Give Me Life

Contra Giles Fraser on life extension.

I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life, which if I can save, so: if not, honour comes unlooked for, and there’s an end.

~ Falstaff, 1 Henry IV, Act 5, Scene 3

Strange enough to be writing pro-life polemics two posts on the trot, but whereas last time I was given cause to sing the praises of Christians, Giles Fraser over at the cow website reminds us that death is a consummation that might be wished for devoutly, as well as profanely. Jeff Bezos has funded a start-up researching new technologies to extend lives and reverse ageing. Hooray, says I; a noble use of Mr. Bezos’ extreme wealth in the betterment of mankind. Boo, whines Fraser, let’s just die already.

Fraser’s piece is mostly occupied with an economic argument — one which I cannot imagine for a second he really intended to make. If he himself was convinced, as I am, that people living longer would be a good thing, I can’t see someone as humane as Fraser saying, “Tough, they have to die — we can’t afford the cost of keeping them alive.” In any case, the economic argument doesn’t make any sense. If Bezos was to be successful in discovering a cure for ageing, the economic burden of caring for the old would be lifted. They could take care of themselves, and indeed continue to be useful to their fellow man. And which domain of production and industry would not benefit from having a few old-timers with literally hundreds of years of experience under their belts?

But, despite spending so much time on it, Fraser insists that this economic case is not at the centre of his argument, so I’ll leave it. Rather, he says, we should look to the “metaphysical question” of death — by which he quite clearly means the ethical question of death. He unforgivably repeats the thoughtless cliché: “Death, after all, gives life its purpose.” Eliezer Yudkowsky is good on this:

Such is human nature, that if we were all hit on the head with a baseball bat once a week, philosophers would soon discover many amazing benefits of being hit on the head with a baseball bat: It toughens us, renders us less fearful of lesser pains, makes bat-free days all the sweeter. But if people are not currently being hit with baseball bats, they will not volunteer for it.

I suppose I myself would struggle to articulate “the” purpose of life, but I would say a life is good when it’s good for the person who’s living it; if it’s “a life worth living”, one about which we say, “It’s good that that happened.” When we see a ten-year-old, whether riding a bicycle down a steep hill hollering in fear and joy or lying with their knees above their head utterly absorbed in their new favourite book, it is not a matter of indifference to us that they were born. When we see a thirty-year-old cradling their new-born-child, brow furrowed in near-perplexity at the sting of previously unknown sweetness and love, it is not a matter of indifference to us that they didn’t die at twenty. And, in fact, when we visit a grandparent at eighty for a cup of tea and to hear for the dozenth time the same old stories, they having forgotten that we’ve heard it before, and know that we have brought them joy with our visit, it is not a matter of indifference to us that they didn’t die at seventy. We are thankful that they have life and the gladness of life and, yes, even the pain of life still. It is almost always the case that it’s only when we actually have to face a loved one’s death that we want to say: this is for the best. Why do we want to say it? Because we’re cowards, and the full measure of the tragedy is more than we can take.

What purpose does Fraser find death lends to life? Here’s his answer:

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once asked why it was that the immortal Greek gods would often fall in love with mortal human beings; Calypso with Odysseus, for instance. Her insightful response was that those who can die are capable of things that immortals are not. They are, for example, capable of courage, of risking everything for others on the battlefield in a way that immortals cannot. Indeed, the very possibility of love itself is bound up with the ability to sacrifice oneself for another. A life without the possibility of death becomes some sort of meaningless extension of mere existence — the unbearable lightness of being.

But this is to get things exactly backwards. It is those who welcome death who are incapable of courage; if a ninety-year-old, being ninety, wishes to die, he is no longer capable of giving his life as a sacrifice. Risk and sacrifice belong only to those who still wish to live, and who have hope of it. I do not say that there is nothing worth dying for; I do say that to die for the belief that dying for something is good seems rather circular. If we are to die for something, let it be for the lives and betterment of others — which goods they will enjoy before they die, or not at all.

As to whether “a life without the possibility of death becomes some sort of meaningless extension of mere existence” — well, who is suggesting such a thing? Who is suggesting even that it could be achieved? No one is suggesting that human beings be trapped in life inescapably, nor that they be made invincible (how could they be?); rather, that they be given the option of living longer; that ageing does not first deny them their capacities and then broom them into the grave before they’re ready. And of course life without the good things of life is worthless — but why should we lack these good things because we live longer? Anyone who does not have enough not only of what they want to do before they die, but enough that would certainly be worth doing, to fill two hundred years frankly lacks imagination and vigour. It seems obvious to me, so copious are the enjoyments and sublimities offered by the world, that a thousand years would be the same. After a thousand years — who knows? We’d be older, wiser, more experienced. Maybe we’d say that’s enough. Ask me in 2989. I’m not committing to any more than that now. But if I can’t fill a measly thousand years with the good life, I’m surely a wretch.

Fraser might feel differently. Okay. I’m not going to force him to stick around. But he certainly has no right to stand in the way of those trying to live longer (in normal circumstances we’d call that murder). And while he might wish to rush to his reward, shouldn’t he hope, in all priestly charity, that Bezos, a man of more doubtful religion, is not rushed so quickly to his?

Eleanor: There’s everything in life but hope.

Henry: We’re both alive — and for all I know that’s what hope is.

~ The Lion in Winter

I lost, recently, a grandfather, and while he was a miserable old grouch I can’t imagine what advantage has accrued to him in being dead, or to me, or to society as a whole in lacking him. Ultimately, he was one of ours, and his death has diminished us. I imagine him now, fresh from his first visit to Professor Bezos’ Miracle Rejuvenation clinic, hair beginning to brown, eyes to unrheum, ears once again growing sharp, the voice powerful and commanding, musical again, limbs regaining thickness and strength, his whole frame alive with fresh energy, able to do all the things his infirmity was keeping him from doing, he and his wife also, delivered from the shackles of dementia — the two of them returned after sixty years of marriage to the thrill of young love… Well, I’ll stop there, because it’s prodding an open sore — but no one will convince me it would have been a bad thing.

Yes, I’d like to live much longer. If all life extension researchers achieve is to make it so that the Prousts on the shelf give up their “tick, tock” for a friendly “at your leisure, sir”, they will have greatly improved the human condition. There’s a great deal to do, and a rather brutish, stupid and tatterdemalion wretch (I mean myself) who will take a great deal of improving; “[t]he lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” as Geoffrey Chaucer had it. But it may be that I came too late and the little hope offered by Bezos and Co. is a false lure. Still, I think of my nieces and nephews, and think that while they’d certainly be sorry to see me go (and I believe that will hold true at whatever age I crop it), the thought of them some seventy years hence on their own deathbeds is like barbed wire in my gut. For them, we must begin now, and so I thank Bezos and those other hubristic billionaires who are our best hope of achieving this. For myself I’ll take an extra ten years, twenty, some several centuries — whatever’s on offer. And while I reserve the right to take this back should the millennia prove tedious, as things stand, here’s what I hope:

I hope we never die.