Six-time Olympian’s tragic diagnosis apparently boosts the case for assisted suicide – so claims the Guardian

It was weird, just reading the Guardian’s headline I had this strange sense of where it was going.

“Could we all be as positive as Chris Hoy facing death? Perhaps knowing when we will go changes everything”, it declared in the Opinion section.

Are they really going to go there, I said to myself, based off Hoy, one of the UK’s greatest Olympic athletes ever, recently being diagnosed with terminal cancer? I then read on.

Sure enough, it comes, after some incredible twists and turns of logic and morality.

The columnist, Simon Jenkins, a renowned and long-term contributor at the Guardian, describes how 48-year-old Hoy now “knows how long he has to live” and it is “four years at the outside”.

Jenkins notes that Hoy has said, “The fear and anxiety…comes from trying to predict the future”, before Jenkins concludes that “for him that uncertainly has gone” because the famous cyclist now has, again quoting Hoy’s words, “the information”, which is, in Jenkin’s estimation, “of inestimable value”.

It is of such value, Jenkins argues, because “most people die amid the pain of uncertainty and eventual incoherence”. He then combines this claim with what he describes as the rate with which science and medical diagnosis is “moving in the direction of resolving that doubt”.

He describes how science can “dig ever deeper into our genetics” which means that, ultimately, one day, it will likely get to a place where “some fiendish algorithm” (that adjective use is probably the one thing I agree with in the entire article) can predict with a fair degree of certainty – Jenkins claims it could eventually be as accurate as “90% probability” – when we will die.

Jenkins adds that “when that occurs, I’m in no doubt that I will want a choice”. And that choice is, of course, the choice of assisted suicide.

In Jenkin’s view, this choice would ameliorate what is “for millions” – ah, yes, good old utilitarianism, always a winning argument – “the greatest and most painful chaos in life” that is “the final chapter, because it is the most unpredictable”.

But aren’t all chapters of life unpredictable? I’ve known enough people now who didn’t make it close to the traditionally held half-way point in life; and many don’t even make it to the start line these days to state the obvious Catholic riposte.

Either way, Jenkins reassures on the benefits and how “in a strange way, the algorithm would offer order and comfort” through it clearing up that uncertainty, while “departure counsellors” could be ready to help us through “our last months on Earth”, with last wishes “curated” and finally, “the ceremony of assisted dying will be conducted with dignity”.

The dystopian-ness of it is mind boggling. Disclaimer: I get a bit triggered when the Guardian goes into its cheery dystopia-actually-has-its-upside mode, because it’s what it spent much of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns doing, waffling on about how great it was, with nature “reclaiming”, families rejoicing in each other’s company and bonding, etc. We’d turned our world into a cautionary JG Ballard sci-fi short story – and they just went along with it. And it seems like they want more of it again.

I’m guessing quite a lot of people have no interest in knowing when they will die, precisely because, as has been noted if assisted suicide comes to pass, it would change everything about how one looks at the world, at one’s life and at the lives of others.

The perspective-altering element related to assisted suicide was put very well recently by the Danish Ethics Council who recently came out against legalising euthanasia in Denmark, echoing the concerns of the Catholic Church in the UK about how such a change would impact the fundamental pillars of civil and moral society.

“The very existence of an offer of euthanasia will decisively change our ideas about old age, the coming of death, quality of life and what it means to take others into account,” the council wrote in its full report.

“If euthanasia becomes an option, there is too great a risk that it will become an expectation aimed at special groups in society.” 

So, similarly, no thank you regarding that smart algorithm being able to potentially dispense knowledge of the Big Day (didn’t the Greeks have a story warning about this sort of thing; something to do with Pandora’s Box?).

Jenkins is more sanguine. “Do I want this?” he asks. “I think I do. I certainly want the choice science appears to be on the brink of giving me, as it has given Chris Hoy” [again, thank you to Chris Hoy and your tragic diagnosis for benefiting the rest of us and making us see the potential of assisted suicide]. “It is the privilege of knowledge. That knowledge is the essence of freedom.”

Knowledge. Control. Order. Rationality. In pursuit of all that clarity some people will go pretty far; they just can’t seem to handle when it all gets a bit more goofy and unclear; that scenario of a life properly lived having to have some intrinsic risk and which was summed up so neatly in the great cry from the protagonist at the end of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin,” says John the Savage.

It’s not just the leveraging of Hoy’s situation by the Guardian to push the assisted suicide agenda that is so unsettling. It’s also the downright odd, weird, sinister logic spun around it all to link the two.

Hence we get the devil mentioned, but not God, of course, while to make things even worse Jenkins does this while managing to quote Dylan Thomas’s famous poem of “Do not go gentle into that good night” (which could serve as the anthem against assisted suicide) and attempting to crowbar it into a pro-assisted-suicide angle:

“We can all join with Dylan Thomas in his words to his father: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. / Old age should burn and rave at close of day’ and ‘rage against the dying of the light’. The uncertainty of death is the devil’s punishment for our arrogance in presuming to live at all,” Jenkins says.

Just as you can keep your “departure counsellors”, you can keep that odd and cynical rationale regarding what life is – it being some sort of arrogant presumption or perversion; call me boring, but I’ll stick with it being something more like a God-given gift, via self-sacrificing parents.

If this is the sort of logic pervading the assisted suicide lobby, we should be even more afraid of what they are trying to achieve. 

It would seem that as a society we find ourselves like the protagonists at the beginning of the film Zulu and facing a latter-day version of the “Horns of the Buffalo” tactic when it comes to the lifespans of our citizenry.

To recap the Zulu dilemma: the Boer advisor, Adendorff, tells the plummy British Army officers at Rorke’s Drift about how the advancing Zulu army will destroy them.

Using a bayonet to draw a diagram in the dirt, Adendorff says: “The classical attack of the Zulus is in the shape of a fighting bull buffalo: the head, the horns and the loins.

“First the head moves forward and the enemy naturally moves in to meet it – but it’s only a feint. The warriors in the head then disperse to form the encircling horns, and the enemy is drawn in on the loins, and the horns close in on the back and sides.”

Stabbing the bayonet into the ground, he concludes: “Finish.”

One horn has only got stronger in the UK since the 1967 Abortion Act. Now they’re making a pitch for the other horn.

Photo: Sir Chris Hoy arrives at the 2023 Laureus World Sport Awards in Paris, France, 8 May 2023. (Photo by Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images for Laureus.)

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