Dr. Fukuyama, when you plant the word "against" adjacent to the phrase "life extension," you've earned an "F" in Longevity Strawman Arguments, Volume 1. The project of longevity is ethically imperative and economically rational; opposing it requires selective amnesia about medicine's entire record.
Fukuyama's case has two pillar: physiological impossibility and sociopolitical sclerosis. But in my view, both crumble on inspection.
*cracks knuckles*
In longevity discourse, there is a classic objection: aging is complex, so targeting individual diseases is futile, akin to playing whack-a-mole at a carnival.
But I find there are two problems with this argument:
First, we're already doing it, and it rocks. Statins have slashed heart attack deaths. Finasteride and tamoxifen prevent age-related cancers. GLP-1s seem to hit obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular risk in one swing. Every whack can buy healthy years. Your conclusion of "therefore don't try" simply doesn't follow.
Second, the moles share a warren: whack one and three neighbors duck. Obesity is more than a poor lifestyle choice, because it multiplies risk for dementia, heart disease, and cancer. Atherosclerosis happens everywhere and is largely preventable by keeping LDL low over decades. Plus - mouse studies show synergy: the combination of rapamycin with either acarbose or trametinib extends lifespan more than any of the three drugs do alone.
The real-world compression of morbidity is already happening by the way. Mannick's mTOR inhibitor trials showed significant reductions in respiratory tract infections among adults 65+ taking rapamycin-like drugs. Human centenarian cohorts consistently show compressed disability periods - they live longer and stay functional longer. Whether we solve aging through root causes or targeted interventions is an implementation detail. Refusing seatbelts because you'd still need airbags would be absurd; so is refusing proven interventions because aging is complex.
Your second argument - that longer lives mean calcified thinking - fails on multiple fronts. Why? Because:
Neuroplasticity is real. The brain remains adaptable well into our seventies. Cognitive decline rates among 70-somethings have fallen roughly 15% per decade since the 1990s. History is littered with late-life intellectual pivots: Wittgenstein reversed his entire philosophy mid-career. Kant published his major works in his fifties. Grace Hopper invented COBOL at 53. I can go on.
You're seeing selection bias. Flexible elders blend in, and rigid ones stick out - so rigidity looks universal when it isn't.
Moreover, plenty of ideas that drive our world today are ancient. Liberal democracy takes its genesis from ancient Athens. These ideas, though ancient, evolved through living minds - not replacement.
The "immortal dictator" variant of this argument - that tyrants will oppress for millennia - applies equally to any powerful technology. Reductio ad absurdum: ban penicillin while you're at it. The paper and pen enabled propaganda; cars enabled blitzkrieg. We ought not to reject transformative technologies because bad actors might misuse them.
Fukuyama forecasts that hordes of caregivers imported to tend frail natives. But following that argument: if healthspan rises, then the care gap shrinks. And even if we do welcome immigrants, that influx historically fuels innovation, not stagnation. To me, this is a win-win, not zero-sum.
The 25-year "turning" model freezes people's beliefs at 25 and claims social progress advances one funeral at a time. Data say otherwise though. Views on marriage equality and cannabis have shifted across living cohorts without mass die-offs. Longer lives simply lengthen the stretch of "formative" experience.
Compound expertise: seasoned engineers, surgeons, and entrepreneurs are force multipliers. A 60-year career can give you multiple lab-to-market cycles instead of one.
Cheaper healthcare: preventing disease beats treating it, and the compound returns on education, training, and relationship-building could be enormous over extended lifespans.
Innovation runway: more time means more shots at breakthrough discoveries and deeper accumulated wisdom.
Basically, Fukuyama's syllogism boils down to:
Change is necessary
Death creates change
Therefore, death is necessary
But by that logic, we'd still accept smallpox as the price of social dynamism. The real question is how to stretch healthy life while keeping societies adaptive. And that's a design problem - not a philosophical roadblock!
Longevity offers even the most rigid among us a chance to revise their priors while still drawing breath - surely the free market of ideas should welcome that opportunity.
So, to put it briefly: Dr. Fukuyama, "against life extension" really means for avoidable disease and wasted human potential. And I'll take the opposite side of that trade every time.