Rand Simberg, one of my favorite writers on space policy, uses the papal election as a hook for an essay, “Habemus Papam...Ad Perpetuitatem?”, wondering what the Church thinks about the prospect of “extreme life extension and indefinitely-long healthy human life spans”. From his tone I suspect that he believes traditional Christianity to be basically hostile to the idea, even if “there wouldn’t seem to be any existing ecclesiastically doctrinal reason” for that attitude. He foresees that the current Pope or a successor might “draw a line, and declare certain life-extending, life-enhancing therapies to be un-Catholic”, even if they didn’t “require killing embryos, or some other means that is morally problematic”.
To be fair and balanced, that suspicion only lurks in the background. The essay’s principal theme is that Christians haven’t thought a great deal about the moral implications of increasing longevity.
In a world of conventional life spans, we can always console ourselves with the thought that, if we’re stuck with a dud pope, or a particularly nasty and competent dictator, or an overactivist judge, no one lasts forever.
But what if they do? What are the implications of this for the future of the Church? Or of dictators (who are usually the first in their own nations to take advantage of new medical techniques)? Or the Supreme Court? Or indeed, any position which, in our current finite-lived reality, is defined as a term for life? And what will be the response of the Church in particular, which like most churches, partly grew in response to the innate human fear of death, in a world in which death was commonplace, to a world in which it becomes a rarity, only resulting from severe injuries occurring too far from medical facilities?
Questions like that aren’t really answerable, because, despite the great medical advances of the past century, a world in which death is rare is still a long way off. One needs a more precise scenario – How long do men live? What medical technology is needed to sustain them? How healthy are they? – to speculate about its practical consequences. On the other hand, there are a few broad principles that, it seems to, must be taken into account in any Christian view of the issue.
Christianity has always affirmed that life on Earth is a blessing and death a curse. In the Orthodox Church, “God grant you many years!” is a frequent acclamation, not “God take you to Heaven swiftly”. Earthly life is not the whole of life; neither is it a trivial prologue to be rushed through on the way to the real performance. Although each of us will live forever, these years of mortality are, to the best of our knowledge, the decisive period of our existence, during which we will either gain eternal glory or cut ourselves off forever from God. From a purely utilitarian point of view, we ought not to be in a hurry.
Still, the blessing of life is not the foremost blessing. No one, including non-Christians, thinks that it is. Were youthful, healthy life always preferable to death, we would praise soldiers who run away from battle. It is possible to make oneself miserable through excessive love of life, just as through excessive love of wealth or food or sex or any other natural good. At the same time, the expectation of many, many years can be an inducement to sloth and ennui. There may be other bitterness in the blessing, too, as I wrote a few years ago:
That the nearness of death repels laziness is no surprise. There are other, subtler psychological effects. Those who have the most potential life to lose are likely to be the least willing to risk it, and aversion to risk, once it gains a foothold in men’s habits, can little by little come to dominate their doings.
In the Age of Exploration, a majority of those who boarded ships for the New World died on the voyage. In our faltering Age of Space Exploration, a handful of deaths traumatize opinion. When the Mir got into trouble, commentators averred that, if the single American on board died, it would be politically impossible to go forward with the International Space Station – and they were probably right.
It was not just that people did not want to risk their own lives. They did not want to see even willing volunteers in jeopardy. Risk aversion, it seems, has become deeply ingrained in the national psyche. The most straightforward explanation is that, just as rich men dread robbers and tremble when others than themselves are robbed, those who feel that they have a natural right to fourscore-and-ten years easily pass from a normal fear of death to a morbid phobia. Eventually, the joy of life is stultified by precautions against losing it.
For our ancestors, so far as one can now discern, the relative shortness of life did surprisingly little to diminish human happiness. Probing the psychology of the past is treacherous, but it is surely noteworthy that depression, suicide and despair did not become visible literary themes until the 18th century nor obsessive ones until the 20th. The melancholy that accompanies the demise of a young Dickensian heroine is tinged with sweetness and hope. Nowadays, except in overtly camp performances like Love Story, the typical novelistic or dramatic response to dying, at almost any age, is rage against man and the universe. Angels in America has displaced David Copperfield and Marion Fay.
That longer life is not a prescription for unalloyed happiness is one of the reasons why we should be cautious about taking morally questionable steps obtain it. In no moral calculus does a mediocre end justify extreme means. Almost everyone, Peter Singer excepted, I suppose, would shrink from killing a healthy newborn infant in order to gain several centuries of personal happiness. Isn’t it then prudent to refrain from killing unborn children when the prospective reward is nothing more than a few decades of life that may not be particularly pleasant or happy?
A quick summary of what I believe to be the Christian answer to Mr. Simberg’s question amounts to this: Prolonging the span of healthy human life would be a great good, but it is not a good to be pursued at all costs, and it will not add as much as many imagine to the sum of human happiness. Ultimately, life in this world, however long it lasts, is of no length at all compared to eternity. Whether we survive for a hundred years or ten thousand, it behooves us to direct our thoughts to the life of the age to come, for that is where our future lies.
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