The President of the French Republic deemed it urgent to rework the Leonetti law relating to the rights of patients and the end of life. A Japanese movie, Map 75 (September 2022), glimpses the drives to which the best intentions in the world can lead
Adopted unanimously in April 2005 by the National Assembly, the law of deputy and doctor Jean Leonetti proscribed “unreasonable obstinacy” of the medical profession and “artificial prolongation of life” of the patient; it authorizes the cessation of a treatment on collegial opinion, if this treatment falls within the “unreasonable obstinacy” ; it imposes respect for the wishes of the patient with regard to the cessation of treatment.
In 2016, the Leonetti-Clayes law marginally modified these provisions so that people at the end of their lives can die as peacefully as possible, and to date, French society has come to terms with these provisions. If they are still poorly applied, this has nothing to do with the law but is a matter of the collapse of the health system, a political issue of another magnitude.
For a progressive fringe of the political class, however, it is important to go much further towards the “right to die” and therefore the authorization given to doctors to administer lethal treatment to whomever so wishes.
Make room for young people
This claim hides the fear of a society crushed by the burden of its old people. The Japanese scenario writer Chie Hayakawa fears that it does not lead by successive stages to the unacknowledged temptation to release resources for the healthy fraction of the population.
It echoes it in a luminous film, all in finesse, softness and emotion, without an ounce of violence. All the characters of Map 75 are pleasant but they do not participate less in a chilling device.
The idea for the film would have started from a news item: the assassination in 2016 of several old people in a retirement home by a serial killer.
In fact, Japan having outstripped all the other countries in the demographic transition, it now has the highest percentage of elderly people in the world (29% over 65) and young working people are deprived of increasing share of the fruits of their labor for the benefit of their elders, hence the despair of some of them.
The government therefore votes “right to euthanasia” for people over 75. A zealous administration is set up to welcome and process applicants. A bonus of 100,000 yen is offered to them so that they treat themselves to a few treats before the big leap (this is less than the monthly salary of a nursing assistant).
The device is proving to be so effective that the Japanese government is soon planning to extend it to those over 65!… He justifies himself by recalling that the measure is part of a national tradition, theubasute (“abandonment of the old”).
This tradition provided the motive for a masterpiece of cinema: The Ballad of Narayama (Shōhei Imamura, Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1983). In the very poor villages of yesteryear, the old, who had reached the age of 70, had to climb the mountain and wait there for death. At the same time, the villagers practiced female infanticide to compensate for the lack of contraception and stabilize their population.
The filmmaker of Map 75 also hints at the big money issues that lie behind the company in charge of euthanizing and cremating the elderly. There is a distant reference to the film Green Sun by Richard Fleischer (1973), which the Arte channel broadcast on Monday October 10 (next broadcast: Wednesday October 19 at 1:35 p.m.). In an overcrowded and suffocating New York, old people are also “guests” to be euthanized gently.
Not enough children!
Nevertheless, our situation and that of present-day Japan have nothing in common with the village of Narayama as with the New York of Green Suneven if the action of this film is supposed to take place in 2022!
– Green Sunnot so far-sighted as that:
Richard Fleischer made his film on the heels of Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book, The P Bomb as Population (1968), which pointed to the threat of an overflow of men, and Meadows Report (1972) who feared that by taking too much of natural resources, we would end up plunging back into misery.
In fact, the birth rate collapsed in all developed countries from 1974. Today, with the exception of black Africa, the human population is below the renewal threshold and will soon decrease. . In Japan as in our countries, we are now faced with the difficulty of replacing the old in the functions essential to the common well-being (industry, agriculture, management, education).
But neither that, nor global warming, nor the depletion of natural resources curb our craving for consumption. We are clearly not ready to do without our Mercedes hybrid SUV, our state-of-the-art Apple iphone, our videos online, our cruises and trips to the antipodes, our cherries from Chile and our roses from Kenya. Much better, thanks to the American GAFA (Google, Amazon, etc.), we have underpaid porters to deliver artefacts from the other side of the world to our homes.
– Death, a matter of big money:
Ancient rural Japan was threatened at all times by famine, hence the need to eliminate mouths deemed useless. This is obviously not the case for Japan Map 75 which bathes in a comfort unequaled in the world and in History. What puts the country in difficulty is less the gain in life expectancy caused by progress in hygiene and medicine than the collapse in births.
The population of Japan has not been renewed since 1974 and has been declining since 2005. With fertility close to one child per woman, the number of births is halved in each generation, approximately every thirty years. This will mechanically result in a quasi-disappearance of the Japanese over the next century. In the meantime, the proportion of veterans is set to increase steadily, so that working people will have to work more and more for the sole benefit of retirees. Under these conditions, it will be increasingly difficult to rectify the situation.
The issues are similar in Europe, even if in some countries like France, the drop in fertility is masked by immigration. This fuels service jobs without addressing the need for skilled jobs.
In other words, in the absence of a resurgence in the birth rate, all modern societies will be tempted by a Map 75 which will relieve the burden on the assets in the short term. We will be able to find generous and progressive motivations for him, with the encouragement of financial capitalism, quick to spot the good deals behind the “beautiful” ideas.
Already in 1981, Jacques Attali, then adviser to President François Mitterrand, had glimpsed this threat in a book of interviews (“The Future of Life”Michel Solomon, Seghers): “In a capitalist society, killing machines, prostheses that will make it possible to eliminate life when it is too unbearable, or economically too expensive, will emerge and become common practice. I therefore think that euthanasia, whether it is a value of freedom or a commodity, will be one of the rules of future society..
André Larane
Published or Updated on: 2022-10-12 11:56:57