Category: Religion and society

This article about one writer’s attempt to practice the so-called Calorie Restriction Diet is very interesting. The CR diet, which essentially entails keeping one’s caloric intake to near-starvation levels has a fair bit of scientific evidence indicating that it may substantially increase one’s lifespan.

Indeed, some of the practicioners seem to think it could provide the gateway to immortality, in conjunction with “the Singularity” (aka the Rapture for nerds):

“Kurzweil thinks we will reach actuarial escape velocity pretty soon,” says Don. “What do you think, Michael?”

Michael pauses to collect his thoughts, and while he does, let’s fill in a blank or two. Ray Kurzweil is an occasionally best-selling futurist, given to flamboyant but well-researched predictions about the “transhumanist” century ahead of us, in which hyperbrainy artificial intelligence, fiendishly intricate nanorobotry, genome-twiddling Frankentech, and other incipient techno-marvels combine to reinvent humanity in the image of the machine. Swirling in the midst of it all is the key concept of “actuarial escape velocity,” a transhumanist term for that moment in the acceleration of biomedical progress when, for every year you live, technology adds another year or more to your maximum life span. It’s a tipping point that, theoretically at least, never stops tipping.

“I would like to hope 50 to 100 years,” says Michael, speaking carefully. He’s well aware what kind of weight that his day job, assisting the maverick life-extension theorist Aubrey de Grey, gives his words with people like Don. “Fifty to 100 years,” says Don, chewing thoughtfully on his lip. “That may be too late for me.”

“It may be too late for me,” says Michael. But the truth is, once you accept that actuarial escape velocity is out there waiting for you, a single point in time that marks the gates of immortality, it’s never too late to hope your life will intersect with it—and there isn’t much you wouldn’t do to minimize your chances of missing it by so much as a day. With stakes like that in play, even a lifetime of hunger seems a small price to pay.

By the end of the article the author has given up on the CR diet, in no small part due to his increasing awareness of the cult-like qualities of its adherent. He then offers some reflections on why someone like him would be attracted to such an apparently extreme lifestyle:

I know: What was I thinking? But do you really need to ask? The workings of a heart and mind like mine are no mystery. I’m your average midlife secular professional—reasonably well adjusted, as the profile goes—a little tightly wound, but aren’t we all? Like the tail-end baby- boomer I also am, I grow more intimate each day with the fears of mortality already gripping the rest of my generation, and lacking spiritual faith, I am perhaps inordinately susceptible to scientific promises of longer, healthier life. I’m of the generation that made marathon running a popular pastime, for God’s sake, so fleshly discomfort in the name of self-involved achievement is a surprisingly easy sell. Throw in a promise that any undue pain and suffering will be masked or compensated by a psychic well-being possibly chemical in origin, and the deal is just about clinched.

I won’t belabor the point: Just take a good look around your neighborhood, your place of work, your therapist’s waiting room. Take a good look in the mirror maybe, too. That ought to be enough to tell you CR’s growth from cult to subculture to fact of mainstream cultural life is not so unimaginable. Yes, CR flies in the face of common sense, but it’s got the preponderance of scientific evidence on its side. Yes, it’s a little crazy, but the crazinesses it requires are only those already endemic to our age and area code. And yes, by any objective standard, the food is lousy, but believe me: Starve yourself long enough and even a tofu-coffee-macadamia-nut-and-flaxseed smoothie becomes ambrosia.

So if you’ve read this far and still think you could never, ever, do what my five dinner guests do to themselves every day, don’t kid yourself. I’ve seen the future, and it’s hungry.

The obvious angle here is the secular loss of faith in anything beyond death leading to a frantic grasping at scientific promises of immortality. But there’s also a class angle. Working-class people, in my experience, are much more fatalistic about the body’s limits and its eventual breakdown. Middle and upper-class professionals, by contrast, see these as problems to be overcome by means of some technocratic fix. As Christopher Lasch wrote in his book The True and Only Heaven, working class culture is more attuned to the idea that life has certain inherent limits. Not everything in the human condition is a problem to be overcome; some aspects of it are there to be suffered.

But there is a tension here that isn’t easily resolvable in one direction or the other. No one thinks that we should simply accept disease, suffering, physical and mental breakdown, etc. as facts of life and do nothing to alleviate their effects. Awareness of life’s limits can become fatalism. On the other hand, quests for a kind of techno-immortality can lead people both to employ immoral means in its pursuit and to confuse quantity of life with quality (to take a trivial example: would you want to live forever if it meant you had to eat the kind of food prescribed by the CR diet?).

Christianity has generally held these two impulses in tension, without fully giving in to one or the other. Alleviating suffering has always been regarded as a good, as Jesus’s healings and the church’s commitment to works of mercy demonstrate. But this life is not an end in itself, or something to be prolonged at all costs. Christians have been taught to sit loosely to this life, being willing to suffer and even die as witnesses to their faith, with the confidence that there is something greater in store beyond the limits of the present world.

Maybe these tendencies can be held together because confidence in the resurrection allows Christians not to be anxious about their own survival, thus freeing them to attend to the needs of others. Christianity has never been primarily about extending one’s own life – that’s God’s business. Becuase our lives are hidden with Christ, we’re free to be “little Christs” to our neighbors, as Luther put it. By contrast, secular schemes for immortality like the CR diet end up being incredibly self-centered. How do you have time for your neighbor when you’re so busy obsessing about your caloric intake?