The Triumph of Death
...and the need for a coalition of the living.
The slender mechanisms, cold and sparse, are rotating with unchallenged purpose in a stale and despondent wind. Amidst the silence of lifeless efficiency, numb to human endeavour, deaf to protest, they protrude from a barren land strewn with unburied bones. Vegetation is putrefied. A morbid horde of skeletal acolytes corral those who yet breathe into crudely made pens. Too late, the living look up from their music, food, and games, lamenting the deception to which they have been unwitting accomplices. They reach for some weapon with which to defend themselves, but the bells toll. Smoke rises in pockets from here to the horizon. Some threshold must have been crossed.
This is the darkness and the insight of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death (c. 1562). The inevitable machinery. The overpowering indifference of Death. The bewilderment and ill-preparedness of the living. The unintended, the unforeseen, the unimaginable, conjured into existence.
Perhaps only the nightmares of a long-dead theological mind, arrestingly committed to the canvas, can now offer a sufficiently fearful idea of the harm that we do by welcoming and enabling Death, rather than distrusting, mitigating, and resisting it. Many of us seem to have left that fear behind too easily.
It is a popular refrain among atheists that the fear of dying is what keeps believers enthralled to God. Yet, too many of my fellow non-believers are now deferring to Death. We seem to have gone too far in proving our fearlessness. Why else are so many secularists and humanists so keen to lend their voices to the macabre chorus that favours “assisted dying”?
They seem to support state-sanctioned killing for no better reasons than to oppose religion, prove their fearlessness of Death, and advance an ideal of “choice” that they don’t fully understand (since this legislation will undoubtedly result in choice being stripped away from vulnerable people and their families). This is unworthy of the Enlightenment legacy that secularists and humanists rightly seek to uphold.
Returning to first principles reminds us just how misguided and backward the debate has become within secularism and humanism. What on earth, to put it plainly, has state-sanctioned suicide got to do with a. ) the separation of church and state, and b.) the celebration of humanity for its own sake?
The National Secular Society complains that “strong opposition to AD [assisted dying] comes from religious leaders who think AD goes against the will of their gods”. Who cares? It is perfectly possible that religious opponents of so-called “assisted dying” happen to be right in conclusion if not in rationale. In any case, there are perfectly good non-spiritual reasons to question the wisdom of granting the state permission to facilitate the killing of its people. In fact, there are positively secular reasons to do so. Aren’t secularists supposed to be wary of an overbearing state constitutionally wedded to a national church and suffused with religious privilege?
Somewhat more shrewdly, Humanists UK seems to be avoiding explicit mention of religion in its prominent statements about “assisted dying”. The closest allusion on offer appears to be the platitude that “Being able to die, with dignity, in a manner of our choosing should be understood as a fundamental human right.” Presumably, the implication here is that some rights are innately human and, thus, distinct from those rights derived from theology or scripture. A worthy ideal in the abstract. Yet, there is surely some labyrinthine circularity involved in harnessing the apparatus of an organisation predicated upon the essential preciousness of human life in support of a campaign to help the state snuff it out - and some nerve to approach this task from a position of self-proclaimed moral prescience rather than an overabundance of caution and humility! Misplaced sanctimony and unearned righteousness are not reserved only for religious zealots, it turns out.
Emerging from these mental twists and turns, the secularists find themselves supporting a Christian nation in its efforts to allow believers and non-believers alike to die, while the humanists find themselves supporting the destruction of human lives. A twisted mess of half-remembered causes and disoriented allegiances. A scramble for sense in a soulless situation worthy of Bruegel’s deathscape.
If standing alongside religious believers is what it takes to resist this, then so be it. A coalition of the living is needed. Death is brazen enough without our allegiance. Death is deceptive enough without our ignorance. Death is callous enough without our indifference. Death is relentless enough without our acquiescence. Death is capable enough without our assistance.
The debate, of course, is as old as medicine. Euthanasia shares an etymological connection with eugenics. Misleadingly, both are partly derived from the notion of what is “good/well” from ancient Greek.1 Conceptually, these words are rooted in the possibility of benevolence. Yet, they are equally bound by an inescapable propensity towards evil.
One imagines the physicians of antiquity, peers of Hippocrates himself, their brows troubled as they wrestled with the same weights and weaknesses, knowing all the while that, ultimately, they must do no harm, no matter what pain might be accepted or mercy withheld in exchange. This impulse will never go away, but it will always be assailed by the angels of Death.
Laws should not be judged on their best intentions, but on their unintended, unforeseen, and unimaginable outcomes. Throughout history, there have always been people - religious and non-religious - willing to muster the creative thinking and moral fortitude necessary to resist the perverse allure of Death. I fear we have yet to do the same.
Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Eu-, comb. form, Etymology. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved July 11, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5837265774.