Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. – Arthur C. Clarke, 2001
As I wrote yesterday, last night would have been a fine one for trick-or-treating, were most children still allowed to roam unsupervised as we did; unfortunately, our decaying society is far too obsessed with “safety” to let the kids be kids. It’s a peculiar paradox: the Child Cultists enshrine an idealized, romanticized view of childhood “innocence” to the point of trying to force it upon young adults who have long since grown out of it, yet are so frightened of the imaginary haunts their timid souls see in every shadow that they cheat actual children of the joys of childhood.
That self-defeating retreat from the world is especially poignant today, the one our ancestors set aside to remind themselves of the omnipresence and inescapability of death. As I pointed out in last year’s Halloween column, every last one of us will join the departed majority in the briefest of moments (cosmically speaking); fear of death is therefore futile because death is the one inescapable experience of material existence. You will die, and so will I, and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it…yet vast numbers are so obsessed with this simple and indisputable fact that they waste much of their time on Earth in a struggle they absolutely cannot win. In a pathetic attempt to stretch their allotted quantity of days just a little further, many are willing to dramatically reduce the quality of the whole. And while it’s certainly their right to use their own lives this way, it is not their right to inflict upon their children a lifetime of paralyzing dread of every activity which might conceivably end in the grave just a little bit sooner than hiding indoors would, no matter how remote the possibility of its occurrence. Such an existence is not living, but vegetation.
“In the midst of life we are in death,” reads the familiar text from the Book of Common Prayer; people used to understand that, and though individual responses to it ranged from the hedonistic to the morbidly religious, practically nobody was in denial about it until a couple of decades ago. What happened? How did we go from understanding this to ignoring it like small children with our hands over our ears shouting, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU BLAHBLAHBLAH”? I think there are several causes, the most prominent of which is Western culture’s increasing urbanization; when one lives on a farm one sees death almost every day, but it’s possible for an urban office worker to go months without seeing any identifiable carcass larger than that of a cockroach. Even most of the meat eaten by modern urbanites doesn’t really look like part of a dead animal; the one exception, chicken, is increasingly encountered in the form of nuggets, chunks or “boneless, skinless breast portions”. Another cause is the fact that our society is a lot less violent than it used to be; people live longer and far fewer are killed by direct action of man or beast than in centuries past. And while that’s a good thing it has a bad side effect: the less familiar a phenomenon, the more likely people are to view it with irrational fear.
Neither of these social changes is likely to be reversed anytime soon (and I hope the second is never reversed), but there is a third cause, no less important than the other two, which we could easily undo if we really wanted to. And that is the disappearance of cultural rituals designed to remind us of exactly what I’ve discussed here. Every culture has rites, celebrations and observances to honor the dead; in Mexico, for example, today is El Dia de los Muertos, from which this column takes its name. But while the Mexicans and many other peoples have continued these traditions to the present day, most people of European descent (including Americans and Australians) have tamed and neutered All Hallows Day until it’s nothing more than another excuse for overindulgence. And though we once understood that an annual dose of controlled fear and mild chaos helped children to cope with the existence of Mortem Imperator Mundi in much the same way vaccines protect them from disease, we have forgotten the former (and many of us the latter as well). In past times, The Day of the Dead was just a formal observance of what most people already recognized, a ceremonial declaration of the omnipresence of death. But now that the more mundane and routine encounters with the Grim Reaper are so much less common for the average Westerner than they were for his grandfather, we need the ritual – in all of its morbid glory – more than ever.
“You will die, and so will I, and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it…yet”
And that’s where I end the sentence. Slowly but surely, we are curing the things which kill people. Even cancer is starting to yield, so slowly, so much a case of brick-by-brick, but progress is made each day. We have yet to conquer the biggest killer of all, aging, but even that is being worked on, and there are some intriguing discoveries there, too. The various things which kill us are all physical problems, and as such amenable to engineering solutions.
