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THE
DESIRE FOR ETERNAL LIFE: SCIENTIFIC VERSUS RELIGIOUS VISIONS (To view the video of this event online, click here.) Few problems have vexed the human spirit over the centuries as those of aging and death. Why are we afflicted with them? Are they forever part of our fate? Is there any way out? Yet hope has never been lost that there might be a way of transcending those seemingly final milestones. While not everyone longs to pass beyond bodily limits, it is for many people a deeply rooted desire. It can be construed most narrowly as a fear of death, but more richly as a longing for a different vision of life’s possibilities—a life that does not end, that remains engaging and fulfilling, and that unites us once and forever with those we love, whether divine or human. As William James, a previous Ingersoll lecturer, put it: "The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us. … We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good that flies beyond the good of nature." Historically, there have been three routes taken to explore that possibility: the philosophical examination of the idea of immortality; various religious beliefs and speculations on an eternal life; and, most recently, a reinvigorated scientific dream of overcoming aging and death. I will not rehearse the long philosophical debate on immortality. My own sense is that the philosophical arguments in favor of immortality have not carried the day. Nor has there been of late any lively intellectual interest in the topic. At least one distinguished commentator, the late philosopher Hans Jonas, surely sympathetic to religion, judged that "the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality." Yet public opinion surveys show that there is a widespread belief in immortality among the American public. And even as Jonas was writing those words, in the mid-1960s, the genetic revolution was gaining momentum. One persistent dream is that of a genetic modification of aging, at the least to take the sting out of it by improving its quality, and more boldly by radically increasing life expectancy, and perhaps even to achieve immortality. If the modern temper is not congenial to the idea of immortality as a philosophical concept, many scientists and their enthusiastic lay followers—usually indifferent to the philosophical discussions—have become excited about the opening of a new combat against aging and death. My aim here is to compare various scientific visions of life extension, encompassing possible immortality, with the Christian vision of life eternal and the resurrection of the body. I could have chosen different religious traditions, but in the Christian tradition there are some well articulated depictions about what life eternal might look like. There are also many Jewish thinkers who believe it to be part of their tradition, and in a form similar to Christian belief. The graveside prayer, the Kaddish, says: "May God’s great name be exalted and sanctified in the world which will be renewed, and where God will revive the dead and raise them to eternal life." The scientific visions, I might note, do not fall into any particular schools of thought; they are much more random and fragmented. I use the language of "vision" because, though sensitive to the clichés that term often evokes, it best captures the nature of the discussion, which is, in both the religious and scientific cases, exceedingly speculative. No one can say for certain what the future world of scientific life extension, if it comes, will be like. It is at best an imaginative extrapolation from our present life. Apart from scriptural clues and theological reflection, no one can say what life eternal with God will be like either. At best in each instance we can find a few hints, but that is all—although the Christian tradition has elaborated its vision over a much longer period. What is each of them after? Why do they want what they want? What are the similarities and the differences between the two visions? What is the attraction of unending life? The subtitle of my lecture is "scientific versus religious visions" because I believe that they are different visions with different individual and social consequences. But there are as well some interesting convergences. One obvious difference, to be pursued further a bit later, is that the secular vision has important implications for the societies of the future—how we will live our lives on this earth and organize our major social institutions, from work, to parenthood, to education, to the Social Security system. The religious visions may or may not affect our present and near-future lives. That will depend upon what we take that vision to entail about our temporary earthly lives and how we relate those lives to a future life under different, transcendent circumstances. The Scientific Vision To be sure, there have always been some scientific visions of a medically transformed human life, going back to Frances Bacon and René Descartes. But few were so hopeful as the French philosophe Condorcet in his 1795 history of human progress. "Would it be absurd then to suppose," he wrote, "that this perfection of the human species might be capable of indefinite progress; that the day will come when death will be only due to extraordinary accidents or to the decay of the vital forces, and that ultimately, the average span between birth and decay will have no assignable value? Certainly man