While the idea of saving lives in general is neither new nor remarkable, the idea of saving the lives of people 100, 110, 120, and even older is often considered to be radical at best. And while there are indeed various technical and practical challenges to achieving effective health care for people who are nearing (or in) the triple-digits, the existence of political challenges is somewhat confounding.
What makes someone’s impending death less of an emergency when they are ninety than when they are nine? If you were told that someone was dying and you didn’t know how old they were, would it even occur to you to ask, with the intent of using their age to decide whether they were worth trying to save or not? Most likely, it wouldn’t. If you can understand that age should not matter as a variable in terms of whether someone’s life ought to be saved, you have grasped the philosophical underpinnings of life extension. Because that’s all life extension advocacy is, really—a recognition of the fact that effective health care must be capable of saving a person’s life in order to earn the “effective” designation, and that older people deserve effective health care as much as younger people do. I am all in favor of keeping the definition of “health” expansive and pluralistically aware so as to avoid the emergence of coercive medical paternalism, but there is no definition of health I can possibly imagine that includes the state in which a person is literally dying*.
Some would (rightfully) point out that there are people right now of all ages who are subject to abuse, coercion, squalid living conditions, and torture—and that that stopping these outrages should be the paramount priority of political activism (and that the idea of life extension suggests something vaguely superfluous). Therefore, it is necessary to examine the idea of where life extension fits into this political equation, if anywhere. Is life extension activism even political at all, or is it something that can be tackled from a more purely practical standpoint? These are questions well worth exploring, particularly in a world where there are so many people still subject to horrors perpetuated by other humans who really ought to know better. Where does life extension, or longevity advocacy, stand in the arena of things that demand our attention?
One thing to acknowledge is that we do not presently have the means to save the lives or preserve the viability of persons 100 and older reliably; this needs to be remedied through research, and part of longevity advocacy is making sure that this research happens (and that it happens soon, so that more lives may be saved). However, we do already have the means to treat our neighbors with more respect, to end torture, and to prevent abuses—there is no great scientific breakthrough that needs to come about in order to make the world a much, much better place than it presently is for many.
This is a hard fact that needs to be reiterated again and again regardless of how much new gee-whiz technology comes down the line: there is a lot we can do to make the world more hospitable to all kinds of people, and for various reasons (many of which are probably political), we are simply not doing enough of it. Perhaps new technologies can help some in terms of making the implementation of political solutions more effective, but the bottom line is still that attitudes (and the ramifications of changing them) are more powerful than most give them credit for.
So, in response to the idea that life “extension” ought to be less of an explicitly political priority than certain other issues, I can tentatively voice agreement—not because I don’t think longevity medicine is as “important” as other things, but because its hurdles are presently more practical than political. In response to my recent analysis of attitudes toward death, Russell Blackford noted:
Death may be non-morally bad, but I don’t see how it can be described as “an outrage”. To me, that suggests a moral judgment, but the fact that we all die isn’t something that anyone brought about deliberately. Moral reactions to something like death are just not appropriate. It’s like saying, “Earthquakes are an outrage” or “attacks by sharks are an outrage” No, they are (in many situations) non-morally bad things, and we have reason to try to avoid them or ameliorate their effects. But it’s not like some god causes any of these things and we can (rationally) blast this being’s actions as “outrageous”.
Here, Blackford is responding to a poll item that included the statement, “Death is an outrage”. And his reasoning is sound; it is true that death (specifically age-related death) does not come as the result of any particular person’s direct, horrific actions. The comparison of age-related death to earthquake or shark-induced death is quite apt from the moral standpoint; all are things that happen for reasons largely outside the realm of human intent. People dying of “old age” is unfortunate (and that is an understatement), but at the same time, you cannot approach age-related death politically the same way you would approach abuse-related death, or poverty-related death. The idea of life extension has really only wandered into the realm of the political because of the need to break down old, outmoded cultural notions of death as justified equalizer or arbiter of final justice (as well as the need for well-funded research)—but in essence, it is about as political as the notion that we ought to cure cancer or AIDS, meaning somewhat political but largely practical.
The difference between longevity advocacy and other kinds of advocacy pertaining to mainly human-sourced atrocities is that if the means to allow people to live well beyond 100 in good health (by their own standards, of course) actually existed, I honestly do not think that there would be many political barriers to disseminating these means. People make a lot of noise about the existential value of death (and particularly age-related death) but I do not see it as likely that they would block their grandmother from undergoing a treatment to boost her immune system or unclog her arteries if such a thing were available.
However, the fact remains that there are unequal power distributions in the world as well as a lot of political and social convolution that do block people from getting needed care. Discrimination, bigotry, and systematic devaluation all still exist (particularly when it comes to poor, minority, and disabled persons), and everyone with half a conscience ought to be outraged at these things. These things, after all, are perpetuated by people and stoppable by people, and we should be making every effort to curb them.
The fact that we are technically capable of stopping many abuses but that many continue go so far as to make excuses for these abuses is symptomatic of the need for intense political action in the areas of those abuses. But there is no reason save time constraints that a person cannot be a longevity advocate and a civil rights advocate simultaneously, and certainly no reason to think that longevity advocacy represents anything more esoteric than the simple quest for effective health care for everyone (irrespective of age) that it actually is. Mainly, I think, for most people, it is simply a matter of getting used to the idea of a very different sort of social demography.
*I know that some would say that everyone alive (and not immortal, which presently includes all of us) is “literally dying”, however, hopefully it is clear that this is not the sort of “dying” I am referring to here. I am talking about the kind of dying you are doing while getting crushed by a bus or overrun by tumors or experiencing cardiac arrest or undergoing systemic organ failure, all of which are obviously different from the mere state of being potentially vulnerable to such things at some point in the indefinite future.
Anne Corwin was an IEET intern 2006-2007, and is an engineer and technoprogressive activist in California. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association, and is active in the longevity movement through the
Methuselah Foundation and in the neurodiversity movement addressing issues along the autism spectrum. Ms. Corwin writes the blog
Existence is Wonderful and produces a related
podcast.
IEET Blog