Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I am Andrew McDermott. On this episode, Doctor Richard Weichardt reads selections from his new book, Unnatural Medicine's descent from healing to killing.
Doctor Weickard is emeritus professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He is author of from Darwin to Hitler, Hitler's ethic, Hitler's religion, and the death of humanity. In unnatural death, Doctor Weickard gives us a wide ranging history of euthanasia and assisted suicide. He takes us from the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans to the contemporary scene where the urge to help people kill themselves has intensified, even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death.
How did we reach this place? Unnatural death answers this question by tracing a complex and fascinating history of ideas, attitudes, and legal wranglings stretching from socrates to Peter singer and beyond.
Along the way, Weickardt shows diverse thinkers wrestling with the tension between the unalienable preciousness of human life and the longing to escape suffering and despair.
As the author shows, the judeo christian tradition encouraged a culture of life, but the secular enlightenment and darwinian materialism have tugged us in a different direction.
In the books final pages, Weickardt considers where these currents are pulling us and what can be done to reverse course.
Before we get to Doctor Weichardts reading, let me share just a couple of the endorsements the book has received already. Michael Agnor, professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University, euthanasia and assisted suicide are gaining respectability with appalling speed, and Richard Weickart's superb new book is a vitally important reply to the organized disposal of unwanted people as state sanctioned killing of the sick and the handicapped, and even the merely troubled becomes more and more acceptable in previously civilized nations such as Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. Weickard shines a light on this methodical obsession with ending the lives of vulnerable people. Howard Glixman, hospice physician and co author of the recent book your Design Body, says the culture of death wrongly interprets the term compassion to mean to get rid of, rather than its true meaning to suffer with in unnatural death. Doctor Richard Weickart uses his formidable skills of historical analysis to show that when it comes to euthanasia and assisted suicide, the proponents of materialism, secularism, and Darwinism should not be allowed to twist and co opt the idea of dying with dignity. Ideas have consequences. If you want to know how we got here and what we must do to correct the situation. I strongly recommend you read this book.
Wesley J. Smith is chairman of Discovery Institute's center on Human Exceptionalism. Hes also host of the Humanize podcast and author of the award winning Culture of the Age of Do Harm medicine. Smith writes, the modern euthanasia movement claims to be based on respect for autonomy and compassion. But Weichardt effectively demonstrates that from its genesis in the pernicious eugenics movement, assisted suicide and euthanasia theory in practice are rooted in a deep and disturbing disdain for human equality.
Now lets listen to Richard Weichardt read from his book unnatural death hell. Start with a portion from the books introduction, which sets the stage and defines some key terms used in the book. Weickart will conclude with an excerpt from chapter three, euthanasia meets eugenics, where he gets into the influence of darwinism on eugenics ideology and how it shaped attitudes toward euthanasia and assisted suicide in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: When 17 year old Johnny Erickson Tada tragically broke her neck in a 1967 diving accident, she was understandably devastated by the shocking news that she would be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of her life. During the long months she lay in the hospital and then in a rehabilitation center, she contemplated suicide and even pleaded with a friend to help her commit suicide. If assisted suicide had been a legal option for her, as it is today in Canada, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, for those suffering from incurable conditions, it seems likely she would have ended her life.
Now, 57 years later, Johnny rejoices that she is still alive and able to help others. Certainly, she has faced many challenges and difficulties in her life, but she still insists that she has had a life filled with joy, meaning, and purpose. Indeed, it is astonishing to learn of her numerous achievements. For many years, she has devoted her life to improving the lives of people with disabilities. In 1988, she was appointed to serve on the National Council of Disability, which reviewed legislation and government regulations that affect people with disabilities.
She and her colleagues on the council drafted the Americans with Disabilities act, one of the most important pieces of us legislation to improve the lives of people with disabilities.