will not become immortal, but will not the interval between the first breath that he draws and the time when in the natural course of events … he expires, increase indefinitely?" Yet there is something different in science since the end of the eighteenth century. The earlier speculations were based on a belief in the unlimited power of science to effect human progress, however that might be brought about. But there were not upon any specific insights into how an indefinitely extended life span might actually be accomplished. Contemporary genetics and cell biology have begun to fill in the necessary details, setting out some plausible road maps to that end. A comparison with the earlier philosophical debate on immortality offers an insight into the importance of the change in perspective. The philosophical debate on immortality trailed off, I believe, for a specific reason. Cartesian dualism, sharply separating mind and body, had been long rejected by the twentieth century and with it the Platonic idea of a soul, or mind, that could exist independently and forever apart from a body. Philosophical proponents of immortality could offer no plausible way of explaining how the decayed body of a dead person could ever be rejoined with that of his mind, lost along with the body, to make again a full person. The new scientific speculations offer a solution to that problem. The body itself will be saved and with it the inextricably joined brain and mind that are the essence of personhood. It is, so to speak, useless to think about saving a separate mind or soul. They can only be saved by arresting or reversing the hitherto natural entropy of the body, seemingly programmed to decline and die, taking with it the mind. For many scientists, and even more for their eager lay followers, it has become realistic to hope to change that program. The way into the new scientific optimism is through research on aging. While many diseases kill people prematurely, the majority of people in developed countries die after the age of 65,with more and more reaching the 80s, 90s, and 100s. If death is ever to be conquered medically, then the royal road to death that of aging bodies and fading minds, must be dealt with. I will not here recount the various theories and experiments being pursued to bring about that end. They include going after the damage to cells done by free radicals, making use of hormone therapy, or caloric restrictions, or vitamin supplements or, most dramatically, healthy gene selection through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or even repairing the entire human genome. The possibilities are broad and tantalizing. They raise the question of whether aging is best understood as a natural permanent stage of life, or whether it is a disease. That question is now being answered not by directly asserting that it is a disease, but by treating it as if it is. This can be done by distinguishing between the process of aging itself, on the one hand, and the reduced biological capacities, the diseases, and the disabilities, that have been the correlates of aging, on the other. If the latter can be radically reduced or eliminated, then one has the functional equivalent of a cure for aging. As one geneticist, Michael R. Rose, has tellingly put it, if we could gain for the elderly the health of those between the age of 10 and 15 in developed countries, most Americans would have a life expectancy of 1,200years, and some would live 2,000 years. A cautionary note is necessary at this point. Few scientists of any serious reputation project a clean cure for aging and its partner, death. They are most likely to talk of a great increase in average life expectancy, of the conquest of the diseases of aging, and of preserving the capacities and vigor of youth. Recall a phrase from the quotation of Condorcet cited above, that of a coming time when "the average span between birth and death will have no assignable value." That is not immortality, but is edging closer to it. I suspect that a similar way of talking helps the more utopian scientists in our day to speculate freely while not looking foolish to their colleagues. There is in any case a fine line between an open quest for immortality and the removal of all the biological obstacles to it. The scientist Michael West, creator of the Advanced Cell Technology Company (now working hard and prominently on stem cell research), is a good example of this phenomenon. Cited earlier in the press as an enthusiast pursuer of research to achieve immortality, he later all but repudiated earlier statements as some kind of misunderstanding but left it unclear just what he was finally after. Hardly any serious medical scientist will talk about achieving life eternal, but they are perfectly comfortable in projecting cures in the future for all of the important lethal diseases. The Human Genome Project, not long ago completed at a cost of $3 billion, was often presented by its promoters as opening the way to discovering the ultimate genetic causes of all disease, thus setting the stage for their cure. The logical trajectory of such visions is tantamount to immortality. If nothing biologically can kill us, then (barring war and social violence) we should be able to live indefinitely. The ambivalence on the part of many scientists about what they ultimately hope for, and the ambiguity of their language about that, is matched by a similar kind of tiptoeing by some seasoned science reporters. One such