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Dr. Bill Thomas is a professor at Erickson's Center for Aging Studies. His blog is (wonderfully) titled "Changing Aging". I've not read through the entirety of Dr. Thomas's site, but I like what I've seen so far -- a lot of positive, common-sense, pro-longevity writing. Thomas suggests an interesting take on the subject of aging in a September 22 post entitled simply, "Pro-Aging":
So let's just say that I am pro-aging. I think longevity is integral to human development, much feared, little understood and a sign of success not failure.
More to the point-- every morning those of us who wake up do so one day older than we were the day before. Fine then. Let's explore this new terrain.
I've actually been uncomfortable with the phrase "anti-aging" for quite some time now. "Anti-aging" is one of those terms that seems to have been co-opted by "quack" supplement vendors and shady "immortality" prophets of various stripes. Web searches for "anti-aging" often lead to pages that contain plenty of bright, flashy slogans and glowing promises, but no solid scientific content whatsoever. And that isn't what I'm about here. My desire to promote longevity medicine and longevity in general is based on the simple premise that all people are valuable, regardless of age.
Lately, it has become apparent to me that perhaps those who consider themselves to be part of the "healthy life extension community" would do well to educate themselves about issues associated with how today's elderly persons are treated and viewed within society.
If our goal is to make it possible for people of all ages -- including the very old -- to access the care they need to maintain their health (and by extension, their life) as best as possible, a fundamental step toward that goal is that of promoting ethical, respectful treatment of older people. Regardless of what medical breakthroughs might come about within the lifetimes of those alive today, we are all getting older every day, and someday, we will all be old.
What kind of lives we lead when we are old will depend in part upon the attitudes we adopt today toward the elders that already exist. This means that yes, we all have an interest in such notions as the problems with institutional nursing. We also need to encourage efforts to improve the safety of medicine for the elderly. And we need to improve efforts toward creating a more interdependent culture, in which the contributions of diverse types and ages of persons are recognized more consistently.
So, while I understand the sentiment behind the call to "battle" the aging process, as if it were some sort of enemy, I think I actually like the notion of (in Dr. Bill Thomas's words) changing aging better. Because it's not as if I don't want people to get older -- getting older means you're living, not dying, after all!
Rather, I think that attitudes toward the elderly, both socially and in terms of what medical options are made available, need to change so that eventually, "aging" won't be synonymous in people's minds with sickness and death -- but with continued vitality and the freedom to keep enjoying the endless wonders of existence, unhindered by prejudiced attitudes and "burden" rhetoric that seeks to stamp individuals with arbitrary expiration dates.
7 comments:
I seem to recall encountering, once or twice, someone who thinks that being for life extension implies discriminating against old people. Have you ever run across this?
Conjecture: some people, through some psychological quirk, interpret "opposition to X" as "not wanting any instance of X to exist" - so if you're opposed to aging, you must want to eliminate all instances of aging in the world, i.e. kill old people.
Conjecture 2: some people conflate judgments about the desirability of traits or states with judgments about the inherent worth of people with those traits/in those states. Evaluating aging as bad is tantamount to evaluating aged people as worth less than the young.
(In both cases I can see strong parallels with controversies about disability and about intelligence, and with criticism of transhumanism by analogy to coercive eugenics.)
These conjectures both lend support to what I thought as soon as I read your post, which is that regardless of any connection to quackery, "anti-aging" phraseology is undesirable simply because it's negatively defined. "Pro-healthy life extension" is so much more positive.
I like what you say Anne, b/c I have thought about this myself. When I am 150 yrs old and as strong and healthy as a 25 year old I will *not* still be 25. I'll have all the knowledge and experience of someone who has live 150 years which is different from "turning back time and being young again"
okie: In the future, youth will no longer be wasted on the young. Heh.
Nick: Yes, I've run across that notion (the one about life extension supposedly being "against" old people), and it's one of the things I try to counter when I can.
The way I see it, it's a lot more discriminatory to suggest that people are obligated to die just because they are old than to suggest that we ought to extend effective medicine to a larger demographic pool, which includes the older demographic. Which is what life extension is, technically speaking.
There is a strong parallel here with disability rights, actually -- disabled people face a lot of the same kinds of medical discrimination that elderly people do (e.g., "People like you are just drains on the system, so we shouldn't bother keeping you alive"). Disability studies represents a great, largely-untapped source of good thinking on issues directly relevant to life extension -- in many ways, disability activists have a lot in common with transhumanists (and there is some overlap between the communities, loosely defined as they are).
Issues like bodily autonomy and morphological liberty are huge (and central) to disability rights, as they should also be to life extension. Disability activists have a lot of practice arguing that yes, they do have the right to live, regardless of the fact that they require particular technologies (respirators, etc.) and/or medications -- this is quite analogous to arguing that older people should have the right to live even though they might need (for instance) SENS-derived therapies in order to do so.
You said: Conjecture 2: some people conflate judgments about the desirability of traits or states with judgments about the inherent worth of people with those traits/in those states. Evaluating aging as bad is tantamount to evaluating aged people as worth less than the young.
