The Idol of an Early Death

Concerning the question of death and academics, our age has returned to the atmosphere of ancient Greece. It was there that Cleombrotus, having read Plato’s account of the immortal soul, threw himself off a building to escape his wretched body. He never paused to wonder why Plato had not done the same. Their’s was a belief that the real world is a spirit world, an ideal land of form. The decaying functions of matter don’t—in a word—matter. The soul must escape the body to see the truth.

The sages of our age have shunned Plato’s metaphysics but retained Cleombrotus’s ethics. Mr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, I read in The Atlantic, hopes to die at the age of seventy-five. The ramblings of mad men don’t usually bother me, but when those ramblings become apologetic, I become concerned. I care nothing if a man at a party pours vodka into his punch, hoping to pass out before the rest of us; but he is quite a boor if he stands on a chair and argues—at length—that the vodka ought to be in the communal punch bowl. According to Mr. Emanuel, “Society” and “families” and “you” will be “better if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly.” I beg to differ.

Mr. Emanuel, up their on his chair, has two reasons for wanting to die: physical and mental. Physically, he cites a study assessing “physical functioning in adults.” Remarkably, “the results show that as people age, there is a progressive erosion of physical functioning.” Staggering. I had no idea.

Mentally, there is dementia, “the most dreadful of all possibilities.” And even if dementia is escaped, we eventually lose our creativity. Mr. Emanuel cites a synthesis of “numerous studies” showing that “creativity rises rapidly as career commences; peaks about 20 years into the career … and then enters a slow age-related decline.” Oh wisdom! Share more of these rare truths!

He therefore will forgo medical care at seventy-five and wait for the reaper in whatever form he chooses to appear. “Rejection of my view is totally natural,” he writes. “After all, evolution has inculcated in us a drive to live as long as possible.” Perhaps. Though it seems obvious that no mere product of evolution could take this step back and actively reject evolution. Only a spiritual thing can command the physical. But the real objection is that the “rejection” of the common reader will come from his common religion, a world under God in His heaven. The fifth commandment proclaims: “Thou shalt not kill.” Unlike the commandment against deception, God does not here add “-thy neighbor.” The willed destruction of ourselves, either by taking up the syringe or avoiding it, dispenses with judge, jury, and jurisprudence. We rightly exult when DNA evidence exonerates the wrongly accused. What crime, aside from writing a dreadful essay, has Mr. Emanuel committed to deserve death?

While I disagree with his conclusions, I must also criticize Mr. Emanuel’s method. He sees what is obvious to everyone through a telescope used by a select few. A five-year-old could tell him that old people move more slowly, and that most careers peak in the middle. But Mr. Emanuel has discovered the obvious by way of the obscure; the National Health Interview Survey, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Dean of the University of California, in short: a bunch of clever boffins with tenure—just like him. If the obvious truth (that old people slow down) is only discovered in the journals of the library, rather than in a chat with the librarian, a man may begin to think that the journals are the only way to discover the obvious truth. Thus the writers of such publications must be the oracles of truth. “And by by golly those chaps are just like me!” Worshiping one’s peers is a sure gateway to worshiping one’s self.

Of course Mr. Emanuel claims ignorance about things supernatural. “Many of us have suppressed, actively or passively, thinking about God, heaven and hell, and whether we return to the worms. We are agnostics or atheists, or just don’t think about whether there is a God and why she should care at all about mere mortals.” But while Mr. Emanuel pretends to have written off religion, he has in fact written his own.

This religion proclaims a story of life and death. Like any good religion it seeks to explain everything. What is man? “Connections between neurons.” What is the meaning of life? “Being creative.” Purpose of pain? To make you prefer death. Purpose of death? To end “psychic” and “physical” pain. But like any bad religion, it rests on an error: the mistaking of self for God. Mr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel has the first name of a prophet, but he is a false prophet. He carries the last name of “God with us,” but he is a very false god. Christianity teaches that we are to pass from death into life. Mr. Emanuel teaches that we are to pass from life into death.

Even Aldous Huxley knew that decrepitude was a gift to mankind. The inhabitants of his Brave New World balked, much like Mr. Emanuel, at the sight of the wrinkled and worn Linda. Huxley knew, for all his religious confusion, that old age may not be desirable in itself, but desirable for ourselves. The endurance of hardship is the surest path to virtue. Even tenured academics know something of this truth, for they once endured grad school. No one dies who wasn’t going to die already. We mustn’t die as cowards. You can hardly call it largeness of soul to seek death as a release from difficulty. The choice is between dying young, a soul soft from the luxury of easy living—or dying old, a soul tempered by trial. Perhaps the difference between Mr. Emanuel and myself is that see I opportunity in the difficulty, whereas he sees difficulty in the opportunity.