mls@dasys1.UUCP (Michael Siemon) (07/11/89)
There are several points I'd like to explore on this issue that William Gardner raised. Some of these emerge from earlier provocative postings; I was at first inclined to dismiss the issue as having no importance, but other participants have caused me to think about it: 1. One response made a point worth dwelling on for a moment: any degree of life-extension would still give us a finite lifespan, as long as we are subject to accidental death or any form of mechanical or biological mal- function. Mathematicians like to point out that any integer you can name is small since it is "only" a finite distance from zero, and most integers are therefore larger. So, even with indefinite lifespans, any nonzero probability of death implies that we all will die, just as any radioactive particles will all eventually decay. If history comes to an end in a final parousia, those who survive till then may escape bodily death, but let us count that event as a transformation of the same magnitude as death for theological purposes. From this standpoint, there would not seem to be any theological importance to life-extension, as such, and this was my initial reaction to the question. 2. Yet our species as presently constituted seems to have a definite span, with an upper limit somewhere around 128 (using a convenient binary round number). The contingencies of point 1 mostly cut us off earlier: for those favored to pass childhood into a healthy adulthood, the biblical threescore and ten is a reasonable figure for life expectancy. And in this span we go through stages that seldom last more than a decade or so -- even if we take "middle aged" as the whole period from 30 years old to 70, there is usually a major phase change in the middle as one's children become adult. I think this succession of short periods characterizes what it means to be human, so that I now view life-extending techniques as posing problems about who and what we are. The thing is, we are defined by our choices: by what we have become and what we have forgone. Each of us *could* have been a different person if we had taken other paths, and we cannot now undo those choices, because we cannot return to the stage at which they were made. If we had before us an indefinite life all in the same stage, our choices have less importance -- there is some sense in which we could then "go back and start over," not to childhood perhaps, but to any adult starting point. This amounts to a way of cancelling, or at least lessening, the moral or spiritual significance of our choices. God seems to have sent us on a pilgrimage, to face many forks in the way, and to have made this a test by making these choices HARD. Indefinite adult life would seem to me to undercut such a view of our relation to God and to life; it seems to be part of the ineradicable human desire to avoid responsibility. 3. Now, I share that desire and would probably jump at the chance to extend my life (assuming health and alertness to the world around me were also to be extended.) Up to a point. If I have the time to do everything I would like to do, I also will have the time to do a thing so often that it turns to ashes and utter weariness of soul. This is a frequent theme of science fiction, of course; it is also one of the principal themes in _Ecclesiastes_ All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. The rich (in opportunity, power, or whatever) often face this "problem" even within our current limited span; life extension for sufferers will not always be looked at as desirable, and it would seem that the same is true for the well off. We seem -- in this America of "heroic" life support measures -- to have forgotten that death can be a blessing. 4. Birth and death are *both* ambivalent, blessing and curse together. The unwanted child comes into this world under a curse that may blight the first decades of life -- and by the choices of these decades continue to curse him for all his days. A child entering the world in love may still be born into a nightmare -- as were the German Jews conceived in hope during the Weimar Republic. The Greeks loved to say that the man is happiest who was never born and second happiest who died young. _Ecclesiastes_ echoes the same sentiment: So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. We in America "pursue happiness" with such frenzy that we sometimes blind ourselves to how miserable life can be, even here. A death is an ending, a completion; it may be untimely and a disaster for the dying or those who survive them. But often the end of a story defines its meaning, limits it or points it in some way. Reading a wonderful story, I may desire that it never end, yet part of the intensity and drive of such a story is just that it *does* move towards its end. The books you cannot put down are those that create an unbearable tension drawing you to the end. And "last things" give meaning to what precedes them. Which is why the cosmos itself must die in universal judgment for it to have the a meaning graspable in poetic language. 5. There is also the question of suicide. May we *make* an end if one is denied us? If extension is periodic and temporary, it seems to be legitimate to forgo it, to say "not this time, thank you" and live out a more or less similar pattern to current old age. But whether or not that is true, we will have made death into yet another *choice*, and if our choice is to endure until accident snuffs out the candle, can we bear living "for ever" with the burden of responsibility for THAT choice and what we make of it? 6. Finally, let me acknowledge the moderator's positive point, that a longer span of life might induce in us a better sense of the ephemeral world and a deeper concentration on the world of the Spirit. This amounts to viewing in hope the time I view above _sub specie Ecclesiastes_ and negatively. 7. Drawing all these points together, I vaguely sense one conclusion: if we do face significant life-extension, our problem will be how to sanctify our time. That is not a new problem, but we have never before operated outside the constraints of the "ages of man" where we have a sort of defined agenda, some common task set us. We will be "free" to face God in ways totally of our own devising; and I suspect we will largely make a mess of it. Our choices, and our responsibilities -- our "answering to God" for these choices and what we make of them -- won't go away. The spiritual task will be to invest these with meaning when the very duration of our lives might trivialize them. -- Michael Siemon Like love we don't know where or why ..!uunet!dasys1!mls Like love we can't compel or fly Like love we often weep Like love we seldom keep.