Institutional Longevity

Over on Hacker News, GraffitiTim points out something interesting: “The first civilization started in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE (more or less), which is 7,000 years ago. If you live until age 80, that’s more than 1% of the history of civilization.” So you can expect to live for more than 1% of the life span of human civilization to this date.

Of course, human permanent settlements have existed for at least 9,500 years. Evidence for human cultural activities appears around 75,000 to 80,000 years ago in the archaeological record; our species of hominid appears to have originated around 200,000 years ago. So the “1% of the history of civilization” idea depends intimately on the assumption that civilization is the only interesting thing about humanity.

But it has me thinking about permanence. We are very bad at building institutions that outlive us. A few have lasted for over a millenium — the Catholic church, Japanese royal family, Roman empire, Pharaonic system in Egypt ... probably a handful of banks, businesses, and universities. But I feel reasonably confident in saying that there’s no direct continuity between early Mesopotamian civilization and our contemporary cultures, other than the most abstract idea of a rule of law, hierarchical authority structures, society based on class divisions, and government abstracted from the individual by bureacratic institutions.

Now: what happens if, in the next 50 years, we learn how to control the human aging process so that we can live long, healthy lives? What sort of institutions are required for a society with indefinite prolongation of physical (possibly also mental) youth?

Senescence is a ghastly illness which, even in the absence of secondary ailments (such as coronary heart disease or cancer) amounts to a sentence of death by torture over a 30-50 year period. Interestingly, it doesn’t appear to have one single cause; rather, it’s the emergent consequence of a bunch of metabolic malfunctions that emerge slowly, only after the carrier has passed reproductive age (and presumably passed the faulty genes on down the line to subsequent generations).

I’ll note in passing that control of the bunch of biological malfunctions collectively known as “aging” doesn’t imply immortality; accidents, violence, and suicide suggest that a median life expectancy of around 600 years would emerge, and that presupposes that other processes don’t kill us first. (For example, we have no idea how human cognitive processes would change if life was prolonged beyond the current extreme of around 125 years.)

But consider this: democratic societies are made tolerable by the generational change of political incumbents — even without term limits, sooner or later the old guard bows out, to be replaced by fresh blood. So too are unelected institutions; public intellectuals, tenured professors, and judges all eventually retire from the public sphere.

Some people believe (or appear to believe) that the abolition of ageing would be an unalloyed blight on the human condition; I disagree strongly. However, it’s very clear that our social and political structures aren’t suited to life on a longer time-span.Try to imagine any cultural activity you are indifferent or hostile to but which is unaccountably popular, persisting deathless down the centuries because its supporters are also long-lived.

What is to be done?

Obligatory background reading: Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw.