In the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., leaders of the civil rights movement startled their white supporters with a change in direction. Their efforts had been toward desegregation, but then talk shifted to black power. There could be no integration, they argued, unless white people looked on blacks as equally and fully human. And this demand was worth dying for. As James Cone, the theologian of black liberation, put it: “When the black man rebels at the risk of death, he forces white society to look at him, to recognize him, to take his being into account, to admit that he is.” In effect: Either recognize our humanity and treat us accordingly, or deny our humanity and kill us like animals.
The mortal “struggle for recognition” propels social and political change. Originating with Hegel, Francis Fukuyama popularized this argument, observing that, from democracy and universal enfranchisement to the rights of women, gays, the disabled, and others, history is a story of social and political upheaval driven by people’s demand that others recognize their humanity. The desire for recognition is not just a symptom of our therapeutic culture. It is the first of our needs, once our animal needs have been met. The struggle for recognition of our humanity is the struggle to clarify our civil and human rights.
What about assisted suicide, now legal in Canada, the entire U.S. West Coast, and soon, perhaps, New York and additional American states? Must it be numbered among our civil and human rights, consequent upon the recognition of our humanity?
Let us first note that the demand for legal assisted suicide addresses not the legality of killing oneself, but the legality of assisting others to kill themselves. The suicidee (patient? victim?) is secondary. The primary object of the right-to-die movement is the living.
People may kill themselves at any time, without permission or even much pain. Even where it is not legally permitted, suicide, once accomplished, is beyond the reach of legal consequence.
No doubt people want legal assisted suicide for many reasons: the fear of being a burden, enduring poor quality of life, dying alone, dying in excruciating pain. We must nevertheless focus on the desire for someone else to do the killing. Alongside fear of a botched attempt or leaving behind a mess for others, I suggest that the desire for assisted suicide is a perverse expression of the need for recognition. People who wish to kill themselves also want their choice to be socially approved.
The need for social approval is bound up with the need for recognition. Humans are neither the fastest nor the strongest animals, and none of us can survive on our own. Social disapproval feels like a death sentence because, for most of history, it has been one. Beyond the evolutionary and civilizational need for social approval, there is the psychological and the spiritual: The approval we receive tells us who we are and who we ought to be. That our desires or behaviors may make us unlovable feels devastating. The yearning for social approval and authenticity with oneself has driven countless people into countless closets, fearful that they will come to be known and shamed rather than known and loved.
Gay pride parades arose from this emotional and spiritual need, turning a ground for social stigma into a point of pride. The need for social approval was a central driver of the gay rights movement. Even when many states had civil unions that conferred on same-sex couples most of the rights of heterosexual marriage, there remained a felt need for social approval that was not equivocal. “Love is love,” we were told. Gay couples were already living together, already out of the closet. But the point was never that same-sex couples needed legal permission to love one another. The point of same-sex marriage was to secure social approval to the point that disapproval was no longer legally admissible or socially acceptable.
The same motivation drives the right-to-die movement. Suicide remains an object of social stigma, directed first at the person who kills himself and then at those close to him—his parents, his wife, his employer, his classmates. In our culture, suicide is still considered a tragedy. I still see crisis hotline phone numbers posted in bar restrooms, urging people to call someone and talk rather than kill themselves. Obituaries treat suicides with gentle euphemisms, informing us that a young person “died unexpectedly.” Those who wish to kill themselves know that their desire is unacceptable, and though they intend to die and so cut themselves off from society, they nevertheless desire that the living approve of their departure. This quest for approval, like the fight for same-sex marriage, is a core element of the demand for legal assistance for suicide. Legal assistance means unequivocal approval.
The social approval of suicide requires the social management of how people talk about suicide. The eulogy or funeral of one who has died by assisted suicide does not require talk of tragedy, nor even saying to those who survive the suicidee, “I’m sorry for your loss.” That it is a loss at all must be obscured. Grief must be circumspect, kept distinct from disapproval.
Again, there is a precedent. Immediately after same-sex marriage became legal federally, activists directed their attention to transgender rights. “Preferred pronouns” appeared, first in university classroom icebreaker activities, then basically everywhere: email signatures, X bios, LinkedIn profiles, conference registration forms, check-in questionnaires at the doctor’s office—too many places to list.
Tactically speaking, the focus on pronouns was brilliant: Not only is it a “small” thing to ask—a matter of life and death to the transgender person but supposedly of zero import to others; it is a way to ensure that people remain cooperative at all times. We use third-person pronouns when speaking about someone, typically in that person’s absence. We address people with second-person pronouns: you, your, yours. Preferred pronouns are a way to manage, not just whether a person is treating a transgender-identified person as though he or she were the gender he or she claims to be, but how that person relates to transgender identification as such. To use someone’s preferred pronouns is to be disciplined by that person in his or her absence. I’ve had too many conversations with parents whose adolescent child identifies as transgender, and listened as they torture themselves, using the child’s preferred pronouns and faking a smile, unable to give voice to the grief that expresses disapproval.
We must expect the same social and political outcome with suicide, which we are meant to believe will be transformed by assistance into something other than a moral tragedy. Like the affirmation of transgender identity, to give social approval to assisted suicide is to allow the dead to manage the living, dictating how the living speak and think about suicide. Assisted suicide is the preferred pronouns of nihilism.
What sort of right is the right to assisted suicide? Like earlier movements for recognition, it offers itself as a matter of civil and human rights, of choice and human dignity. The truth is otherwise. Its advocates say they wish to die with dignity, and then they ask to be euthanized like pets. It is a feature of human dignity to be able to face enormous suffering. The rights emerging from the sexual revolution require the non-recognition of the meaning of the human body. Likewise, the “right” to assisted suicide can only be the right not to be recognized as a human being.
When black Americans were struggling for civil and human rights—for the recognition of their humanity— they arrived at the profound conviction that it was dignified to risk death in that struggle. Assisted suicide represents a perverse inversion: a renunciation of dignity, the demand that one’s humanity go unrecognized. A society that honors that demand will not, in the end, recognize the humanity of anyone.
