Culture and Humans Living Forever
we may soon be able to live hundreds of years. How will human culture adapt? It gets complicated fast.
Have you ever heard of a supercentenarian? It is a human who has lived over 110 years. The only documented person to do so, for now, is Jeanne Clement. She died in 1997 at the amazing age of 122 years and 164 days. Our search for immortality stretches back over centuries and is deeply rooted across many cultures.
Science on this front is advancing rapidly. There are a group of determined working to solve this issue. They include philosophers, engineers, geneticists, software engineers, futurists and more. Most of whom follow the ideology of post-humanism.
Many have been using the term Longevity Escape Velocity (ELV), a tidy little acronym for an issue that is very untidy indeed. It was coined by one of the leading post-humanity thinkers, Aubrey De Grey in 1994. When exactly humans will reach this is much debated.
The topic of living forever or at least a very long time, as in hundreds of years certainly begs the question of, just because we can, should we? And then goes off madly in all directions on topics such as religion, ancestor worship, ethics, morality and so on. Heady stuff.
In cultural terms this topic raises concerns as well. While it would likely take a book, perhaps two, to cover the topic and all its vast multitude of issues, I’m trying to sum up a lot of complex ideas into a decidedly short article. But it is a topic that bears thinking about.
On the dystopian side of things it brings up the issues of equal access across societies. Such as it only being available to society’s elite. The core concept being the Sci-Fi movie Elysium. Or of who controls the manufacture of human organs or related procedures? Is it an overarching all-powerful company. You get the idea. Again, a maze of issues.
On the brighter side, near utopian in the ideal, is all of humanity being elevated. Of being able to accumulate vast amounts of wealth, curing addictions, being able to try multiple careers throughout ones lifetime of hundreds of years.
In terms of Western thinking, once a human hits 50 years of age today business largely goes to the mindset of entering ones twilight years of work. That ones 25+ years of experience can’t possible be useful with current changes in business. We think of human productivity in terms of just a few short decades. It requires a massive sociocultural change of mindset to think of a worker being valuable for eighty or more years.
If you get a nice gold watch for 25 years with a company, what do you get after a century with a company? A diamond watch?
The very idea of pensions gets a re-think. Life insurance. Mortgages and all the grizzly things that actuaries think about today. Does your life insurance policy then come to mean how many times you can receive genetic life extension treatments or maybe limits to the number of liver transplants?
As population growth is in decline in the West and much of Asia, our current economic system will either need a lot of robots, like really a lot, or humans to live longer. Much longer. China has peaked in terms of population, Japans is on significant decline. India’s will peak soon. Eventually, so will African countries.
Culture includes political and economic systems, societal governance, aesthetics (art, literature, music etc.), belief systems, norms, traditions and so on. The majority of post-human thinkers and tinkerers tend to be atheists. Yet religion and various belief systems plays a part in a majority of cultures around the world. Ancestor worship is a key part of them. Living forever changes this dynamic quite a bit.
Living for hundreds of years is likely to have profound impacts on our mental health. Hard to know how, we’ve just not ever lived that long. There would also be an impact on what in anthropology is referred to as kinship systems; how we socialize in terms of friends and family. How does one think of family when being married 15 times is well, just normal?
Our current primary economic engine is based on capitalism and edging towards techno-feudalism. Living for hundreds of years creates a lot of economic challenges. Capitalism by necessity, will have to be re-thought. Our very concept of wealth accumulation and dispersement at death is largely based on just a few decades of existence.
These are just a few considerations that sociocultural systems will have to deal with, including our relationship with nature and this planet.
No culture in the world today knows how to think about or deal with living for hundreds of years. It is all, in various ways, measured in just a few decades, from our twenties to our fifties. That’s just 30 years. Younger than say, 18, we are considered unproductive. Over 55 and certainly over 60, we are again considered unproductive.
These are factors one rarely sees considered from post-humanists like Nick Bostrom, De Grey, Rothblatt, Kurzweil et al. But they a technorati, culture is someone else’s problem or is simply solved through an algorithm. Which is an evolutionary diet.
Technology is inextricably intertwined with what it means to be human. Today, technology is becoming even more deeply embedded than ever before, in profound ways that impact our global sociocultural systems. It is more imperative then that we not leave it all to the engineers, but rather include more philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists. Not to stifle innovation, but rather to speed it up in ways that are human.