Suicide pods and the trivialization of death
UnHerd reported this week on a voluntary suicide using a Sarco pod, a 3D-printed personal gas chamber designed to take the life of its owner via nitrogen. The arrival of such a thing, both in terms of its purpose and its design aesthetics, suggests that therapeutic suicide is set to become a routine part of our culture, or at least that it aspires to do so.
This is not a trivial development, for it goes to the heart of the deepest questions of existence. Our modern Promethean aspirations are not merely marked by Frankenstein’s desire to play God in the creation of life. We have taken on the role of God in the bringing of death as well.
When Albert Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus with the claim that “There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” he pointed both to a truism — one must decide to continue living in order to ask any subsequent questions about life — and to the seriousness of both life and death. In so doing, he reflected the cultural default on such issues.
Both were considered of the utmost importance in Western culture, and suicide was thus profoundly significant for how life was understood. Whether it was regarded self-murder, as in the Christian West, or a means of restoring lost honor, as in the code of the Samurai, the act was significant because life was important. That is why Pascal commented that “the last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.” To borrow from Wittgenstein as he mused on the concept of eternity, death is not an event in life. It is powerful, incomprehensible, mysterious and, yes, terrifying. And rightly so, because life is valuable, and any death not only takes away a living person, it also reduces those who are painfully left behind.
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Yet ours is an age where nothing is safe from inevitable trivialization. It is of no real importance whether this is the result of all things being reduced by our consumerist culture to profitable commodities or of our society’s therapeutic values reshaping everything in light of a utilitarian ethic. Death is no exception to this constant downgrade of meaning and significance. And thus our cultural officer class is invested in its transformation from something sacred to something that we conform to our own desires and convenience. Abortion is thus considered a basic human right and something to be proud of. Belief in postpartum infanticide is no longer the monopoly of a few grotesque psychopaths but looks set to move into the political and cultural mainstream. And medically assisted suicide is the latest part of the culture of death. Just as “safe, legal, and rare” became “shout your abortion,” euthanasia, once pushed by advocates as a last resort for those at the end of painful terminal illnesses, is now for anyone who is tired of life. It will doubtless soon be something pushed onto those whose lives have become tiresome to others: the infirm, the senile, and those annoying elderly people who demand our time and resources and simply refuse to die of natural causes.
Death has been turned into a routine thing just as life (of which it is a privation) has been turned into something of no intrinsic value.
The suicide pod is emblematic of much of this. It has the smooth aesthetics of the Apple age. It presents death as an attractive, consumer option. And it plays its part in this transformation of death into just one more lifestyle option. The designer has clearly developed a product that in appearance and ease of use is intended to persuade people that, contra Wittgenstein, death really can be just another event in life, and one carried off with the clean lines and attractive appearance that we have come to associate with a certain postmodern minimalist style.
In the worlds beyond Western materialist consumerism, death has typically been regarded as sacred. It is powerful, mysterious, something over which human beings have no control and before which they have to acknowledge their impotence. And it is sacred, of course, because life too is sacred and mysterious. The beginning and the end of our existence is something over which we have typically had no control and, if truth be told, no real understanding. That is why death usually has ritual religious significance. Contact with a corpse rendered one unclean in ancient Israel and subject to ritual cleansing. Christianity sees death as the last great enemy and resurrection as the central religious hope for human beings. Suicide by pod at a time chosen by the individual and for whatever reason, however trivial, denies the sacred nature of what death represents.
Attitudes to death have not therefore simply been transformed by the commercial dynamics of our therapeutic culture. Those dynamics themselves have a plausibility and attraction here because of what they market: the idea of control. This is evident from the paradoxical opinions that our culture simultaneously has toward death. First, in the world that gave us Sarco pods, it is just one life option among many, and so suicide is justified for increasingly trivial reasons. But second, it is to be avoided at all costs, and so we have the absolute terror of death that characterized the COVID pandemic and drove often incoherent and irrational mitigation policies and the delusional quest for immortality via technology. A desire for control over that last enemy seems to be the common foundation of both.
And so the Sarco pod, as disturbing as it is as an innovation, is on this level really nothing new at all. It speaks of the perennial human need to act as if we are gods and masters of our own destiny. And, strange to tell, it highlights one last paradox: The more control we claim for ourselves over the great matters of existence, the more “godlike” we become, the more we reduce ourselves to nothing. In making our deaths trivial, we make our lives — our selves — trivial too. Our Promethean aspirations have made us small indeed.
Originally published at First Things.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