She also founded Johnny and Friends, an organization which sponsors retreats for children with disabilities and their families, distributes wheelchairs for free in impoverished countries, and sets up centers in poor areas to help people with disabilities access health care. She's inspired millions of people through a biography and a film about her life. Through her radio program and through her speaking engagements. She also has recorded music and completed holding a brush between her teeth. Many lovely paintings. What a loss, both to herself and to the world, if she had killed herself in the depths of her despair right after her injury.
Johnny addressed the problem of assisted suicide in her 1992 book, when is it right to die? Suicide euthanasia suffering mercy in this work, she vociferously rejected suicide, assisted or otherwise. She expressed thankfulness that assisted suicide was not legal when she was a depressed teenager laid up in the hospital.
The love and care of other people often rescued her, she said, from the temptation to end her life.
When a new edition of her book was released in 2018, Johnny noted in the preface that the situation had grown worse in the intervening 26 now it is no longer a manner of merely supporting a person who has decided that his or her life is not worth living, she writes. No, we are witnesses to more instances where the right to die has been given to a person with no say in the matter.
Some people, so the argument goes, are so disabled that they can't decide for themselves whether to live or die. In such cases, according to the euthanasia movement, a properly merciful society would help such individuals to end their suffering, which would simultaneously relieve loved ones and medical staff of the burden of caring for the disabled individual, freeing them from their energies to better use elsewhere, as Johnny notes, this is not the same thing as assisted suicide. For clarity's sake, here are some generally accepted definitions.
Assisted suicide a physician or other person provides the means for the patient to kill himself.
Voluntary euthanasia the patient asks to be killed, and someone else kills him.
Nonvoluntary the patient is incompetent, unconscious, or otherwise unable to consent, and someone else kills him.
Involuntary euthanasia the patient is capable of giving or refusing consent but is not asked, or the patient is killed against his will.
Passive euthanasia a physician or other person withholds or withdraws life saving measures from someone with the intent of causing death. A refusal to act causes death. Note the problematic broadness of this definition. Not all situations where life prolonging measures are withheld or withdrawn constitute euthanasia in medical settings. Most are not.
When I use the term euthanasia in these pages, I'm referring to active forms of euthanasia. Unless otherwise noted, until the past few decades, assisted suicide and euthanasia were illegal almost everywhere in the world. That's largely because the influence of the judeo christian worldview was pervasive. Traditionally, Christianity taught that humans are created in the image of God, thus imbuing humans with great value.
Because of its stress on the value of human life, Christianity rejected not only murder, but also suicide. Assisted suicide and euthanasia to be clear, the terms assisted suicide and euthanasia do not refer to administering painkillers, even if that has the unintended intended effect of hastening death. Christians have consistently defended the view that easing pain is acceptable, even if an unintended side effect is the hastening of the patient's demise.
Assisted suicide and euthanasia refer instead to the intentional ending of a person's life, usually by poisonous pills or a lethal injection.
Over the past few centuries, especially since the 18th century enlightenment, secularization has slowly eroded the judeo christian sanctity of life ethic, as I document painstakingly in my book the death of humanity and the case for life. As intellectuals and opinion leaders jettisoned the christian religion, they also called into question many christian values, including its prohibitions on suicide and euthanasia.
The increased acceptance of suicide in euthanasia led to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland becoming the first three countries in the modern west to legalize various forms of these acts. Some other countries have followed suit, so now euthanasia, or assisted suicide, is legal in Germany, Austria, Spain, and Canada, among other countries. Additionally, Washington, DC, and ten states in the United States, including California, have legalized assisted suicide. However, opposition to assisted suicide is still prevalent enough that in most countries it is still illegal, and many efforts to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia in the US and in other countries fail each year.
How a secular worldview undermines the judeo christian sanctity of life ethic and paves the way for assisted suicide and euthanasia is illustrated in Yuval Noah Harari's best selling book Sapiens, a brief history of humankind.
