Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  The original single cell from which your body started is therefore still very much alive and present in all the trillions of cells that have resulted from the first splitting; not only do they have an identical set of genes, but they have arisen from an unbroken series of divisions. But that first cell was of course a fusion of offshoots from the great clumps of cells that were your mother and father. And they each started out as one cell, each of which was itself a fusion of offshoots from your grandparents. Even Alexander the Great began his career as a single cell, and that arose from the fusion of an egg cell that was once a literal part of Olympias and a sperm cell that was once a part of Philip. He, like all of us, was a literal, physical continuation of his parents. As Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the more famous Charles and an important scientist in his own right, wrote in 1796, “the offspring is termed a new animal; but it is, in truth, a branch or elongation of the parent.”

  From this perspective the history of life does not look like a series of discrete organisms that live and die but rather an unbroken chain of splitting and fusing cells, driven by busily replicating genes. The chain widens as a fertilized egg divides to produce something of human form, then narrows when that large cluster of cells itself produces a single egg or sperm, which in turn will produce the next link. You live on in your children because you are not really the distinct individual that you think you are; you are just a widening of a chain of life that is billions of years old and has no end in sight. Talk of you as a particular person with a date of birth and one day a date of death is therefore just a convenient shorthand. To quote Lynn Margulis once again, “From an everyday, uncontentious perspective ‘you’ began in your mother’s womb some nine months before whatever your age is. From a deeper, evolutionary perspective, however, ‘you’ began with life’s daring genesis—its succession, more than 4,000 million years ago, from the witch’s brew of the early Earth.”

  FAMILY CONSCIOUSNESS

  ALTHOUGH we moderns know more about the underlying mechanics of heredity than any other people in history, we might nonetheless also be the least able to empathize with the biological Legacy Narrative. The reason is that we have such a highly developed sense of ourselves as individuals, as we saw in chapter 6. Anthropologists believe that people in most other cultures in history and around the world regarded themselves much less strongly as individuals and identified instead with their family, clan or tribe. The influential French ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl wrote a hundred years ago that in traditional societies “the individual is apprehended only by virtue of his being an element of the group of which he is part, which alone is the true unit.”

  Take, for example, this epitaph from a member of that proud Roman dynasty the Scipios, every aspect of which relates the individual to the broader biological unit: “By my conduct I added to the virtues of my family; I begat offspring and sought to equal the deeds of my father. I maintained the glory of my ancestors, so that they rejoice that I was their offspring; my honors have ennobled my stock.” Before the arrival of Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion, ancient Roman culture was based on a form of ancestor worship, with each family having its own cult. Every family member was defined by his or her relationship—biological, social and ethical—to ancestors and offspring.

  The Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau described this as the “Jewish strategy” (in contrast to the “Hellenic strategy” of pursuing undying glory, which we examined in chapter 8). We saw in chapter 4 that individual immortality in the form of resurrection developed only relatively late in the history of Judaism; prior to this we find instead emphasis upon the survival of the tribe of Israel as a collective. As the theologian John Hick put it, initially the Hebrew religion was focused “fully upon God’s covenant with the nation, as an organism that continued through the centuries while successive generations lived and died.”

  This is a worldview that would also be instantly recognizable to people from China, Japan, Korea and many parts of Africa. The biological Legacy Narrative has been influential throughout history not only in the obvious sense that we have children, but also as a powerful ideology that has defined the contours of many people’s lives. In all cases, along with contributing to the well-being of both the dead and the living, such ancestor veneration strongly reinforces the identity of all family members as part of something greater than each individual, something that extends back into the distant past and will survive long after their own deaths. It offers a strong sense of collective immortality, in which the particular person recognizes that he or she is a part of an ancient and continuing whole. For people in such societies the conclusion that we are a mere link in a chain of life would not have come as a surprise at all, but rather reflected a deep, lived reality.

  THERE is therefore a way of seeing life that makes it look much more like an unbroken continuity than a series of lives and deaths, and many people have identified profoundly with this view. But there is a stumbling block to taking the claims of biological immortality literally: consciousness.

  What is it that we want when we want to live on, whether until tomorrow, next year or next millennium? Following our discussions of the Resurrection and Soul Narratives, I would suggest that what we most want is the continuation of our consciousness. Or put another way, if someone tells me that I will still be alive in the summer next year, then I should reasonably be able to look forward to feeling the summer sun on my face and seeing my children playing in the garden. We might want lots of other things too, like the preservation of certain character traits or memories, but at the root of it all is the continuity of the same consciousness. Of course, I might lose this consciousness before death—for example, if I entered a permanent vegetative state. But that is exactly why I would consider such a thing to be just as bad as actually dying.

