I don’t often find myself thinking about pop impresario Simon Cowell, but last week I came across the news that the reality show star has declared his intention to have himself cryonically preserved when he dies in order to be revived by doctors in the future. Cowell’s intentions were of course met with predictable derision as the typically bizarre behaviour of the senselessly rich and famous, and his press agent quickly moved to say that Cowell had merely been joking. Often what we find amusing are ideas that take conventional attitudes and reveal their absurdity by taking them to their logical conclusion. Cryonics is a perfect case in point – an idea that while bizarre is entirely in keeping with our culture and the dominant values of our age.
In the UK there has lately developed a movement perhaps best described as a sort of militant atheism. With biologist Richard Dawkins as its figurehead this movement has identified religious fundamentalism and the various brands of new age spiritualism as the greatest threats to rationality and progress. I would prefer to argue as others have that there are two other brands of fundamentalism much more pervasive and of far greater threat to humanity – the cryonic dream of a radically lengthened life span being entirely typical of both.
Consumerist Fundamentalism
We live in an age of aggressive state managed capitalism, a system predicated on endless economic growth and the sating of endless desires. Boosted by the PR and advertising industries the ideology of consumerist fundamentalism is near inescapable. Like other brands of fundamentalism, the consumerist variant flies in the face of reason, elementary facts about the world we live in and the realities of human psychology. Based as it is on the expectation of constant economic growth consumerist ideology is obliged to pretend that we live on a planet of infinite resources. So despite the fact that it is now clear that we are endangering the possibility of decent life for ourselves on Earth (much less the other forms of life we “share” the planet with) the ideology is incapable of adapting to reality but instead continues to pretend that unbridled consumption can be sustained in the long run. The academic and activist Robert Jensen puts it this way:
Imagine that you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone’s way of travelling, of course, but it appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barrelling forward is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, “Well we like the train and arguing that we should get off is not realistic…
The high priests of consumerist fundamentalism also pretend that the accumulation of consumer products will bring us happiness despite the fact that psychology and simple common sense, (it takes a minutes perusal of the celebrity press to see how miserable, delusional, and quasi psychotic many of the supposed winners of our society are), tell us otherwise. There is by now a substantial body of data showing that once basic survival needs are met extra income and consumer products have minimal effects in terms of long term happiness. Directly comparable to substance addiction – the acquisition of new products provides the consumer with a fleeting feeling of pleasure quickly followed by feelings of deflation and unhappiness – and like the addict the consumer feels compelled to to return to the source again and again in the hope of finally finding lasting happiness. Psychologists and writers such as Oliver James, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Clive Hamilton and many others have told us what does contribute to human well-being: community, meaningful non-alienated work, relative economic equality, shared goals and values, and an altruistic other-centred orientation. These are all of course values and attitudes that the dominant institutions of our time at best fail to provide, and at worst actually destroy.
Technological Fundamentalism
The ecological precipice we now find ourselves on has been reached because of our arrogant and ignorant application of technology in a fragile ecosystem whose workings we only barely comprehend. Instead of adopting the precautionary principle we have utilised unproven technologies without any acknowledgement of the fact that the effects of those technologies are frequently unpredictable and often disastrous. The results are polluted air and water, massive soil erosion, the destruction of other species and habitats, and now the apocalyptic threat of runaway climate change. Given that reality one might expect that the introduction of new technologies would now be carried out in a far more responsible manner but unfortunately in the grip of technological fundamentalism we appear incapable of changing our practice and instead we barrel ahead in the same arrogant way that has brought us to this parlous state. Amongst the more striking examples of this arrogance are the various techno-fixes currently being proposed to solve global warming. Those proposals include trying to boost the albedo effect of the earth by methods such as hanging mirrors in space to reflect sunlight away from the planet or lofting sulphur into the atmosphere in order to create a “global dimming” effect. Regarding the latter the authors of the Corporate Watch report ‘Technofixes: A Critical Guide to Climate Change Technologies’ note that:
[T]here are a number of significant issues with this particular approach. It is essentially fighting pollution with more pollution. Sulphate pollution causes a thinning of the earth’s ozone layer. The sulphates will eventually come back down to earth, with an unknown impact on ecosystems. Governments have been working to reduce emissions of sulphates because they cause acid rain. Nobel prize winner Paul Crutzen, who advocated research into sulphate aerosols as a last ditch solution to global warming, predicted around half a million deaths as a result of particulate pollution. New studies have shown that the historic droughts in the Sahel region of Africa that caused widespread famine in the 1970s and 80s were caused in part by industrial emissions of sulphates in the West.
