Anne
Trends in Attitudes Toward Life, Death and Progress
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees (out of a --Those dying generations -- at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. From, Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats (1927)
Is the modern world still "no country for old men"? Is it still almost universally believed that if one desires to find life, one must look to the cycles of birth, animation, and decay that characterize the unaltered natural world?
Like Yeats, many would probably still suggest that permanence (or at least a semblance of it) is only achieved in the creation and appreciation of objects and structures not subject to the sort of aging that biological bodies are.
And while Yeats makes no apparent apology for bodily senescence in Sailing to Byzantium (in fact, one might even argue that the poem ends on a rather transcendent note), he does not question its inevitability, either. And no wonder: the prospect of real, non-metaphorical, empirically-demonstrable means of intervening in the aging process is so new that at times it seems trapped somewhere in the shadows between science and mythology. Over the past few years, however, the increased visibility of key players in longevity science as well as successful and highly public fundraising efforts have helped draw the international longevity discussion further and further toward the "science" side of things.
While some today probably still believe unquestioningly that humans will continue to live to a maximum of no more than 120 years or so into the indefinite future, more and more are beginning to see the shadow of aging's destructive, clockwork inevitability fade. Effective longevity medicine may not yet exist, however, there have been some promising results in the area of calorie restriction), as well as mainstream attention to the potential for humans to live to unprecedented ages.
Clearly, the attitudes of individuals (and, by extension, cultures) toward death and mortality are facing the prospect of requiring extensive adjustment. Modern psychology, for instance, has plenty to say on the matter of existential dread and the various paths one can take toward managing it -- as well as on the various pathologies that can supposedly emerge as part of the ego's defense against ideas of personal nonexistence. From the "circle of life" cliches one finds in popular articles on explaining death to children, to academic treatises on Terror Management Theory, humans demonstrate a clear and obvious fixation on mortality awareness and its implications. And as a result of unmistakable longevity gains over the past few generations in the developed world, the questions at hand are many.
