Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  At a biological level we are born individuals: we are each a distinct organism. But at the symbolic level, we have to fight to carve out a distinctive identity in a space of shared words and ideas. This begins with a name—and it is noteworthy that Akhenaten chose this unique name for himself, rejecting being simply the next Amenhotep (the fourth) as his father had intended. We still talk about the acquisition of a reputation in terms of “making a name for oneself”—a name that serves to stake out space in the symbolic sphere on which a legend can then be built. The above-mentioned Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called this the “tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves,” and “it is this struggle,” he believed, “that gives its tone, color, and character to our society.”

  But to establish oneself as an individual is only the first step. It is entirely possible that your name and individuality will still die with you when your biology fails; many an eccentric has gone this way. The second step, therefore, is to project this individuality into the undying cultural realm and fix it there. This Akhenaten also attempted with estimable vigor: the evidence recovered from the new capital he and Nefertiti founded at Amarna suggests their images, statues and deeds adorned every spare space, public and private. The royal road was lined with huge statues of the heretic pharaoh, the royal couple alone were pictured in the temples to their god and even in private houses and tombs they appear, granting riches and eternal life to their loyal followers.

  These statues, pictures and records are all what the psychologist David Giles calls “reproductions of the self.” We who are now awash with images—of ourselves, celebrities, models advertising toothpaste—find it difficult to appreciate the power these reproductions once held. Throughout history, access to the technology of cultural reproduction has been jealously guarded, the right to it a continual source of controversy. Alexander, for example, was the first man to feature his own face on official coinage—previously this was a privilege of deities; Julius Caesar was later to follow suit. With the upsurge of portraiture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ruling elites fought to control the uses of this technology, in particular as it applied to themselves. Elizabeth I of England, for example, redefined herself through a public image that mixed the symbolism of majesty, piety and power with elements proclaiming her as a unique and irreplaceable individual. Meanwhile you could be boiled alive for reproducing her image in the wrong way.

  Today opportunities for symbolic reproduction are no longer available only to pharaohs and emperors. We are each reproduced in hundreds of baby photos, holiday snaps and home videos. Indeed, with the digital revolution, we are now living through the greatest opening of the cultural sphere since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. It has never been easier to leave an impression in the shared space of symbols: with the minimum of computing power and know-how, it can be achieved in minutes.

  At the start of 2011, there were 158 million blogs (personal Web pages that are—in theory at least—updated regularly with the views of the blogger), with tens of thousands more being added every day. On top of this, there are hundreds of thousands of other personal websites on which people display their wares—photos, thoughts, stories, products. But even these are eclipsed by the number of people using online social networking services, which also allow the user to create a personalized space in the digital realm, connecting it to the similar spaces of friends and acquaintances. By spring 2011, Facebook, the most popular of these sites, had over 600 million active users and counting. One 2010 consumer report found that 92 percent of American children had an online presence by the age of two.

  Some of these pages are known to no one but their creator; they are the digital equivalent of the fading holiday photo in the bottom drawer: not enough to earn symbolic immortality. But others attract hundreds of thousands of visitors or followers, allowing people with meager resources but a good idea to reach massive audiences. The paradox of this new ease of access to the cultural realm is that achieving significance requires a whole new scale of self-reproduction and exposure. Fame now requires vastly more than a few carefully painted portraits; to count as a celebrity, you must be virtually reproduced many thousands or even millions of times. This is a scale that might even have astonished Alexander.

  Of course, all this activity brings this-worldy satisfactions, and social media websites have become part of everyday interactions. But there is also an underlying awareness that the digital realm has opened up a new dimension to posterity. Most social networking sites offer some kind of “memorialization” facility, which will preserve a user’s activity even after they have bodily departed this world. More sophisticated services offer to collect your data from across the Internet—blogs, photos, videos, Facebook posts and any other digital musings—to create a comprehensive memorial site. One company even enables you to have this digital legacy embedded into a real, physical gravestone, whence it will be beamed to interested passersby. The increasing popularity of these services suggests that those who spend their time transmuting their thoughts and images into digital form hope that something of this will outlive their frail flesh. Those who are determined to achieve Alexander-like status today have no choice but to master the means of digital reproduction.

  A major advantage of cultural reproduction in all forms is the possibility of creating a kind of ideal self. Early portrait artists knew well to flatter their powerful patrons, just as models present their best side to the camera and wise users think twice about what they post to their website. And crucially, these images, once made permanent in cultural form, do not age. That of course is the point, as the ancient Greeks recognized—that the symbolic realm does not suffer from the inherent decline and decay of the biological. Achilles and Alexander, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix all therefore in their ways achieved what the First Emperor and Linus Pauling could not—eternal youth.

  ALEXANDER THE BUNDLE

  “WHY should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?” asked Groucho Marx. It is an important question: before we sacrifice too much taking the two steps to cultural immortality, we ought to be sure that they are taking us to an immortality worth having.