Given that many of the effects of the industrial/technological revolution were wholly unpredicted, there may be vastly worse consequences of such proposals that we simply cannot envisage. The authors of the Corporate Watch report warn us of the literal insanity of advocating such leaps in the dark when we have already demonstrated how our monumental hubris can endanger future life on earth:
Humanity is already conducting an uncontrolled planetary scale experiment with the planet’s climate through greenhouse gas emissions. Is it really sensible to start another one which could have equally disastrous and unpredictable consequences?
Cryonics – A “Science” For Our Times
The idea of cryonics is of course entirely typical of the two modern forms of fundamentalism, and the Cowell story was likely taken seriously because a desire for more life is a logical denouement of the celebrity lifestyle. Cowell is estimated to earn upwards of fifty million pounds a year. He owns several sports cars and a helicopter. He has changed his physical appearance with botox and dated various models and socialites. It would be absolutely consistent with consumerist fundamentalism that having acquired more or less everything money can buy Cowell would then attempt to get more of what is inherently finite – life.
In his book The Way of Ignorance, the essayist, novelist, small farmer and poet Wendell Berry remarks that dominated by consumerism we have lost all sense of what Erich Fromm called ‘the art of living.’ Without community, meaningful work or any sense of shared goals we no longer have any understanding of form or limits. And the idea of greeting death with a certain degree of equanimity having enriched our community and the lives of those around us is by now an utterly alien idea:
We seem to have lost any such thought of a completed life. We no longer imagine death as an appropriate end or as a welcome deliverance from pain or grief or weariness. Death now apparently is understood, and especially by those who have placed themselves in charge of it, as a punishment for growing old, to be delayed at any cost. ((The Way of Ignorance, Wendell Berry, counterpoint))
Typical of consumerist fantasies the cryonic dream is also profoundly anti-social; like many other luxuries it is by definition only possible for a minority – since the earth plainly cannot hold more than one generation at a time. Just as the planet could not long survive were everyone to consume at the level of the average American or Western European it would be impossible for cryonics to be available to all. It is also a dream that imagines a person as a completely detached entity, adrift in space and time, divorced from all community, human solidarity and in this case even family. That is a nightmarish conception of human existence, it is also a conception of human existence that gets closer to reality by the day.
Our techno-fundamentalist age has been characterised by an incredible disrespect and contempt for nature. Consider for instance so-called “terminator technology” – genetically modified plants whose seeds self-destruct thereby forcing farmers to depend on agro-industry rather than saving their seeds for each new season. The conception and implementation of such perversions of nature are representative of what is in effect humanity’s war on the biosphere. The Indian physicist Vandana Shiva makes the comparison between those attempting to live in some kind of balance with nature and those waging war on natural systems for profit and market share:
When we plant a seed there’s a very simple prayer that every peasant in India says: “Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year.” Farmers have such pride in saying “this is the tenth generation seeds that I’m planting,” “this is the fifth generation seed that I’m planting.” Just the other day I had a seed exchange fair in my valley and a farmer brought Basmati aromatic rice seed and he said “this is five generations we’ve been planting this in our family.” So far human beings have treated it as their duty to save seed and ensure its continuity. But that prayer to let the seed be exhaustless seems to be changing into the prayer, “let this seed get terminated so that I can make profits every year.”
The pseudo science of cryonics is similar in its contempt for nature – instead of viewing death as healthy, inevitable and essential for life death is instead re-conceptualised as a mere technical problem that will eventually be solved and the question of whether it is wise or moral to interfere with one of the most fundamental elements of all natural systems is considered irrelevant.
We would be living in a far better world if cryonics were purely an outlandish fantasy but however technically unfeasible it may be, or however bizarre it may seem, cryonics is a perfectly logical extension of our current mode of thinking. It is a mode of thinking that has always threatened the mental and physical well-being of ourselves, it now threatens the existence of the biosphere at anything more than a grossly degraded level.