There Harari explicitly rejects the famous statement from the US Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Harari counters this with what he considers a scientific worldview, arguing, according to the science of biology, people were not created they have evolved, and they certainly did not evolve to be equal. Evolution is based on difference, not equality, he continued. Created equal should therefore be translated into evolved differently, just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a creator who endows them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process devoid of any purpose leading to the birth of individuals. Equally, there is no such thing as rights in biology. Thus far, Harari by denying human equality, human rights, and purpose and meaning in life, Harari opposes the foundation for valuing human life, thus opening the door to acceptance of assisted suicide and euthanasia.
Harari's view is, I believe, fundamentally misguided. Human life does have value, purpose, and meaning. Some may object to my stating this and point out that my christian worldview leads me to this conclusion, a conclusion I am free to hold, while others with a different worldview need not embrace. For those not constrained by Christianity, why not adopt Harari's nihilistic view?
First of all, other religions of the world agree with Christianity that human life has value, purpose, and meaning. Further, even most secularists recognize that human life has intrinsic value. It seems to be an intuition built into almost all of us, as I have shown in my short work made in the image of God. Why human dignity argues for a creator some of the staunchest secularist intellectuals who overtly denied the value of human life were unable to live or speak consistently with that viewpoint. Somehow, deep down, they understood that human life has value and purpose, even if they vigorously denied it because of their worldview.
Another way we can see that the vast majority of us recognize that human life has value is by considering the suicide prevention measures we fund. If human life has no value or purpose, then no suicide is a tragedy, but is rather just another ho hum event without any moral significance. It's just a random rearrangement of chemicals in the cosmos.
We know better, and this should lead us to recognize that all human lives have value. So any suicide, including the forms of assisted suicide, currently being legalized in many places, is tragic.
Finally, history attests that when a culture does not draw a firm line protecting human life, it inevitably progresses to ending lives for all manner of reasons, often against the will of the victims and their families. This should be as troubling to the secular person as to the religious.
Now the next excerpt excerpt three, which is entitled Darwinian Death. One secularizing influence Darwinism played a particularly powerful role in helping erode the judeo christian sanctity of life ethic. Ian Dalbighen highlights this point in his book on euthanasia by stating, the most pivotal turning point in the early history of the euthanasia movement was the coming of Darwinism to America.
Nick Kemp, who has written the best book on the history of the british euthanasia movement, concurs with Dalbigen. He writes, while we should be wary of depicting Darwin as the man responsible for ushering in a secular age, we should be similarly cautious of underestimating the importance of evolutionary thought in relation to the questioning of the sanctity of human life.
Indeed, Dowbiggin and Kemp both portray the pioneers of the euthanasia movement as mostly atheists, agnostics, or something similar, whose ideas were heavily influenced by Darwin's theory of biological evolution.
In Germany, the euthanasia movement arose out of similar secularizing tendencies. One of the leading experts on the euthanasia debates in Germany before World War one, Hans Walther Schmull, explains, by giving up the conception of the divine image of humans under the influence of the darwinian theory, human life became a piece of property, which, in contrast to the idea of a natural right to life, could be weighed against other pieces of property. Not only did most darwinists see humans as just another animal, but many believed that morality had evolved, undermining any objective moral standards, such as judeo christian ethics.
Most darwinists in the late 19th century also embraced human inequality, believing that some races and individuals were more evolved than others and therefore more valuable than others. Many races and individuals they deemed unfit, and they considered death a positive force that would cull these inferior peoples from the human race, leaving the fit to propagate the species.
Most early euthanasia proponents saw killing people with disabilities as just a natural normal part of the darwinian struggle for existence.
Another powerful influence on the early euthanasia movement was eugenics ideology, which emerged first in the 1860s under the leadership of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin.
