Two things are true about Luddites. The first is that they are often vindicated in their concern about dramatic technological change, a process that often flies under the name of “progress.”
The other is that they lose. No one can stop the future from arriving, any more than Xerxes’s men could punish the sea with whips and red-hot irons. “You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension,” as Nikola Tesla put it, and these you may also call progress.
With Tesla’s words in mind, turn your attention now toward Bryan Johnson, the 47-year-old ultra-wealthy chief executive of Kernel, a company that creates devices that record brain activity. Johnson is a biohacker. His goal is simple enough to put on a t-shirt, even if it is in defiance of all creation’s ordinances: “Don’t’ Die.” To that end, Johnson subjects himself to a totalitarian degree of regimentation. Every aspect of his life, every bodily process, down to nighttime erections, is carefully quantified and recorded in a multi-million-dollar longevity panopticon that, he says, has stalled or reversed the aging process.
It’s easy to laugh at Johnson. It happens every day online, and he gives critics plenty of fodder, like when he revealed that he apparently also tracks his 19-year-old son’s erection data. A lot of people could have lived happy lives never knowing that. But Johnson robbed them of their ignorance, just like the class he belongs to would steal from us, if given the chance, the tatters of our privacy and freedom. I think these people are right that we’d live longer if we followed their lead. But would we still be human, really?
Johnson recently shared a photograph of himself holding a bag filled with a straw-colored liquid. It looked a bit like melted butter. It was plasma—his plasma—the stuff that makes up about 55 percent of blood’s overall content. Johnson said he had previously injected into his own veins his son’s blood as part of his anti-aging regimen, which in former, backward, superstitious times might have been considered appropriate for vampires. The British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke proposed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. These days, exploiting the youth is just an accepted part of some people’s supplement stacks. But it seems that even vampirism is passé. We have moved on to more potent sorcery.
No more bloody sips for Johnson. He says that he had taken the plasma out of his body and replaced it with a smoothie that consisted of albumin, a protein found in the blood, and intravenous immunoglobulin, a medication that contains antibodies. He wants us to know that it is probably superior to the kitchen grease the rest of us are running on.
Johnson also does a lot of common sense things. He eats clean, exercises, does not drink alcohol, goes to bed on time, and avoids partying. No doubt sticking to that formula will increase your longevity. Or maybe you’ll get hit by a bus while compulsively checking your “Don’t Die” app. There is also the fact that life without some dysfunction in it isn’t really living. That is to say, one can’t live a proper human life without reveling in a little entropy.
William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks and between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. Widely considered one of the greatest American novels, critic Harold Bloom called As I Lay Dying “an authentic instance of the literary sublime in our time.” Poor Faulkner was too busy reaching for the diaphanous chords of the sublime to measure his nighttime erections. He also liked a strong drink, another longevity no-no, for he believed that “civilization begins with distillation.” On one occasion, Faulkner went on a day-long benders that ended with him passing out against a hot radiator. The heat burned his back badly enough so that he had to be hospitalized. His publisher, Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf, chastised Faulkner for ruining what was supposed to be an overdue vacation for the author.
“Bill, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You come up here for your first vacation in five years and you spend the whole time in the hospital,” Cerf said.
“Bennett, it was my vacation,” Faulkner replied.
Cerf said that “Bill” would come out of these benders “clear-eyed, ready for action, as though he hadn’t had a drink in six months.”
My purpose is not to endorse Faulkneresque benders, but to suggest that life is intended to be a short series of balancing acts, and one might as well enjoy it because no one cheats death. Memento mori is part anxiety, part excitement because the prospect that we only get to do this once, I think, should naturally fill you with both. The one makes you savor the other. The Greeks knew that.
We still don’t understand a whole lot about their Eleusinian Mysteries. Those were secret religious rites, the origins of which seem to stretch back to the Bronze Age and symbolize the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Initiates were required to imbibe kykeon, a psychedelic concoction consisting of wine or water, barley, goat’s cheese, or other substances such as pennyroyal. I think it might have even been too stiff a drink for Faulkner, but he would have appreciated the purpose it served, as did Cicero. In his dialogue On the Laws, Cicero tells us that there is “nothing finer” than the Mysteries, “and as they are called an initiation (initia), so indeed do we learn in them the basic principles of life, and from them acquire not only a way of living in happiness but also a way of dying with greater hope.”
Extreme biohacking does the opposite of teaching us “a way of dying with greater hope” by causing us to imagine that one can cheat death. I suspect such delusion makes death harder to confront in the end.
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