I've encountered a variant of this in neurodiversity circles as well -- and therefore, I do take such critiques very seriously. I am personally offended when I come across references to "eliminating autism" or "defeating autism", because to me this says that the person making such references thinks the world would be better off without any autistic people in it. Which means they basically think my existence is a mistake. So I can see how someone might think that talking about "eliminating aging" might mean a Logan's Run scenario. And of course, promoting such a scenario would be heinous.
The main issue here is, I think, a semantic one -- at least with regard to aging in particular. When some people say "aging", they mean, "getting older" in the sense of accumulating birthdays. When put in those terms, I am definitely "pro-aging" because I most certainly think that people should be enabled to experience as many birthdays as possible! But when others refer to "aging", they mean, "the underlying bodily processes that lead to stroke, heart disease, immune collapse, dementia, and death". When put in those terms, I am "anti-aging".
Because of thoughts like this, lately I've been wondering if I should aim to use more positive language when talking about age in general, and to reserve negative language for the specific negative things that can turn "being old" into "being dead". Because I don't think that there's anything wrong with being old, and I don't think that today's elderly people want or need pity -- they need to be valued as individuals, and not "written off" as used-up or disposable. Sure, perhaps in the advent of advanced longevity medicine, the average 200-year-old might physically resemble the 20-year-old of today, but his or her body will still need to be maintained in ways that a 20-year-old's won't, and he or she will also (as Okie noted) have the mind and life experiences of a very old person by today's standards.
You said: (In both cases I can see strong parallels with controversies about disability and about intelligence, and with criticism of transhumanism by analogy to coercive eugenics.)
I've actually seen far more ignorant, "eugenicist" attitudes in comments from Random Members of the General Public than from transhumanists overall -- I think that eugenic attitudes are deeply entrenched in society, and that is the problem that people who care about diversity and personal liberty ought to be addressing. Most people who have eugenic attitudes don't seem particularly self-aware as far as the origins and implications of those attitudes go; they just go around saying things like, "Oh, let's hope they come up with a prenatal test for autism soon, so we don't bring any more of those poor children into the world!" They probably just see themselves as being compassionate and having common sense. Which, in a way, is scarier than just being overtly prejudiced, since there's a huge missing layer of self-awareness there. At least if someone knows they are prejudiced they can examine and work on that attitude -- but if someone can't look at the status quo and detect the built-in prejudices it tends to perpetuate, it's really difficult for me to have coherent discussions with them.
The people that scare me most actually tend to be the short-sighted utilitarian types, because they seem to be very prone to judging the "suffering" of another person based on their own discomfort/squick factor levels in that person's presence. Which reminds me a lot of when some of my classmates in sixth grade decided that they felt sorry for me because I liked Star Wars and not the ridiculous boy-band "New Kids on the Block" -- my classmates seemed to genuinely think I was missing out, and tried to coerce me out of my own interests in favor of theirs, and then got very nasty when it didn't work. The same seems to be true of those with "eugenic" attitudes -- a layer of superficial "compassion" with a lot of nastiness and hostility underneath.
But these attitudes are by no means restricted to those who call themselves transhumanists, and I've actually found far more neurodiversity-accepting people in this (H+, technoprogressive) community than in the general community-at-large. Probably because a lot of people interested in things like AI, neural modification, etc., can see that there's more than one valid way for a mind to function, and that there's nothing sacred about the "typical" or unmodified human.
Very nice post Anne, and your comments here in the forum are also excellent. [I]t's... discriminatory to suggest that people are obligated to die just because they are old... There is a strong parallel here with disability rights, actually -- disabled people face a lot of the same kinds of medical discrimination that elderly people do (e.g., 'People like you are just drains on the system, so we shouldn't bother keeping you alive')." This is an enormously clarifying way of framing the issues involved -- and also, if I may put it bluntly, a winning rhetorical move given the technodevelopmental outcomes I know you are looking to facilitate. Much better, in my view, than framings rejuvination and longevity activists have tended to put out there.
Great blog- insightful writing and important topics. Thanks for putting it out there so that the world can see/read/absorb it all.
Love the conversation this post has generated. I'll add one comment about the intrinsic value of aging. There is, I think, an important difference between an old age that serves as a satisfactory facsimile of youth and an old age that is to be lived, and valued, by its own metrics.
Conventional anti-aging rhetoric is actually much more about "youth extension" than life extension. Longevity is a good thing but should not distract us from understanding just what, exactly, old people are for.
I love your blog, Anne. I agree with your view of the ambiguity caused by using the term "aging". As you and many others in the longevity world have echoed, this term brings along with it the connotation of "reduced vitality". Perhaps, instead of saying you are "anti-aging", you should state that you are "pro-vitality"! In this way, you can divorce the idea of being a healthful, active, and vibrant member of society from the numbers of years one has spent figuring out their role in it.
On the slippery slope of introducing the desire for increased vitality within yourself, this should merely be posed as a possibility and a question to those who may feel the way that you do, while at the same time not offend those who do not. For instance, if I tried to sell you something that you did not want while making it sound like you're an idiot for not wanting it, you'd be all the more likely to not buy it. However, if I pose the desire as a question such as "Are you like me? Do you suffer from...?" then you do not offend those who are not "like" you. This also keeps the door open to them should the day come that they have a change of heart.
BTW, I am "like" you! Keep blogging!
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