  Despite all the thousands of would-be Alexanders, Elvises and Marilyns, few thinkers have attempted to provide a thoroughgoing defense of the idea that fame or glory really can deliver everlasting life. There has been no equivalent of Plato or St. Paul to map out just how this path is supposed to lead up the Mount of the Immortals. The Homeric heroes and their successors seem to have gone to battle on the basis of powerful intuitions rather than persuasive arguments. But a philosophical case could run something like this:

  We have already concluded that you have no soul—no unchanging essence or immutable inner core. We could go farther and say that there is, in fact, nothing that is the “real you.” You are just a collection of disparate thoughts, memories, sense impressions and the like, all bundled up together in a package we conveniently label a person. What is more, all these disparate parts are continually changing, as some things are forgotten and others learned, opinions changed and new memories formed. The question is, then, if you are such an ever-changing bundle, what does it mean for “you” to survive?

  One answer might be that you survive if enough of these disparate parts survive. So what makes me the same person as the Stephen Cave of last week is that I have inherited enough of that person’s bundle of ideas, memories et cetera. Following philosophical tradition, let us call this the “bundle theory” of the self.

  Now, anyone pursuing cultural immortality is taking various bits of themselves and replicating those bits in the symbolic realm—say, for example, by ensuring that their deeds, thoughts and sayings are recorded by court historians and their images captured by statue makers. This can be seen as a way of ensuring that various bits of that particular bundle live on. And if enough of the bits of the bundle live on, then the person lives on—even if entirely in the wo
rld of symbols.

  So if Alexander had not (biologically) died in Babylon in 323 BCE, there would have continued to be a human being with certain ideas and memories more or less continuous with those of the earlier Alexander, and so we would say that he had survived. The physical, human Alexander, however, did die—but many aspects of the Alexander-bundle continued, for example, in the records of his deeds and sayings, in the many engravings of his image and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands whose lives he touched. Indeed, his image, ideas and reputation were replicated to such an extent that we can argue the Alexander-bundle survived just as fully as it would have done if the original flesh-and-blood human being had survived.

  And these images, these ideas and this reputation have survived to this day: Alexander therefore lives, albeit in a rather diffuse form, spread around the libraries, museums, video collections and Web servers of the world—and of course in the minds of other human beings. The route to immortality, therefore, is to ensure that as many of the component parts of your current self-bundle are continued in forms that are more robust than flesh and blood, and the more such parts that survive, the better. This might not sound much like really living on, but the supporter of this view might argue that it is just as good as ordinary day-to-day living on, which is itself just a mishmash of such overlapping continuities.

  So might argue a metaphysically inclined celebrity. Of course, most celebrities are probably not quite so metaphysically inclined, but nonetheless some of the experiences they regularly describe fit well with the bundle theory of the self. David Giles, the above-mentioned psychologist of fame, notes that the famous often talk of a fragmentation of their identity as they increasingly find it difficult to distinguish between their public and private, real and manufactured selves. As they see themselves on television, read their own views in magazines—or what the PR people told them should be their views—or see their images on album covers, their sense of having an irreducible self over which they alone have ownership is rapidly eroded. For some, such as Ernest Hemingway, this is a problem that challenges their authenticity: Hemingway’s suicide was therefore his final attempt to reclaim and bring cohesion to a fracturing self. But to others, such as Picasso, this endless proliferation of perspectives on the self and reality is exactly what makes art possible and life interesting.

  The idea that images or records capture something real and alive is an old one. Images in the form of statues have long been worshipped in the belief they contain some aspect of the divine. In all three main Abrahamic religions such image making has been deeply controversial, as it mimics the act of creation that is the prerogative of God, thereby implying both hubris and idolatry. Yet even in Christianity, icons continue to be objects of veneration. Similarly, before such technologies as film and photography became ubiquitous, the idea that they and other image-making techniques actually captured a part of the person was widespread. In many cultures, from China to Native America, photographs were initially thought to peel off a layer of the person’s self and trap it on paper.

  The bundle theory is therefore not as odd as it might at first sound. Indeed, the idea of a coherent, unchanging self has been under sustained attack for over a century, starting with the speculations of the psychoanalysts who divvied up our consciousness into various conflicting parts, and continuing with the revelations of neuroscience, which emphasize the brain’s multiple systems and structures. So is Alexander the Bundle still among us?

  IT MIGHT BE ART, BUT IS IT LIFE?

  THERE are good reasons to think not. Though it is a respectable idea, the bundle theory is controversial and has ample critics. Many philosophers argue, for example, that there cannot be memories, beliefs, desires etc. without there being someone doing the remembering, believing and desiring. Desires don’t just float about in bundles or any other way. But if there is a person doing my remembering, believing and desiring, then surely I am that person and not just the memories, beliefs and desires. In which case, I am not a collection of memories, beliefs, desires etc. after all, but rather I am a person with memories, beliefs, desires etc. That person might be a soul or a biological organism or something else. But it is not a book or a statue—no book or statue is a person. In which case, Alexander does not really live on in the history books after all.

