An answer made necessary
by a new situation?
The first number tackled the question of aggressive medical treatment and euthanasia, which the Welby case, or better, its shrewd political exploitation, brought to the fore in Italy.
Today, many see many negative and dangerous aspects in the very scientific progress that has enabled us to delay death more and more. Human beings have always been afraid of dying, but now they are afraid of dying badly, or of not being able to die, of being kept alive while sick and in pain, by a medicine incapable of curing, but quite capable of prolonging life without caring about the conditions it imposes on the patient. This is the background against which part of the Italian political scene, (and this is also true of other European countries) is asking for euthanasia. It is as if an answer is required for a new situation–that defined as aggressive medical treatment.
On this pretext, they have tried to dodge around the first of all human rights, the defense of every human life. After birth control–and in some way linked to this from the ideological point of view–an ideology is growing that is aimed at robbing death of its “naturalness,” arguing that science has already transformed it into something artificial.

When and how to die
But this is only part of the story. If we look carefully at the cases of euthanasia under consideration and the praxis in the countries where euthanasia is legal, we see that a “good death,” is being extended not only to the sick who are still alive thanks to “aggressive medical treatment” but also to those who are simply suffering from incurable illnesses, and whose suffering could be consistently reduced by palliative medicine. What is actually happening is that, as its supporters state clearly, euthanasia–though presented as a remedy for extreme cases–is becoming a new “right”–the right to decide when to put an end to one’s own life. The question of aggressive medical treatment–which is certainly a problem, but which could be solved in the ambit of medical ethics and of a clearer and more attentive relationship between the doctor and the patient and/or his family–is brought up only for ulterior motives, i.e., to make it easier to acquire this new “right” in cultural situations in which it is still seen with concern and suspicion.
The request to decide when and how to die is therefore part of that process of personal self-determination that characterizes modern society, and is defended by the dominant culture as the only way to happiness for mankind. In this horizon of self-determination there is no more room for the unforeseen, no space for someone or something different from us that can open the way to new experiences, new spaces for understanding our life. We think we already know everything, that we need nothing more, except to control every aspect of our life, and just as we control birth using contraceptives, we would like to control death with euthanasia.

A life not worth living
Deciding that it is better for a human being to die rather than to live, entails a concept of “a life not worth living” that we hoped we had seen the last of with the defeat of nazism. Considering the costs of long-term therapy and of keeping seriously ill people alive, if this concept is applied to legislation on euthanasia, it risks becoming the most powerful factor of social discrimination. So what we are facing is not simply a technical or juridical question, but a frightening social scenario in which inequality between human beings is founded on what we consider to be the human right par excellence, that of respect for every human life.

The Science and Life Pamphlets
The essays collected in the first pamphlet provide a general picture of our concept of death–how it has changed and why, and of the dangerous aspects of a situation–that of a prolongation of human life unknown to any society before ours–that appears to offer only positive aspects.
These are followed by explanations–highly scientific, but easily understandable to non-experts–of the questions under discussion: what is meant by artificial feeding; how can we define aggressive medical treatment; what are palliative cures; what legislative scenarios will the legalization of euthanasia entail, even in the form of “biological testament.” Alongside these informative articles are reflections on the meaning of the relationship between doctor and patient and on the right to life and to a dignified death.
One topic dealt with, whose importance is being felt more and more, is the relationship between doctor and patient, in recent years more and more restricted to the technical plane. Every sick person, is a case in itself, not a number on a list of statistics.
These are a useful contribution for a better understanding of the questions, outside the logic of the “hopeless cases” so indulged by the media who want to draw the listeners and readers toward more “tolerant” choices, determined by superficial feelings.

* Professor of Contemporary History
at the Università La Sapienza, Rome

“The possession of a life that has no end”: if the human heart is made for this, then everything that happens, even death itself, as the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga observed, is an event within life and necessary for its definition (J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1955). The definition of life must include all the phenomena of which it consists–death is a phenomenon of life, because death happens to someone who is alive. It is paradoxical, but death happens to someone living. So death enters into the definition of life.
Eternity is nothing else than this happiness realized.
If the human heart is made for this, everything that happens is for happiness, and whoever looks at you without desiring your happiness is an enemy, even if it is your mother.
For us–and this is our good fortune, or grace–a man has come who made us unable to think of ourselves and other men as a fleeting nothingness, a fleeting breath or sigh; a man has come who forced us to think that the most dramatic and imposing thing in life is this problem–that everything is made for happiness and yet man finds happiness in nothing. Happiness lies somewhere beyond man’s horizon, but it is necessary–and first of all reasonable; it is reasonable and therefore necessary–for man to travel beyond that horizon. What man is made for is a promise that looms over that horizon, and beyond it; it is something sensed, not seen, as Pascoli would say, in his poem The Blind Man. It is something sensed, not seen! Any affective, social or political relationship that forgets what man is, what every man is, what every child of woman is, any relationship that forgets this is the outcome of the deception that dominates the world of culture today, and were are all sickened by it. No, a lot of people are not sickened by it because they haven’t suffered its first consequences yet. If everything is made for happiness, then this is the substantial and synthetic problem of our life, more than any calculation, more than any construction, more than any invention, more than any increase in life-expectation, and if we deny the mystery of the answer, then we deny nature itself.