreme, prolonged, disgusting violence demonstrates that everything really is permitted to us—at least in fiction. Both books are closed systems offering their characters—and their readers—only the options available by society’s logic, brilliantly and terribly so. Ellis has been called a satirist, but his work is more intimate and less moralizing than any satire . . . The Shards is something of a departure. Writing in the 2018 nonfiction collection White, Ellis mentions a potential novel idea that occurred to him as early as 2013, that would be about ‘somebody pretending to be somebody he wasn’t, an actor.’ This is the Bret of The Shards, a confused high-school kid who is obsessed with his friends, sleeping with men while trying to satisfy a horny teenage girlfriend, and faking everything. The book ostensibly seeks the truth behind his act, but is complicated, Ellis-style, by unreliable narration and obvious falsehoods that make the author an actor, too.”
The Romance writer who faked her death: “ Her husband told the newspaper that his wife, who is under treatment for bipolar disorder, could get ‘really brutal’ responses to her work from fellow authors and would sometimes ‘talk like a character from a book, like she was the individual she was writing.’ ‘It got to the point where it was like, enough is enough,’ he said.”
The Smithsonian to restore hundreds of recordings made by Alexander Graham Bell and fellow researchers: “‘Over the three-year duration of this remarkable project, “Hearing History: Recovering Sound from Alexander Graham Bell’s Experimental Records,” we will preserve and make accessible for the first time about 300 recordings that have been in the museum’s collections for over a century, unheard by anyone,’ says Anthea M. Hartig, the museum’s Elizabeth MacMillan director, in a statement. The new initiative will begin in the fall.”
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