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By Root 1418 0

the human world. Death, I insisted, would forever remain a fact of life and its influence on fundamental human psychology must be recognized and respected. I argued that the infallible perpetuation of the human mind would never become possible, let alone routine, no matter how far biotechnology might advance or how much progress the cyborganizers might make in their material metamorphoses. The victory that humankind had achieved, I argued, was not and never would be a conclusive conquest; it had reached its conclusion because the only conclusion that was or had even been conceivable was a sensible reconciliation and the establishment of death within its proper place in human affairs. Having said that, however, I took some trouble to compliment the Cyborganizers for their bold attempts to widen the scope of human experience, and I did concede that any significant transformation of the quality of life has important consequences for the existential evaluation of death.

For the first time, I took the side of the neo-Thanaticists in declaring that it was a good thing that dying remained one of the choices open to human beings and a good thing that the option should occasionally be exercised. I still had no sympathy with the exhibitionism of public executions, and I was particularly scathing in my criticism of the element of bad taste in self-ordered crucifixions and other Thanaticist excesses, but only because such ostentation offended my Epicurean sensibilities. Deciding upon the length of one’s lifetime, I said, must remain a matter of individual taste. While one should not mock or criticize those who decided that a short life suited them best, one should not attribute more significance to their suicides than those suicides actually possessed.

At the risk of being obvious, I took care to stress that it was a thoroughly good thing that people were still markedly differently from one another even after half a millennium of universal emortality. However conducive it might be to Utopian ease and calm, I argued, it would not be good for the species if we were ever to become so similar that it became impossible for people to think one another seriously misguided or even deranged. Again, I complimented the Cyborganizers for trying to discover new modes of human experience, including those that seemed to more conservative minds to be bizarre.

I made much of the thesis that a proper contrast with death is something that can and does illuminate and add meaning to the business of life. Although death had been displaced from the evolutionary process by the biotechnological usurpation of the privileges of natural selection, I observed, it certainly had not lost its role in the formation and development of the individual human psyche: a role that was both challenging and refining. I declared that grief, pain, and fear were not entirely undesirable things, not simply because they could function in moderate doses as stimulants but also because they were important forces in the organization of emotional experience.

The value of experienced life, I argued, depends upon a proper understanding of the possibility and reality of death, which depends in turn upon a knowledge and understanding of grief, pain, and fear. The proper terminus of man’s long war with death was, therefore, not merely a treaty—let alone an annihilation—but a marriage: a reasonable accommodation in which all faults were understood, accepted, tolerated, and forgiven.

I asserted in my conclusion that death’s power over the human imagination was now properly circumscribed but that it would never become entirely impotent or irrelevant. I proposed that man and death now enjoyed a kind of social contract in which the latter’s tyranny and exploitation had been reduced to a sane and acceptable minimum but still left death a meaningful voice and a manipulative hand in human affairs. To some of my longtime readers it seemed that I had adopted a gentler and more forgiving attitude to the old enemy than had ever seemed likely while I was organizing the earlier parts of my study.