  But even if we accept the highly controversial bundle theory of the self, there are problems with trying to survive purely in the symbolic realm. The bundle theory claims that you live on if enough of your memories, beliefs, desires etc. do—but it is deeply questionable whether your memories live on in a literal sense just because they are written down in a book. Memories and desires are, after all, mental states, and a book does not have mental states. A book does not actually remember or desire. It merely has descriptions of mental states, and a description of a thing is not the same as the thing itself. A description of Alexander’s ambitions is not the same thing as Alexander’s actual yearnings, just as a picture of Alexander’s face on a coin is not really Alexander’s face. The replications of ourselves that we make in the symbolic realm are simply the wrong kinds of things to constitute a person—you don’t live on through pictures of you any more than you get fat by eating pictures of a hamburger.

  It therefore looks very difficult to argue that cultural legacy can provide anything like literal survival. It is contentious enough to argue that your self is just a bundle, but even if it is, the things that make up this bundle do not themselves really survive in the cultural realm. But perhaps the greatest mystery with the pursuit of this kind of immortality is that the pursuers would mostly admit this. They know that they are not really living on in anything like the normal way by conquering foreign lands or painting pictures—yet they do it anyway.

  David Giles, in his inquiry into the motivation of fame seekers, dismisses the possibility that famous people have some psychological or genetic trait that explains their quest for prominence—no such quality has been found. And other alternative theories, such as that we seek renown for the immediate wealth and status it brings, he concludes are “inadequate to account fully for the long-standing and desperate desire for fame.” Of course, fame can bring significant this-worldly benefits—but, as we have seen, a mark in the symbolic realm is often made at the expense of a long and happy life, as in the case of Alexander or the countless pop and film stars who have lived fast and died young. Achilles, the paradigm of the Western hero, even knew that his pursuit of glory would cost him his life, so this pursuit cannot have been a means to this-worldly profit.

  So what were the great names of history hoping for in dedicating their lives to eternal renown? It is highly likely that here the Mortality Paradox is at work—or rather, the second half of it, the inability to imagine our own nonexistence. Even if the aspiring hero claims to know rationally that he will not be around to reap the glory of some suicidal mission, still he cannot help picturing the laurels being heaped on his memory. That act of imagining, which makes him present as the observer, makes it seem like he will still be there in the future to receive the back-slaps and plaudits. So even if Achilles claimed to know consciously that he would die on his path to glory, a powerful, nonrational cognitive process made it feel to him that he would still be around to profit from it.

  We might add to this that at a subconscious or emotional level we do not really distinguish between the material and symbolic realms. As symbolic animals, so entirely immersed in a symbolic understanding of the world, we transfer our will to immortality instinctively from the physical to the cultural. This is what Giles calls “the evolutionary rationale” for the pursuit of posterity: the urge to reproduce ourselves into the future is so strong that it will be satisfied even if that reproduction is only a picture in a magazine.

  The reason why no Plato or St. Paul has attempted to show how cultural legacy can deliver a satisfactory immortality is therefore that the strong arguments are not to be found. The motivation for the pursuit of glory is instinctive and intuitive, and tho
se instincts and intuitions are misled: the inability to imagine our own nonexistence suggests to us we will be around to reap the glory, but reason suggests the opposite. Achilles and Alexander succeeded in becoming extraordinary and succeeded in stamping their names onto the cultural sphere, but they are still as dead as their countless anonymous victims.

  The conclusive damper on aspirations to cultural legacy has nothing to do with the bundle theory; it is the entirely practical point that memories are not forever. Indeed, very few people are remembered for long at all—the psychologist Roy Baumeister has estimated the length of time for which most of us can expect to be remembered as seventy years. He points out that not many people can even name their great-grandparents—and if their own progeny know nothing about them, it is unlikely that anyone else does.

  Of course, some people like Alexander do achieve great fame. But the cultures that hold them in esteem will not last eternally. The glories of Greece still shine, but the heroes of countless other ancient cultures have long been forgotten. Marcus Aurelius was aware of this when he wrote in his journal in 190 CE, “Soon you will have forgotten the world; and soon the world will have forgotten you,” and he was an emperor of Rome, with a good deal more reason to expect lasting fame than most of us.

  We do still remember Achilles and Alexander and even Marcus Aurelius, despite his prediction. But one day they will have to contend with the end of the Western civilization that values their deeds, and beyond that the end of our species and the eventual end of the world. Culture might outlive a single human, but it will not outlive humanity. No matter how great our glory, it could only ever be a postponement of oblivion. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the 1818 poem “Ozymandias” by Mary Shelley’s poet husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. A traveler reports finding a ruined colossus in the desert: