elfs | Dear John Derbyshire, May You Get What You Wish For

Dear John,

In your most recent column in National Review, entitled "Three Score and Ten: The Coming Threat of Immortality," you've gone on quite a tear against those still questing for personal immortality.

Like most people, I too, am a bit skeptical about many of the stabs in the dark being taken about immortality, and biological immortality in particular, are going to wind up going nowhere, but that's the nature of research: 99 times out of 100, you find that what you're doing benefits nobody at all. The advantange of research is that once you've done it, nobody ever has to do it again, thus freeing our hands for further investigations. Eventually, a fruitful result will emerge.

But I do take issue with your descriptions of life, and death, and everything in between. You can't imagine that people would want to work for more than 40 years, so the economics don't work for you. Centuries ago, people didn't live past 40 as it was, so the economics of now wouldn't have worked for them. Humanity has adapted, and in the meantime adopted a reasonable work week along the way.

I can't imagine why you have such a dreary idea of retirement. "A few years of gardening, or fishing, or just watching TV... and then we die." Aside from the cartoonish (not to mention somewhat ghoulish) depiction of the aged neither interesting or valued or capable of real contribution to our existence. You make it sound as if only those under thirty ever accomplish anything or challenge the status quo. If that's the case, heck, fire up Carousel and be done with it.

You make the most classic of fallacies in your final arguments, John, and that's where you really dissapoint: You, and many of the bioethecists behind you such as Kass, make a virtue out of necessity. All civilizations, and all apologists for the status quo, do this, mistaking "what is and has always been" for "what is good and right." You've all got Stockholm Syndrome, attached to the Grim Reaper because you cannot imagine what freedom from the violence he brings would be like.

I understand and sympathise. After all, the alternative is to imagine "what is and has always been" as "what is evil and wrong." Well, some of us do just that. The thus-far human condition as ignorant, disease-ridden, ill-fed, ill-clothed, with no access to water and no chance for peace, is evil and wrong. Fortunately, we in the 20th Century have found mitigations and cures for many of these conditions; all we need now is the political will to sweep out the various autocracies that stand between people and access to relief.

And while you cite Poul Anderson and Walt Disney's images of immortality as unappealing, you completely miss out on the current generation of authors, such as Vernor Vinge and Greg Egan, who have a different take on immortality. These authors point out that if we can make humanity immortal, there is no reason that it should live with its other frailties either.

I imagine living in an ordinary human body to the age of 80 would be wearying and anyone inside of such a terrible shell might truly wish for rest, but only because every day is a terrible burden. But we're talking about immortality, John. We're talking about waking up every day rested and rejuvenated and refreshed, as learned and experienced as our years suggest, but as empowered and capable and perhaps hormone-enthralled as any twenty-year-old. We're talking the kind of immortality that translates into nigh-indestructibility. We're talking real, functional, overcome-all-our-silly-limitations immortality.

"The person, the core of myself that knows my own history... will get weary at last. Biochemistry will never be able to do anything about that." This is simply where you're wrong, John. There are people in their twenties who already feel that way, and biochemistry is already doing something about that. There's no difference between their condition and yours, except perhaps that you're unwilling to do something about your own. To each his own. It seems, John, that in your case not only shall the meek inherit the Earth, they shall become it.