Who wants to live forever?
Not me. I suspect most people would say the same. Or maybe not. I don’t know about anyone else but I find it difficult to really grasp the concept of my own death. That is, the universe carrying on without me in it. We humans are, as Descartes knew, indelibly self-centred creatures. Descartes ultimately centred the fact of the universe’s existence on the fact that he thought and existed: Cogito ergo sum.
But to think and exist forever?
Albrecht Durer’s Melancolia beautifully captures the fate of the immortal: to sink into abject despair. Tolkien described his elves’ immortality as similarly a burden: to endure the unending change of the world while remaining changeless. Slowly to forget, and to be forgotten.
Douglas Adams’ character “Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged” described the curse of immortality best:
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55… as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
But, if not forever, I would very much like to live longer. I reckon the lifespan I could comfortably endure is round about 250 years.
After all, consider trying to live alongside a human being of a more distant time, say 500 years ago. If you’re both English speakers, you’d be barely intelligible to one another. Moreover, your mindsets would be almost completely alien.
An Elizabethan still lived in what Carl Sagan dubbed The Demon-Haunted World. Witches were as real and present a threat as terrorism or crime is today. Even your very concepts of time and progress would seem outlandish to people who ‘just knew’ that the Earth abideth forever and things didn’t change. Time was circular, not linear. Sunrise, sunset, it all went on forever, just the same.
A Victorian, on the other hand? It might be thought that attitudes on, say, race and sex, were completely alien. But this is without reckoning with the fact that Shelley and others had been advocating female emancipation for over 50 years, and that Jefferson had declared that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”, over a century ago.
Not only is Jefferson’s English perfectly understandable to any educated modern, his attitudes were not too dissimilar. The only thing that would have mystified and no doubt enraged Jefferson, would be such modern conceits as that men can get pregnant and women have penises. But even those are fringe, extremist ideologies.
So, 250 years would, I reckon, be about the span one could live before the weight of change just got all too much. But there’s another trap to beware of: the fate of Tithonus.
According to Classical mythology, Tithonus, a prince of Troy, is taken as a lover by Eos, goddess of the dawn. Eos begged Zeus to bestow immortality on her lover – but forgot to ask for the simultaneous gift of eternal youth.
So, Tithonus lived on, and on, and on… always growing older, never dying. “Loathsome old age pressed full upon him,” wrote Homer. “And he could not move nor lift his limbs.” Eventually, Eos turned the shrivelled, babbling creature into a cicada, forever chirping and shrilly begging for death.
Medical technology has advanced to the point that people are living healthier lives into their 70s that would once have seemed miraculous. It seems not unreasonable that some combination of genetic medicine, transplant technology and artificial body parts will see even centenarians or older living as well as a fit 60-year-old today.
So, the question becomes: should they?
Many people instinctively answer, no! Their reasons are varied, but generally fall along the lines of it’s unnatural, and it’s immoral. Neither objection really stands up to scrutiny.
If genetic and transplant technology is ‘unnatural’, then so is most modern medicine designed to alleviate the decrepitude of age. Spectacles and hearing aids aren’t ‘natural’, neither are hip and knee replacements. Genetically, we’re ‘programmed’ to reproduce and, after our child-rearing years are over, we’re superfluous.
So, human beings have been thwarting nature since we first decided it wasn’t on to just leave our useless aged out on the hillside for the wolves to devour.
What about the morality arguments? The two strongest are firstly, that it’s wrong for oldies to keep on consuming finite natural resources and secondly, that a so-called ‘genetic divide’ will develop. As in the movie Gattaca, the wealthy will live genetically-enhanced lives as modern supermen, while the less fortunate are left behind.
The resources argument seems plausible enough but falls apart on closer examination. Would generations of healthy oldsters just keep forcing more mouths on to an overburdened world? The evidence is, in fact, quite the contrary.
Total fertility rates – the number of children a woman bears over her lifetime – drop precipitously with increased longevity. When women’s life expectancies increase from 50 to 70 years, the number of children they have is cut by half, to just 2.5 children on average.
When people stop dying like flies, they stop breeding like rabbits.
