Read part one of Rundle’s euthanasia series here.

Hilarious. The Hammer of the Greens (formerly The Australian) has started publishing an ongoing list of private members bills put forward by Greens MPs. Given their avowed intent to see them “destroyed at the ballot box”, one can presume this isn’t provided in order to show how industrious the Greens are. Once the public know that they’re supporting voluntary euthanasia — among other things — they will desert them in droves.

Yeah, uh, in the short term at least, dream on. As I noted in the first part of this piece last week, public support for VE has sat around the 65-70% mark for quite a while now- – and the public are quite conversant with the necessarily grisly procedures of suicide machines, Mexican Nembutal, plastic bags and the like. They’re also conversant with the increased incidence of prolonged and painful death.

If so many people are dying of long, debilitating diseases, it’s because a lot of the instant ones are on the decline. Lethal flu and pneumonia etc are all but gone, save for the very old, or the otherwise ill. People who a generation ago would have keeled over from heart disease are taking statins and exercise to live long enough to get cancer.

The religious and pseudo-religious right who talk about death as an act of nature appear to have missed all these developments. Death has been drawn into the realm of culture and technology, the realm of choice.

That does mean that the question as to under what circumstances of ill-health one would end one’s own life has to come to the fore. We moved into that realm when — not so long ago, really — we decriminalised suicide, a crucial recognition that we are free citizens and beings, not given subjects of God.

But that’s where things start to get complicated. Suicide as a possibility, yes. Which implies assistance for those physically incapable of ending their lives who express a clear wish to do so. But the next step — to a state-managed and authorised process whereby euthanasia is administered to those asking for it — takes us into another category entirely.

Here things start to get confused. People talk about their right to die with dignity, which is an overextension of the concept. The right to end your life is obvious (obvious in that the consequences of criminalising it are absurd), but there’s no right for it to be administered by others, or straightforward. The question is not whether that is a right, but whether it would be a social good.

There’s a lot of arguments in favour. Self-administered suicide can be violent, messy, disturbing, go horribly wrong etc. You can sit by the bedside of someone slipping away from a morphine overdose. Saying goodbye to someone about to blow their brains out, or asphyxiate themselves is another matter.

The means to a straightforward, self-administered death are unfairly distributed among doctors, chemists etc and people close to them. The desperate suffering of people you love can make it impossible not to assist them — thus, currently, pushing law-abiding people to break the law for an end that most of us would see as moral. And so on.

All of which are good arguments for a piecemeal reform of several laws, and creation of special exceptions, but the process by which something a standardised procedure by large institutions — ultimately an item on a Medicare rebate — is something else entirely. If you’re from the materialist Left, rather than liberalism, there’s a lot about the push to VE that should ring some alarm bells.

The first is that VE draws a free existential act — suicide — out of the social and individual realm, and into the process of the state, turning a citizen back into someone subject to a series of processes. Yes, suicide remains an independent option, but that area of life effectively becomes colonised by the state. It’s for that reason that many of us worry about VE shading into non-voluntary euthanasia — that it becomes an autonomous process in which administered death becomes an act of larger institutions, and the ill person becomes less a free human being than a death to be managed.

That concern is especially so when it occurs in the context of a culture that is so very good at turning people from free human beings into objects and units of utility — labour units, consumer units, people subject to the demands of the state expressed in any number of ways from the CCTV camera to the public health campaign. There is something very disturbing about hearing people say that they would want euthanasia “when they’re no use to anyone”, as if usefulness was the measure of meaningful human existence.

It’s that cultural bias towards objectivity that appears to underpin some of the disturbing ways that VE appears to work — especially the degree to which terminally or seriously-ill women talk about “not being a burden”. The caricature of scheming relatives can be over-used by the VE opponents — the cultural danger is more that the dying person would take on the pain of others and consent to the process to spare them, rather than out of genuine want to die. The power relations that would govern this process in the NT — with a white medical establishment and a large number of chronically and seriously ill Aboriginal people without a lot of social power — make for a scenario that is, frankly, a bit terrifying.

One of the reasons that that latter concern is so relevant is because voluntary euthanasia is quite different to suicide, in that it makes the act of dying so relatively easy. There’s a reason why it’s tough to kill yourself — because we’re physically incarnated beings projected towards the future. The bias is towards life, which effectively protects us from capricious or impulsive desires to end it.

Voluntary euthanasia over-rides that worldly resistance — and when you add that to an institutional process and a culture of objectification, does validate some concerns about ‘a culture of death’. It’s clear that some advocates of VE have crossed a line into outright nihilism, based on a simple model of choice: Philip Nitschke’s notorious statement that he wouldn’t be disturbed about suicide pills being sold in supermarkets for example. Death is, among other things, a powerful erotic force, and its capacity to take command of those who spend a lot of time near it, shouldn’t be underestimated.

Liberals do what they do. Those of us from the materialist and radical left have to advance a politics based on a more critical and holistic account of reality — and one that is biased towards life as a process of making meaning and expressing one’s will to act and love against resistant conditions. We advocate for the whole, multidimensional human being, against attempts to turn it into object or process. Affirming not merely the right, but the existential authenticity of suicide as a choice in certain extreme circumstances — and the rationality of the argument that people immobilised by illness should not be denied that choice — we should nevertheless oppose what is really a major transformation of relations between the citizen and the state.

Bob Brown has long been an advocate of VE, and he’s got a right to introduce whatever bills he likes. Nevertheless, it’s a strange choice for an initial bill though despite Chris Mitchell’s Krazy Krew, it may well increase their popularity, rather than diminish it. But the early introduction gives the sense that VE is part of the whole Green package and there’s no reason an intractable issue like this should be. In terms of getting to the next level, should the Greens really be giving the impression that you have to sign on for the whole ‘progressivist’ agenda, even as the whole bases of our politics are wheeling and changing quite dramatically?

Life is difficult and beautiful, and beautiful because it is difficult. Death is a part of life, and its meaning is determined by that nexus. In this case, a radical commitment to free human being is best served by a piecemeal prudence in changing the ways that its extinction is governed.