In Depth:  Kirsten Birkett

Kirsten Birkett

The founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying has recently written on what he calls a new and different approach in the case for assisted dying. ^[1]

He says: “I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death – that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of how we die – should be central to this conversation.”

Kirsten Birkett

Recently, I started reading three new novels.

One of them I came across on a table in Waterstones, a new historical novel set in early medieval England, a period I’m very interested in. The cover is beautiful and the back cover is full of commendations for this wonderful new work of literature, praising not just its good writing but its insight and depth. Good to look at, something that would impart wisdom. I paid out my valuable money for it.

Kirsten Birkett

"I don’t want a f***ing baby right now."

This was pop singer Lily Allen speaking of her "four or five" abortions in a recent interview – she can’t remember exactly how many; she used to "get pregnant all the time".

Kirsten Birkett

"Peter has always had everything except the things he really wanted".

This is the voice of the fictitious Duchess of Denver, Lord Peter Wimsey’s mother. Peter Wimsey is the lead character of Dorothy L. Sayer’s detective novels and short stories, a young man who grew up in the height of privilege, as an early twentieth-century younger son of an English Duke.

Kirsten Birkett

The media I read has been awash lately in articles that, in various ways, demonstrate the failure of feminism.

At one end, older women are lamenting that their lives, influenced by feminist thought, have led to singleness and childlessness, and they are realising the sadness of this. In the end, a successful career – however much enjoyed – did not make up for the loneliness of being without these basic life relationships.

Kirsten Birkett

Actor Ralph Fiennes has apparently said recently that he attributed Trump’s win in the United States presidential election to having a better story.

It seems he thinks that Make America Great Again (MAGA) was able to capture people’s spirit and imaginations in a way that liberal progressivism wasn’t.

Kirsten Birkett

If you have been at all aware of popular thinking about wealth over the past 20 years or so, you have probably come across the phenomenon of manifesting. Apparently it’s very popular on TikTok at the moment; it was beloved of the New Age teachers long before that.

'To manifest something means to make your dreams, goals, and aspirations a reality by believing you can achieve them' says one popular website. It is based on a so-called 'law of attraction', positing that if you think about something often enough, hard enough and positively enough, you can make it happen by the power of your thought alone. It focuses your 'energy' to affect future events out there in the universe.

Kirsten Birkett

I read recently that farmers, who have made up the majority of the world population for millennia, have all but disappeared from Europe ‘in the blink of an eye’.

Up to the mid twentieth century almost half the working population was involved in food production in European countries – now it has fallen to single percentage figures. It has been replaced by large-scale agribusiness, with vast amounts of land farmed by a small number of landowners. It has resulted in much more food being produced, much more efficiently. It has also been ‘heavily subsidised, economically unjust, and ecologically disastrous, in a climate-threatened economy of shortages, destabilised supply chains, growing economic protectionism, and degradation of soils all over the world’. ^[1]