  This is a problem for the biological Legacy Narrative. It may be true that an individual human is just a phase in a small part of the undying web of life. It may be true that it is therefore a mistake to think that “I” am really born and really die, as “I” am actually part of a broader continuum. But this “phase” that is me gives every impression of having a distinct, individual consciousness, and when the phase is over, that consciousness disappears. Even if we decide we no longer want to call the end of that phase “death,” we still might think that, like being in a permanent vegetative state, the loss of my distinct, individual consciousness makes it just as bad as death. I might live on in the great web of life, but if not consciously, then that claim to immortality rings a little hollow.

  As I write this, I can hear one of my young daughters playing in the room next door. As much as I love her and empathize with her struggles and successes, I do not literally see the world through her eyes. I am in this room, she in the next, and the door between us is closed. When I die, this will not change. My consciousness will not leap into her—or at least, nothing about the way we understand consciousness to work suggests this will be so. Even if there is a way of looking at the world that implies a profound continuity between us, we remain separate conscious beings. And that does not bode well for my bid to live forever.

  But perhaps we simply need to shift perspectives again. We have zoomed in to the micro level to examine the nature of the continuity between parent and child; now it is time to zoom out—to a super-macro level, where a whole new degree of connectedness becomes apparent. And perhaps even a whole new consciousness.

  THE BIGGER PICTURE

  THE image of the chain in which you are a link fails to capture the real extent to which you are part of a much wider story. If you have siblings, then they are also offshoots of your parents’ cells, just like you are. On average, you will share as much genetic material with them as you do with your own children or with each individual parent. Your cellular connections do not just reach backward and forward in the generations, but also sideways. There is not a single thread, but rather a web, continually forking and rejoining.

  There is nothing abstract about
this web: it is both a biological reality and a reality in the lives of many people. It manifests itself in the idea of the clan, the tribe and the nation. Despite consisting of hundreds of thousands or even many millions of people, most nations have some myth of common ancestry, and their members see themselves as alike—in contrast to all “foreigners.” One of the prophets of German nationalism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, wrote that for the good German, immortality lay in “the hope of eternal continuance of the people without admixture of, or corruption by, any alien element.” The nation is, in Fichte’s words, the “eternal thing to which he entrusts the eternity of himself.”

  Within each tribe or nation, the sense of commonality can be a hugely positive force, leading to strong mutual support mechanisms, both formal and informal. Indeed, it was in Germany, not long after Fichte’s death, that the first welfare state was created. If you feel closely connected to another person, you will be more likely to help them out in hard times, whether directly or through paying taxes that pay for their social benefits. A narrative of collective immortality makes this impulse even stronger, encouraging people to sacrifice even their lives for the sake of the greater whole. The psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton has documented this effect in the countries that experienced communist revolutions in the twentieth century. In China, for example, communist ideology built on a long tradition of ancestor worship to refocus identity from one’s own family to the broader community of the national proletariat.

  But of course there is also a darker side to this narrative. Family and community might sound like innocent values, but they are intimately linked with the struggle to preserve our legacy at the expense of others. Indeed, raising one’s own group to the status of “chosen” or somehow superior to others is a sure way of strengthening that group’s myth of immortality—whether that group is an aristocratic family or a billion-strong nation. An ancient impulse, this destructive ideology reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, when 170 million people died in war, the defining motif of which was chauvinistic nationalism—as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, “seldom … expressed so frankly as in the Nazi project of the world made fit for the immortality of the healthiest and most virile of races.”

  NOW we can measure the genetic differences between peoples of different nations and see just how minuscule—or indeed nonexistent—they are. In evolutionary terms, it is not long ago that all humans had a common ancestor—a mere two hundred thousand years. A more positive ideology based on the biological Legacy Narrative would encompass the whole human race as our immortality vehicle. And indeed there are idealists, such as Einstein and Linus Pauling, who advocated just this.

  But why stop at humans? Not so long ago (about six million years) we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees, with whom we share about 95 percent of our genes (estimates vary depending on the method of calculation). Before that (about six hundred million years ago), we had a common ancestor with all animals—even now, we share some 44 percent of our genes with fruit flies. And before that, we shared common ancestors with fungi (with whom we have about a quarter of our genes in common), plants (about a fifth) and many single-celled organisms such as bacteria. A few simple creatures that started replicating a very long time ago have covered the earth with a tissue of life—the biosphere—all of which is profoundly interconnected. The question is, can any of these super-macro perspectives of nation, species or biosphere provide a plausible immortality vehicle—one that might even solve the problem of consciousness?

