L(ong)evity
Preface L (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)
This book is about a convenient falsehood: that one can live long and prosper. It exposes this error in showing that prospering is antithetical to living long. If this seems far fetched to you then it only seems so because its truth hits too close to home. And it so hits because it exposes the guilt you try not to feel taking the bread1 away from other life forms. Forms not yet frozen solid in their ways. Life you should care for more than your own because, unlike you, it still has the potential to take on another form. Maybe one that does not burden, like you do, the planet so much. Maybe one that is not so attached, like you are, to explaining privilege as the product of a lifetime of hard work. As if poor people who do not live so long do not work hard. As if they don’t die younger precisely because they do work hard (so as to make the stuff that keeps your privilege intact over lifetimes of always longer longevity).
Let me ease back now I have your attention. Yes, I wanted to put your emotions in play but I believe reason is on the side of my argument as well2. This book has two complementary arguments: a rational scientific one and a playful emotional one. They are two sides of the same coin as all those not yet living too long (and if you made it here then all chances are that your youth is not yet fully extinguished ;-) will come to appreciate. Let’s get to it. First, there is the argument from entropy. Second, there is the argument for still having projects in life.
Life is a far from equilibrium state. Strange things therefore happen in life. It can, for instance, so happen that life evolves to the point of creating human babies who are arguably the most far from equilibrium form of life that we know. They need to be sustained by a human culture so elaborately intricate as to defeat the imagination in always having to remain imaginative. It is a widely held misbelief that order is incompatible with chaos. Ilya Prigogine, one of a few Nobel laureates from the chaotic country of Belgium, set that record straight3 by showing it is through order that more possibilities are created. More possibilities means more entropy, more ways to create new order, thus more chaos, more potential for far from equilibrium states, and, hence (QED) more life. It really is as simple as that. Babies evolved because they are a new order capable of generating yet newer orders. Such is the tale of evolution (a tale as told by Darwin inspiring Boltzmann inspiring Bohr inspiring Prigogine to see time as a telltale sign of unification-in-diversity of the human and the exact sciences). Babies grow up, for instance, challenging binaries in their parents’ culture so creating a new non-binary4 world order full of novel and imaginative life forms unimaginable before. Setting the record straight, therefore, is to accept life as being - necessarily, unavoidably, essentially - queer.
The energy of the sun then powers eternal becoming on earth. That is as long as we make room for that becoming. And a single organism has only so much becoming in it because it necessarily needs to power itself to create enough equilibrium for its self to articulate its life projects5. In doing so, the individual organism is, in the metaphor of Simondon, always a bit like a crystal, in growing outward from an initial perturbation. However, in growing it also increasingly rigidifies in one direction of growth. A single organism like you can maybe grow indefinitely (limited only by energy it can extract from its environment), it definitely loses its ability to change course, and to adopt new projects in life. Ultimately it just repeats its own order, over and over again ad a type of nauseam filling the bitterness of too old an age. Until finally the only life project remaining is that of maintaining one’s own biological life, sucking all life, or potential thereof, from its environment.
And there you have it, maybe without you having noticed it: the playful and emotional argument. Indeed, there is nothing more serious than merely staying alive. The project of merely staying alive doesn’t even count as a life project if you follow - as we must in such things - the ethicist Bernard Williams. Logic then has it that if one stops having potential of becoming someone else, one just statically is6. And merely being works against entropy, wastes energy and necessarily spoils the party for anyone else (yes, this book will show climate change is a problem caused (not simply aggravated) by longevity!7).
It is a sign of our modern culture that life has become sacred after it desecrated all else. It is a sign of this culture outliving its potential that it has become static, continuously putting resources in living as long as possible. Everything we do, from morning to night, we do in the shadow of preventing untimely death. Everything we do is dead. It is unsayable to say what I am trying to say. It will be said that just my saying it is proof that I don’t mean it. But I do mean it. I mean that the practice of ubasute - as told by Akira Kurosowa in the Ballad of Narayama - should be more than a legend. It should be our best practice not to outstay our welcome. It will also be said I am trying to impose an age limit on living, committing a crime of advocating senicide, or worse: that of peer pressuring the elderly into suicide. And I am, but not in any senile straightforwardly old age-based way. The problem anyway is not setting up new norms to control others but one of getting rid of normalizing longevity.
Because, why all live a same (sense of) time? Why all serve maximum time? Why all work to retire instead of retiring to do some real work? This book is about a choice between levity and longevity, bracketing the ong so you can use it constructively toward your younger peers (look up: ong/urban dictionary).
This book is about a modern day taboo: living long and not prospering. The fact of aging is as solid as the second law of thermodynamics. Age decreases the ability to shed the skin of old projects, upsetting the order in chaos. The longer one lives the more our choices crystallize out, making the mind too hard to change its heart. “Humus, not Homo”, as Haraway has it.
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).
This works with breath as well. As it does with basically any shared resource. Although then it does not rhyme, it still stands to reason that extending your stay on this planet is only then an attitude of sharing if you contribute something valuable. Quod non. Worse: being convinced you so contribute is the surest sign of having overstayed your welcome (just like Enlightenment dogma has overstayed its welcome through its hypocrisy in insisting on an equality on paper which it cannot achieve in reality).
That reason and emotion are seen as incompatible is the reason longevity is incompatible with play. Indeed, living too long is outliving your emotions to degenerate into the purest rationality, indistinguishable from irrationality. Longevity leaves you just two options: the emotionality of dementia or egotistical rationality.
Why is he less well known than Einstein? Because Einstein sides with longevity and with determinism: if everything is determined there literally is no future. A perfect thought for those of you wanting to live in the eternal present where you are the center of everything coming before and after you.
Setting up binaries is setting up new orders constitutive of the non-binary future (that is for another book).
It is not, by the way, the content of the projects that matters. A Nobel prize or a comfortable home in which to love one another or merely seeking survival away from war are all projects of becoming.
Which probably in itself accounts for philosophers of being having been born so very very old, resisting death with a vengeance capable of powering war on anything new (Plato, Hegel or Heidegger come to mind).