Anderson is founder of Stagecoach Ventures, a tech media firm in NYC. He publishes Weekend Reader at Maxwella.
It turns out that Peter Thiel quotes Hamlet.
For Thiel, a line in the play’s second scene throws open the pessimism that runs throughout the tragedy and, in his opinion, our current cultural moment. “Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,” says Gertrude to her son, Hamlet. Her words are a cold comfort to the young prince, who is grieving the death of his father. All that lives must die. “At some level it’s a statement about reality. At another level,” Thiel postulates, “it’s a statement about accepting the rottenness that is in Denmark.” Death is a fact of life, Gertrude says. There’s nothing to be done. Get over it.
But Peter Thiel isn’t getting over it.
“Why,” he asks, “must we die?”
On a recent Monday evening in San Francisco, 700 members of the Silicon Valley tech scene swarmed the SF JAZZ Center for something of a fireside chat between Peter Thiel and N.T. Wright, hosted by The Veritas Forum. It’s not unusual for the technorati to show up in droves to hear from the billionaire technologist-philosopher Thiel, who co-founded Paypal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-founded the behemoth private data analytics firm, Palantir (recently valued at $15 billion). He is one of the most successful tech investors in history, and has been called “America’s leading public intellectual” by Fortune magazine. Thiel’s fans have made his new book on entrepreneurship, Zero to One, an instant bestseller. But this Monday night he drew a crowd for an unusual reason: to talk about death and God with one of the world’s leading Christian theologians.
N.T. Wright, bald and bearded with the Gandalf-wise accent of the British upper crust, is known simply as “Tom” in personal conversation, but has been hailed by Time Magazine as “one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought.” He is an Anglican priest and former Bishop of Durham and has taught at McGill, Cambridge, Oxford, and now at St. Andrews University in Scotland. The author of dozens of academic and popular books on theology, Wright is both prolific and profound. And like Thiel, N.T. Wright holds some non-conformist views about the reality of death that make some people quite uncomfortable.
I listened to Thiel and Wright during their public conversation and had the chance to sit down with them privately. I came away with a new perspective on religious faith and the prospect of death. I also grew more convinced that there is a dangerous lack of moral philosophy and theological reflection about the rapidly emerging technologies that are forever changing our understanding of death and of life itself.
The Undiscovered Country
Peter Thiel sat on the stage in a trim suit and open-collared white oxford. He has made more than $2 billion by betting big on contrarian ideas that cut against the conventional wisdom. To hear him speak can remind you of the smallness of your own dreams. So it was unsurprising that the conversation this evening eventually turned to what is perhaps his most ambitious project and most controversial idea: trying to extend human life indefinitely.
Thiel, whose speech patterns combine a jarring number of unsure-sounding “ahs” and “ums” with some confidently stated and precisely articulated original aphorisms, summarized the basis of his interest in life extension in the self-evident way an intelligent ten year-old might: “I think the thing that’s really incompatible with life is death.”
The line drew laughter, but one got the feeling the joke was unintentional. For Thiel, life is a self-evident good and death is the opposite of life. Therefore death is a problem, and as he says there are three main ways of approaching it. “You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.” Whether we can successfully fight death is a question about the nature of nature and about our ability to understand it. Whether we should try to fight death is a question of our philosophy and our theology.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, psychologist Ernest Becker argued that death, or more precisely our fear of death, is the primary driving force in human culture. Unique among the animals, humans are aware that someday we will die. The fundamental irony of our life is that we are so limited that not one of us can escape death, yet we are so magnificent that every one of us conscious of the factwe can’t escape it.
“Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever…”
Most of us, most of the time don’t think about our own mortality. We avoid the idea because if we really think about it, it is terrifying.
“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die.”
