The Only Problem With Immortality

Most Criticisms of Immortality are really silly but there is one that is valid

The weakest argument against immortality is that life is valuable only because it is brief. By that logic a child that has only lived for a single day has lived a better life than someone who lived for sixty years. After all the shorter one’s life is, the more temporary and therefore more meaningful that life is, apparently. This sort of attitude is quite common in humanistic narratives from anime and JRPGs.

The fictional immortals are usually sharp-witted but leading unhappy and/or meaningless wandering lives detached from the flow of history, cynical and jaded, and usually beset by love-related hang-ups which replace any yearning for greatness, unless of course they are evil immortals. Writers of such characters often appear to observe jaded elderly individuals and project this disillusionment onto immortal characters. The problem with this is that you can’t separate the oft jaded sadness of old folk from the total physical degradation which the body suffers as it ages after middle age.

I suspect that the current enthusiastic uptake of euthanasia for the old is motivated partly by these supposedly humanistic attitudes towards life as something valuable only because it is tragic, or in other words that life has any value only because of death. Of course the actual reason for the practice of euthanasia is that the increasingly ageing population has become a financial burden for the state and for individuals, and these other peripheral reasons are just excuses for why the old should be thrown early into their graves. The muted response to these euthanasia laws aimed at liquidating the old being passed signals that perhaps the people don’t have much of an appetite for life at all let alone an immortal life.

Religious viewpoints have in my opinion being a bit more ambivalent, suggesting that immortality is only something that can be earned through death or enlightenment of some kind. In other words, that any attempt to avoid ageing and biological death are a perversion of the natural order. This is not entirely detached from the attitude that certain pagans and primitivists have that the advent of modern medicine and civilisation has led to too many people living for too long past their purpose. These views in turn are not totally removed from environmentalist and anti-natalist attitudes that human life is just painful and pointless/harmful and should just end right now, or at least it wouldn’t be a great loss if it ended right now.

Now, my own unscientific opinion is that we are a long way off from any kind of biological non-ageing immortality. It isn’t a real issue worth worrying about, except for science fiction and fantasy authors. The billionaires who seek out eternal youth, are both pathetic and comical, but who knows maybe some good health-related tips might come to light through their trial and error, given that they seem so keen to make themselves the test subjects of experimental treatments, so don’t make too much fun of them. However, what’s more important is that our attitude towards this immortality question might affect how we live in the here and now, because if you are in favour of there being an expiry date for human lives, that could lead to some disturbing conclusions. I view the current push for euthanasia in the west in that light. A humanism that has lost any faith in human potential will lead to a loss of faith in one own’s life, as well as that of others, as can be evidenced by certain movements that have long supplanted human-perspectives with those of plants, animals, and even inanimate objects. Even when they are in favour of some humans, it is to the degree that they can identify non-human or anti-human characteristics in them.

More could be said about arguments that others have made against immortality but I think it’s time that I provide my own: namely that, quite frankly, without death there can be no passing of the torch from one generation to the next. Sons will have to live forever under the shadows of their fathers and daughters under that of their mothers.

This trend can already, to an extent, be observed by looking at the static nature of ageing European societies. There is almost no growth, little concern for continuity and even then only in terms of nostalgia for the past, there is no tomorrow (that will belong to anyone (forgive me if that sounds a bit melodramatic)). The rise in ageing might also cause the fall in birth rates (rather than just the other way around as is oft assumed), because the longer the old live, the longer it is that they will hold onto assets and property which they would have otherwise passed down to the next generation. This alone is not an explanation for why the newer generation has found it harder to get started on the path of property ownership, forming a family and generally becoming an adult by having children, but it is not a negligible factor.

The tension between the old and the young too, is made worse by the young being unable to move out from their parents and their dependence and kind tyranny. It is not unheard of in places such as Greece with high youth unemployment that adult children have to live off of their parents’ and grandparents’ pensions.

Of course, this current situation is not exactly analogous to a society of immortals because if people were ageless then that means that they could keep on working indefinitely, without any state pension or benefits, thus resulting in an increase in the assets available for everyone, or at least they could work for long enough that they actually become independent from state spending whereas now the old live off through pensions funded by the state clawing out of the meagre and fleeting savings of the young (whether through taxes, debt or inflation) to fund older peoples’ pensions and medical care (and other “social” policies which may or may not benefit the young).

However even with these differences between the real world and an imaginary immortal society in mind, I wonder if a society of immortals would be a static unchanging society where the previous generations never give way for the new generation. I mean there really wouldn’t be any need for a new generation, so the immortal generation would be last generation. On the other hand, perhaps if physical ageing would be abolished then people’s mind would still remain youthful and plastic to new ways of life, their desires would still be burning rather than burnt out.

Having voiced my major worry regarding immortality, if I were offered to live rather than die, I would still choose to live, whether now or a hundred years from now. Would I accept the choice to live an eternity? Well, first you would need to give me an eternity to decide, because I don’t think it’s possible to know what it’s like to live an eternity without first having lived an eternity.