Bryan Johnson is spending an extraordinary amount of money and an even more extraordinary amount of attention trying not to die.
I don't mean that dismissively. If somebody offered me a century of good health and the body of the Farnese Hercules, I'd have a few questions about the terms, but assuming there wasn't a demon hiding in the paperwork, I'd take the deal.
Health is good. Strength is good. Living long enough to know your grandchildren is good.
Johnson exercises, eats carefully, sleeps on schedule, measures nearly everything he can measure, tests interventions and discards the ones that don't work. There is something admirable about the discipline.
There is also something religious about it, and lately Johnson has become surprisingly explicit about that.
I once thought of him as an Apollo worshipper. I don't mean that he secretly burns incense to a Greek god. I mean that if Apollo needed a temple in twenty-first-century America, a longevity clinic would do nicely.
Youth, beauty, proportion, discipline, clarity, purification. The body brought under reason and kept there.
The ancient statue has disappeared. The altar remains.
But Johnson has gone farther than my metaphor. Don't Die has grown beyond a personal health protocol into something he describes in moral and social terms. Most strikingly, he has written that existence is the highest virtue.
That sentence bothers me much more than anything he injects, swallows or straps to himself.
Existence is good.
But highest?
Christians sometimes talk about idolatry as though it were an embarrassing primitive sin that mostly disappeared when people stopped keeping household gods. Nobody I know is tempted to melt down his wife's jewelry and make a golden calf. This can make the First Commandment feel almost quaint.
It isn't.
Modern idols are difficult to recognize because they usually begin by telling the truth.
Money really can provide security. Exercise really does improve health. Political power really can protect people. A strong military really can deter an enemy. Technology really can solve problems. A career can provide dignity and support a family. A nation really can be loved.
The trouble begins when one of those truths acquires jurisdiction over all the others.
Nothing else is allowed to overrule me.
That is what unsettles me about Don't Die.
If existence is the highest virtue, what happens when existence conflicts with truth? What happens when survival requires cowardice? What happens when a man can preserve his life by betraying someone who depends on him?
What happens when he can live by denying Christ?
The martyr gives his answer with his blood.
Christianity doesn't therefore consider death good. Christ weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. Paul calls death an enemy. Christians build hospitals because sickness should be fought and lives should be saved.
But there are things worth dying rather than doing.
Health has legitimate jurisdiction over a great deal of my life. It can tell me to exercise, sleep and stop eating garbage. It cannot tell me whether another man's life is worth mine.
Johnson may have principles elsewhere in his philosophy that limit Don't Die. I hope he does. I'm not interested in inventing some future atrocity and assigning it to a living man because his philosophy makes me uneasy.
But whatever can finally tell Don't Die no occupies a position higher than Don't Die.
Highest means highest.
That question feels less academic because Johnson has already demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice to his project. None of those sacrifices is necessarily wrong. Athletes surrender years to disciplines most people would find insane. Monks order their entire lives around bells.
Serious loves cost things.
The question is what they are permitted to eat.
I felt no satisfaction when Johnson disclosed that he had autoimmune gastritis. Treating another man's illness as God's clever punchline would be disgusting. I hope he gets well.
But it made something about the project painfully visible.
Health cannot love the man who serves it. It cannot even know his name.
A fragile god cannot save its priest.
I understand some of the transhumanist impulse for exactly the same reason.
My grandfather had macular degeneration. Near the end of his life he could barely see.
If somebody could have fixed his eyes, I would have wanted them fixed.
I don't care whether that meant gene therapy, synthetic tissue or electronics wired into his nervous system. Let the man see.
Cochlear implants are a damn miracle.
If I lose an arm and somebody offers me a robotic replacement that moves when I think, gives me tactile feedback and happens to be stronger than the original, give me the arm.
I don't even find the usual restoration-versus-enhancement line particularly convincing. If the artificial retina gives my grandfather slightly better color discrimination than the eyes he was born with, I'm not going to demand that the engineer cripple it until the specifications become sufficiently humble.
Christianity isn't a cult of whatever happens without technology.
So keep fixing things.