So we try to ignore death, or in Becker’s words, to deny it. Freud argued that most human action is driven by a sublimation of the sex drive. Becker thought Freud was half-right. Human action is driven by sublimation, but the need is not sex, instead, he argues, “the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation.” This sublimation is expressed in any number of ways — we may focus on our careers, our love lives, our families, the size of our bank accounts, or on any number of things that may be good (or bad) in themselves. Ultimately however, Becker says, we pursue these things not for themselves, but for the same root reason: to distract ourselves from the fear of our own mortality.
“…the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of…”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
I would argue (with self-acknowledged oversimplification) that at a high level, in order to psychologically deal with the reality of mortality most people can be divided into two camps. The first is “The Here and Now Camp.” The second is “The Hereafter Camp.”
The Here and Now camp says what’s important is the present moment, the here and now. You can’t control death, but you can control your life, so focus on that. Many, though not all, in this camp don’t believe God exists. With no God, they are faced with a choice between two beliefs. The first is that life is a meaningless accident that will soon end (a belief that leads to melancholy, depression, or worse). The alternative is to believe that life is short but not without meaning — the meaning is what you make of it, so make as much of it as you can. In this camp are the Epicureans and the Stoics, pursuing lives of pleasure or of virtue for their own reward. Don’t waste your life say the Here and Now campers, because this is all you’ve got.
The Hereafter Camp deals with the problem of death in the opposite way. Instead of emphasizing the importance of this life, the Hereafter camp treats this life as nothing but a training ground to prepare for the great hereafter. Death is not to be feared because it is not the end of the story; it is the beginning of an even better story. Heaven or paradise is real and is awaiting those who merit it. Maria Shriver’s children’s book, What’s Heaven, sums up the popular western notion of the afterlife by describing heaven as “a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk…If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]…” Act in a good way that pleases God and you get to go there. A few take this basic idea to a radicalized extreme and begin believing if they blow up themselves along with infidels they will earn an eternal glory in paradise. Whether violent or peaceful, for the Hereafter camp, you accept death as a part of life because life is just a qualification period for the afterlife anyway.
Neither Peter Thiel nor N.T. Wright would agree with either of these views. For Wright, the “heaven” described by the hereafter camp, which is the dominant conception of our cultural imagination, is mostly unbiblical nonsense. The Bible never paints a picture of us wearing robes and strumming harps in the clouds. It describes heaven coming down to Earth. We live, he argues, in the “already, but not yet” time where the kingdom of God has begun here on earth with Jesus, but won’t be complete until He returns. The Lord’s Prayer, Wright argues, says as much, when we pray “Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present — by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself — will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”
If Wright’s views on death and the afterlife are on the contrarian spectrum, Peter Thiel’s are off the charts. He begins with an entirely different premise: What if death isn’t part of the paradigm at all? What if death doesn’t have to be a given?
Drinking from the Grail
Arthurian legend has it that the Holy Grail, from which Christ allegedly served his disciples at the last supper, would grant eternal youth to whomever held it. Many of the great tales of Arthur’s court involve his knights questing for the legendary cup. From Arthur, to The Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones,“grailing” has been the stuff of great story-making. But, some serious people today, Thiel among them, believe that the promise of the grail (not the cup itself but the hope of overcoming death) is not just fodder for knight’s tales. It is possibly within our reach.
At least he and others are funding it like it is within our reach. Google has committed an investment up to $600 million into Calico (short for the California Life Company) to do anti-aging research and, as Time magazine puts it, to “solve death.” Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma and Sergey Brin (among others) have funded "Breakthrough Prizes for scientists who make discoveries that extend human life. Its $3 million payouts — given to six scientists each year — dwarf similar awards, including the Nobel Prizes, currently about $925,000.” Thiel himself has invested in 25 biotech companies and has funded gerontologist Aubrey de Grey with $6 million, partly for the work of the Methuselah Foundation, whose near-term goal is to make “90-year-olds as healthy as 50-year-olds — by 2030.”
Thiel has spoken elsewhere about the source of his optimism about stopping and even reversing aging. The idea is to do what we are doing in every other area of life: apply powerful computers and big data to unlock insights to which, before this era, we’ve never had access.