We are indeed much less violent than we used to be, but we hear about more acts of violence than ever before. So much is it reported that most people have no idea that we are, in fact, less violent. Death in its most frightful forms is thrust in our faces daily, and this is in fact much of the reason we keep our children locked up inside, in protective custody.
When grandparents start dying, we learn about the (thus far) inevitability of death. Aunts, uncles, even cousins start joining those thirty ghosts before we ourselves are old enough to start worrying about our own aging. We soon know that, if car crashes* and psycho killers don’t take us, disease and/or aging will. I’ve said for some years now that the cure for aging will come too late to save me, though my younger nieces and nephews have a chance.
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* Self-driving cars will cure that one.
I hope to Hades you’re wrong; immortality for some would be bad enough, and immortality for most would be the greatest disaster the human species has ever endured. I know you don’t agree, but you really need to think about the culture that would produce; our society’s current “safety” obsession would look like a whim in comparison to the one that would develop in such a world, and if you imagine we’d give up our love of incarceration because of it you’re fooling yourself. Imagine a life sentence, quadriplegia or a “persistent vegetative state” in a world with the technology to keep people alive indefinitely…and that’s just the tip of the horrible iceberg.
Death is not an evil or even a mere fact; it is a positive good. And the sooner people understand that, the better off we’ll all be.
A technology that can conquer death can’t reverse quadriplegia or vegetative states?
There’s no way to know whether or not we would be more or less safety-obsessed in a world of very long life, or even total lack of aging. There’s just no example to point to, one way or the other.
Our fetish for incarceration seems to have little to do with how long we live. Somebody on a “life sentence” could always live long enough to see the national or global mood change.
Death isn’t an evil or a mere fact, and it isn’t a positive good, either. It’s simply a problem to be solved. And really, if life everlasting turns out to be a bad thing, well we’ll figure that out at the thousand-year point, or the two hundred thirty-seven point, or whenever, at which point we’ll quit extending our lives. So the problem, if there is one, solves itself.
I agree … they say that too much of a good thing can be bad. I say … I’ll worry about that once I’ve had too much of it! 😀
So much to learn, to do, to experience… I can certainly see some people going centuries before they find it too boring.
I disagree that it’s a problem to be solved. Old growth has to be cleared to make way for the new; keeping the old around forever will accomplish nothing but to turn the world into a museum.
You’re right, or, more precisely: I agree. And I’m reminded of one of Asimov’s robot novels… I believe it was the Robots of Dawn, where the people on the planet lived some extended number of years (300ish?). In response to their increased lifespans, there was increased desire for personal fame and reward with a commensurate reduction in sharing of ideas.
I wouldn’t want to live in a society without children and no future other than preservation of the status quo, including feuds. Which is what would happen: immortality would preclude reproduction for obvious population related concerns, and people are generally change averse, which does not improve with age. Vampire stories generally provide a pretty good template for what immortality does for us socially.
Asimov, like everybody else, was guessing. Living in vigorous health for hundreds of years is so far beyond anybody’s experience that we really have no idea whether it would be good or bad. Since we can’t have it, we assume it would be awful. Sour grapes.
And, of course, this means that I can’t know for sure either. What I do know is that our current situation sucks, hard but not well.
But what if, in the words of the old song, I’m a little bit wrong, and you’re a little bit right? What if life everlasting would be truly horrid, but life to one hundred eighty years would be wonderful? What a shame if we didn’t do the research because of our vampire fables, and additional generations never get to enjoy that extra century of good, good life.
You’re right – there’s a lot of “downside” in immortality. But there is HUGE upside …
I want you to imagine what it would be like in America today if George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were still alive and full of energy. Do you think we’d be saddled with this abomination called ObamaCare? Fuck no. Would they have approved of the invasion of Iraq? The Vietnam war? Most probably not. They would have been here to warn us on news outlets like CNN and Fox. We wouldn’t have any “debates” about “original intent” – they’d tell us first hand what the intent was and steer us away from this liberty-choking leviathan government we’ve built in their absence – which insults their legacy today.
