The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [124]
I could not help making much of the ironic observation that the near conquest of death achieved by twenty-first-century medicine had offered an unprecedented libation to the specter of death, in the form of an unparalleled abundance of mortal life. I was careful to call attention to the tragic dimensions of the Malthusian crisis thus generated—but historians are always prone to make more of irony than of tragedy because history lacks the moral order characteristic of works of fiction. It was inevitable that my argument would emphasize the fact that the new medicines and the new pestilences of the twenty-first century had to be seen as different faces of the same coin, spinning out the logic of the situation by which the twentieth century’s new technologies of food production had been progenitors of worldwide famine rather than worldwide satiation.
Perhaps it was unfair of me to pay so much attention to the irony of such situations as the one by which the harvests of the twentieth century Green Revolution facilitated enormous population growth in what was then known as the Third World at a time when China was the only nation whose government was prepared to address Malthusian problems seriously. There was, however, nothing but irony to be found in the fact that when the First World’s enthusiastic promotion of patentable genemod staples introduced global population management by the back door, its endeavors prepared the ground for the stock-market coups that established Hardinism as the last economic orthodoxy. I did admit, of course, that the awful political chaos that followed the Zimmerman coup had been a terrible price to pay for the foundations of the new world order.
I also found irony rather than tragedy in the process that ensured that the preservation of millions of children from the diseases that had killed them in previous centuries delivered millions of twenty-first-century adults into the untender care of more subtle viruses, which rose to the occasion by increasing their mutation rates. Even if the interventions of biological weaponry were disregarded, I pointed out, natural selection allowed the unconquered diseases to achieve such a sophistication of method and effect that the plague of sterility would surely have been precipitated eventually, even if Conrad Helier and his associates had not decided to give evolution a helping hand.
The most controversial aspects of the analysis of The Last Judgment were, for once, peripheral to my main argument—but that did not prevent them generating considerable criticism. My discussion of the manner in which the advent of tissue-culture farmfactories had been carefully delayed and loaded with unnecessary commercial burdens by a Hardinist cabal still heavily dependent on their staple monopolies was bound to be resented by those who preferred to represent the early Hardinists as the True Saviors of the human race. I contended that those biotechnologists who were deliberately excluded from the Inner Circle—including Conrad Helier—had been cynically maneuvered into doing dirty work that the world’s new owners desperately wanted done but did not want to be caught actually doing, thus becoming further marginalized. I even suggested that the Hardinists’ levered acquisition of the crucial Gantz patents could easily be seen as a direly unfortunate development in that it had destroyed the last vestiges of authentic competition within the global economy. From that moment on, I claimed, the benignly flexible invisible hand of classical economic theory had been replaced by an iron fist whose grip was sometimes cruel as well as irresistible.
Perhaps I should have deemphasized these peripheral matters lest they distract too much attention from the main line of my argument, but I simply did not care to. The central thrust of my commentary was, however, that this had been the most critical of all the stages of man’s war with death. The weapons of the imagination had finally been