reporter, Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine, deftly handled the ambiguity recently by quoting in one paragraph a prominent researcher, Leonard Hayflick, that "there is no intervention that has been proven to slow, stop, or reverse aging—period." Then, in the next paragraph Bailey said, "Despite that, researchers are making a lot of progress." The title of his article was "Forever Young: The New Scientific Search for Immortality," and that title did convey the flavor of the article even if Bailey skirted the word "immortality" in the text itself. At the end of the article, he added to the ambiguity by quoting approvingly a demographic researcher, Jay Olshansky, who has said that "we don’t want to make ourselves older longer, we want to make ourselves younger longer." Just how much longer was not specified. There are at least three possible goals for research. One of them, the normalizing of aging, would aim to get everyone up to an average life expectancy of that now enjoyed by Japanese women, that of 85 years. The American average is now 76.9 years and is steadily increasing (with the gap between men and women now diminishing). Another goal, which I think of as the optimalization of aging, would be seek to get everyone to the age of about 120 or so, matching the life span of the Frenchwoman who died a few years ago at 122;and it has become increasingly common already for a some people to make it to105-110. A third goal can be called maximizing life expectancy, aiming for lifespan beyond 150 years and then indefinitely long after that. Perhaps that last possibility might even better be called incremental immortality—Condorcet’s "no assignable value’’—adding more and more years with no envisioned stopping point. That seems to be the utopian goal and one which, as I have suggested, is built into the eschatological trajectory of the quest to subdue aging even if not an explicit aim. In the general context of these three possible aims, it is worth mentioning that some demographers project an average life expectancy of close to 100 within 50 years or so even without any specific effort to achieve that outcome. There is solid evidence that, for at least 160 years, average life expectancy has increased at a rate of three months per year every year. Why is that happening? It is coming about because of improved socioeconomic conditions, the main determinant of population health; higher general standards of living reduce the mortality rate of every age group; and because of technologies to improve the quality of life of the elderly, an indirect effect of which is to increase average life expectancy. Two features of these various scientific speculations, particularly the most utopian, are worth some comment. One of them is the assumption that science will overcome what was long taken to bathe most worrisome possibility of amuck longer life, that of increased disability and dependence. Two decades ago it was common for epidemiologists to posit, with good evidence, the proposition" longer life, worse health." The ideal of what was called a "compression of morbidity," that of a long life in good health followed by a quick death, seemed a fanciful and unlike outcome of medical progress. That pessimism has switched to optimism. More recent evidence has shown that, as average life expectancy has increased, the disabilities traditionally associated with aging have actually decreased. There are simply more healthy older people these days than just a few years ago. As even casual observation reveals, those who live to be 90 or older have, typically, not spent much time in the company of doctors and high technology medicine. Good genes and healthy life style enable those fortunate people to do an end run around the health care system. In short, the long history of cautionary tales about the implications of a radically longer life has now given way to a newly envisioned, upbeat old age. We can put aside the struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels, who had lived for hundreds of years, and "who had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more, which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying." The scientific believer confidently assumes that the commonly expected burdens of aging bodies will be lifted, and that is already happening to some extent. The new cautionary tales center on how life may have to be brought to an end if people lived indefinitely long in good health but just got tired of it all. Would not opposition to euthanasia, for instance, have to be reconsidered if bodies no longer ran down? The other feature of the scientific speculations about greatly extended life spans seems to me even more important. That is a pervasive vagueness about what our lives and our societies might be like if we lived dramatically longer lives, including an eternal life. The rationale for pursuing that kind of goal is not presented as if it was some kind of social necessity, as if we would have better societies if everyone lived much longer, or that it would help solve some pressing social problems. Instead, the most I can make out is the rationale that an extended life span would simply satisfy many private desires: first, hardly anyone wants to die; second, as a basic human good, life is worth extending indefinitely; and, third, it would be remiss of science not to respond to that ancient expression of human hope and desire. Jay Olshansky, responding to worries about the effects of