Inundated with an Ideology of Death-Acceptance
Is it a challenge to advocate for greater funding for rejuvenation research, a challenge to persuade people that significantly extending healthy human life spans is possible, plausible, and potentially imminent, because we are all relentlessly taught from an early age that death is to be accepted? Our myths, our ever-rewoven heritage of stories modern and ancient, propagandize for aging and death. Our cultures are replete with tales in which longevity is a punishment, and heroes are castigated for even trying to seek a longer life. This is an interesting question: to what degree are we controlled and constrained by the expectations taught to us, directly and indirectly, by the stories that wind their way through life around us?
I suggest that we have been culturally conditioned to think that it is virtuous to accept aging and death. We are taught to believe that although aging and death seem gruesome, they are what is best for us, all things considered. This is what we are supposed to think, and the majority accept it. I call this the Wise View because death acceptance has been the dominant view of philosophers since the beginning. Socrates compared our earthly life to an illness and a prison and described death as a healer and a liberator. The Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the way to escape suffering is to end the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Stoic philosophers from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius believed that everything that happens in accordance with nature is good, and that therefore we should not only accept death but welcome it as an aspect of a perfect totality.
Many of the stories we tell promote the Wise View. One of the earliest known pieces of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, follows Gilgamesh on a quest for eternal life ending with the wisdom that death is the destiny of man. Today we learn about the tedium of immortality from the children's book Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt, and we are warned about the vice of wanting to resist death in other books and films such as J.K Rowling's Harry Potter, where Voldemort must kill Harry as a step towards his own immortality; C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia where the White Witch has gained immortal youth and madness in equal measures; J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy where the ring extends the wearer's life but can also destroy them, as exemplified by the creep Gollum; and Doctor Strange where life extension is the one magical power that is taboo.
We are inundated and saturated with an ideology of death-acceptance. The Wise View resonates with us partly because we think that there is nothing we can do about aging and death, so we do not want to wish for what we cannot have. Youth and immortality are sour grapes to us. Believing that death is, all things considered, not such a bad thing, protects us from experiencing our aging and approaching death as a gruesome tragedy. This need to escape the thought that we are heading towards a personal catastrophe explains why many are so quick to accept arguments against radical life extension, despite their often glaring weaknesses.