Do we live too long?

A hundred years ago, individual life expectancy was probably only 45 years. Now, that is likely to be over 70 years, at least in developed countries. So within a decade, we have managed to extend dramatically all of out lives. The reasons seem obvious: science has managed to provide us with so many things that allow us to be born much more safely and to live much longer. We have medical knowledge and medicines that insulate us from infections and illnesses and diseases. We have surgical expertise and instruments that can prevent or defeat malignant growths and mutations. We have basic and advanced sciences to protect us from extreme climates. We have higher learning and research that continue to exclude and cope with the dangers of life. In short, through ever advancing sciences, we have learned to live longer. And we all seem to love it. Who doesn’t want to live longer? On the contrary, there is a quest for longevity that resembles that of the Holy Grail.

But have we not, however, interfered with Mother Nature? We get worked up about global warning; we get worked up about environmental pollution; we get worked up about animal slaughter; and we get worked up about cloning and stem-cell developments. We get worked up about these things because those who respect Nature are rightly concerned about man’s recklessness and ignorance of the disastrous consequences of interference. Yet I cannot think of a greater interference of Nature than our own extension of individual life expectancy. Isn’t it unnatural that we should have to resort to and rely on so many artificial things in life? We build hospitals to take care of the proper conditions of child birth. We build concrete homes in which to live; we pump gas into them for cooking and heat; we invent transport and technological systems to achieve mobility and communications; and we supply medicines and vitamins to cure and enhance our health. It might well be that as human beings, it is only right that we should use our brains to improve our own livelihood. But I am often sceptical about our double standards on the interference with Nature. Everyday, environmentalists pontificate about abuses of the earth, yet we never hear of their criticisms on our greed to live longer and longer be unnatural processes.

There is, in any event, another immense problem about the prolongment of out lives. Pension schemes are simply not adequate to look affter the aged. This dinosaurial worry has only dawned on governments and people around in recent years. In Hong Kongm we have seen the introduction of compulsory pension schemes. But already, there are immediate headaches. The pension funds are often mismanaged or under-managed with the result that they actually depreciate in value over time, thereby providing all the beneficiaries with less value. Then there is the question of adequacy: are pension payments enough to provide all the pensioners with an adequate lining in retirement? Invariably, the answer is NO. (In China, the country will definitely frow old before it frows rich.) So having an increasingly large population of pensioners is going to create an enormous problem for the world, especially when we can already predict that they are not going to be properly previded for.

This seems to be very much like another human folly. Our vanity to prolong our lives is going to end up in another tragedy. In another hundred years, the earth is going to face the problem of and aging human population that will have an unimaginably adverse effect on Nature. We should think carefully now before we take it for granted that living longer is necessarily a good thing. And environmentalists should begin to address the cause, rather than the effect, of human abuses. For the answer does not reside in human behaviour itself, but rather the artificial changes that bring about the elongation of our lives.

An Article written by David Tang(鄧永鏘)