longer lives, has said that the science to bring it about cannot be held back: "It is too alluring. … It’s been the dream of humanity forever. How can we not?" At best, when potential problems are mentioned, they are rarely confronted directly. Just as there is a working assumption that medical progress will deal successfully with the long-standing disabilities associated with aging, there is an analogous assumption that, somehow or other, the social problems occasioned by much longer lives will be solved as well. After all, it might be said, we are not going to jump instantly into an era of radically longer lives. We will have plenty of time to gradually learn how to cope with any problems it might cause. Along the way it is possible, even likely, that whole new realms of unexplored, hitherto inaccessible human experience may open up to us. If a gain of 50 years of life expectancy during the past thousand years ago—and 30 years in the twentieth century alone—has immeasurably improved the quality and security of our lives, why shouldn’t we envision like benefits from much longer lives? As two demographers have written, "Increases in longevity are conducive to improvements in wealth and thus create a virtuous spiral." That kind of uplifting rhetoric manages to neatly bypass one of the most telling worries about immortality, voiced by the philosopher Bernard Williams. Williams speaks of the "profound difficulty of providing any model of an unending, supposedly satisfying, state or activity which would not rightly prove boring to anyone who remained conscious of himself and who has acquired a character, interests, tastes, and impatience in the course of living, already, a finite life." In his 1922 play, "The Makropulos Secret," Karel Capekhas one of his characters, Emilia, now337 years old, say: "No one can love for300 years—it cannot last. And then everything tires one. It tires one to be good, it tires one to be bad. The whole earth tires one. And then you find out there is nothing at all: no sin, no pain, no earth, nothing." As the theologian Carol Zaleski has noted, speaking of a mortality that aims only at keeping the body alive, "To be given everlasting longevity without being remade for eternal life is to live under a curse." That is not an inspiring picture. But don’t worry, the optimists seem to be saying, we can deal with that. Such optimism ignores one fundamental problem, hardly ever alluded to, that of the social, not biological, pathologies that have in the past and in the present ruined so much of life and brought about so much misery and so many deaths. I believe that sickness and biological death represent a lesser evil than those we human beings bring upon ourselves. Is a death from cancer at 80 worse than death at the same age in a concentration camp from murder or deliberate starvation, or is death at age 5 from a genetic disease worse than death from a nuclear bomb? Or is the pain of a broken marriage, or spousal abuse, or child molestation, necessarily less than the pain of arthritis or congestive heart failure? I suggested above that a radical extension of life expectancy would do nothing to solve any of the major problems facing our present world. It promises no solution to the threat of nuclear or biological warfare, to worldwide poverty, to ethnic cleansing, to international hatreds and rivalries, to the agonies possible in our private lives. Without solving those problems, a medically extended life span could simply set the stage for more of the same social miseries. Our bodies and our minds might be in good shape, but our social environment and prospects might be simply terrible—and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and clever means of biological warfare offer no reason for special hope. A cure for cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer’s is not a cure for death from those social causes or a guarantee that life without illness and disease will necessarily be marked by greater happiness. That is not to say that cures for those diseases would be irrelevant for happiness. They would surely help. It is only to say that, if the aim is to radically change live expectancies, then there are many things to be considered other than the health and mortality benefits. In the end, problems of that kind are just ignored by the enthusiasts. The visionary thrust of those hoping to extend life expectancy appears to come down tone simple idea: more time in our lives is sought by almost everyone; science can bring that about; therefore science ought to bring it about. In the face of that kind of an argument, buttressed by an expectation that, problems or not, the research on life extension will go on anyway, those whom Ronald Bailey has called "the mortalists " must especially be taken to task, standing in the way of progress. They include such figures as Francis Fukuyama, Leon R. Kass, and one Daniel Callahan. That debate offers a good transitional way into the theological perspectives on immortality and is worth a closer look.
