The destroyer of minds

This posting was inspired by this one over at DemWit, which I do strongly recommend you read; it has its own point to make which is different from my point here, and does so very powerfully. It excerpts a 1955 novel on the Civil War, mourning the loss which the war's death toll inflicted on future human creativity. Some of those who were killed might, had they lived, have gone on to be great scientists, artists, or humanitarians; because they died young, their contributions are forever lost to civilization.

It occurred to me, while reading DemWit's post, that the same is true of death from any cause. Until a few generations ago even the most civilized regions were regularly swept by epidemics and famines which killed millions; the great genocides of history killed millions more. How many geniuses did we lose before they had a chance to achieve?

The world has come far since then, yet people still die. Because we have become so good at eliminating other causes of death, the great majority of human deaths now happen because of aging. Millennia of religion and traditional thinking have brainwashed us into thinking of death from old age as more "natural" and less tragic than death from other causes, although disease, starvation, and violence are just as much a part of the natural world as the aging process is. Yet this kind of death robs humanity of talent just as surely as death in wartime does -- mature talent rather than potential talent, but the loss is, if anything, all the greater for that.

MacKinlay Kantor, the author of the novel DemWit cites, died in 1977 at the age of 73 -- not even a particularly short life by the standards of that time. If he were still alive today and still young and vigorous, how many more great novels might he have written, novels which we will now never read? If the Civil War had not happened, all of the soldiers killed by it, whose deaths Kantor mourns, would still be dead now -- dead after longer lives, yes, but still dead, their full potential still unrealized because they had only seventy or eighty years in which to develop it. How much better if they had not only survived the war, but were still with us.

Imagine if Beethoven or Tchaikovsky were still alive and working, having experienced and absorbed the vast increase in range of cultural influences and available musical instruments since their time. What music might they then have written that, in fact, we will never hear? If Shakespeare had lived through and seen all the history and cultural development from his day to ours, what great works might he be writing at this very moment?

Worldwide, aging kills more than forty million people each year -- almost as many as the entire death toll of World War II.

Given the state of our scientific knowledge today and the pace of technological innovation, I'm confident that billions of people now living will never suffer the terrible scourge of aging and death. But it can't come soon enough. Not when every year's delay costs us forty million.

Links to previous posts on this topic

FAQ