Of course this will lead to a society of vastly expanded generational families. Where, a century or so ago, three generations would be lucky to co-exist, in advanced societies today, at least four generations being alive at the same time is the norm.
Where’s the problem? People living in multi-generational households testify to their social benefit. More specifically, experimental programs bringing kindergarten children and aged care residents together show immense benefits, both social and health-wise, for each.
Who would dispute the delight that grandparents and grandchildren bring to one another? What wisdom could a younger generation glean from their great-grandparents, and so on? Those who forget the past, as the saying goes, are condemned to repeat it. Imagine, then, the benefit of having living reminders of the past on hand?
Another facet of this argument is that a society of healthy geezers would become sclerotic, holding back the young while the selfish aged cling to the goodies. Those promoting this view might point to the current housing crisis, and generational wealth divide as examples.
These are true enough, but, to be fair, more than a few cashed-up Boomers recognise the issue and want to do something about it. The ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ has become a stepladder for many. Doing away with meddling government housing policies that encourage the elderly to squat in their empty nests rather than downsize would free up much supply.
As for social stagnation, anyone who argues this clearly hasn’t paid attention to contemporary protest movements. Take a look at any ‘progressive’ social cause and what I call the ‘nosey-nannas’ will be prominent. For better or worse, freed of the burden of child-rearing and work, many oldies throw themselves into ‘causes’.
In the world of business, hoary greybeards dominating the boardrooms do nothing to stymie the entrepreneurial young. If anything, it encourages the juniors to creatively think around the fossilised boxes. Bill Gates didn’t wait his turn in the C-suite at IBM; he started Microsoft at 19. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google at age 25. Cut off from the family emerald mine fortune, young Elon Musk dropped out, started up and became the world’s richest man, by endlessly innovating.
Fears of a social divide seem exaggerated too. Sure, many anti-ageing enhancements will at first be available only to the rich. At first. Because, if the history of medicine – not to mention capitalism – has taught us anything, it’s that yesterday’s exclusive benefit for the super-rich is tomorrow’s commonplace. Look merely to the shrinking of international travel costs in just the last half-century or so. Where once, working-class people might have dreamt of a once-in-a-lifetime overseas holiday, many now travel annually.
Certainly, some parents will seek enhancements to benefit their children, but so what? Parents always have and still do. Whether it’s my parents filling the house with books, or earnest modern parents paying for private tuition, people will more or less seek to advance their children much as they always have.
Finally, some ethicists fret over the effect of longevity on morality. Especially monogamy.
The first argument is a curious one, given its obvious corollary: when people lived shorter lives, they must have been more virtuous. Is there any real evidence that people of a few centuries ago, with 40-year lifespans, were paragons of virtue? Should we actively curtail lifespans in order to increase virtuousness?
As for monogamy, well...humans have always cheated. Divorce rates may have increased sharply with the introduction of no-fault divorce in the 60s and 70s. Since then, though, the crude divorce rate has slowly declined.
What has happened though, is that couples are tending to divorce more as they age. Where previously couples divorced most often in their 20s and 30s, now divorce rates are only rising – slightly – among couples aged over 45. At the same time, median marriage ages are rising.
Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, a Catholic conservative, argued that this was nothing more than a natural outcome of longevity. Once couples would marry their sweetheart young, have a family and die in their 40s or 50s. Now, they’re marrying later, and living long enough for marital ennui to take its toll.
Is this such a bad thing? Abbott wondered. Perhaps it’s simply wrong to expect healthy people in their 60s to be entirely monogamous. Certainly, where parental breakup is traumatic for young children, the children of people divorcing in their 50s are adults themselves and much better equipped to deal with such slings and arrows.
All in all, the arguments against “in principle” extending human lives out to centuries or more seem hard to maintain. It should, finally, be borne in mind that the potential to live to 200 or more is not a mandate to do so. Anyone who wishes a more ‘natural’ lifespan is welcome to it. Just stop taking your age pills and let life take its course.
Meanwhile, I for one look forward to telling the kids of 2165 to get their darn hoverboards off my lawn.
