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Logan's Run Revisited
Unfortunately, there's little chance of Jenny Agutter making an appearance in Britain's dystopian future
A duty to die?
Remember the old sci-fi movie Logan's Run? A few centuries from now, population growth puts so much pressure on the world's resources, it is decided that the young should lead sybaritic lifestyles while the old - that it, anyone over 30 - are killed off to prevent them taking up space.
It could well be a parable for our times. It takes two centuries plus countless catastrophes for the Logan's Run dystopia to be created, but the idea that those who are a drain on resources should be eliminated would have to gain respectable currency somewhere along the way.
Who better then to speak the unspeakable than 84 year old Baroness Warnock, who has argued that euthanasia should not only be legal but that the elderly and infirm should be pressed towards death.
Baroness Warnock speaks as one of Britain's most respected and best-connected authorities on health and ethics. She is described by the Daily Telegraph as Britain's leading moral philosopher, and in the 1980s sat on a committee which advised on embryo research.
In an interview with the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work, she argued,
"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service. I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die."
She added that she had just completed an article titled "A Duty to Die?", "suggesting that there's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself."
According to the Telegraph,
"Recent figures show there are 700,000 people with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's in Britain. By 2026 experts predict there will be one million dementia sufferers in the country, costing the NHS an estimated £35billion a year."
The Baroness has been a prominent supporter of euthanasia for many years, but her views on dementia sufferers mark a worrying new stage in how UK experts judge "quality of life" and its drain on resources.
While Alzheimer's and senior charities have reacted to the Baroness's remarks with horror, the opinion columns have been strangely silent. With the exception, that is, of Melanie Phillips, who retorts,
"What drives her is simply the belief that lives which she considers to be worthless should be ended. Down this particular road, of course, lie the historic spectres of eugenics, the concentration camp and the gulag.
"Tempting though it may be, it would be a mistake to treat this elderly philosopher as an eccentric who can be safely ignored. Lady Warnock is a key figure in the development of medical ethics in this country, from research on embryos to the debates over euthanasia.
"Although the days when governments called upon her to serve on such committees of the great and the good may be over, her thinking provides graphic evidence of the slippery slope down which we are sliding at terrifying speed."
"(...)What she originally presented as the 'right to die', for example, soon mutated into the 'duty to die'. The claim that euthanasia would benefit sick people by ending their pain is thus revealed as a fraud. The real point is to benefit the sick person's relatives, in whose interests the patient must be expected to forfeit life itself. "
As Phillips notes, the Baroness is by no means alone in her opinion: "They are mainstream among our secular, anti-religious elites - and alarmingly, nowhere more so than in the medical profession."
Once again, we see that the government ensures that the upper echelons of our advisory committees are peopled by extremist thinkers. How did we get here? Is it a case of the loudest quacker drawing the most attention? That an academic philosopher who wants to distinguish herself from her fusty colleagues proposes some shocking, daring new principle, thus gaining the attention of government, who love appointing radical loudmouths - the philosophical equivalent of radio shock jocks - to head quangos?
Despite the protests, there must be someone, somewhere in government or opposition who thinks the Baroness has a point. In a civilised nation, we would be looking at ageing - an issue which will eventually affect us all - and work hard to think of ways in which our declining years are made as comfortable as possible. Instead, we're entering a climate where the country's "leading moral philosopher" is happy to suggest putting the elderly to sleep in order that resources may be spent elsewhere.
Britain, like many western countries, is getting older. Resources are drying up; the events of previous weeks indicate that we are no longer getting richer. Agriculture is all-but-dead, manufacturing has been outsourced and it is only a matter of time before even Britain's much-touted "services industry" is shifted to the developing world. Which leaves us with what, exactly? An enormous leisure class, who would have a great deal more fun if they didn't have to fork out scarce billions to keep granny comfortable.
The Baroness spoke of end-of-life agreements, where euthanasia might be demanded by the patient once dementia took hold; but how quickly would this policy spread? "A terrifying, amoral landscape is opening up before us," writes Melanie Phillips.
Two centuries until Logan's Run? It's looking more like two decades.
