Staying Alive
Annalee Newitz’s latest Techsploitation column takes on longevity medicine. Although her verdict is ultimately less affirmative than my own, she manages to make the skeptical arguments more pleasantly and amusingly than is usually the case. What is key in her argument for those of us who champion genetic medicine in the hope that it will deliver greater longevity and morphological freedom, is that she shows once again why the technical case for the plausibility of longevity is not enough. We have to explicitly take on political questions that tech-minded longevity triumphalists would sometimes rather not wade into: for example, ensuring that unequal access to longevity treatments doesn’t re-write the already acute crisis of haves and have-nots practically into a kind of permanent speciation – or ensuring that longevity not unduly strain the environmental commons on which we all depend.
Newitz concludes her piece: “Although the idea of taking pills to stay alive an extra 100 years is tempting, the idea of popping one makes me feel profoundly guilty. Life is good, but only if everybody has equal access to it. Maybe someday we'll have solved enough problems in our respective societies that I can suck up the world's resources for an extra 100 years without repercussions. But we're not there yet.”
She is right. Longevity will only represent a good if access to it is shared across human civilization. I think the perspective of a technophilic left should be to insist that the promise of longer lives is a spur to a renewed effort to address problems of global inequality, rather than using the crisis of global poverty to reject or resist the conspicuous goods of longer healthier lives for all. I would like to think that people would behave more rationally and with an eye to the longer-term if longevity medicine promised them that even the distant future was less an abstraction than a world in which they themselves will be living, a world shaped by how responsibly they act here and now. Also, I would hope that a polity that delivered longevity beyond nature’s three score and ten would be one that even silly anti-gu’ment Americans would have the sense to affirm and work to better as citizens.
Newitz concludes her piece: “Although the idea of taking pills to stay alive an extra 100 years is tempting, the idea of popping one makes me feel profoundly guilty. Life is good, but only if everybody has equal access to it. Maybe someday we'll have solved enough problems in our respective societies that I can suck up the world's resources for an extra 100 years without repercussions. But we're not there yet.”
She is right. Longevity will only represent a good if access to it is shared across human civilization. I think the perspective of a technophilic left should be to insist that the promise of longer lives is a spur to a renewed effort to address problems of global inequality, rather than using the crisis of global poverty to reject or resist the conspicuous goods of longer healthier lives for all. I would like to think that people would behave more rationally and with an eye to the longer-term if longevity medicine promised them that even the distant future was less an abstraction than a world in which they themselves will be living, a world shaped by how responsibly they act here and now. Also, I would hope that a polity that delivered longevity beyond nature’s three score and ten would be one that even silly anti-gu’ment Americans would have the sense to affirm and work to better as citizens.
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