Not a noble death
by Michael Cook
The euthanasia of Nobel laureate Christian de Duve in Belgium
is a worrying precedent for the world's baby boomers.
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His heroes were Malthus and Paul Ehrlich; his villain was the oppressive and obsessive Catholic Church (even though he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences). His solutions were anything which would defuse the population bomb: homosexuality, contraception, sterilisation, abortion, taxing children… “Given the urgency of the problem, political authorities should, with the support of as many moral authorities as possible, take active positions in favor of limiting births,” he wrote.
De Duve’s philosophy was that we will all perish unless we take responsibility for directing our own evolution. He even thought that Brave New World’s hatcheries of cloned infants were a better idea than the randomness of natural procreation. “Substituting reasoned choice for such a blind game could be seen as desirable,” he wrote. Man’s inability to fix the lottery of life seems to have driven him to a deep pessimism.
Like a snowball of angst, de Duve rolled through the last years of his life, adding more and more existential threats to the continued existence of humanity until he became a miserabilist snowman with a scarf emblazoned “Après nous le Déluge.”
With all this weighing upon him, no wonder he asked for euthanasia. No wonder his baby-boomer children thought it was a good idea. Despair over his own present and despair over the world’s future was literally a lethal combination.
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Read more: www.mercatornet.com
His heroes were Malthus and Paul Ehrlich; his villain was the oppressive and obsessive Catholic Church (even though he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences). His solutions were anything which would defuse the population bomb: homosexuality, contraception, sterilisation, abortion, taxing children… “Given the urgency of the problem, political authorities should, with the support of as many moral authorities as possible, take active positions in favor of limiting births,” he wrote.
De Duve’s philosophy was that we will all perish unless we take responsibility for directing our own evolution. He even thought that Brave New World’s hatcheries of cloned infants were a better idea than the randomness of natural procreation. “Substituting reasoned choice for such a blind game could be seen as desirable,” he wrote. Man’s inability to fix the lottery of life seems to have driven him to a deep pessimism.
Like a snowball of angst, de Duve rolled through the last years of his life, adding more and more existential threats to the continued existence of humanity until he became a miserabilist snowman with a scarf emblazoned “Après nous le Déluge.”
With all this weighing upon him, no wonder he asked for euthanasia. No wonder his baby-boomer children thought it was a good idea. Despair over his own present and despair over the world’s future was literally a lethal combination.
......................
Read more: www.mercatornet.com
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