“Immortality” would be an evolutionary leap practically – a game changer. Yeah I can see where you might think that “accident-phobia” would become epidemic – but I don’t believe so. I think people who could live for thousands of years might waste a few centuries “hunkering down” and trying not to get hurt – but eventually boredom sets in and they either commit suicide or strike out and do daring things.
It would be … AWESOME. Launch a space vessel to the nearest solar system to ours – and be alive when you reached it! And – for the flight back!! All without any technological advancements over what we have today.
He is. There’s no getting around the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Unless you are referring to the heat death of the universe, well, we are not closed systems. There is no reason within physics alone that peoples’ lifespans can’t be billions of years.
As for safety-obsession, well, it seems downright implausible that any trauma short of the destruction of the brain would be fatal in such a society – and quite possibly not that, with backups. Safety concerns would be matters of avoiding inconvenience of waiting a short period for it to be fixed – and in the case of a fatal accident, amnesia of the events since your last incremental backup. There would be no infirm or disabled, so the ‘lowest common denominator’ for safety would be ‘able-bodied and firm of mind’, if not higher due to enhancements.
And that’s all assuming we’re still implemented in meat.
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” -Susan Ertz
I think about that every time someone wants to pursue immortality. Yeah, the first century of extended life may be cool but after that? This is what I enjoy about well-written immortals in fiction: most are crazy. The boredom, the ennui…watching humanity repeat its mistakes and triumphs like a broken record would get old very fast. It’s like deja vu all over again! lol
While I don’t want to rush to the grave, spending time worrying over avoiding that end and whatever may or may not occur after that, is a waste of the precious time I do have on this plane of existence. That said, I’m heading over to Facebook right now. 😛
A world of people like those of today, but possessed of immortality, would be a nightmare, no question. However, I suspect that that problem will be remedied not too far down the pike–a society of people who are afraid of their own shadows and who willingly give up their humanity to government is not long for this world. The real question is whether our successors (and those lucky enough to live through the crash) will be smart enough to toss out the irrationalities that would make a society of immortals impossible. I think they will, though it may take awhile.
Immortality does not mean deathlessness. It is nothing more than the option to live until accident or choice ends one’s life. If it really is true that there’s a point beyond which most people will have no reason or desire to live, immortality will merely mean that people will greet death when they’re ready for it, not merely because their bodies have worn out. In the future, we might very well have death-day parties, where a person’s life is celebrated and everyone gets to say bye before he gracefully bows out of life.
It depends on whether the immortality was optional, in my mind. If someone can ‘opt-out’ should they become dissatisfied with the conditions of their otherwise ever-lasting life, I don’t really see the problem.
But I agree with your basic point. People put an inordinate amount of time and energy obsessing over risks (if they can even be called such) so small and trivial that they end up dramatically decreasing their overall quality of life. By historical standards, we are all ridiculously safe. The big threats/risks are well known and often easily avoided, yet people spend their time fretting over trace amounts of “risk”.
I think that Robert Heinlein does an excellent job of addressing these issues in “Time Enough for Love.” Including boredom, opting out, family, choices, and all that. If you haven’t read it, you probably ought to. Although I would suggest reading “Methuselah’s Children” from the “Future History” series first, for context.
I had Barsoom’s thought while reading; I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that someone beat me to it. There are existing animals that don’t die of old age. One day, we may join them. I for one hope I live long enough to see it. Because there are *still things I want to do* , and they’re going to take more time than I have. And that is *not* okay, even if it has, thus far, been inevitable.
Maybe death looks worse to me because I find the existence of an afterlife to be ridiculously unlikely; death is, almost certainly, forever. But try explaining to someone who has never known death why it’s a Good Thing and they should try it. I doubt they’d go for it, whatever the supposed benefit.
