English Novelist Proposes Euthanasia Booths for the Old

“The novelist Martin Amis has called for euthanasia booths on street corners, where elderly people can end their lives with “a martini and a medal.” “How is society going to support this silver tsunami?” he asked in an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine. “There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops.”

The sixty-two-year-old Amis may have been deliberately causing a sensation in an effort to call attention to his latest book, but the attitude his remarks express is not unique to the novelist. More blatantly than in the recent past, we are confronted with numerous suggestions that the lives of the disabled and elderly are not worthy to be lived. Along with this, we hear numerous expressions of the attitude that the ideas of the elderly are not worthy of being expressed.

Disagree with someone considerably older than oneself? Don’t bother seeking to counter his arguments. All you have to do is suggest that his ideas are the product of senility. Or, more subtly, you can resort to chronological snobbery and suggest that his ideas belong in the trash-can of discarded ideology.

Such concepts are not new, but their recent resurgence suggests more than one peril. Besides the obvious one that pressure may be put on the old to end their lives, there are dangers to society in general: Not only do such attitudes lead to a lack of compassion in society, but writing off the ideas of the past as not worthy of examination may prevent us from benefiting from the collective experience of those who have come on the scene before us.

There is a lesson or two here for teachers, for those planning curriculum, and for parents who entrust their children to the schools. Education can lead the young to value the lives of the elderly and to esteem the wisdom of the past. Or it can lead them to take a cavalier attitude towards those lives (and the lives of the disabled or disadvantaged) and towards the collective experience of the past. The result of those negative attitudes can be the repetition of the mistakes of past history, justifying the unfortunate saying that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

E.S.H., January 30, 2010
(This essay has previously been published as an editorial on the

British Columbia Parents and Teachers for Life site

.)