The Case for Mortality While Kass touches on the most common anxieties about a greatly extended average life expectancy—its potentially dire impact on work patterns, parenthood, the Social Security system, and species renewal, for instance—his main approach is to ask what the value of mortality, of the finitude of life, is for us as persons. In his recent book, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, he offers "four benefits" of mortality: interest and engagement, suggesting that, say, adding 20 years to the human lifespan would not proportionately increase the pleasures of life; seriousness and aspiration, proposing that the knowledge that our life is limited is what leads us to take life seriously and passionately; beauty and love, presenting the idea that it is precisely the fact that they do not endure, for instance, that gives flowers part of their beauty for us, much as the coming and going offspring makes that season all the more meaningful; and, finally, virtue and moral excellence, by which he means the possibility of virtuous and noble deeds that mortality makes possible, including the sacrifice of our own life for a worthy cause, our knowledge of our own finitude "allowing us to rise above attachment to survival." For my part, I find these benefits of uncertain value, suggestive but not wholly persuasive; and, in any event, Kass seems intent more on evoking insights or feelings than in rigorously proving some kind of case for mortality. Most tellingly, he concludes, that "the immortals cannot be noble" and that" immortality is a kind of oblivion—like death itself." At the least, that first conclusion seems to me unproven by his own arguments in favor of mortality. If people were genetically programmed for immortality, for instance—that is, if they were born that way and did not voluntarily choose immortality—then why could they not be prepared to give their life for others? Not every biologically immortal person need succumb to an obsession with survival. Moreover, even if immortality was given to us by a pill taken voluntarily, that possibility need not entail an unwillingness to serve others and to die for them if necessary. But Kass’s more important contention is that "immortality is a kind of oblivion." What does he mean by that cryptic phrase, which I somehow doubt is based on personal experience. "Mortality as such," he writes, "is not our defect nor bodily immortality our goal. Rather, mortality is at most a pointer, a derivative manifestation, or an accompaniment of some deeper deficiency. …The human soul yearns for, longs for, and aspires to some condition, some state, and some goal toward which our earthly activities are directed but which cannot be attained in earthly life. … Man longs not so much for deathlessness as for wholeness, wisdom, goodness, and godliness…" The immortality that medical science would make possible could not satisfy that kind of longing, he says, and that perception is right on target. Kass’s analysis could of course be used to make the case for a union with God, and eternal life in His presence, as the true end of that kind of desire. This is what the longing has traditionally been taken to mean. He does not, however, go in that direction, though he glancingly notes it as a possibility. He says instead that our perpetuation through procreation is a valid way of satisfying our yearning for something more than sheer mortality. "One cannot," he writes, "pursue agelessness for oneself and remain faithful to the spirit and meaning of procreation." Procreation is, then, the most promising positive route to immortality: We pass on to our children and then to their children not only our genes, but also our values and worldviews, and so we live on. There is much that can be said for and against such a belief. But it conflicts with my (parental) idea and experience of parenthood, which has everything to say in favor of the future lives of those children and their happiness, and nothing whatever to do with perpetuating me. Kass’s view strikes me as a fundamentally flawed idea of parenthood, and a wholly anemic kind of immortality (is that all I will get?). Children are their own person, not clones and, despite the genes I pass on (whose value is unclear), I will not live on in my children other than (I hope) as a fond memory and as the originator of a few hardly original ideas and virtues. Even more I cannot hope to live on in my great-great-grandchildren in any meaningful way whatever. Kass, moreover, characterizes the deep longing as something that "cannot be attained in earthly life," which is just where procreation is located. It does not meet his own standard. But those are side squabbles. We mortalists are not all of a kind. I want instead at this point to turn to the religious idea of immortality. Kass is right, I believe, to think that none of the secular versions of immortality, the kind science might give us, can satisfy any deeper yearnings, assuming we have them as part of our human nature. Leaving aside wholly imaginary musing about the new possibilities for human liberation that might accompany infinitely expanded life spans—multiple psychological lives, multiple careers, multiple hobbies, and multiple spouses the essence of the secular and scientific deal is simply more time on this earth, and still more time, and still more time after that, ad infinitum. We will live lives not too different from those we now live and develop over the centuries strategies to deal with any attendant social dislocations. That outcome may not satisfy those longings that Kass points to, and it may have problems not all that readily soluble. But I suppose there is a response to such worries. Is it is not better than the alternative, death, which might have something to be said for it as a way of invigorating he species and helping us make more of our finite life span, but goes on just a bit too long, forever, and I irreversible ways. I am, I confess, a mortalist, in great part because the prospect of an endless life brought about by science that is mainly more of the same is less than attractive. Been there. Done that.