More on-topic, the decline of trick-or-treating is still sad; and I feel some sympathy for the kids even though I dislike children. I live in an apartment complex with a hundred families or so. We had exactly two trick-or-treat groups this year — the most of any year we’ve been here. They both showed up before sundown. With parental chaperones. In a gated community within a low-crime area.
What.
The.
Fuck.
I hate people so much, sometimes. Really, could they be any more cruel to their children?
Oh well. I’m not going to complain about having to finish off a neighborhood’s worth of candy, at least not until the next day.
(Today is the next day. 🙁 )
Maggie,
I wonder if the proliferation of slasher films and violent video games are a cultural response to this lack of death-exposure.
Speaking of different outlooks on disease and death, I have a legacy from my grandmother – cold sores. I had suffered from them from my earliest memory and well into my late 20’s. I found out that my grandmother didn’t refrain from kissing her grandchildren when she was having an episode and that apparently was the vector. On the other hand, she slept in the same bed with my grandfather when he was suffering from small pox. So I imagine that it was just that she came from a different time when such things were commonplace and not remarked upon.
I grew up in a rural area and my first paying jobs were in the agricultural sector. At home, we raised chickens and rabbits and butchered them in the fall. We retained a breeding stock for the rabbits through the winter for a number of years until we had a weasel get into the shed where we had them hutched. Talk about nature, red in tooth and claw. Man is NOT the only animal that kills for pleasure. Imagine 20 odd rabbits with nothing eaten except the hole in their neck that was used to kill them. Vicious little bastards weasels. And mink as well.
My father died of ideopathic COPD. They had a longer name for it, but that’s what it came down to. (We’ve since found out that another of his colleagues, also a non-smoker and a fitness nut died of the same thing. Probably some incidental exposure to chemicals in the biology lab) .
I had helped nurse him when it was just my mother and I available and I had my younger brother double up on the delivery routes so that someone could give her some time to sleep. (He did the same thing for me when my niece was dying of cancer – at 26). We have a large family, and as the end approached, most of us were able to be there.
Whenever we get together, it gets a bit loud and boisterous and this was no exception. My sisters went around trying shush everyone and I finally pointed out that this was what happened when we got together and they should just let it be. They told me that I had no respect for the gravity of the moment and I pointed out that Dad was more relaxed – with the bedlam in the background – than I had seen him in months. They recognized that and relented.
I think that the idea that life WAS going to go on without him was comforting and that the best demonstration of that was the rest of us acting with some degree of normality even when he was in extremis.
So the reversion to home hospice, as it is now fancily called, is really just a return to what everyone did until the 1950’s. And, certain conditions aside, probably a superior approach than the isolation of a hospital bed.
My dad, stepdad, was prepared to fight all the way when it seemed that there was a chance of adding a year or more, with a quality of life he found acceptable. But when he tried the chemo, the surgery, the radiation, and it was clear this would add, at most, a couple of months, with attendant suffering from both the disease and the treatment, he chose to spend his last days at home, in hospice care. I respect that choice. He was willing to fight, fight if he was fighting to win, but not to make losing even worse.
I suppose all of us here have lost someone, probably several someones. My heart goes out to all of you. It is this way in which death, not so much our own but of those we love, is the great uniter.
My mother was the same. There comes a point where further treatment is pointless, and the choice to accept the end is the better option.
Is ovrrprotectiveness a reason why it seems there are not as many trick-or-treaters as there used to be?
Yes, absolutely. Modern parents are obsessed with lurid fantasies of child molestation and hoary urban legends of poisoned candy and needle-bearing fruit…despite the fact that the former is no more common on Halloween than any other day and there has NEVER been a documented case of the latter.
Here’s another example of over-protectiveness. I have two beautiful neices–one aged ten and the other eight. But I can’t post any pictures of them because my sister does not want photographs of them on the internet.
