#1

Our culture is routinely diagnosed with an excessive fear of mortality. A calm look at the evidence tells a different story

It is often said that contemporary Western societies are in the grip of an excessive and irrational fear of death, a thanatophobia. For instance, this is the diagnosis given by the grief counsellor and author Stephen Jenkinson who observes that:

[P]eople in any culture inherit their understandings of dying much more than they create them. In our case, that inheritance takes the form of an extraordinary degree of aversion to and dread of dying. My phrase for it was that the culture is incontrovertibly and, for the most part, unconsciously death-phobic.

Jenkinson’s diagnosis aligns with that of the French historian Philippe Ariès, the author of a seminal study of the history of Western attitudes to death. Ariès argues that whereas our premodern ancestors maintained an equanimous relation to death, we moderns suffer a ‘horror of death’, which he describes as a ‘violent attachment to the things of life … a passion for being, an anxiety at not sufficiently being.’

Evidence for this view is not hard to come by. We are surrounded by advertisements for various supplements and ointments that promise to restore our youth or hide every sign that it is fleeting (and that we are going to die). Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and corporations such as Google are spending billions on anti-ageing research. Popular science books such as Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009) by Raymond Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To (2019) by David Sinclair, and Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (2020) by Andrew Steele have become bestsellers. The spirituality genre similarly assures us that we can keep on living, albeit in a different realm. The much-publicised multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, who spends $2 million per year on a personal anti-ageing regimen (the Blueprint), is building a community under the banner ‘Don’t Die’. Our collective fear of death is also evidenced by how we die: outside society’s view, in a hospital bed, drugged and connected to machines via intravenous tubes, fighting death until our last breath. Those around us ensure that everything is done to keep us alive.

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#2

I disagree with his thesis that we are not death phobic, but death complacent. His argument revolves around our lack of action in trying to extend life. But I believe that the lack of action is a combination of a taboo around death caused by the fear of it and ignorance about how to extend life.

Once people see the continued health and long life of those of us who purposefully try to extend it, public opinion will shift in favor of extending life.

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#3

Found this interesting… maybe we are not programmed to die. We are programmed to extended our genetics. But… those things that help promote genetic continuity cause death. Lol

Link: ‘We Are Not Programmed to Die,’ Says Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan | WIRED

Kinda fun to consider. We die when the body stops working all the pieces… as a whole being.

#4

There are some obvious errors in what he says:

There have been several surprises, actually. One is that death, contrary to what one might think, is not programmed by our genes. Evolution does not care how long we live, but merely selects the ability to pass on our genes, a process known as “fitness” in evolutionary biology. Thus, the traits that are selected are those that help us survive childhood and reproduce. And it is these traits, later in life, that cause aging and decline.

The problem with this is that it is clear that Evolution does set different lifespans for different species depending on their role in the ecosystem.

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#5

Exactly right. Evolution propagates the replication of genes, but not necessarily the persistence of any individual. Rather, if the group can promote the genes better, then the individual might be sacrificed or privileged in order to promote the group, as it is the group in this scenario that promotes genes best. We see that all the time. The “Grandmother Hypothesis” is one - here evolution has allowed longer lifespan so that the grandmother can take care of the subsequent generations and thus promote the survivability of the genes better - interests of future gene promotion determine the lifespan of the individual.

Bottom line, evolution does care about the individual. If a longer lifespan exhausts the environment of the species thus limiting the promotion and replication of the gene pool, then evolution might engineer shorter individual lifespans.

It’s simply wrong to claim that there is no evolutionary pressure on individual lifespans in a species. It’s all enviromentally dependent, what matters is what propagates the genes best, including the individual lifespan.

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#6

This discussion sounds like just the rehash of “The Selfish Gene” I read about 20 years ago…

The whole “disposable soma” theory of aging…

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#7

It’s more just normal evolution than fitting with Dawkins.

Disposable soma goes a bit further in arguing a central role for a tradeoff between replication and survival which I think has been experimentally disproven.