LIVING well, dying well. Both are on my mind this week. I just discovered humanmaxxing as a phenomenon – the latest term for the ancient human yearning for longevity and vitality.
And a friend passed away, who couldn’t have been more energetic and dynamic in his life and creativity, right here and now.
One subtly qualifies the other. The humanmaxxers are excited that Wegovy, the slimming drug, is now commercially available as a pill (not just injected) in British chemists.
They see it as another advance in the acceptability of human enhancement—medicine for improvement, not just ailments.
But Brian McFie – vibrant musician and visual artist, raconteur and 12-step sage – was taken from us in his vital prime a few days ago. Mortality lurks for us all.
For sure, the fear of death can easily paralyse or stymie your life course.
Brian’s great role model was Iggy Pop and his anthem Lust For Life. A shirtless Ignatious, at any of his ages and stages – addicted or clean – is as precious an image of the life force as you could wish for.
There’s more wisdom on this side. Take Hannah Arendt’s idea that we should dwell on our “natality” than our mortality, our human capacity for novelty and invention. There’s Bob Dylan’s version of this from his great anthem, Masters Of War: “he not busy being born is busy dying.”
Or there’s my favourite living philosopher, Roberto Unger, who hymns the human capacity for the unrepeatable. “The point of living”, he often growls, “is to die only once”. By which Unger means that we sapiens have evolved to realise our imaginations, not to “die little deaths” in systems that treat us functionally, like grindable cogs in a great machine.
Again, Brian is – dammit, was – such an exemplar of all this. Right up until his sudden end, his Facebook page is a joyous tumult: curating great artists (his last citation Brian Eno), his sensuously abstract paintings, his own spectacular rock guitar playing, hilarious aristocratic spoofing, along with many photos of Brian and his creative peers.
Everybody evidently in a state of natality. Busy being born.
The many gratifications of a creatively-centred life intersect fascinatingly with the human-maxxers. There’s a fit, but there’s also a disjunct.
A wild New York Times (NYT) interview with an exemplar of the trend – biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer – begins with a vision of what humans might do with themselves, after AI and robotics absorbs routine human labour.
Take this exchange: Angermayer: You go to an individual factory worker in China and say: Hey, do you want to have the same quality of life and half of the work? This person will say: Yeah, like, tomorrow.
NYT: Then play becomes more important in that world?
Angermayer: Play, sports, entertainment, social stuff.
It turns out that Angermayer is a founder of the Enhanced Games. This runs athletic contests where the sportspeople can improve their performance using drugs that are beyond the usual sporting regulations, but approved as usable by the Federal Drug Agency (FDA).
This event is obviously an attempt to build soft power for his human-maxxing or (as the Pope called it earlier this month) transhumanist enterprises. But Angermayer wants to bring a deeper context to his ventures.
“That’s what I’m doing with the Enhanced Games: humans maximizing their potential with the help of science”, says the mogul. “Because we’ve been doing that for thousands of years! We’re just feeling a little bit weird at the moment because it’s medical drugs we’re putting in our body”.
Again, the late lamented Brian comes swaggering elegantly into the picture. For years (and explicitly from his own mouth), he was a benchmark for the programmes and encounters of 12-step programmes against alcohol. And particularly the way that they don’t repress the bohemianism of a drunkard’s life, but can establish a new platform for artistry and creativity.
Pointedly, Angermayer is an enemy of alcohol – “it destroys everything…spiritually a path to hell”. While being a friend to (and a soon-to-be commercial and licensed vendor of) hallucinogens, particularly based on psilocybin and DMT.
These substances are creeping close to credibility as a treatment for trauma and depression. Their effect is (in Angermayer’s words) the “dissolving of the ego”, which then reveals a deeper ground of being or eternal soul, providing a fundamental change of direction.
I don’t know how, or what techniques, helped Brian made this happen in his life. But an “egoless ego” would be a good description of him. All of the testimonies and condolences over the last few days remark on his easy, unforced expressions of kindness, his regularly loving emotions.
A big man, a full creative – but someone who poured himself out into a sometimes barren world, and received a flowering in response.
There's a lot of critique of the whole “maxxing” phenomenon, whether they be “looks-maxxers”, “fibre-maxers”, “sleep-maxxers”… The root of the suffix comes from gaming culture. To “min-max” in a game is to dump all resources into a single variable, optimizing it at the expense of everything else.
A monoculture of the self, versus creative eclecticism.
The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost identifies this an outcrop of the way our digital culture has been designed. The online maxxers are inevitable: “The speed, urgency, and constancy of online life amplifies extremism because posting, replying, and generally participating in the discourse is its own virtue enrobing all the rest, an internet-maxxing to rule all the others.
“Maxxing declares this state of affairs honestly”, concludes Bogost. “Finally, we can shed the pretence that internet life is reasonable, level-headed, or healthy. The whole internet is a machine for extremist thought, belief, and action.”
Yet again, the dearly departed Brian, by means of the inferno of his artistry, qualifies this. What about the obsessional, even extreme practice of music – woodshedding, as the jazzers call it – taking them higher and deeper?
Brian told me he was once entirely lost in his rehearsal playing, during a Big Dish recording. He looked up from his fever to see Pete Townshend of The Who smiling approvingly over him. Brian’s exquisite taste was obviously rooted in his obsession with his instrument. Was he rock-guitar-maxxing? At the very least.
Human creativity is itself a maximal phenomenon: our search for its enabling conditions should be suitably eclectic. My favourite creative memory of Brian is multitudinous.
One season I’m savouring the flash and sizzle of his rock’n’roll guitar beside me on stage. The next season, the same man delivers stunning digital artwork for our 1999 cyber-jazz album
Next Move.
As the internet reminds me, he produced a mysteriously natal, even pre-natal image - a grid of powerlines above the womb, a gentle anticipation below. Interpret away – but it’s just another dazzling spark from McFie’s volcano.
What’s our vision for living, our lust for life, that might anchor us humans - as powerful systems and machines challenge our role on earth? Defend the human, extend the human: what’s the right mix?
That’s our battleground. The Maxxers have one strategy. But I think the Artists have many. I mourn my old friend, exactly as I hold his life high, as a complex precedent. Rest In Powerchords, Brian.