The Religious Alternative
My contention in response to that question is that in the Christian belief in immortality one can find exactly those ingredients lacking in the scientific vision and, at the same time, move us beyond the shortcomings of the mortalist view, which makes it appear that a happy life is one that can only be had by embracing death as a good in itself. Putting entirely to one side the matter of whether the Christian view of life eternal is true or not—about this I pass no judgment here—it is remarkably sensitive to the various objections that can be leveled against the vague scientific vision. At the same time, it is no less sensitive to the desire of human beings not to sicken and die, to be relieved of social strife and injustice, to be forever in the company of their loved ones, to have their deepest yearnings satisfied, and to have an infinitely long life, one that is infinitely and interestingly worth having. Let me say at once that those virtues do not give any added plausibility to the Christian vision in contrast to the scientific vision. A skeptic could say that the scientific view is incomplete and problem-ridden while the Christian vision is just outlandish. But what I find interesting about the Christian version is how over the centuries it has worked out most, and maybe all, of the conceptual pitfalls of an eternal life. At the core of the Christian belief in eternal life is that of the bodily resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ. His resurrection is not only the promise of our resurrection but also a promise that we will, though transformed, still be ourselves in all of our uniqueness, in body and soul. The same Jesus who came back from the dead was the same Jesus who was crucified. Just as the scientific vision has understood that it is the preservation of the body that is the key to the preservation of our personhood —not an abstract, disembodied saving of our soul only (even if we had one)—so also Christian belief has insisted on the necessity of embodiment. In its condemnation of the Cathars, the Second Lateran Council in 1215 required heretics and other dissenters to agree to the proposition that "all rise with their own individual bodies, that is, the bodies they now wear." But just what is the body we now wear? Young, middle-aged, or old? Recall the judgment of Jay Olshansky, quoted above, that the scientific aim is to "make ourselves younger longer." Thomas Aquinas would have agreed with that aim. "But all must rise in the age of Christ," he wrote, "which is that of youth, by reason of the perfection of nature which is found in that age alone. For the age of boyhood has not yet achieved the perfection of nature through increase; and by decrease old age has withdrawn from the perfection." While some might disagree that "boyhood" is old enough as an ideal for our body, few are likely to dispute another feature of eternal life, that of "freedom from noxious passions, internal and external." Nor is St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s twelfth-century description of our body objectionable either. As that fine historian Carolyn Walker Bynum has summed up Bernard’s views in her book The Resurrection of the Body, "…the glorified body ... will possess immortality so it does not become dust, impassibility so that it does not experience suffering or disorder, lightness so it will have none of the downward pull of weight, and beauty so it will be clear and shining, with no spot of shadow or dirtiness." If the Christian vision presents an attractive view of our fate as individuals, it no less insists that our eternal life will be a life with others. As individuals on earth we always live in a close relationship with the rest of humanity; so also it will be in our immortality. Thus not only will we be reunited with our family and friends, but with all other persons. Our eternal life will be individual and collective, but now a collective life marked by peace and joy. No less important, the wholeness that is to be ours will see a restoration of the justice that was lacking in our temporal life. That is the meaning of the lovely phrase that in the final judgment "all of our tears will be wiped away." "For in the end," as the English theologian Nicholas Lash has written, "God heals absolutely, makes all things new." And if the desire for a final justice is part of our human longing, so too is that longing for something more, whatever that might be, that Kass and the Western tradition have long sought. It is a longing never mentioned, I might add, by the generation of aspiring scientists and not at all the same as a desire simply for more time on earth. For the Christian that longing is above all for an eternal life with God, who alone can satisfy that deepest of our needs. "All love," the influential Cardinal Ratzinger has written, "desires eternity; God’s love not only desires it, but effects it and is it." While the details of our eternal life with our glorified body, with each other, and with God are necessarily sketchy attest, it is clear that some thought has been given to Bernard Williams’s boredom issue (even if not so described). The general belief seems to be that an eternal life with God and each other will, of its essence, be attractive and