by Kyle Munkittrick
Nearly every argument against longevity is a version of, “But death is good sometimes.” Death creates finitude, thereby creating meaning and forcing change. Take Frances Fukuyama’s recent piece “Against Life Extension” in Persuasion. Fukuyama argues slower generational turnover delays social and political dynamism. He does this at 72, recapitulating an argument from over 20 years ago, without a hint of irony. What is odd is that Fukuyama, like others who oppose life extension because it robs us of finitude, doesn’t explore any other source of finitude beyond one: death.
Here is Fukuyama’s claim:
The slowing of generational turnover is thus very likely to slow the rate of social evolution and adaptation, in line with the old joke that the field of economics advances one funeral at a time. […] You will have an overlapping of generations and increasing social conflict as younger people begin to think differently and demand change, while older ones resist. The problem will not be conflict per se, but a gradual slowing of the rate of social change.
Fukuyama opens by pointing out out that life expectancy has gotten longer and that’s good. His first implicit claim, that as people live longer society itself gets older, is, I suspect, so self-evident in government and in our movies, that he doesn’t feel the need to note it. But by not pointing out that our society is already older, he doesn’t have to address the fact that it’s not entirely obvious our society is also already less dynamic. It is almost a truism that we live in a world of accelerating change, not just in tech, but politics and social movements. If we accept the claim that we’re already older, our society should already be getting slower, right? Read more »
