The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [89]
The questions I was asked once the backlash against Thanaticism began went relentlessly back and forth over the same reactionary ground. Is the new fascination with death a kind of social sickness? How disturbed should we be by the discovery that the sanity on which New Humans pride themselves has proved to be so fragile? Ironically, honesty forced me to moderate my own opposition lest I should find myself condemning my own work along with Nyxson’s crusade.
“The contemporary fascination with death is by no means inexplicable, nor is it necessarily unhealthy,” I argued, earnestly and frequently. “In the days when death was inescapable, people were deeply frustrated by the imperious imposition of fate. They resented it with all the force and bitterness they could muster, but it could not be truly fascinating while it remained a simple and universal fact of life. Now that death is no longer a necessity, it has perforce become a luxury. Because it is no longer inevitable, we no longer feel an oppressive need to hate and fear it, and this allows us to take an essentially aesthetic view of death. The transformation of the imagery of death into a species of pornography is perfectly understandable, no matter how regrettable it may be.
“Planning a life is an exercise in story making. Living people are forever writing the narratives of their own lives, deciding who to be and what to do, according to various aesthetic criteria. In olden days, death was inevitably seen as an interruption of the business of life, cutting short life stories before they were—in the eyes of their creators—complete. Nowadays, people have the opportunity to plan whole lives, deciding exactly when and how their life stories should reach a climax and a conclusion. We may not share the aesthetic sensibilities of those who decide to die young, but there is a discernible logic in their actions. It is not helpful to dismiss them as madmen.
“We assume that our biotechnologies and nanotechnologies have given us the power we need to regulate our mental lives, but we have resisted roboticization. The freedom of the human will is rightly considered our most precious possession, setting us apart from even the cleverest AIs. We must recognize and accept that this freedom will occasionally be exercised in strange ways and should be prepared to defend the rights of the strangers in our midst. The decision to die young, even though one might live forever, is an exercise of freedom.”
The Thanaticists were by no means displeased by my adoption of this argument, and Hellward Nyxson took to describing me as his “first convert.” The more lavishly I embroidered my analogy, declaring that ordinary emortals were the feuilletonistes, epic poets, and three-decker novelists of modern life whereas Thanaticists were the prose-poets and short-story writers who liked to sign off with a neat punchline, the more the diehard Thanatics grew to like me. I receive many invitations to attend suicides, and my refusal to take them up only served to make my presence a prize to be sought after.
Perhaps I should emphasize that I was then, as I am now, entirely in agreement with the United Nations Charter of Human Rights, whose ninety-ninth amendment guarantees the citizens of every nation the right to take their own lives and to be assisted in making a dignified exit should they so desire. I continued to harbor strong reservations about the way in which the Thanaticists construed the amendment and to detest their solicitation of suicide, but I never sympathized with those extremists who argued for the amendment’s repeal while the Thanaticist Panic was at its height in the 2730s. The item’s original intention had been to facilitate self-administered euthanasia in an age