The Economist recently published an article suggesting that living to 100 could become the norm, and living to 120 a realistic possibility. Once scientists crack how to control complex biological processes linked with ageing, who knows where it will end?
A very long life without the problems associated with ageing is the goal. But is it reasonable to want to extend your life by so much? Investors in Silicon Valley think so. I’m sceptical.
I’m a sucker for newspaper interviews with centenarians in which they reveal their secrets about how to live well into very old age. But I shouldn’t be.
The advice, though sincere, usually falls foul of the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this therefore because of this”). This is the mistaken belief that because one thing follows another it must be the effect of what preceded it. It might or might not be.
In this case, eating yoghurt, drinking a glass of wine every day, practising ballroom dancing, or having a long and happy marriage all get cited. But whether they contributed to healthy longevity or not needs further scientific investigation, not just anecdotal evidence. Most centenarians neglect to mention the crucial prerequisite for a long life: the right genes.
The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno confessed to a strong desire for personal immortality. Not the desire to be remembered as someone who did significant things, but the desire for actual immortality, never ceasing to exist.
For Unamuno, if we don’t have immortality, everything human is brought into question. Bernard Williams, a British philosopher who died 20 years ago at the age of 73, took a rather different line. In a famous essay on the tedium of immortality, he argued that it is the fact that we will die and cease to exist that gives meaning to our lives, and that even a very long life, let alone an immortal one, would probably get unbearably boring.
Unamuno, in contrast, had a very deep fear of his own annihilation. It wasn’t suffering that worried him, but non-existence:
“I don’t want to die – no, I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.”
Even the horrific images of hell he was shown as a child were less frightening to him than the thought of becoming nothing.
They didn’t work for Unamuno, but many centuries previously Epicurus had presented arguments designed to eliminate just this sort of fear. Lucretius repeated them in his poem On the Nature of Things.
Most people worrying about their future non-existence imagine the situation as if they’d be present seeing their own absence. But, of course, that’s not possible. They won’t be there. Nothing to be concerned about then. Also, we don’t care about all the time we didn’t exist prior to our births, why care so much about all the time after our deaths when we could have existed but won’t? That asymmetry should jolt us out of fear for our future eternity of non-existence. Allegedly.
But even if we’re not afraid of future non-existence, isn’t it reasonable to want to keep existing for as long as possible?
Bernard Williams used the plot of a Janáček opera The Makropulos Case to bring out why he thought that too many years of life could and almost certainly would be bad for the individual.
In Janáček’s story, Elina Makropulos has been given an elixir of life. At the time the opera takes place she is 342. Her life has become, in Williams’ words, “a state of boredom, indifference and coldness”. Everything has become joyless.
She refuses to keep taking the elixir and dies. A young woman then deliberately destroys the formula so no one else will experience what Elina went through.
Elina Makropulos has been 42 for 300 years and just about everything that could happen to a particular 42-year-old woman has happened to her. She was intensely bored by her life because it was all just more of the same.
Williams implies that this is likely to be the fate of anyone who keeps living on and on, and that it’s fortunate that we die.
Yet there are still many Unamunos among us craving immortality, no matter how boring or painful that would be.
