A cura di @Apollyon (modificato)

Un editoriale del New York Times fa alcune considerazioni sulle politiche relative all’eutanasia in Europa, a partire dal caso Pothoven:

The initial narrative was indeed bad reporting. However, contrary to the tone of some of the correctives, the underlying facts remain shocking even after the correction. It remains shocking that a young woman’s parents and doctors would give up on treating her at seventeen and let her kill herself. And it remains shocking that Western nations are normalizing euthanasia for mental illness among otherwise healthy adults.

Partendo da questa vicenda, che secondo Ross Douthat passa relativamente sotto silenzio in quanto svoltasi “secondo le procedure del liberalismo”, l’autore pone il problema di come frange sempre più ampie, sia a sinistra che a destra, inizino a mettere in questione il regime liberale tout court:

On right and left, it has become easier to imagine ways the liberal order might deserve to fall, because of evils generated from within itself.

On the right, that imagining extrapolates from examples like the Low Countries’ euthanizers toward a future society that remains formally liberal but resembles Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” — dominated by virtual reality and eugenics and mood-stabilizing drugs, post-familial and post-religious and functionally post-human. Would such a society deserve the political loyalty of (let us say) a traditional Christian or Muslim, just because it still affords them some First Amendment protections? It is reasonable to say that it might not.

On the left that imagining takes the form of a dire ecological extrapolation — a fear that climate catastrophe isn’t inevitable despite liberalism but because of it, that the combination of governments with limited powers, publics with limited knowledge and corporations with capitalist incentives might be responsible for civilizational disaster.

 

 

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