Existence

was about to say. In public speaking, as in music, a pause was sometimes just the right punctuation, before striking a solid phrase.

“Take the most arrogant of your obsessions,” Brookeman resumed. “This quest for life-span extension! You give it many names. Zero senescence. Non-morbidity. All of it boiling down to the same selfish hope, for personal immortality.”

This goaded a reaction from the crowd-hisses and muttered curses. Tor commanded her specs to deploy a slender stalk wafting upward with a tiny, omnidirectional lens at the end, surveying members of the audience, joining dozens of other gel-eyes floating, like dandelions, up to a meter above the sea of heads.

“Did I strike a nerve with that one?” Hamish Brookeman chuckled. “Well, just wait. I’m getting warmed up!”

Clearly, he enjoyed the role of iconoclast… in a hall filled with self-styled iconoclasts. A kindred spirit, then? Even while disagreeing with his hosts over every specific issue? That kind of ironic insight could make her report stand out.

“For example, it’s easy to tell which of you, in the audience, believes in the magic elixir called caloric restriction. Sure, research studies show that a severely reduced, but wholesome diet can trigger longer life spans in bacteria, in fruit flies, even mice. And yes, keeping lean and fit is good for you. It helps get your basic fourscore and ten. But some of the fellows you see around here, walking about like near skeletons, popping hunger-suppression pills and avoiding sex… do these guys look healthy? Are they enjoying their extra years? Indeed, are they getting any? Extra years, I mean.

“Alas, sorry to break this to you fellows, but the experiment was run! Across the last four millennia, there must have been thousands of monasteries, in hundreds of cultures, where ascetic monks lived on spare dietary regimens. Surely, some of them would have stumbled onto anything so simple and straightforward as low-calorie immortality! We’d have noticed two-hundred-year-old monks, capering around the countryside, don’tcha think?”

This time, laughter was spontaneous. Still nervous, but genuine. Through the stalk-cam, she saw even some of the bone-thin ones, taking the ribbing well. Brookeman really was good at this.

“Anyway, remember that age and death are the great recyclers! In a world that’s both overpopulated and unbalanced in favor of the old, do you really think the next wave of young folks is going to want to follow in your shadows… forever?

“Putting things philosophically for a minute, aren’t you simply offering false hope, and thereby denying today’s elderly the great solace that every other ageing generation clutched, when their turn came to shuffle off this mortal coil? The consolation that at least this happens to everyone?

“During all past eras, this pure and universal fact-that death makes no exceptions-allowed a natural acceptance and letting go. Painful and sad, but at least one thing about life seemed fair. Rich and poor, lucky or unlucky, all wound up in the same place, at roughly the same pace. Who said that our lives only become meaningful when we are aware of our mortality?

“Only now, by loudly insisting that death isn’t necessary, aren’t you turning this normal rhythm into a bitter pill? Especially when the promise (all too likely) turns into ashes, and people wind up having to swallow it anyway, despite all your fine promises?”

Brookeman shook his head.

“But let’s be generous and say you meet with some partial success. Suppose only the rich can afford the gift of extended life. Isn’t that what happens to most great new things? Don’t they get monopolized, at first, by the mighty? You godmakers say you want an egalitarian miracle, a new age for all. But aren’t you far more likely to create a new race of Olympians? Not only privileged and elite, but permanent and immortal?”

Now the hall was hushed. And Tor wondered. Had Brookeman gone too far?

“Face it,” the tall man told 3,012 listeners in the hall… plus 916, 408 who were tuned in, around the planet. “You techno-transcendentalists are no different from all the millennial preachers and prophets who came before you. The same goggle-eyed, frenetic passion. The same personality type, yearning for something vastly better than the hand that you were dealt. And the same drive to believe! To believe that something else, much finer, is available to those who recite the right incantation. To those who achieve the right faith, or virtue. Or who concoct the secret formula.

“Only, those earlier prophets were much smarter than you lot! Because the redemption they forecast was usually ambiguous, set in another vague time and place, or safely removed to another plane. And if their promises failed? The priest or shaman could always blame it all on unbelievers. Or on followers who were insufficiently righteous. Or who got the formula wrong. Or on God.

“But you folks? Who will you duck behind, when disillusion sets in? Your faith in Homo technologicus-the Tinkering Man-has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.

“When your grand and confident promises fail, or go wrong, who will all the disappointed people have to blame?

“No one… but you.”

RENUNCIATORS

In 1421, Admiral Zheng He led a huge armada of Chinese ships, some over a hundred meters long, “to proceed to the end of the earth, to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.”

Ironically Confucius-or Kong-Fuzi-wrote in the Analects that “While his parents are alive, the son may not take a distant voyage abroad.” And although Zheng He’s parents may have been slaughtered in the Yannan rebellion, for thousands of other sailors who manned the famed Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, this was far from a typical Confucian exercise. It showed what could happen when a bold emperor roused that great nation to reach toward its potential, in the future rather than the past.

Zheng He’s voyages brought home tribute, trade, and knowledge. Had they continued, Chinese armadas might have sailed into Lisbon Harbor, in time to astonish a young Prince Henry the Navigator with ships the size of cathedrals.

Only then, the extroverted emperor died. His heir and court ordered a halt to trade and outlawed oceangoing ships. It was all part of an ancient cycle. Eras of enlightenment, like the Song Dynasty would be followed by long periods of repressed conformity. Before William the Conqueror landed at Hastings, the blast furnaces and coke ovens of Henan produced a hundred thousand tons of iron per year! Then, abruptly, they were abandoned till the twentieth century.

Often, it wasn’t economics or even politics at fault, but the whim of hyperconservative elites, who preferred serenity over the bustle of change. Especially change that might threaten their status or empower the poor.

When carried out vigorously, renunciation can extend even to memory. In our example, the records and navigation tables of Zheng He’s expeditions were burned, along with the ships. China’s southern border was razed and turned into a lifeless no-man’s-land. When eighteenth century Western visitors amazed the Imperial court with mechanical clocks and other wonders, a few scholars cited obscure texts, saying: “Oh, yes, we had such things. Once.”

Is history repeating itself? After their recent epoch of zealous modernism, stunning the world with ambitious accomplishments, will the Han turn inward again? There were already signs of retrenchment, in a generation with too few young people, especially women. Then that terrible blow-an ill-fated space mission that was named (ironically) after Admiral Zheng He.

Renunciation, it seems, has persistent allure. Only this time, will the whole world join in, recoiling against change? Rejecting progress in the name of stability? Anti-technologists cite the ancient Chinese pattern as a role model for how to turn back from the precipice in time.

Yet, we know there has always been another side. A side represented by the marvelous Zheng He and so many like him. Those who had the will to look ahead.

– from The Movement Revealed by Thormace Anubis-Fejel