Human aging: an outrage to the planet?

Oblivious of the irony, Time magazine recently featured a story on its cover about scientific progress in defeating human aging. Straight-faced, the publication that measures the flow of history in minute weekly increments sought to reassure its readers salvation was nigh from the ravages of time.

World events will continue to unfold in sufficient number to fill Time, but those who follow them may do so from the comfort of perpetual middleage.

Is it possible to imagine a more telling account of late-20th century Western vanity, hubris, and selfdelusion? Well, yes, in fact, it is. It was available a week later in Time's letter-to-the-editor section which featured nine--count'em, nine--apoplectic complaints about the story on aging.

Were readers affronted by false prophets in white lab coats offering to defeat death with no acknowledgement of the Cross? Were they piqued at unparalleled interference in the order of God and man? Errrr. . . no. They were--wait for it--outraged that unworthy humanity seeks to extend its life span without asking the permission of water, trees, furbish louseworts, and a representative council of mammals from mice to moose.

"What will mankind do with this extended life-span?" demanded Mr. Christopher Renner of Phoenix, Arizona. "Will we use (it). . . to wage war against the environment and one another?"

"When I lie dying 40, 50 or even 60 years from now, I will face death not with fear for myself but for the burned-out, used up world my generation and the ones preceding it left behind," snapped Mr. Bob Chambers of San Diego.

"The greatest problem on the planet is the intolerance of one person for the next," intoned Mr. Sean Hamilton of St. John's, Nfld., "And we are also sitting on a population explosion. Take a look around."

If, as G.K. Chesterton once said, proof of Original Sin is found on the front page of every newspaper (or news magazine), surely these correspondents demonstrate that the superstitions of the age can be found in letters to the editor. In this case, the superstition is an almost-Manichean belief in the constitutive evil of humanity. The approach--or the affectation--is an absurdly conditional nihilism. Life wouldn't be quite so entirely pointless if only all these other awful people would realize how entirely pointless their lives are.

Note, for example, how Mr. Hamilton identifies rampant "intolerance" as humanity's great failing--then suggests the ticket to overcoming it is to refuse to tolerate all those horrid human beings primed to explode on the planet. Why, some of them might even end up living next door!

Likewise, with extraordinary altruism, Mr. Chambers posts a warning to future generations not to bother making reservations on this "burnedout, used up world." He also nobly offers to hold his own, and preceding, generations responsible when he is ready to depart in, oh, six decades.

On one level, such nonsense is hilarious confirmation that North Americans truly are oblivious to irony, especially from their own mouths or pens. Yet lurking in its muddy hypocrisy is something truly disturbing. It is that these faux protestations represent a sort of shamanistic incantation for warding off what the letter writers, and others like them, really fear: their own inevitable death.

By angrily insisting human life is the whole problem, they hope, through sympathetic magic, to continue their own participation in the problem indefinitely. If they truly believed their own anti-human rhetoric, after all, they would neither rage nor write letters to the editor of Time. They would cease existing. That would be a truly unnatural act, of course--one no selfrespecting tree, furbish lousewort, or moose would consider. Or as a wise friend put it as we visited a nursing home: "Who wants to live to be 91? Try 90-year-olds."

In their feigned rejection of that simple truth, however, these letter writers and those who share their approach (affectation?) actually join with the scientific project they ostensibly oppose. That is, they accept, at least for political purposes, the foundational idea that human life is merely one more malleable (and among the least worthy) aspects of nature to be tried, tested, expended or extended as science and politics deem appropriate.

Similarly, at least in the abstract, they regard aging and ultimately death as mere "values" to be enhanced or decreased according to society's current managerial needs.

Like all superstitions, what is truly disturbing about this one is not just its folly but the fact it keeps those who hold it from recognizing the Truth: that human life and death are not really the property of politics, science or even Time, but of God for Eternity.

Peter Stockland of the Calgary Herald contributes this column every other issue from Calgary, AB.