Attitudes to Death

Abstract

‘Millions now living will never die.’ This was the astonishing claim made by a large number of people not so long ago. Many of them, one must suppose, believed it — or was it perhaps the half-belief which Professor Price has been describing for us lately? They were certainly wrong, and if there is one thing about which all of us must be agreed, it is that we shall all die sooner or later. Indeed, we can be much more precise. Very few people live to be a hundred, and usually, when some do so, their faculties are so much impaired that they can do little to fend for themselves. In another twenty-five years a very large proportion of the adult population of the world will be dead. No one seriously doubts this although, on the face of it, no one seems to be seriously perturbed by it.