Snopes agrees about the poisonings — all documented Halloween child poisonings were targeted to poison the afflicted child — but disagrees on the needle-bearing treats — there are 10 documented cases of people injured by needles or pins in Halloween treats since 1959 out of 80 reports, the vast majority of which were hoaxes.
Ten cases in 46 years? You’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine that get a Halloween treat with a needle, pin, or razor blade in it.
“Who wants to live forever?” – Well, I do! At 50, I have had a tremendous life and been all over the world and done some pretty amazing things and witnessed a lot of history being made personally. I can still think of an eternity of more things to do though.
Having said that – quality of life and LIVING life is everything. I remember, back in the 80’s, I was surfing at Sunset Beach in Hawaii on a medium-sized day, and I met Mark Foo in the break. In between sets we chatted. If I remember correctly, Mark had just quit the professional surfing circuit and had begun big-wave surfing at places like Waimea Bay. It was a big deal, because Mark was considered to be a guy with huge potential in pro-surfing and he just kind of “chucked it” in favor of big wave specialization – where there really was no money at the time. In doing this he was joining a bunch of “big wave” pioneers like Ken Bradshaw – who had said “Fuck it” to pro-surfing and was working every day to figure out how to surf these gigantic – 50 plus foot waves. Anyway, I asked Mark if he had any fear of those BIG waves. He told me … “I respect them – but I have more fear of a car accident that injures me so that I can never surf those big waves again.”
A few years later Mark died at Maverick’s in California – surfing a huge wave. There’s a report that, in the days before he died, he told a reporter that “I don’t consider it a tragedy for a person to die doing what he loves to do.”
I totally agree with him; dying for an important cause, or while doing something one loves, is a triumph, not a tragedy.
And here we can agree. God* bless all the Mark Foos this world has seen, and all the Mark Foos this and other worlds will see.
* Whatever you may think that He, She, It, or They may be. And if you believe that there is no God or Gods, then bless yourself.
Well, when I was a kid, we trick-or-treated during the night.
Today, if I lived by myself, I would refuse to answer the door on Halloween unless it’s after dark. I would leave a sign up that says, “Come back for candy after sundown.” Alas, I don’t live by myself.
The kids have to go to school the next day. I’d be fine with making November 1st a school holiday, or a day when classes start two hours late, but so far, that isn’t the case.
No one who can stand on their feet is too young to be awake and about at 7:00.
It was later than that here. Perhaps where you live the sun goes down early. Tracy, every year, wants to decorate and get her special soundtrack and have food ready, and she is NEVER ready when the kids start showing up. She says the same thing each year, “They shouldn’t be out this early!” She thinks the holiday is all about HER, instead of the KIDS.
This year, I want to take her to a party or something, and not bother with the whole thing. Or, I want to show up at her place at about NOON, and start decorating much earlier than she does.
If she isn’t willing to accept one of these two options, I’m going to stay home. Which is a shame, because she’s really the only person I can share Halloween with, and kids don’t show up at a second-story apartment for trick-or-treat. But I just can’t stand her attitude that the entire world, including other people’s children, should adjust to HER just because SHE doesn’t want to adjust the way SHE does things to reflect objective reality.
And you know, they are other people’s children, not Tracy’s.
Or yours.
By the way, I was going to go to Woodlawn Cemetary today, where the famous people are buried. Hurricane Sandy changed that plan.
Wow, so Halloween is like the scene in Huxley’s Brave New World where the children get the best treats at the hospice where people go to die.
Cool.
A century or so ago, death was a frequent bystander for families; it wasn’t unusual for several children to die and for their parents to have to bury them. Now, we have safe drinking water, sanitation and immunisation so most of the childhood killers have more or less disappeared. And “modern” medicine has an answer to most things. Nowadays, all newborn kids should be perfectly healthy, and grow to maturity. And so we think that death is preventable, and if it occurs it is medical negligence.
