Why are we not immortal?

It seems as if, in light of the success of recent experimental scientific attempts to extend the life of certain insects and animals, immortality is not in principle impossible, as Ulrich Bahnsen observes in Zeit Wissen’s feature on “the 12 big questions of science”.

Astonishingly, by means of genetic manipulation scientists have managed to extend the lives of various kinds of animals, including mice, whose lives have been extended by as much as 26%. The first indication that life can be prolonged, according to Bahnsen, came from researcher Michael Rose in 1991 when he bred flies with extreme longevity demonstrating in this way that age or lifespan is at least partly a matter of genetic control. These animal experiments also showed that there is an “every day” and “suitable” — albeit drastic — method of lengthening lifespan, namely an enduring diet of lack (Mangeldiät) or reduction of food. A possible explanation for this is that it reduces or drives down metabolic processes radically and concomitantly also so-called oxidisation stress in the living being. Unfortunately, for those people who may already be thinking of cutting down severely on their food intake, Bahnsen remarks that it is doubtful whether this applies to humans. And besides, who would want to remain hungry for a century, he asks, to be able to reach that age?

But if such Methuselah animals can be genetically bred, there doesn’t seem to be any reason, in principle, why this cannot be done with humans. It is already the case that the average lifespan of humans has increased by 40 years over the past 170 years — approximately an astonishing 2.5 years for every decade — probably partly because of improvements in hygiene and medical treatment. But even if scientists have learnt something about ageing, many puzzles remain concerning the link between genes and the surrounding world as far as ageing goes. Bahnsen reminds his readers of riddles such as the fact that some fly species only live for a few hours, while some humans live as long as 120 years enjoying good health — not to mention the Sequoia Redwoods in California, which live for about 4 000 years.

Evolutionary theory provides an important answer to the question why we have to die: without death, we (as well as most other species) would not have existed. Why? The law of natural selection, the survival of the fittest, is well-known. What is less well-known is the law of sexual selection. Some individuals are more successful at procreation than others and they are the ones who transmit their genes to successive generations. In this way new species are created, Gyna and Homo sapiens, for example. Hence, was it not for death, Bahnsen says there would not have been a species which is capable of asking: why we are not immortal?

The above is a broadly scientific take on this question but it does not exhaust all the possible perspectives one could adopt towards it. There is also a psychological-existentialist perspective, as well as an ethical one, to mention but two. Martin Heidegger explains in Being and Time that the precondition for an “authentic” life (as opposed to an “inauthentic” one of being the victim of mere convention) is to face one’s own possibility of non-being (that is, your death) resolutely via the state of mind known as anxiety.

Once you have accepted the inescapability of your own death (instead of avoiding it, covering it up, and so on), paradoxically, it frees you for living a full life of caring for yourself and for others because everything else is relativised in light of the unavoidability of death. Petty competition with others for institutional or political power, for instance, appears insignificant compared to those things that appear important in light of your own impending death such as love for your family and friends, the attempt to live a creative life, and so on. This is an existential reason for our mortality — it is a prerequisite for an “authentic” life.

Friedrich Nietzsche adduced an ethical one. In Thus spoke Zarathustra he talks about the so-called “spirit of revenge” that haunts humankind — “the will’s ill-will against time and its ‘it was’”. What does this mean? Simply that it is typically human to wish that something disastrous that has happened to us, did not happen, and to imagine, over and over, how we could have avoided it or how it could be undone. But the fact of the matter is that, once something has happened, it cannot be undone. The puzzling doctrine of the “eternal recurrence”, delineated in the same work, offers, I believe, a way of overcoming this “spirit of revenge”, which is a most difficult thing to do, according to Nietzsche and I believe he was right. The ethical meaning of this “eternal recurrence” is this: that we should have the (impossible) strength to “will” that every detail of our lives, the good and the bad (no matter how bad or painful) should repeat itself over and over, for all eternity. In other words, to affirm life in all its pain, suffering and joy, of course — something very few people can do. Here is an ethical reason for not being immortal: to enable us to affirm life no matter what the cost and in the process become truly ethical beings.

To try and clarify further what these philosophical answers to the question entail, I’ll introduce a personal note — partly because it offers a concrete instance for clarification, and partly, I suppose, to come to terms with it because I don’t think I really have, after a number of years. Perhaps one cannot really ever “come to terms” with something traumatic like this.

Eight years ago, one of my sons (I have two, as well as a daughter) was driving his girlfriend from Port Elizabeth back to Rhodes University in Grahamstown where she was studying. About 50km from Grahamstown, in broad daylight (about 2 o’clock, the day hunting season opened), a kudu jumped over a low fence on the side of the road colliding with the car he was driving. It hit the car’s windscreen and the force of the collision caused my son’s neck to break. To cut a long story short he survived and has spent his daylight hours in a wheelchair since his dismissal from hospital about a year after the accident. The part of this story that seems to me relevant here is the following. A few days after the accident when he was still lying flat on his back, completely helpless — not even being able to move a finger at that stage — he asked the inevitable question: “Why did this happen to me?” My rather clumsy reply was to point out that it had been, by definition, an accident, in other words, that I did not believe that some higher power had willed this to happen to him. I still added that I could not believe in the kind of God who would deliberately impose such superfluous suffering on anyone.

But my wife, Andrea Hurst — his stepmother — gave him the best possible answer and one that bears on the question, why we have to die. She said “only you can answer that question”. When he seemed to be confused she explained: “How you deal with it will determine why it happened. There is no prior reason for it happening but now that it has irrevocably happened, you are the only one who can, if you have the strength, assign a reason to it.”

Though I know he has his ups and downs — who wouldn’t in his position? Most of the time he has been able to provide an affirmative answer to the question that he originally put to us. In the process he has not only proved to be the bravest person I know (he has overcome the “spirit of revenge” to a far greater extent than I have regarding the accident) but has infused his severely restricted life with meaning.

He has completed a master’s degree in media studies and is at present registered for a PhD in the same field. And he regularly socialises with his friends. I believe that in the process of affirming his life he has simultaneously given a personal answer to the question why we have to die. We die because if we had been immortal we would not have been in a position where we searched for and worked towards some meaning or sense to our personal lives. The fact that he has to die drives him to make sense of his life in the limited time available to him even if, at times, he has his own existential crises — who doesn’t?

I recall an old movie called Zardoz (an allusive contraction of the words Wizard of Oz) — starring a young Sean Connery in the role of a space traveller who arrives on a planet where the people are immortal and bored out of their skulls. Everywhere he goes they plead with him to teach them how to die. The lesson: we can have meaningful lives only because we are mortal. This is the gift that death gives us — the possibility (not the guarantee) of a fulfilled life. And every one of us has to give our own answer to the question, whether we will benefit existentially from this gift.