Mortality

Upgraded from the Moot, in direct response to a denial of the assertion made in the first sentence.

You are, indeed, absolutely, and most certainly going to die, as will everybody else reading these words.

Genetic and prosthetic techniques will likely increase human longevity for some lucky humans, possibly in quite unprecedented ways, but that is another story.

And in any case I doubt very much that even the luckiest beneficiaries of such technique will acquire sufficient "superlongevity" to feel less keenly the existential dilemma and demand of mortality as such in consequence of these interventions.

(I am leaving to the side of this post the actually interesting questions of budgetary and regulatory priorities distributing the risks, costs, and benefits of emerging medical techniques -- as well as neglected ones -- in ways that are more fair, more democratizing, more emancipatory. I'm focusing here instead, for the moment, on much broader questions, many of which seem to me rather more silly than anything else.)

It is rather flabbergasting that one has to say these things to truly intelligent and earnest people, but when there are techno-immortalists and other Superlative technocentrics among one's readership these things become surreally necessary.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I think that it is an awfully good idea to come to terms with mortality sooner rather than later, else one become one of those unfortunate people who are not only mortal -- as we all are -- but manage to become less alive in life than they otherwise could be, either for an obsessive concern with mortality (a concern that distorts priorities outward from there) or an hysterical denial of the facts of mortality (a denial that spreads ignorance outward from there) that are the usual unfortunate and altogether unnecessary alternatives to coming to terms with it.

This is not to say that I am personally thrilled at the prospect of my own mortality (since being alive seems to me pretty much the only game in town), or, worse, many of the particular physiological pathways through which mortality tends to exhibit itself (some of which certainly seem pretty awful indeed). Nor do I believe that disease and mortality confer some special dignity or wisdom on a suffering humanity that could not find some equal or better occasion in an always flourishing humanity if that were our lot (as very obviously it is not), although it does seem to me a weird kind of unkindness, not to mention blindness, to deny that it is in coping with suffering and mortality that many actually existing human beings have found and do indeed still seem to find their way to that last best measure of dignity, wisdom, and meaning their lives will ever testify to. It is not only dumb but also awfully mean to deny these realities.

Again, these seem to me obvious rather than earthshattering insights, and their denial or denigration, frankly, much more infantile than daring.