THE CITY
of human agency, and that calling something ‚God’s will‛ is anything more than an act of rank mystification. But notwithstanding the proliferating need for scapegoats, much of the burden of blame will devolve upon ourselves, since in being set free to choose so much about our lives, we will almost certainly find ourselves more and more anxious about, and dissatisfied with, the choices we make. It need hardly be pointed out that the expansion of choice does not always make for the expansion of happiness. Everyone knows the sense of inexplicable relief that comes when a hard decision is taken out of our hands by the flow of events. That relief will become rarer. Everyone knows the aching hollowness of ‚buyer’s regret,‛ when we were allow to ‚make the call,‛ and we blew it. That ache will become more familiar. The more we claim mastery, the more it will all be our own fault. The more our lives are prolonged and extended, and the more death becomes seen as an avoidable evil whose precise moment should be ‚chosen,‛ rather than an inherent feature of human life, the more we will come to live imprisoned by a compulsive and narcissistic dread of all risk. We may even begin to look with horror and distrust upon our own children, since the possible consequences of such risk—the gulf between life and death, which will yawn before us as a chasm between eternity and extinction—will be too vast, too horrible, and too fully avoidable, to be contemplated. Salvation and life-extension will become the same thing. Hence, the price of living a life to the fullest will be deemed too high. The typical man of the medical-miracle future will not be an Ubermensch. He will be more like an obsessive-compulsive handwasher who lives in constant dread of other people’s germs, and ends up living the life of a wealthy hermit, like a latter-day Howard Hughes. That such a world would drain human life of its dignity and vigor is not hard to imagine. Just as the treatment of the soul as a mere congeries of manipulable psychological states renders inner life meaningless, so the infinite extension of life will render life infinitely trivial. ‚Death is the mother of beauty,‛ intoned the great postChristian poet Wallace Stevens; ‚hence from her,/Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our desires.‛ Such words sound weird, even pathological, to the modern secular ear. And yet everyone who has ever read The Iliad knows that the gods of Homer’s epic are rendered less admirable, less noble, and less beautiful than the 26