Roundup: Euthanasia, Stiff-upper-lips, and Feminism

–American journalist Roger Kimball, writing in The Spectator, offers his views on certain aspects of legislation proposed by the new Labour Government:

…What if you are old, sick or just plain inconvenient? Starmer’s government has a plan for you, too. It’s called euthanasia, sometimes known as mercy killing, but what unsophisticated rubes like me would call state-sanctioned murder. Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted by 330 to 275 to support the assisted dying bill. The idea was outlined in by Evelyn Waugh in his brief novel Love Among the Ruins. “In the New Britain which we are Building,” one of Waugh’s characters says, “there are no criminals. There are only victims of inadequate social services.”

Waugh’s protagonist is Miles Plastic, a sort of porter at one of the scores of euthanasia centers dotting the country. Although not part of the original 1948 health service, Waugh explains, such facilities had by degrees become “key” departments, “designed to attract votes from the aged and mortally sick. Under the Bevan-Eden Coalition the Service came into general use and won instant popularity. The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children.” Of course, Waugh was a satirist. Children would never be eligible for this “service.” But how about the Canadian judge that this year cleared the way for a twenty-seven-year-old woman to end her life with the help of her doctors? Perhaps this was the sort of thing that Nigel Farage had in mind when he wrote that “I voted against the assisted dying bill, not out of a lack of compassion but because I fear that the law will widen in scope. If that happens, the right to die may become the obligation to die.” Welfare and palliative care are so expensive. A pill or injection, though, is quick, painless — and cheap.

It is that sort of thought that prompted one wise academic to observe, “Assisted suicide bills are always sold to the public as increasing autonomy and preserving dignity when we all know they do the opposite: they prey on the weakest and most vulnerable among us, precisely by denying their inviolable dignity and seeing them as better off dead”…

The full article is available here.

–Blogger Tyler Cowen has posted a transcript and recording of his recent  podcast interview with Waugh biographer Paula Byrne. Here’s an excerpt:

This was one of the most fun — and funny — CWTs of all time.  But those parts are best experienced in context, so I’ll give you an excerpt of something else:

…COWEN: Your book on Evelyn Waugh, the phrase pops up, and I quote, “naturally fastidious.” Why can it be said that so many British people are naturally fastidious?

BYRNE: Your questions are so crazy. I love it. Did I say that? [laughs]

COWEN: I think Evelyn Waugh said it, not you. It’s in the book.

BYRNE: Give me the context of that.

COWEN: Oh, I’d have to go back and look. It’s just in my memory.

BYRNE: That’s really funny. It’s a great phrase.

COWEN: We can evaluate the claim on its own terms, right?

BYRNE: Yes, we can.

COWEN: I’m not sure they are anymore. It seems maybe they once were, but the stiff-upper-lip tradition seems weaker with time.

BYRNE: The stiff upper lip. Yes, I think Evelyn Waugh would be appalled with the way England has gone. Naturally fastidious, yes, it’s different to reticent, isn’t it? Fastidious — hard to please, it means, doesn’t it? Naturally hard to please. I think that’s quite true, certainly of Evelyn Waugh because he was naturally fastidious. That literally sums him up in a phrase.

COWEN: If I go to Britain as an American, I very much have the feeling that people derive status from having negative opinions more than positive. That’s quite different from this country. Would you agree with that?…

The recording and transcript of the interview (which also includes discussions of other authors such as Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf) are available at this link.

–MIT Press has published a book by Amanda K Greene entitled Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo. Here’s a description from the press release:

A novel exploration of popular photographic media cultures in 1930s Europe through a feminist lens—and how visual social media changes what it means to be human both then and now.

Glitchy Vision takes a feminist approach to media history to examine how photographic social media cultures change human bodies and the experience of being human. To illuminate these glitches, Greene  focuses on the inevitable distortions that arise from looking at the past through the lens of the present. Treating these distortions as tools as opposed to obstacles, Greene uncovers new ways of viewing social media cultures of the past, while also revealing parallels between historical contexts and our contemporary digital media environment.

Greene uses three “born-digital keywords”—real time, algorithmic filters, and sousveillance—to examine photographic media environments in and around 1930s Europe. Each chapter of the book places one of the keywords in dialogue with an unconventional archive of popular “feminized” cultural artifacts and technological innovations from this historical moment that have been overlooked as critical resources for media studies: Evelyn Waugh’s bestselling novel Vile Bodies (1930) and photographic reproductions for the tabloid press; Lee Miller’s war photography for British Vogue and glamourous photo-retouching techniques; and the Mass-Observation Movement’s surrealist anthropology.

Glitchy Vision provides new strategies for reading history that show how small shifts in the circuits that connect bodies and media affect what it means to be human both in the past and today.

Chapter 2 is entitled “Real Time: Vile Bodies, Tabloids, Melancholia.” A link to a PDF copy is available in the release but a subscription may be required.

–Several publications are posting their Best Books of 2024. Among those posted in the Catholic World Report is this of interest from British academic Andrew E Clark: “Holly Ordway’s Tolkien’s Faith and Barbara Cooke’s Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford belong on the shelves of anyone who loves these two British Catholic masters.”

–A discussion of A Handful of Dust (both the film and book) appears on the website BookBarmy.com. Here’s an excerpt:

…Seldom do I watch a film before I’ve read the book, but in this case I found both equally riveting. The film is well acted and beautifully filmed. It follows the novel fairly closely but it was a sad and desperate story

The book is deeper, with a more satirical (and often funny) critique of the social classes in Britain during that time period. Mr. Waugh seems to both criticize and admire English aristocrats, and he is especially fascinated with their homes and architecture — not to mention the Catholic church. This makes for a seductive combination, which left me feeling I had inhabited the society described.

Where the book fell a little flat, was the characters didn’t come to life as well as in the film. Or, perhaps I just couldn’t help visualizing the actors in the film. The book does do a wonderful job of mixing both the tragedy and comedy. The characters are so hapless and awful but with Mr. Waugh’s brilliant writing and descriptions you can’t stop reading. (It was also interesting to read the alternative ending Waugh wrote.)

As I put the book back on my shelf next to my other Evelyn Waughs’, I noticed my copy of Brideshead Revisited, and realized I had done the same thing with that novel. First I saw the infamous and beautiful film, and was so transformed by it, I had to immediately read the novel.

The full article can be read here.