But this is imagination, it’s wish fulfilment. Death is inevitable, sooner or later; we can defer the sooner often, but not always. Our life-span isn’t that much greater than a century ago, just more of us will get there. But do we want to spend the last decade propped up by pills, living an “existence” but with no real quality of life? Or do we want to live to the limits, and accept a reduced span? And do we have a choice today?
There are fewer people in nursing homes than there used to be. Not only are more people reaching a hundred, but more of them are reaching a hundred with their minds intact and their bodies, though frail, not racked with pain or incapable of movement. The human life expectancy (which is a different thing than life SPAN) has nearly double from a hundred fifty years ago, and now the human genome has been decoded.
Again: aging is a physical problem, and physical problems are amenable to engineering solutions.
Worth noting: Aging is a slightly different problem than death. I think even the people who believe death is a net good would approve of, say, living to 80 with the physical health of someone in their 20s, then dying. And while I disapprove of death, I’d not like a world where we lived to be 500 but just kept getting older and frailer all that time.
Good point. And even with all disease and aging cured, you could still slit your wrists, or get hit by a truck, or somebody could twist your neck. So death itself is only cured if people are indestructible or we have resurrection on demand.
I should have added:
And even then, people may choose, for reason which only need be “good enough” for them, to die and stay dead.
Unless we evolve politically before we evolve technologically (a forlorn hope considering that it’s been the opposite throughout human history), that is not going to happen. Even our present feeble means of life extension are largely compulsory, and there is no reason to suspect that resurrection would not be made compulsory as well; can’t have the subjects of the ruling elite escape via death, after all.
Yes, Maggie, but could they still vote? That’s the important question! At least in Chicago.
On behalf of Chicago, I’ll just go ahead and assume they’ve voted Democrat.
That makes me think of an amusing thought experiment: If there’s a government with a policy of resurrecting the dead whether they like it or not, what do they do with a revolutionary killed in battle? Raise them just so they can spend money imprisoning them?
If not, the most effective form of suicide might be to bomb government buildings.
(assume present tech other than the raising itself, i.e. no 100% effective brainwashing)
K. W. Jeter wrote a novel in which corporations had the legal right to resurrect deceased debtors and put them to work at minimum wage until the debt was paid off. Of course, that was minimum wage minus the cost of room and board, and the debt kept accruing interest…
Then again, a novel in which things go well is rather boring. The USS Enterprise had those phasor banks for a reason, and the most famous SF movie franchise in history wasn’t called Star Peace.
One of the intellectually satisfying things about your columns are the contributions by your readers, Maggie – along with your columns themselves, of course.
There’s something I haven’t mentioned, because it’s a bit more “” than simply curing diseases and aging.
Right now, you can get bumper stickers, T-shirts, and coffee mugs emblazoned with “I Have NOT Lost My Mind — It’s Backed Up On Disk Somewhere!”
Well, what if you could actually do that? Well, there are people working on that, too. I suspect aging and cancer and Alzheimer’s and diabetes and Ebola to all be cured before we have THAT, but eventually, yeah, even accidents and murder will be inconveniences instead of tragedies. And when that happens, so much for risk aversion; take all the risks you want. If you happen to die in a crash of your experimental whatever, or are murdered, or are killed while riding a big wave, so what? You wake up in the hospital with no memory of the last week.* Then you walk out the door and continue living your life.
“Ah man, did I die AGAIN!? OK, what damn fool stunt did I pull THIS time?”
* I’m assuming the backups are updated once a week. If you would do it more or less often, adjust accordingly.
…it’s a bit more “out there” than simply curing diseases and aging.
“dying for an important cause, or while doing something one loves, is a triumph, not a tragedy.” Really? Who decides, what an important cause is? Taking unreasonable risks (“to hell with danger”) is not very grown up.
xerxes
The person who takes the risk, of course; who the hell else is qualified to make decisions about his own life? It’s prizing mere existence above meaning that’s immature, not vice-versa.
How romantic!
Reincarnation is enough immortality for me.