While reading Darwin's book the Origin of Species, it occurred to Galton that from generation to generation, humans could vary biologically. Moving in what he considered either a positive or a negative direction, he then proposed that we should consciously aim at improving the human species by fostering the reproduction of those with good traits, while restricting the reproduction of those who are allegedly inferior biological specimens. Galton did not suggest killing anyone to improve the species, and not all eugenics proponents agreed with euthanasia as a proper eugenics measure. However, the eugenics movement's tendency to value only some human lives, rather than all human lives, together with its negative attitudes toward people with disabilities, helped spawn attitudes congenial to euthanasia. After all, based on the darwinian vision of nature, most eugenicists saw death as a beneficent force that rids the world of those who are inferior. The eugenics movement gained many adherents in the early 20th century, especially among psychiatrists and physicians, many of whom regarded mental illnesses as hereditary and incurable.
Some of the more radical members of the eugenics movement played leading roles in the euthanasia movement as well.
In the anglo american world, Samuel Williams, an obscure british schoolteacher, fired the opening salvo in the public debate over euthanasia when he published a controversial article in the essay of the Birmingham Speculative Club in 1870.
Though this journal was usually not very widely read, his essay must have touched a nerve, for it generated many responses, both positive and negative, in more influential venues.
Williams essay also appeared as a pamphlet titled Euthanasia, and it sold so well that it went through four editions by 1873.
Williams proposed in his essay that physicians be allowed to administer a lethal dose of medicine to patients with incurable, painful illnesses, but only if the patients desired it. Williams dismissed the traditional christian ideas that all human life has value, but instead maintained that it may well be doubted if life have any sacredness about it apart from the use to be made of it by its possessor. He stressed the importance of understanding the darwinian struggle for existence among humans, and he argued that those who perished due to illness, disability, or old age were merely succumbing to the fate of all weak creatures who had lost out to the hardiest individuals.
Invoking the darwinian struggle for existence as a justification for getting rid of the sick and weak would be a common refrain by euthanasia proponents in the following decades.
One of the most prominent responses to Williams essay came from Lionel Tolemach, who published the Cure for Incurables in 1873. In fortnightly review, an influential publication, Tolemach agreed with Williams. He thought the time had come for people to toss the sanctity of life idea on the ash heap of history. He shared the advice of the ancient roman epicurean poet Lucretius, who encouraged the elderly to welcome death because nature could recycle their material to fashion younger bodies. He also invoked more modern ideas, Tolomak said, and in a somewhat similar spirit, modern science informs us that in an overcrowded population there is a sharp struggle for existence, so that an unhealthy, unhappy, and useless man is in a manner hustling out of being, or at least out of the means of enjoyment, someone who would probably be happier, healthier, and more useful than himself.
Thus Tolomak invoked darwinian biology to defend euthanasia. He also seemed to be shaming anyone who would be selfish enough to continue living when they are no longer useful.
This theme of a person's usefulness continues to surface in today's discussions of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Williams and Tollamach, however, faced many critics. Their ideas were considered extremely radical in the 1870s, and most of the articles published in the ensuing debate rejected their position.
Certainly most of the religious leaders in Europe and the United States rejected their brand of euthanasia. The medical community was not very receptive either, as most still faithfully adhered to the hippocratic oath. In 1873, the famous british anthropologist Edward Tyler joined the debate by attacking Williams position, arguing that killing the elderly was a characteristic of primitive societies. He believed that civilized societies had advanced beyond this practice, and he portrayed euthanasia as a relapse into barbarism.
A couple of decades later, in 1894, the british philosopher Fh Bradley published an essay in the International Journal of Ethics promoting involuntary euthanasia as a new form of punishment for those deemed biologically inferior. Bradley also referred to this punishment as social surgery or moral surgery. Bradley claimed that he derived this new vision of punishment directly from darwinian processes. Since evolution produces improvement through selecting individuals with favorable traits and eliminating those with unfavorable characteristics, Bradley explained, the right and the duty of the organism to suppress its undesirable growths. Is the idea of punishment directly suggested by Darwinism.
He overtly rejected the notion of individual rights, subordinating them to the interests of the community. He stated, assuming here that the welfare of the community is the highest end and law, and assuming that selection among varieties is necessary to that welfare, I intend briefly to apply these ideas to the subject of punishment.
