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 our 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.
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 by unnatural processes.
There is, in any event, another immense problem
about the prolongment of our lives.
Pension schemes are simply not adequate to look after the aged.
This dinosaurial worry has only dawned on governments
and people around in recent years.
In Hong Kong, 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 living in retirement?
Invariably, the answer is no.
(In China, the country will definitely grow old before it grows 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 provided 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 an 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.
(By Mr. David Tang )