forever satisfying. But just how will that be? My favorite proffered solution to that puzzle comes in a passage from the fourteenth-century French nun and mystic Marguerite of Oingt, who wrote that "the saints will be completely within their Creator as the fish within the sea: They will drink to satiety, without getting tired and without in any way diminishing the water. … [They] will drink and eat the great sweetness of God. And the more they eat, the more their hunger will grow. And this sweetness cannot decrease any more or less than can the water of the sea." Put in somewhat different terms, it might be said that our immortality will consist of infinitely renewed desires, but fresh desires infinitely and differently satisfied. Should you wonder if, in eternal life, you might be bound down to some fixed place, God will give to his friends "an agility [legerata] so great that in an instant they can go wherever they wish …[and] they can enter and depart through closed doors, without any impediment, as Jesus Christ did after the resurrection." St. Marguerite does not tell us just where one might want to go, or just what kind of dwelling with how many doors we might live in. But those are small, probably overlooked, details. St. Marguerite has already given us the answer to Bernard Williams’s problem. I have picked and chosen among a number of theologians and saints over the century to put together this picture of the Christian belief in an afterlife. There have been many disputes, many fanciful tales, and of course a superheated imagination of a life no one has ever experienced on this earth. But it adds up to a much richer, more nuanced picture than anything the scientists and their followers have conjured up. Caroline Walker Bynum’s concluding words in Resurrection of the Body are worth citing: "For however absurd [the resurrection of the body] seems … it is a concept of sublime courage and optimism. It locates redemption there where ultimate horror also resides—in pain, mutilation, death, and decay. … Those who articulated [it] faced without flinching the most negative of all the consequences of embodiment: the fragmentation, slime, and stench of the grave … we may not find their solutions plausible, but it is hard to feel they got the problem wrong." The crux of their "courage and optimism" was to make the body the center of their attention, turning their back on the Greek notion that the soul is the essence of personhood. Not so, the medievals held: it is the body. There, in that belief, is the greatest commonality with the contemporary scientific vision. Even if it entertained the idea of a soul, which it does not, science must of necessity work to reform the body and its wayward behavior, leading us downhill in aging and to death at the bottom of the hill. But if there is a critical confluence in the two visions of our possible future as embodied persons, there is also an enormous difference. Even if we believe the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, it is beyond our power to alter or manipulate the glorified body that will come after our time on earth. That power is in the hands of God alone. That is not the case with the body that science can examine and change. There is something that can be done about that, something that medicine has always done in seeking cures from disease and the relief of suffering—and would now do with aging and death. But as I hope my earlier analysis of the scientific writing on life extension made clear, there is no working picture or vision of what our lives, as individuals or living in common, might actually be like in the world that science might bring about. That is left vague and unexplored, papered over with assurances that there is more than enough time to work through lingering puzzles. That is not good enough. I want to end with some words first for the lay public—that is, words for us to think about—and then some words to the scientific community. I call myself a mortalist because, for the time being and probably much longer, aging and death will remain our fate, put off and ameliorated perhaps but not vanquished. We thus have no serious choice but to accept them, to find what virtues we can in them, and to live our lives in a way that integrates them into our own understanding of our personal life cycle, from the beginning to the end of our lives. Even for those who believe in the Christian possibility of eternal life, death is still a reality and still stings. It is a myth that those who believe in the resurrection of the body are insouciant about death. It is, after all, the end of that which they know firsthand and a parting from those they love, even if temporary. Faith and hope must take over at that point—because only they can bridge the gap. Few believers can fail to be troubled by that gap, even if they believe it will be transcended. Putting those considerations aside, it is not too early to begin thinking together what a life on earth that is much longer than at present ought to be like. Even if aging and death were not deliberate research targets, the demographic trends strongly suggest that the lives of future persons will be much longer on average than they now are, surely long enough to cause serious social disruption if not wisely handled. Even if there were no deliberate life-extending efforts to bring about some dramatic breakthrough that could happen by accident, by the kind of serendipity that the history of medicine has often produced (as with the discovery of penicillin). Like it or not we might then be forced to live with a kind of knowledge and a set of technical skills we might rue, but which could not be eliminated—any more than our knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons can be eliminated. One way or another, then, we had best give thought to the consequences, deliberately pursued or not, of lives much longer than those we now enjoy (if "enjoy" is the right word). For the scientists and their followers who welcome efforts to understand directly the mysteries of aging, and to take up decisively effective arms against them, two considerations need entertaining. One of them is just this: It is irresponsible to continue pushing for a cure to aging without thinking through the likely consequences. It is not enough to believe that any problems will be taken care of in due course. They might indeed, but poorly for lack of serious prior reflection. It is not enough to hold that a good reason for pursuing it is just that many people want it. Many people want lots of things that are not good for them or those around them. Desire alone has never been a good guide to a life worth living. It is not enough to proceed without some picture of the kind of life that future generations would have if the quest for a cure for aging was successful, or more likely came about inadvertently. It is not enough to contend that research should be pursued in the name of scientific freedom and that, in the name of market freedom, people should be able to take it or leave it as they see fit. We should know by now that almost every major technology introduced in the name of expanded personal choice sooner or later is overtaken by cultural patterns and practices that finally shape everyone’s behavior, whittling away almost to nothing the range of the choice. How much choice do we really have about driving automobiles, do women have about using prenatal diagnosis, do we have for ignoring email, the Internet, and television? It can be done, but most of us have neither the energy nor the psychological or economic resources to do with them exactly as we please. The culture closes off our real options. The other consideration follows from the first. If scientists should think through the consequences of their research, where might they find a model worth emulating? I think I have already provided the answer—in the perspective of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. I realize that to suggest that science should turn to religion for guidance is not a notion it will necessarily welcome. For many scientists, religion is seen as an obstacle to doing good science and a constant threat to freedom of inquiry. Have we not tiresomely of late heard about the menace of "religious ayatollahs" in hamstringing embryonic stem-cell research? Nonetheless, in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body many generations of thoughtful and imaginative people have tried to envision what eternal life might be; and, even more to the point, what it ought to be if we are sensibly to desire it. It is not necessary to believe anything they have said about what eternal life will actually be like. It is sufficient that they have tried to go as far with their faith and imagination as they can—and with a sharp eye for the potential pitfalls of what they desire. They have offered a vision that solves the problem of boredom (a peculiarly modern kind of anxiety I suspect); that solves the problem of our life in community with others and overcomes the pathologies of so-called civilized life, which finds us at each other’s throats as often as not; that solves the problem of our body and our personhood, positing a body that is the one we have always known but finally glorified and without its frailties and decay; and that solves the problem of satisfying those infinite desires that nothing now on earth is able to do, full of intangible, so far unfulfilled longing. All in all, it is not a bad model. There are, in any event, no other models with such literal solutions to longstanding puzzles, just as there are no comparable efforts to think things through in the long, long term. The truly intimidating feature of a greatly extended life span, much less earthly immortality, is that just about everything else in human life would have to be changed to make it worthwhile. We would need, in effect, nothing less than a glorified body, one where each and every part and organ functioned perfectly, resistant to any wear and tear. We would no less need an analogous social order, perfect in its own way but that, at a minimum, did not kill us by war and violence or spoil life by meanness and other forms of private misery. We would have to find ways of living with all technologies in a way that kept them from forcing us into ways of life that really give us no choice at all about taking or leaving them. We would, in a word have to become different kind of people, transformed, and glorified people. A longer life would not be the end of our problem with finitude. It could just as well be the beginning of some that could be even worse. I am sure I have failed to do full justice both to the scientific speculations and to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. Much more could be said. My only excuse for not going further is this: I should live so long.
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Copyright 2008 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. |