Blindness sometimes has a seam. Deafness sometimes has a seam. Paralysis may have seams we haven't found yet. Cancer contains mechanisms we are learning, agonizingly slowly, to reach into.
Pull them.
The danger comes from learning the wrong lesson after being right so many times.
Repair enough broken bodies and it becomes tempting to see embodiment itself as a technical problem. Cure enough diseases and death begins looking like the final disease. Replace enough failing parts and perhaps the human creature starts to resemble a platform awaiting a sufficiently ambitious upgrade.
Transhumanism becomes religious when repair becomes eschatology.
Christianity shares more of the underlying hunger than some Christians like to admit. We also believe blindness should end. We also call death an enemy. We also expect the human body to be transformed.
The disagreement is not over whether man should be healed.
It is whether man can finally heal himself.
Christianity promises resurrection.
Immortality is received.
That word, received, is obnoxious to a certain kind of mind.
I know because I have that kind of mind.
I like systems.
Give me a problem with a mechanism inside it and I will happily disappear into it. Find the constraint. Locate the bad assumption. Instrument the thing. Build the tool. Test it against reality. Fix what breaks. Once the solution works, make it repeatable so nobody has to waste time solving the same problem tomorrow.
This way of thinking has served me extremely well.
It has also trained me to distrust limits.
A file format is incompatible until you write the converter. A process requires a person until you understand what that person actually does. A project takes two weeks until you find the assumption that made everyone think it takes two weeks.
Again and again, something everyone has been treating as a wall turns out to be drywall.
Punch through.
There's another room.
You pull at a seam.
The thing opens.
Do it enough times and reality teaches you a dangerous lesson.
Every solved constraint suggests another constraint behind it. Every increase in capability enlarges the set of things that can now be treated as problems. Things that once had to be endured become fixable. Things that once consumed attention become infrastructure. Yesterday's impossibility becomes today's annoying implementation detail and tomorrow's invisible plumbing.
You begin to distrust the word impossible.
Often, you should.
Then the habit escapes its jurisdiction.
Dependence starts looking like technical debt.
Another person's will starts looking like an unreliable interface.
Grief starts looking like a fault condition.
Prayer can feel offensively unlike doing something.
Death becomes the final item on the backlog.
There is a seam in everything.
There isn't.
Eventually I am not standing in front of another badly designed system.
I am standing in front of reality.
I am a creature. I did not cause myself to exist. I cannot make another person love me. I cannot guarantee what happens to my children. I cannot manufacture forgiveness or optimize myself out of dependence on God.
There is no upstream version of me available to engineer my own creation.
At some point I have to receive.
This is one reason I find Elon Musk so interesting. His companies have spent years demonstrating that a shocking number of supposed limits really are bullshit.
Reusable rockets are fucking cool.
I hope Musk makes it to Mars. I mean that without irony. I want human beings standing on another planet. Hell, build the Cathedral of Christ the King of the Solar System on Olympus Mons when we get there.
The danger isn't that the work is frivolous.
It's that it isn't.
A man like Musk can fill his life with important things. There will always be another rocket, factory, satellite constellation, artificial intelligence, energy problem or civilizational risk demanding attention.
Imagine having a to-do list on which make humanity multiplanetary is an actual project.
A lazy man can hide from God in distraction. An industrious man can hide from Him in mission.
The second may be harder to notice because the mission keeps producing rockets.
There is no degree of system mastery that is salvific.
Palmer Luckey bothers me from even closer range because, frankly, I'm a little envious of him.
What a fantastic story.
He builds Oculus young, sells it, gets knocked sideways, then comes back and helps build Anduril. And the public-facing things Anduril is building are some of the coolest shit in the world.
I'm glad Luckey publicly identifies as a Christian. I'm glad he has become a father. I want men like him building things.
But he has also helped build a very hungry machine.
Successful organizations become hungry almost by nature. Feed one a solved problem and it discovers three adjacent problems. Capability creates opportunity, opportunity creates requirements, requirements demand more capability.
The beast wants fed.