  A clue can be found in ants. Those who study these social insects have long known that individual organisms working in extremely close cooperation can produce what seems to be a whole new entity—a superorganism. Colonies of ants can do things far beyond the capacity—and almost certainly the understanding—of any single ant, such as build complex nests with carefully regulated internal temperature and humidity, or farm fungus and herd aphids. In many ways, individual ants make up the greater whole that is a colony in the same way that your cells make up a human being. And contrary to what otherwise seems a universal imperative to survive and reproduce, most ants are quite content to sacrifice themselves for the greater good: as long as the colony lives on, they do not seem at all worried about their individual immortality.

  Some thinkers have suggested that human communities are similar. This was a popular idea in the nineteenth century, advocated by writers like the philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer, coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and it is now being taken seriously once again. People in modern cities long ago lost the ability to survive independently—we are utterly reliant on a complex higher-level system for clean water, food, clothing, shelter, medicine, security and energy. Like the specialized cells of our bodies, which have given up their independence for the greater strength and security offered by life as part of a macro-organism, we have each given up our independence to be part of strong and secure superorganisms.

  Just as a human has abilities that no individual cell has, and an ant colony has abilities that no individual ant has, our societies have abilities that none of us as individuals has. No one understands every aspect of how a modern city works—which would require knowing everything about hospitals, transport logistics, nuclear energy production and so on. Yet somehow these things do work, and with a kind of coordination that regulates and sustains huge communities. The system therefore manifests an intelligence and ability exceeding that of any of its individual members. In the words of the biologist Alison Jolly, “Homo sapiens is slowly evolving into something akin to a superorganism, a highly-structured global society in which the lives of everyone on the planet will become so interdependent that they may grow and develop with a common purpose.”

  SO both your city and the entire global society can make claims to being real, living entities—wholes of which you are a part and that will (probably) outlive any individual member. But it is an even more macro perspective that is currently receiving the most attention, that of the biggest superorganism of them all: the planet Earth, otherwise known as Gaia.

  The Gaia hypothesis is the claim that our entire planet is an integrated system that regulates itself in a way that is conducive to life. This system does not only consist of all living things but includes other aspects of the planet, such as the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and ice caps. First put forward by the English scientist James Lovelock in the 1970s and named after the Greek goddess of the earth, supporters of the Gaia hypothesis argue that this entire system is directly comparable to what we ordinarily consider a single organism, such as you or me.

  Lynn Margulis is one such advocate. She writes, “Atmospheric, astronomical, and oceanographic evidence attest that life manifests itself on a planetary scale. The steadiness of mean planetary temperature of the past three thousand million years, the 700-million-year maintenance of earth’s reactive atmosphere between high-oxygen levels of combustibility and low-oxygen levels of asphyxiation, and the apparently continuous removal of hazardous salts from oceans—all these point to mammal-like purposefulness in the organization of life as a whole … Life on Earth—fauna, flora, and microbiota—is a single, gas-entrenched, ocean-connected planetary system, the largest organic being in the solar system.”

  From this super-macro perspective, the human quest for personal immortality looks increasingly like a kind of mix-up. Individual humans are merely temporary forms taken by the single, shifting web of life on earth. To suggest one should live forever is like trying to preserve the shape of a particular dune in the shifting sands of a desert. If humans are not really separate things, then their births and deaths are also not real, but simply one way of seeing the rhythms of life. Margulis thinks so: “Death is illusory in quite a real sense,” she writes. “As sheer persistence of biochemistry, ‘we’ have never died during the passage of three thousand million years. Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone, but we have persisted.”

  GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND YOU


  MANY find this a reassuring view. It is, in a way, the flip side to the cultural Legacy Narrative that required you to assert your uniqueness, to rise above the masses and prove your specialness. The biological Legacy Narrative, in contrast, dissolves you into a greater whole; it releases you from the struggle to become someone special, emphasizing instead the natural connectedness and continuity of being. Ernest Becker described these two contrary impulses as “the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality” versus “the need to surrender oneself in full to the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one’s whole existence to some higher meaning.”

  Religions play upon both these impulses. We have seen how the belief in an immortal soul and a personal God encourage an individual’s sense of heroic self-worth. Equally, other traditions—including within the same religions—offer opportunities for submerging oneself in a greater whole. “Islam,” for example, means “submission” and requires the believer to submit to the unimaginable greatness that is Allah. The idea of dissolving the self into a greater whole is also crucial to the Buddhist idea of nirvana and fundamental to some strands of Hinduism and to Taoism. Indeed, recognizing yourself to be part of a deeper reality is for many the first step on the spiritual path. The Taoists say that the only difference between the immortals and the rest of us is that the former have recognized their unity with the underlying eternal reality, whereas we poor mortals still believe in individual death.