The great increase in human life expectancy during the twentieth century is often cited as proof that humanity’s lot is rapidly improving. On average, an infant born in 1900 could expect to live to about 32 years, while by 2000, life expectancy had reached 65 years. By contrast, alarm bells sounded when American life expectancy declined in the first years of this decade by 2.5 years, primarily due to Covid and opioid overdoses. Some scientists and entrepreneurs suggest that the human lifespan might be dramatically increased beyond the current limit of 120 years. But before we place too many of our eggs into this basket, we would be well-advised to think more deeply about the allure of longevity.

Our attitudes toward length of life reflect profound assumptions about human nature and what makes for a good life. For example, is life necessarily improved by its lengthening? Are there other goods in human existence that need to be balanced against duration? Might there be other features of life for which a good and wise person would trade some portion of longevity? To gain insight into such questions, there are few better intellectual resources than one of the great explorations of human nature and human good, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which contains perhaps our most memorable literary depiction of deathless human life.

In parts I, II, and IV of the book, Gulliver finds himself among little people over whom he towers as a giant, then a homunculus among giants, and finally a humanoid yahoo amid a race of utterly rational and virtuous equine creatures. Book III represents a very different voyage, in that Gulliver ventures through a number of different lands, all of which caricature the ambitions and pretensions of modern science. For example, the Laputans are superb abstract reasoners utterly divorced from the practical aspects of life, the Balnibarians are ruined by living under scientific tyranny, and the royal academy’s denizens, the projectors, devote themselves to absurd ventures such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.

It is on this third voyage that for the first time Gulliver encounters a vision that dissuades him from attempting to return home to his wife and family. Specifically, he learns of people known as “struldbruggs,” who are rumored to be immortal, a prospect that fills him with “inexpressible delight.” Specifically, he writes,

Happy nation, where every child hath a least a chance for being immortal! Happy people who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages. But happiest beyond all comparison are those excellent struldbruggs, who being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of death.

Suddenly relieved of all desire to return to those who make him a husband and father, Gulliver resolves to spend the remainder of his life in conversation with these immortal creatures, enraptured by thoughts of what he would do if only he could live forever.

To repeat, it is the prospect of immortality that seduces Gulliver from his homecoming. Like Odysseus in the Odyssey, he encounters many strange places and people, many alternative accounts of what life might amount to, but in the end, he always yearns for home. This time, however, having learned of the struldbruggs, he is prepared to set aside his return, envisioning that he will pass his remaining years among what he imagines must surely be the happiest people in all the world, perhaps even hoping that immortality might somehow rub off on him. Gulliver, like many contemporary titans of Silicone Valley, supposes that the solution to life’s problems lies in its indefinite prolongation.

In fact, however, the struldbruggs and their lives are nothing like what Gulliver imagines. First, they are each born with a red dot above their left eye, which identifies them as immortals. Second, they lead normal human lives, including the decline and indignities of old age such as hair loss and diminished vision and hearing. Finally, upon reaching their 80th year, they are declared legally dead and forbidden to own property.

Their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust of profit; they cannot purchase lands or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal or economic, not even for the decision of metes and bounds.

In other words, these immortal creatures are neither imbued with the “wisdom of all former ages” nor fit to serve as “living examples of ancient virtue.” To the contrary, they are wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinners who must be legally incapacitated to prevent harm to others.

Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.

Immortality, it turns out, leads not to the perfection of the virtues, but to their most extreme corruption. Just imagine if some of the great tyrants of history—in the twentieth century, men such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—were granted not one but many lifetimes to carry out their plans.

To this magnification of human pride and greed, Swift juxtaposes Gulliver’s lofty dreams of what he would accomplish if only he could live forever. First, he would procure riches “by all arts and methods whatsoever” until he had become the wealthiest of all men. Next, he would commit himself to study until he excelled “all others in learning.” Then he would keep a record of all events and customs, becoming “a living treasury of knowledge and wisdom, the oracle of the nation.” He would then teach the young about the “usefulness of virtue in public and private life.” In other words, Gulliver would make himself a great man, perhaps the greatest ever to live.

Yet there is a problem. He does not really provide a convincing account of how he would acquire virtue, nor does he appear to understand what virtue really is. He thinks only of himself, failing to recognize that other struldbruggs would have lived far longer than he, and as a result, possess even greater wealth, knowledge, and virtue. His account also makes it rather difficult to imagine that he would devote himself to the service of others, his country, and humankind, in part because he seems to envision spending all his time exclusively with other immortals. In fact, he supposes he would shed nary a tear for any mere mortals, regarding their passing with no more remorse than a gardener of his seasonal tulips.

Why, then, does Gulliver choose to return home? In part because he realizes that the real struldbruggs are hidebound, selfish human beings, leading lives that can only be characterized as both vacuous and a threat to the happiness and well-being of those around them. They are not the happiest of humans but the saddest. Those plotting the extension of the human lifespan through movements such as transhumanism would be well-advised to think again about the welfare of humanity, and those supposing that the problems of the world can be well addressed simply by turning to people advanced in years, the impulse of gerontocracy, should recall that extending something inherently defective merely prolongs deficiency. 

In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift issues an important warning to scientists, physicians, economists, and politicians who mistake the quantitative prolongation of life for its qualitative improvement. Merely extending the duration of a vapid and indifferent life does nothing to enhance its excellence and may only magnify its deficiencies. To genuinely improve human life, it is necessary to discern and enhance what is good in it. All the psychopharmacology and artificial intelligence in the world cannot add one iota of goodness, and until we are ready to do the hard work of educating minds and hearts and cultivating characters, we should avoid—like the plague—the temptation to vest our hopes in life’s prolongation.