Death, be not allowed
A year and a half ago, when President Bush named Leon R. Kass to chair the President’s Council on Bioethics, a national advisory council created to explore the moral implications of human cloning, stem cell research and similar scientific advances, the reaction was mixed. In spite of his reputation and original intellect, Kass, a biomedical ethicist and professor at the University of Chicago, had frequently spoken out on the perils of modern medical advances. Given Kass’ capacity to influence public policy, we should want to inquire into his reasoning, and “Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity” helps us do so.
Kass is writing at a revolutionary moment. Since time immemorial, man has desired increased personal longevity and has done as much as he can to perpetuate his DNA by creating descendants. Now, however, thanks to cloning, it may soon be possible for an individual to perpetuate his DNA on his own, without descendants. And thanks to breakthroughs in cellular, hormonal and genetic therapies, it looks increasingly likely that our descendants -- although not we ourselves -- could realize that dream of heightened, perhaps unlimited, longevity.
Much of the attention that Kass garnered over the last year focused on the council’s decision to recommend a ban on “reproductive” cloning. But lurking around the council’s deliberations and central to Kass’ preoccupations in “Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity” are concerns about “the desirability,” as Kass writes, “of gaining a cure for death.”
A radical question and a cosmic one, but in Kass’ locution, it is a little slippery. A more cautious query, as he acknowledges, would encompass not death’s total demise but simply an increase -- if a dramatic one -- in our longevity. Yet let us grant Kass that we’re talking about a cure for death, especially because no such cure would ever be compulsory, only available, and in effect would simply give individuals control over their own life spans. In “Life, Liberty and the Defense of Death,” Kass sets out to show that such a cure -- indeed, any extension in the current human life span -- would be a bad thing.
To his credit, Kass refuses to make his task easy for himself. He in no way relies on religious arguments that death is the gateway to eternal life, knowing that they have lost their sway in a secular age. He assumes that any new elixirs of life won’t be open to criticism on equity grounds because they’ll be publicly provided for all. He grants, for purposes of discussion, that increased longevity won’t raise difficulties for the labor market, pensions or family structure; that in time these social institutions will adapt. And for the most part, he seems willing to allow that new life-extending therapies, once perfected, will keep us not only alive but also in good health, free from the decrepitude that currently afflicts our later years. (True, Kass at one point goes so far as to slip in a good word for senility, arthritis and other depredations of age because without them, “[w]e could no longer comfort the widow by pointing out that her husband was delivered from his suffering.” But, of course, if pain is good because it removes death’s sting, and death is good because it brings pain’s agonies to an end, we would still be better off without both of them. This argument is so unready for prime time that we hear from it no further.)
Instead, Kass voices a deeper philosophical objection to dramatically boosting our longevity, even if extending our life spans brings no inequality, instability or infirmity. With dramatically increased longevity, we would apparently face a dilemma. On the one hand, as day follows day without end, we would sooner or later lose “interest and engagement” until life became a boring trial. Even now, Kass says, at “some point, most of us turn and say to our intimates” in Peggy Lee style, “Is that all there is?” On the other hand, as the philosopher Bernard Williams noted 30 years ago in thinking along the same lines, there is one thing we could do to avoid this fate of eternal boredom. We could remake ourselves at regular intervals, radically altering our values and relationships and perhaps erasing our memories, so that -- as Kass puts it -- we would be able to experience “aspiration, hope, freshness, boldness and openness ... anew.” The problem, though, is that then we would be essentially different people, not the same ones living forever. In which case we might as well keep the status quo, with longevity limited by death and with renewal, such as it is, occurring through procreation.
This may be the most thoughtful nonreligious defense of death available. But it runs into a problem. Ironically, although religion may have lost its capacity to console us for our limited lives, it can still counsel us on our potentially unlimited longevity.
Kass worries that if we persist too long as the same person, then we are doomed to boredom. And yet beliefs ranging from the medieval Christian notion of apatheia to Buddhist techniques for ego death to ancient Stoic philosophies offer ways of converting natural times of boredom or emptiness into a calm disengagement from the world: a periodic and virtuous “disinterest in ephemeral goods,” as Michael L. Raposa describes it in his book on the topic, “Boredom and the Religious Imagination.” All approaches furnish rich means, as Kass’ University of Chicago colleague Wendy Doniger has observed, of introducing times of “temporary death” into life, allowing a person to withdraw -- to take an extended time out if necessary -- to come back to the world refreshed. In fact, periods of boredom and world-weariness came to be viewed as wholly bad things only in the 20th century; in most of Western thought, literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks shows in her 1995 book “Boredom,” they have been welcomed as a kind of “suspended attention” that allows for “semi-conscious brooding” and “makes a space for creativity.”
As for the idea that if we are to avoid boredom, our only alternative is to periodically remake ourselves so profoundly that we will no longer be the same person -- and so may as well have died anyway -- religious thought again falls along different lines. Christian notions of being born again while maintaining one’s core identity, Hindu ideas of a person’s being reincarnated while retaining his individual essence and platonic conceptions of renewal within an individual life offer rich and subtle religious resources for reconciling personal rebirth with longevity, for enabling fundamental change within persistent identity.
In short, Kass is of the view that the status quo -- longevity limited by death and renewal through procreation -- is the only path to take. But for millenniums, religious thinkers have meditated on ways of weaving periods of death into life and reconciling renewal with longevity. Certainly, Kass draws on religious and philosophical thought in arguing his point, and he does so with great erudition. But by and large he finds what he is looking for, and not the many strands that argue against him.
At one point, Kass writes that unlimited longevity is such a bad idea that although it “might be what we say” we want, it couldn’t be “what we finally mean.” In so saying, he gives us leave to turn the question around on him: If it is so difficult to plausibly articulate what’s wrong with immortality -- and Kass acknowledges that his pro-death argument goes against even his own deep natural desires -- then perhaps what he is saying isn’t what he finally means.
What psychological turmoil will erupt when the members of an entire generation -- one in the not-too-distant future -- come to realize that they may die just as science is on the verge of finding cures for the diseases, including the aging process, that will kill them? Many have written of the bitterness older AIDS sufferers felt in the mid-’90s when it looked as if protease inhibitors, discovered a little too late for them, would cure patients whose illnesses were not yet so far advanced. The possibility that a whole generation might harbor such feelings may well be something that council members want to forestall until we have greater moral clarity. It’s an issue worth debating, and there’s no better forum for a debate to begin than in the council; no better person to lead it than Leon Kass.