“Many biological processes appear to be irreversible, but computational processes are reversible. If it is possible to understand biological systems in informational terms, could we then reverse these biological processes, including the process of ageing? I do think that the genomics revolution promises a much greater understanding of biological systems and opens the possibility of modifying these seemingly inevitable trajectories in far more ways than we can currently imagine.”
Almost everyone I talk with about these ideas has the same reaction. First there is skepticism — that can’t really happen, right? Second, there is consideration — well those Silicon Valley guys are weird, but if anyone has the brains and the money to do it, it’s probably them. Finally comes reflection, which often has two parts —1. I would like to live longer. 2. But I still feel a little uneasy about the whole idea.
In some ways, the project of radical life extension, though it wasn’t called that, has already been a tremendous success. Consider that between 1900 and 2000, the average life span of Americans increased from 47 years to 76. And with new scientific discoveries there’s no reason to think it won’t keep expanding. Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist, figured out how to double the life span of a roundworm by disabling a single gene.
And this may just be the beginning. The inventor and “futurist” Ray Kurzweil, who serves as Google’s director of engineering, believes that through a combination of gene therapy, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, it may be possible to live forever. He believes that eternal life will come when humans move beyond our current physical limitations and merge with machines, eventually uploading our minds into computer databases where they will never “die.” He has even speculated it may be possible to reincarnate his dead fatherinto a digital avatar that would convince many people he is actually alive.
All this speculation brings up significant questions about the nature of reality and life itself. Is there a difference between mind and the soul? Or between the brain and whatever the mind/soul is? Is human consciousness reducible to biological and mathematical algorithms that we can manipulate and recreate through code? Or is this line of thinking the ultimate example of hubris?
What Dreams May Come
When the conversation this evening turned to life extension, Wright recalled Petronius’ story of Cumaean Sibyl, which T.S. Elliot attached as an epigraph to his poem The Wasteland. Cumean Sibyl was a Greek oracle who asked Apollo for eternal life. Apollo granted her wish. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth, so she kept aging and growing more and more decrepit and miserable through the centuries.
The arguments against research into life extension are legion. Some people are simply concerned that if you had a dramatically longer life, you’d probably get bored. Put differently, they fear life might lose its sense of meaning and purpose if it never ended. Would you lose the entrepreneurial spirit? Steve Jobs once advised a Stanford graduation class that “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” On the other hand, you might feel like you have nothing to lose if you knew you’d never die.
Others are concerned about what indefinite life extension would do to inequality in a world where already 50% of the world’s wealth is controlled by 1% of the population. (Exhibit A: Justin Timberlake’s future thriller In Time uses this scenario for its plot). Others look at the possibility of extending our own time and worry about overcrowding on a planet already predicted to reach 11 billion “normal lifespan” people by 2100. Thiel believes these are just challenges to overcome and not worth sacrificing the beautiful vision of a life without death.
The concept of indefinite life extension feels uncomfortable to people, thinks Thiel, because we have become acculturated to the idea that death, like taxes, is inevitable. But, he says, “it’s not like one day you’ll wake up and be offered a pill that makes you immortal.” What will happen instead is a gradual and increasingly fast march of scientific discovery and progress. Scientists will discover a cure for Alzheimer's and will say, “Do you want that?” Of course our answer will be “Yes!” They will find a cure for cancer and say, “Do you want that?” And again, of course, our answer will be “Yes!” What seems foreign and frightening in the abstract will likely seem obvious and wonderful in the specific. “It seems,” Thiel said, “that in every particular instance the only moral answer is to be in favor of it.” And yet…
- Woody Allen
When Thiel raised the topic of life extension, the mood at the SF JAZZ Center changed. People sat forward in their chairs. I noticed hands reaching into bags and pockets grabbing phones to tweet. What would the theologian think of this?
Wright was clear to say he was all for living a full long life, maybe to 100 or 120 years old, “or whatever the case may be.” But he rejected the proposal of eradicating death. He offered two arguments. The first was simple enough: he does not believe God would allow it.
