Death is inevitable. I have actually known people who have managed to avoid taxes for their whole lives, so don't tell me that taxes are inevitable. To avoid taxes, you must be more clever than the IRS. That is quite difficult. To avoid death, you must be more clever than Nature. That is impossible.
Now look at how we deny death. We pretend it will never happen, we hope it will go away, and when it actually happens, we turn it into a glorification of our own lives. When we are sick and dying, we want nothing more than to survive, at any cost. We will pay the highest price, just to live, and just for the sake of living.
I have a sneaking sense that our future will involve those who have the means demanding to live much longer lives. Those of us without the means will lives much shorter lives. My heart, or my kidneys, or my liver may, after all, help someone much better than me. We all know, of course, that better people deserve longer lives than all of those worse people.
I suspect it will go even beyond all of that. Even now, there are huge advances in medical science. Genetics is the way to go. If I can afford it, I might be able to conquer aging or disease. If I can't afford it, I wasn't made to get it. It will take care of itself, because certain people will have the chance to reproduce, and the rest will whither away. It will be genetic selection at its best, human evolution at its most efficient.
Imagine if I can choose the physical, mental, and emotional characteristics of my future child. It doesn't matter if I have an actual wife, because I can grow this wonderful person in a beaker. It will be all about what I want, and there will be no worry about what is given to me. Marriage is already a product to be sold for conditional gratification. Now children will also be products for gain.
I was once taught by my family that the eugenics of the Third Reich was a great evil. Now watch while we do it again. It will sound quite proper, of course, just like it did back then. It's all good for society as whole, they tell me, and to make an omelet you need to break some eggs. The ends justify the means.
And all of it, absolutely all of it, flies in the face of true humanity. This is not because of some arbitrary social or religious rules, or because of stale tradition, or because of a reverence for the past. It is about what any and every human life means in and of itself.
Once I reduce a human being to how long he may live, or how strong his body may be, how beautiful he looks, or even how clever he is, I have mistaken the purpose of human life. The worth of any man or woman has nothing to do with the gifts they are given. It has everything to do with the choices they make about the gifts that they are given.
Change the gifts, and you will not change human nature. Make men taller, stronger, faster, or brighter. Extend their lives as long as you might like. You have not made them better. Human beings will still be defined by their free judgments and choices, whatever their dispositions may be. Their characters, and never their circumstances, will make them human.
By all means, make us live for hundreds of years. Futurists even speak of thousands, if we can transfer our minds to machines. It will make no difference.
Live for twenty years, or live for twenty thousand years. I am still a creature of reason and choice, and what makes me is never about how much I have. It is what I will do with what I have, for better or for worse. Because man is a rational animal, he isn't just a producer or a consumer. He is a moral animal. His sense of right and wrong defines him, however smart he is, however rich he is, and however long he lives.
Written in 8/1992
IMAGE: Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897)
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