Feed it coal and oil and iron, Palmer. Feed it silicon, electricity, machine tools and money. Feed it some of your ambition.
But don't give it everything it wants.
National defense really is good. Countries really do need weapons. Deterrence really can prevent wars. Better equipment can keep soldiers alive.
Again, the god tells the truth.
But the machine cannot tell you which sacrifices are permissible.
If a weapon makes my country safer, is that enough? If an autonomous system makes our military more effective, is effectiveness enough? If our enemy is genuinely evil, does that make everything useful against him good?
National defense remains a good only while something higher can tell it no.
The moment national interest becomes the thing doing the judging, the nation has climbed onto the altar.
There is an opposite road to the same place.
Suppose the good is compassion.
Someone is about to make a choice that will hurt him. You can prevent it.
He doesn't want you to.
But he's wrong.
Other people will suffer because of his decision. You know what will happen. You can intervene. Perhaps you can even arrange the better outcome without his knowing.
At some point compassion can acquire a strange hostility toward freedom.
If I had enough knowledge and enough power, I could prevent some suffering.
If I had more, I could prevent more.
Keep going and eventually the question becomes theological.
Why does God permit people to refuse the good? Why permit the prodigal son to leave? Why make creatures capable of hurting one another? Why permit us to reject even Him?
And beneath those questions lies a dangerous thought.
If I were sufficiently knowledgeable, sufficiently powerful and sufficiently good, perhaps I would arrange things better.
Now I am attempting Providence.
A creature attempting to become Providence is no safer than a creature attempting to become omnipotent.
This is where idolatry becomes difficult to recognize.
The thing on the altar may be mercy. It may be justice. It may be safety. It may be freedom. It may be truth. It may even be evangelization.
The good can be genuine.
So I have started finding one question more useful than asking what I love too much.
What good am I no longer willing to permit anything else to limit?
If efficiency may never yield, people become inefficiencies.
If safety may never yield, freedom becomes a hazard.
If compassion may never yield, consent becomes an obstacle.
If mastery may never yield, creaturehood itself begins to look like a design flaw.
Every idol eventually starts eating things.
The ancients understood this more literally than we do. Their gods required sacrifice.
Ours do too.
The career takes the marriage. Politics takes the friendship. Health takes the meal with friends. Safety takes freedom. The nation takes conscience. The system takes the person who doesn't fit it.
Because the idol began with something good, the sacrifice can still be described as necessary.
Psalm 115 contains one of the most frightening descriptions of idolatry I know. The idols have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear.
Then the psalmist turns from the statue to the worshipper.
Those who make them become like them.
I used to read that mostly as mockery.
I think it is worse.
Worship trains perception.
A man who worships markets eventually has trouble perceiving value without price. A man who worships efficiency becomes irritated by people who cannot justify the resources they consume. A man who worships control experiences dependence as humiliation.
Eventually the worshipper doesn't merely choose the idol over competing goods.
He has trouble seeing them.
The idol remakes its maker.
There is a temptation here to finish with moderation. Keep your health, ambition, technology and patriotism in reasonable balance. Don't get carried away.
That isn't Christianity.
Christianity contains an absolute.
The mistake isn't loving too intensely. The question is what deserves that love.
Christ does not ask to become one important good carefully balanced among the others. He asks for the whole person.
The Christian claim isn't that ultimate devotion is dangerous.
Only God can bear it.
Everything else becomes more itself when relieved of the burden of being God.
Your child doesn't need to justify the universe for you to love him extravagantly. Your country doesn't need to determine good and evil for you to sacrifice for it. Your work doesn't need to save you for you to make something excellent. Your body doesn't need to live forever for you to care for it.
A machine doesn't need to redeem humanity to be fucking cool.
Created things are allowed to be finite.
We can repair the eye, replace the arm, cure the disease, build the rocket, defend the country, reduce suffering and make astonishing systems.
We can build things and know they are things we built.
Use them. Improve them. Delight when they work.
If we reach Mars, build the cathedral.
Then kneel.
The idol will always ask for one more sacrifice.
God asks for us.
And unlike the gods we build, He can love us back.