“There is a reason why, in the ancient story at the beginning of the Bible…Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat of the tree of life once they have rebelled against God. [It is] because God will not give immortality to people who are deeply infected with this disease called rebellion, or idolatry or sin.”
Wright was drawing on the ancient Christian idea that after the Fall, humanity was forever stained with the blot of sin, separating people from the holy God. In the apostle Paul’s letter to the Roman church, he wrote that death is the universal and inescapable result of humankind’s rebellion.
“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”
Based on this theological premise, to tease out Wright’s thinking, he was arguing that it may be possible to prolong human life to some extent, but we will by no means be able to extend it indefinitely. Death will not be defeated by science. God’s abhorrence of sin will not allow it. Thiel did not respond directly to this claim, so I am not sure what he makes of it, but I would like to know.
Wright’s second objection was to articulate a skepticism about whether the project of life extension really is all that good, either for the individual or for the world. “If [I] say, okay I’ll live to be 150. I’ll still be a sinner. I’ll still be conflicted. I’ll still have wrong emotions. Do I really want to go on having all that stuff that much longer? Will that be helpful to the world if I do?”
This roused Thiel. “I really have to disagree with that last formulation…it strikes me as very Epicurean in a way.” For Peter Thiel, Epicureanism is akin to deep pessimism. It means basically giving up. One gets the sense he finds the philosophy not just disagreeable but offensive to his deepest entrepreneurial instincts and life experience. “We are setting our sights low,” he argued, “if we say everyone is condemned to a life of death and suffering.” Others might say we are setting our sights realistically. But for Thiel, conquering death isn’t just an interesting suggestion or an aesthetic preference. It is the outflow of his Christian belief about the nature of the world. In his words: “…Schiller said, ‘There can’t be anything wrong with death because nothing universal is evil.’ I agree more with the Christian view of death: that death is evil and we shouldn’t accept it…”
For Thiel, death may be natural, but nature doesn’t have to be our baseline. In his mind it isn’t the baseline narrative of Christianity. “The word ‘nature’,” he pointed out, “doesn’t occur once in the Old Testament.” Besides, he might argue, in the biblical account of the Garden, death did not exist in the original design. It only came later as a result of sin. So why take it for granted? His line of thinking isn’t all to dissimilar from the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton’s a century before, who argued in Orthodoxy that what we take for granted in life is no more “reasonable” than the stories we hear in fairy tales. “Death,” he writes, “is more tragic even than death by starvation.” So why do we work so much to fight death by starvation, Thiel might ask, and so little to fight death itself? And with technology, maybe we can actually do something about it.
Technology as a concept is an instance of the odd marriage of reward and risk. With technology, as with investment returns, to increase the size of your benefit or “reward,” you almost always have to increase the risk you take. Deciding which benefits are worth the risk of new technology and thinking through ways we might attain the benefits at lower risk profiles are questions for philosophers, theologians, engineers, and entrepreneurs to consider together. But by and large these conversations aren’t happening. As a result, our moral philosophy is failing to keep pace with our technological progress. And that might be a very bad idea.
I have been doing a lot of reading lately about advances on areas like artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, and genetic editing. We may not be at the Singularity, but technology is changing at a startling rate. In so many ways, all this development will be very good for us. But that may just be positive thinking. Technology is amoral. For every advancement that someone might use to generate human flourishing, there is opportunity for that same technology to be used in a way that generates harm. Smartphones make us vastly more productive, but they also make us vastly more distracted and keep us working longer hours. Self-driving cars may make the roads safe, but they will likely cause a massive dislocation of employment.
Some of the biggest technological developments on the horizon raise fundamental questions that traditionally have been the domain of the philosophers and pastors. Socially advanced and intelligent robots bring up attendant questions of the nature of consciousness. Gene editing is bringing forward questions on the ethics of manipulating human DNA. The potential growth of artificial intelligence is causing some, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, to worry whether it might someday pose an existential threat to the human race. These are deep questions we all might be asking in a few years time, when confronted with technological change. But at the moment I’m not sure how many pastors are aware that these questions are on the horizon.