He remonstrated against the christian doctrine of the sacredness of human life and insisted that humans are not equally valuable. Thus, in his view, what he called social amputation, as he called it, should be directed against people with disabilities. Surely, then, the least cruel, the most merciful course of conduct, the best means in our power to diminish suffering, is to regard nothing but the conditions of general advantage of the community, he argued.
Then, he said, and to these conditions darwinism offers a positive doctrine. It teaches, in a word, the necessity of constant selection.
That way consists in the destruction of worse varieties, or at least in the hindrance of such varieties from reproduction.
In closing the essay, Bradley rejected the suggestion that these worse varieties of humans should be confined as in asylums, since it seems wrong to load the community with the useless burden of these lives.
That was his quote. He expressed contempt for those with mental illnesses, remarking, I am disgusted at the inviolable sanctity of the noxious lunatic.
Rather, he proposed that we kill them, but still our remedy would have to utter and to enforce this sentence, you and you are dangerous specimens, you must depart in peace.
Bradley's focus was thus on involuntary euthanasia for those that society deems inferior biologically.
The same year that Williams published his controversial essay in Britain in support of assisted suicide, the darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel became one of the first german intellectuals to seriously propose infanticide for babies with serious disabilities. In the second edition of his book on evolutionary theory, the Natural History of creation, Haeckel did not overtly advocate infanticide, but he did promote it in a backhanded way.
If someone would dare to make the suggestion, according to the example of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill immediately after birth the miserable and infirmity to whom can be prophesied with assurance a sickly life. Instead of preserving them to their own harm and the detriment of the whole community, he remarked, our whole so called humane civilization would erupt in a cry of indignation.
Haeckel, both in this book and many subsequent works, stressed that humans are not equal, and this inegalitarian attitude would become widespread in the eugenics and euthanasia movements.
In his 1904 book, the Wonders of life, Haeckel admitted that his 1870 comments about spartan infanticide were indeed intended to encourage the practice in modern society. To justify this position, he appealed to the theory of evolutionary recapitulation, which claimed that as organisms develop embryologically, they go through the stages of their evolutionary history. Thus, when humans were conceived as single cells, they were equivalent to protozoa, and as they developed further, they would traverse a fish stage, a reptile stage, and so forth. Even a newborn infant, Haeckel thought, was at a lower evolutionary stage than an adult human. Thus, a baby's life is no more valuable than some kind of animal in the infant's evolutionary ancestry.
Haeckel used similar reasoning to devalue the lives of people with mental disabilities.
He argued that people with hereditary mental illnesses had not developed beyond an animalistic stage, so killing them would not be morally problematic.
He condemned the idea that we should always preserve human life, even if it is completely worthless. That's his term, worthless.
He lamented that his society was wasting its resources by keeping thousands of mentally ill people alive. Better, he insisted, to give them a shot of morphine and end their lives. He suggested that the decision for these acts of involuntary euthanasia should rest with a commission of physicians.
In that book, Haeckel also advocated assisted suicide for those with incurable illnesses. He rejected the idea that suicide is self murder, which is the literal translation of the german word. He preferred the terminal self redemption. He pointed out that we kill animals in misery, so he thought we should do the same for humans who want our assistance in ending their lives. He stated, likewise, we have the right or if one will, the duty to prepare an end for the dire sorrow of our fellow human being, if severe illness without hope of improvement makes their existence unbearable, and if they ask us for redemption from evil.
Haeckel thus promoted voluntary euthanasia for those with incurable painful illnesses and involuntary euthanasia for those with hereditary mental illnesses.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: That was Doctor Richard Weichardt reading portions of his new book, Unnatural Medicine's descent from healing to killing. It's available now from Discovery Institute Press. Learn more and order your copy at Discovery Press. That's Discovery Press. And don't miss our interview with Doctor Weichardt unpacking some of the arguments and insight of his book. That's available in video format at the Discovery Science YouTube channel as well as in audio forum wherever you listen to id the future for the id the Future podcast, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Visit us at the idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org dot. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
