The horrifying death of Terri Schiavo clearly raises the most profound issues about the calamitous decline of western society. Despite the fact that the US is normally ten years or more ahead of Britain in cultural trends, this time America has only now been dragged into the moral swamp in which Britain has been drowning ever since the Law Lords gave permission to starve Tony Bland to death in 1993. Britain's brutal utilitarian contempt for the integrity of human life has been accelerated by the almost complete rout of the Church of England which, instead of upholding the authority of Christian doctrine, has feebly flapped its hands at cultural change and genuflected to the moral relativism which has steadily corroded the values of an entire society. In the US, by contrast, the rude health of the American churches has acted as a bulwark against the most murderous trends of the culture wars. But no longer. Mrs Schiavo was starved and dehydrated to death with much of the country apparently either nodding in approval that she was being 'allowed to die' or excoriating those like President Bush who tried to halt this slide into barbarism as religious fundamentalist nutcases (Andrew Sullivan, with his obsession with 'theocratic' Republicanism, being a notable case in point).

Just like in Britain, therefore, bien-pensant opinion in America has now effectively redefined life itself. If someone is alive and not dying, but nevertheless displays no identifiable cognition, they are now considered to be no longer a living human being. In other words, it is no longer the state of being alive that we recognise as having a primary claim on our human sympathy, but the quality of that life. So vast is our contemporary solipsism and self-regard, so all encompassing is our sanctification of sensation, feeling and self-awareness, that we no longer acknowledge the intrinsic and absolute respect owed to life itself. Thus a person who is not dying is said to be 'allowed to die'; thus a person who is living is deliberately killed, with the language being murdered along with the individual in order to pretend that living is really dying and a live human being is actually a 'vegetable'.

Our western culture has thus been utterly brutalised. The bedrock of our civilisation, the absolute respect we afford each other because all human life is equal, has been destroyed. Those who are aghast at this pre-modern brutishness find themselves vilified as obscurantist throwbacks. The judiciary, one of our erstwhile bulwarks against any descent into tyranny, has turned into the enforcer of a post-modern deconstruction of personhood. As psychiatrist William Anderson writes in the Weekly Standard:

'What is to be learned? (1) Hard cases make bad law, but wrong ideas propelled by formidable legal talent may prevail over decency and common sense. (2) The judiciary, at every level, appears to have assumed an arrogant lack of accountability to legislatures and to elementary concepts of right and wrong. 3) Courts that reject laws as unconstitutional if they mandate undesired results are a growing danger to fundamental principles of popular sovereignty and separation of powers.'

All bets are now off. With our common humanity thus now lethally compromised, the way is open for other categories of human life to be progressively declared deficient or undesirable and therefore expendable. We have entered a new age of barbarism.