As I sat in my Uber on the way to this San Francisco summit between the clergyman and the billionaire, it occurred to me just how unusual was this occasion. The Venn diagram showing the overlap of people who are familiar with both Peter Thiel and N.T. Wright is probably quite small. And I think it is indicative of a broader gap between those doing technology and those doing theology. It is a surprise that a large concert hall in San Francisco would be packed with techies eager to hear a priest and an investor talk about death and Christian faith, even if that investor is Peter Thiel. San Francisco is not known as a particularly God-fearing, religious town, especially if that religion is Christianity. According to Ehrlich Bachman, the maladjusted incubator founder on HBO’s Silicon Valley, “Christianity is borderline illegal in Northern California.”
I chuckle at that line but I shake my head at the truth it points to. To the extent that there has been any conversation about Christianity and science, it has been about the past — evolution vs. creation — to the total neglect of the future. The history of Christianity is littered with close-minded zealots (as is the history of every religion, and atheism, too). But it is also littered with examples of people who were inspired to do science because of their faith. Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Newton. Galileo was punished by the church for his views on helio-centrism, but it was his Christian faith in the existence of Truth that led him to explore the heavens in the first place. The fact that today Science and Faith are rhetorically pitted against one another ignores the fact that faith has most often been the well from which scientific thinking has sprung. But there is no denying that few today would agree they work hand in hand. There has been a great divorce between Faith and Science.
I shared with Thiel and Wright my perception of this a gap between those working on cutting edge technology and those with the theological resources to think through the social and ethical implications. I was hoping they would say I was looking in the wrong places. Or maybe that these conversations were happening, just out of public view. Instead, they confirmed my fear. “I don’t know many people involved in cutting edge technology. It’s just not my world,” admitted Wright. “There’s a lot that gets lost,” said Thiel, because we are failing to have these interdisciplinary conversations.
Maybe it’s time to take a different approach. Maybe it’s time for more conversation between faithful thinkers and thinking techies and a shared project of building a better future. There may be more people than I’d expect who are ready. After the forum I spoke with several attendees, many of who said they had no particular faith in a higher power. They had come because they were attracted to the notion of a conversation about ideas with consequences, even if some of those ideas incorporated religious faith. According to David Hobbet, the executive director of the Veritas Forum (who organized the event), he encounters a hunger for these kinds of high-level honest conversations in cities across the country.
Perhaps that’s especially true when the topic of conversation is what one believes about death.
The fact is, whether we should accept or fight against death is not a Christian question, in particular. It is one that all of us, whatever our beliefs, will answer one way or another. And it’s a question I imagine most of us feel conflicted about answering. We read the counsel of Dylan Thomas and feel the stirring of the fight within us.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
But not everyone feels thus. I have a friend who told me she’s always thought of dying as a Christian to be an experience like the story of Balaam’s donkey in the book of Numbers. The donkey sees the glory of the Lord and lays down its weak body as an offering in front of it. From an areligious perspective, physician Atul Gawande, writes about a similar conclusion based on his experience working with the elderly and the dying.
The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.
Raging against the dark may be the calling of the young man. Knowing when is enough maybe the wisdom of the aged. Maybe both are right. The fight and the surrender. Maybe wisdom lies in knowing when to do which and with what vigor. At one point in the evening, N.T. Wright brought up the example of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet. His example is as good as I’ve heard of a balanced Christian approach to death. Here was a man who had a coffin built for him and slept in it as a spiritual preparation for the end of life. Yet here was a man who wrote passionate immortal poetry railing against death, taunting it even.
Donne believed he could not conquer death, so he prepared himself for it in the most morbid way imaginable. Yet he also believed that death would be conquered, not by him but by the suffering Christ. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “as one trespass [Adam] led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness [Jesus] leads to justification and life for all men.” Donne imagined the death of death. It came not from a research laboratory, but from the death of God.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee; Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.