Britain is having a national conversation about The Right To Die……..by which is meant the process where a terminally ill person with no prospect of life can be “assisted to die”. At the moment in Britain, people are free to board a plane for Switzerland where assisted death is permitted in exceptional circumstances. The legal position of their relatives is ambiguous.
In Britain the organisation Dying With Dignity, previously known as EXIT campaigns for a change in British legislation to allow “assisted dying” within Britain. Most doctors and an even higher number of the General Public are in favour of Euthenasia. I suspect that most are at ease with it when they think of themselves rather than a general principle.
My own position is that I am unafraid of Death. But like everyone, I am scared stiff of Dying. Out there, there is a date on the calendar with my name on it. A meaningless date now like 18th June or 27thOctober will be the date that will be remembered by my family as my “anniversary”. And as I will be 60 years old in May, I find this more pressing than I once did.
I watched my parents die. I have watched my beloved aunt suffer with dementia and die. I find little dignified about Death. I do not wish to be embarrassed on my death bed. I do not want a eulogy that mentions how inspirational I was. If I have noticed one thing………….it is that there is an optimum age…….different from person to person but sometime between 75 and 80……….it just doesnt get any better.
Churches oppose Euthenasia but while we potentially live longer, the quality of those end years do not seem to be better. There is of course a difference between unnecessarily prolonging life and deliberately terminating life but thats a grey area which theologians and doctors reserve to themselves.
Its odd that we talk about a Right to die. It is negative. But increasingly there are pragmatic reasons to at least think about it as an option.The provision of Health Care and Accomodation for a growing population of senior citizens. And the shocking revelations about what goes on behind closed doors in old peoples homes.
The position some years ago was that every elderly person could expect to live in a (state provided) old persons home. But of course there were comparatively few old people and the system coped. Margaret Thatcher privatised many old peoples homes and the Capitalist Vultures descended, cutting corners with under-trained staff, no trade unions and business models. Ironically they often financed this by speculation in property markets, selling off the homes and renting them back. Many have gone bust and the strain has been taken up by…….the State……again.
Financing retirement in an old peoples home is a nightmare. Nobody can be left outside the system so even the destitute are entitled (properly) to the best care.
The system works like this: A person with less tha £14,000 capital (including value of a house) is entitled to live in a nursing home (subject to age or infirmity level) and the cost will be met thru the State pension. The actual cost of Care is about £350 per week, which is about three times higher than the State Pension. The State Pension is paid directly to the Health Authority (about £20 is given back to the resident as an allowance) but the full cost of care is met by the local Health Authority (the State). Where no local authority Home is available, this means the old person is sent to a “private home” effectively for free and might well be in the next room to someone paying over £350 per week……..because capital exceeds £14,000.
This means that houses ….family homes often have to be sold……to meet the costs of elderly care. Ironically, this disproportionately affects the rich, comfortable and middle class voters who enthusiastically vote Conservative. They have seen their assets……..or expected assets dwindle before their eyes. The family home, intended to be a nestegg is actually a liability and the longer elderly parents live……more so.
Much can be made of greedy middle-aged sons and daughters wanting their elderly parents to die to preserve their inheritance. But I think the vast majority of people are decent. The reality is that the elderly themselves are distressed to see the anticipated nest-egg disappear because they are living “too long”.
For the record my late mother went into home in 1996 and died in 2003 (aged 90), She hated it and led the regulation Irish Mother guilt thing on me at every visit. In truth she stayed with us most weekends.. But it was a genuinely miserable end to her life.
For me………no old peoples home. We all say that, dont we? But for me the saddest thing would be Life becoming a single room and a short walk to the communal dining room and communal TV lounge. And the constant presence of Death. From 1996 to 2003, we frequently saw the empty chairs.
Life as Restriction has no appeal. Here in this house, the photographs, stamp collection, postcards, the fridge magnets, the toy soldiers, the computer, the books, the essays, the football programmes, the autographs, the memorabalia are………….evidence of an expansive sixty years. Arguably it is my……..archive. Essentially there are no 18th century portraits on a grand staircase as evidence of the fact that I am “Somebody”. The greatest Irish insult is “he/she is Nobody”…….literally an invisible person and in essence thats what an Irishman or Irishwoman is. A person who has struggled for centuries to be………visible.
And so the talk of A “Right” (sic) to Die. It worries me. For the simple fact is that every right granted by the Establishment has been for economic reasons rather than principles.
In USA (circa 1810) Slavery was uneconomic. There was talk of the “Rights” of Slaves. Circa 1845 Slavery was economic. Nobody talked about “Rights”. And every Right……..the Right of Women to work, stay at home, vote has all been a response to an economic necessity. Alas the debate in Britain now between those principled people who advocate the Right to Die and those principled people who oppose it……….will be decided by……… (unprincipled) economists
Keeping An Eye On the Czar of Russia 
So many topics for discussion here. I wonder about the “right to die” issue myself… not being a religious person, I find it odd that governments (and others) will get so involved in people’s business on such a personal issue. I remember watching the Kavorkian controversy, which of course began in my home state of Michigan, and noting how heavily people’s religious understandings weighed into their views–even when they thought they did not. Then too, though, I am a very adaptable person (at least so far). I have seen family members go into nursing homes and become miserable, some because of pain but others simply because of the restriction on their movement. But what of the “archive” of your life (I loved the term)? With adaptation and creativity, why can it not be moved and adapted to a new lifestyle? I realize that adaptation gets more difficult as we age, but I have seen family members decide to be miserable because of nursing homes and am therefore not surprised when they find themselves miserable. They have, after all, planned it. For one of my grandfathers, whose life was completely built around activity such as painting houses for people and building houses for people, I can see why his adaptation was so painful… and he died sad, years after going into the home. The other grandfather always loved books and film… He was not big on traveling, and not big on going out. And yet, he decided that he would be miserable in a nursing home. The honest truth is that he was miserable before he went in there, and continued the trend after going in. He had access to any of the books he wanted, to all of his films, to the same things that he did before going in there. Why not take the opportunity to redefine a few of the things that make up who we are? I realize that I’m younger at the moment, but that seems to me so far to be the key to aging without feeling TOO lost. This discussion is, of course, unrelated to the costs and the poor care that so many receive. That aspect is another discussion entirely.
The word “Archive”………I am glad that you like that. I first heard it used in this context almost exactly year ago. British actor Richard E Grant used it in the context of a short series he was doing on “Diaries and Diarists”. He has kept a diary for several years and he used it, pointing out the memorabalia around him……in his case photographs, theatre programmes. And it resonated with me. I probably should have referenced Richard E Grant in this blog (you know how I am with footnotes) but in my defence I had already referenced this in other Blogs.
I think youre right that people are already miserable going into a retirement home…..my mother was determined to hate it. But I think moving into a single room is evidence in itself of a restricting life style. Necessarily my mother (who lived with us) had to leave stuff in our garage and theres still stuff in the loft and in an outside shed. Same for my Aunt Sheila.
Necessarily sharing communal dining room, TV lounge, institutional bathroom is difficult forpeople like me. I have no real wish to socialise on the basis that people around me are the same age or “professional carers”. No that life is not for me.
And living life in a home is necessarily about RULES…..perhaps the loveliest yet saddest thing I saw visiting my mother was the lady who belonged to an organisation which brought dogs into old peoples homes so that residents could stroke them.
With this comment, or set of comments, I have to take issue: “In USA (circa 1810) Slavery was uneconomic. There was talk of the “Rights” of Slaves. Circa 1845 Slavery was economic. Nobody talked about “Rights”. And every Right……..the Right of Women to work, stay at home, vote has all been a response to an economic necessity.”
Too narrowly Marxist! While I agree that economics necessarily played a huge role in historical decisions relating to these topics, I would take issue with the idea that “every right granted by the Establishment has been for economic reasons rather than principles.” I am an admirer of Marx’s thought, and of the thought of many who followed him and built on his work, but am at the same time against the narrowing of history to one element. Slavery was not especially economical in the United States in 1845… the debate was, at its core, much less about economy than people thought. Where it was about economy, it was about economy in ways that were not directly related to the slaves, and in ways that were just as true in 1810 as 1845. For example, the (false) hope among the many poor white Southerners that they could but own a slave one day and advance was an enormously important cultural tool, and one into which people bought … enough to defend an institution that often kept them poor. The fact that slaves fell below them on the sometimes-imaginary social ladder was probably much more important for most poor whites who defended slavery. That is about much more than economics. Something much more deeply engrained than economics.
The economic aspect that changed the tone of the discussion of slavery by the 1840s was also colored by ideas of principle and politics, social identity and self-definition, more than it was by some actual economic benefit from slavery.
I would argue that the same goes for your other example: Rights of women. Is it about economics, per se, or politics and identity? Yes, politics and economics are intertwined, but the right for women to vote in most countries in the early twentieth century was less about economics (rushing women into the work force during war was PART of it, but probably not the largest part), and more about the fact that women seemed likely to vote in particular ways. Parties thought that women would present conservative and predictably manipulable voters, and it was usually in those locations that women first gained the right to vote. In Britain because labour was strong and women so often backed labour, in the U.S. because of one of many strong turns toward cultural conservatism, at a time when the majority of women were angling for conservatism in politics. I hate to use this example, because it makes the slaves and women seem pawns in a system that manipulates them, but luckily the same sorts of examples can be written for any manner of historical actors. These are just the examples that you opened up.
In a capitalist world, as Marx saw, economic decision-making is tied into basically all decision making, whether people will it so or not. But, even in a capitalist system, human beings are much too individual and unpredictable to boil society down to something so simple.
Racist policy in the twentieth century, for example, was economically unsound in the United States, but fiercely defended. This was not because it seemed economically expedient, but because people (in general) fear change and try to understand things in the most simple terms or categories possible. U.S. expansionism/imperialism was/has often been MUCH more costly than beneficial economically, but allows people another sense of security (especially around the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially regarding race). Sometimes people have to make those terms up, and sometimes they run parallel to what seems economically sound. But often they do not, and people champion them anyway.
A narrow Marxist? Me? Yes that just about sums me up.
Two different issues here I think.
Specifically on Slavery I was being simplistic.
That on the establishment of USA, Slavery was not dealt with because the founding fathers decided that it would fade away and was so doing until it became more economic in mid 19th century.
There was always a dimension of Principle but I think my point is that Principle ALONE rarely makes an impact.
Its about NECESSITY usually but not always Economic. Black soldiers only became visible in the Civil War, when it became a necessity as much as a Principle.
Likewise with Votes for Women in the 20th century..a key factor was that women were perceived as “conservative”.
But certainly the experience in Britain after WW1 was that it was the LEFT that were being hard on women.
Women had started becoming independent in factories etc but it was MEN and their TRADE UNIONs who led the campaigns to get Women “back in the home”. The perception was that Women were working for lower wages and that their working was emasculating men………who wanted to control the family finances.