Pop the Balloon

Jonathan Weiner's non-fiction enterprise was of interest precisely due to his reviewer's diffidence, precisely due to the author's lack of diligence. Initially, I was sympathetic to Weiner's fusion of European culture with the complex science of microbiology. Aubrey Jasper de Grey, featured prominently in Weiner's approach to the science of immortality, is a composite of the British eccentric, and learning about how Aubrey became obsessed with cellular biology is entertaining, but Weiner's attempt to behave like a Renaissance humanist falls apart in this book. He glosses over Francis Bacon and he glosses over Montaigne, and by the opening of part three, who cares about Aubrey's near ascetic compulsion to see humanity defeat death? Many of my readers may wonder if I am play acting at times, since, how can a disabled writer be against homosexuality in and of itself? It is an absurd position, and if the disabled writer wasn't so dissolute and poor, it is at least speculatively a dangerous position to have, and that same disabled writer's racism is unconscionable if she is as clever as she professes to be, but Jonathan's scattered bird pellet approach to his thesis makes the terror of the Inquisition seem almost a rational authoritarian stricture next to the hubris of our 21st century ambitions. We're going to defeat death itself. We're going to enter the transhumanist age of Singularity, and yet we cannot solve the basic economic problems of liquidity for everyone. We all claim we're universally tolerant and cannot mitigate geographical reality, whether it's American inner cities or the fall of Middle Eastern deserts to fanaticism, or the fact that West Africans are  about as brutal governing themselves as Imperial Europeans were in governing them in the colonial age.

In part three of his book, Weiner focuses on how death is a Kantian concern throughout the course of human civilization, as of course, it would be-- but let us say, for the sake of argument, that Weiner and Aubrey are right and within two or three lifetimes, we solve the problem of DNA entropy and the metaphysics of ontology is solved for complex organisms. It would seem to put the very process of living in stasis, which is not how evolution works. We may not be able to answer why life is what it is, which is about surviving to make successful copies of itself, but there is only so much matter to go around, and death recycles finite sources of material, especially water.

There is also the issue of progression. We invented the wheel. We maximized food sources through agriculture and animal husbandry. Created propulsion and artificial wings and learned how to aggregate data through circuitry, pushing the limits of what is manageable even with the extraordinary capacity of the human mind. I'm 53 and I'm rather bored with the fictions of convenience as a shield against calamity. Let's take physics, which says that galaxies behave in predictable ways, and stars burn in predictable increments of time, but what if that predictability was disrupted? What if the Sun stopped behaving as a well heeled middle aged star and something went wrong? The Internet wouldn't amount to much if a massive solar flare stripped away the Earth's magnetic field, hence we shouldn't presume we can exist as a species to witness the end of time itself. Infinity and immortality aren't verifiable concepts, as such. A few million years ago, our primate ancestors were creating the big toe and wrist ligaments that branched us off from gorillas and chimpanzees, and now we spend our time playing God when we aren't otherwise insufferably shallow, and if Weiner even knew my warped skeletal frame was typing this post, he'd probably say "Geez, I really ticked her off." And yes, he has.

Despite a life of regimented unhappiness, I fear death, which is an illogical emotional investment within my suffering, destructive impulses. I'll be gone soon just as Montaigne was at 59, even if I will not be quite sure how, through stresses to my heart, or COPD, but to extrapolate being the child of the postwar generation, and to add what? Two hundred years to that? A thousand? I agree with my father. Once you reach a certain age, you get tired. I do not share the digital optimism of people like Ev Williams, and the reason is simple. Despite all the marvels of human innovation, marvels which at least precipitated my survival, I cannot even satisfy the simple wish to relocate and return to the suburban modality of my youth. It isn't as if I'm aspiring towards the software moguls that populate Silicon Valley, like Bill Gates.