The Archie Battersbee case and the nationalised conscience

The state decides who does and does not live, and what counts as a person of value.

This week, we saw a further example of the nationalised conscience of the state, and its imposition on the lives of individuals, by the court system’s continued insistence that young Archie Battersbee can have medical support removed against his parent’s wishes.

Quite obviously, it is the imposition of disrespect for natural parental authority and primacy over their children, with the state taking that authority and primacy. This is only going to increase in the months and years to come, such as through the targeting of home schooling, as expected with the Government’s Schools Bill, requiring registration of home-schooling with local authorities. This is supported by the increasingly negative views towards the concept of home-schooling, such as common falsehoods that home-schooled children miss experience socialising with their peers and the like. Home-schooling is one of the very few methods left by which parents can transmit their values to their children unfiltered, not merged with the state conscience that imposes itself increasingly on every facet of society.

Secondly, and relatedly, it is the imposition of the state’s answer to the question of what it means to be alive, and to have value. It seems strange that a state committed to the value of equality, as it so often claims, should reject the idea of the soul. The soul is the perfect equaliser of all human beings, independent of anything one might possess or not possess, their characteristics, their background etc. But alas, in the commitment to secularism and materialism the state abides by, any implication of religion cannot be accepted, nor the notions of individual responsibility they might come with. After all, if there is a soul, then it is one’s own, something even the most powerful of states cannot seize from you and make their own.

Instead, in a desperate search for an alternative answer to this question, arguments increasingly centre on an abstract debate on the concept of ‘personhood’, and what this is supposed to be composed of, be it our ability to have experiences, consciousness etc. While the answers to these questions are unclear and muddled, if they are related in some way to what we possess, then the state can at least influence or use them for its own purposes, by means of a nationalised conscience. It is this imperfect answer that is imposed by the arbiter of this question: the state. The state decides who does and does not live, and what counts as a person of value. And in the example of Archie Battersbee, the consequence of the imposition of these values could prove to be fatal.