The Length of Life

How to value the length of a life? The standard answer? The longer the better. But in modern thought qualifications follow. Yes, provided that our health is good and our means suffice to give us comfort. No if the person is in pain and the prognosis is continued suffering. In such cases medically-assisted suicide seems right—indeed is legal in some places.

Cosmologies shape common views. Ours is that life is everything, but bounded by what we call the quality of life; its end is absolute, thus the more of it the better. In religious cultures—let me take the Catholic which I understand fairly well—the length of life, as such, is not the value. What matters is the soul’s state when death claims us. If we die in a state of grace, thus sinless for the moment, having repented our earlier sins, our age is of no consequence. But a long life, however comfortable, is worthless if we die in sin. In this tradition life is God’s gift. Suicide is sinful, whether medically-assisted or not. Most tellingly, suffering is viewed as an occasion to develop our soul’s capacities and never a sufficient motive for taking a life, our own or another’s . Prolongation of such a life by artificial means is, however, not required. Underlying this view is that life is just a segment in a human existence; what matters is the quality of soul, not the quality of life. Indeed the two are not necessarily complementary.

In the traditional view life is also valued, but for another reason. The longer a person has to find the truth, the better. Those disinclined to use words charged with transcendental implications, as truth is, development will do as well. But transcendence—at least of corporeal life—is nonetheless implied.

If life has meaning, human existence suggests a developmental purpose. It is fleeting; it is a mixed sort of something; at best we’re in a kind of normal equilibrium, not on cloud nine. And it ends. But most lives way outlast our breeding years, all else equal. If the selfish gene is really king around here, why permit decades upon decades of “useless” survival. Our grandchildren would surely breed even if we did not interrupt our active senior years occasionally to try to entertain them. Why does nature give us those extra years? The following generation isn’t, as it were, hanging on our words of wisdom. In my maturity I wasn’t into listening either. Is all of this just the advance of technology? Was three-score-and-ten coined in a high-tech civilization? Or were those people still just herding sheep?

The sequence seems to be: education, service, preparation. Youth, maturity, old age. Preparation for what? Preparation for the next life. It makes sense to me, all this, but length of life, particularly into the declining years, only makes sense if I see the world through a transcendental lens.