Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  To create such a wonderful creature as a human being only to permit him or her to turn to dust seems indeed an extraordinary waste, a cruel, cosmic joke at our expense. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson, put it, “If immortality be not true, then no God but a mocking fiend created us.” (Rather petulantly adding, “If there is no immortality, I shall hurl myself into the sea!”) More recently, the psychologists behind Terror Management Theory suggested that without our comforting illusions, we will become “twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety.”

  The Mortality Paradox only worsens the situation, as we saw in chapter 1. The truth of the first part, that we must die like all other living things, goes unmitigated, while the second part, that we cannot imagine our own nonexistence, plays terrible tricks on us. We have seen that this intuition can serve as a scaffold on which immortality narratives can be built, with their promises of a happy afterlife among friends and angels. But if we have dismissed the immortality narratives, then we are deprived of such positive pictures—yet this does not make it any the easier to grasp the prospect of not being. And so we fill the imaginative void with nightmares. In the absence of a positive image of eternity, we cannot help but imagine death to be endless gloom, an eternal exile in the abyss—the House of Darkness feared by the ancients.

  We can see this fear of the emptiness of eternity reflected in the efforts many have taken to ensure they would not be alone. The First Emperor of China had not only terracotta soldiers, bureaucrats and musicians buried with him, but also real live concubines and many others. He had no intention of stepping unaccompanied into the void. Most of us, however, must face death without such an entourage. This prospect—of nonbeing, of nothingness—becomes defined in our minds only by the utter absence of all that we know in life.

  Like Gilgamesh, we are therefore left without comfort: afraid that any moment might be our last; knowing that our drive to live on, our very essence, will—must—be thwarted; certain that life is a failure waiting to happen. And when that failure comes, then all will be lost; we will be plunged into eons of lonely oblivion and, as Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu puts it, “see no light, but dwell in darkness.” To live and die without the promise of immortality seems a terrible fate.

  AND that is only from the individual’s point of view; from the perspective of civilization it gets worse still. We have seen repeatedly that civilization itself has been driven onward by our quest to triumph over death, indeed that the founding raison d’être of many civilizations is the promise of immortality. We saw that science and the ideology of progress emerged from the pursuit of indefinitely increasing lifespans, that religions thrive through their assurance of an afterlife, that most cultural products are our attempts to replicate ourselves in the symbolic realm and that having children reflects a biological urge to perpetuate ourselves into the future. We have seen that these are all misguided as attempts to secure the immortality of the individual—but what kind of a society is possible without them?

  A much-impoverished one according to some scholars. Recall the words of the psychologist William McDougall writing on the decline of the belief in a soul that it was “highly probable that the passing away of this belief would be calamitous for our civilisation.” He went on: “For every vigorous nation seems to have possessed this belief, and the loss of it has accompanied the decay of national vigour in many instances.” The Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad, himself skeptical about belief in a hereafter, went so far as to recommend that measures be taken to prevent such a loss of vigor: “It is quite possible,” he wrote, “that the doctrine of human immortality (whether it be in fact true or false) is one of these socially valuable ‘myths’ which the State ought to remove from the arena of public discussion.”

  But “the State” has not so acted, and we are free to worry ourselves with our doubts and questions. Having worried ourselves to the point that none of the immortality narratives seems satisfactory, will we continue to work, worship and create—knowing that these activities will not after all deliver us from death? Can there be progress, justice and culture if we know that all our efforts will end in dust? Or should we for the sake of both our sanity and our civilization forget all our hard-won insights and attempt to recloak ourselves in the illusion of life everlasting?

  This final chapter is dedicated to answering these questions. It is my belief that we do not need to despair, that it is possible to lead a decent and satisfying life in the face of finitude. Indeed, it might even be easier: immortality would have downsides at which we have so far only barely hinted. We will look at some of these and at a broader tradition of thought that offers an alternative to the four immortality narratives—a fifth narrative that we can also find weaving its influence throughout the ages. This alternative also attempts to grapple with the will to immortality and the Mortality Paradox, yet without promising to deliver eternal life. And though ancient, it fits well with the findings of modern science. We might call it—for reasons that will soon become clear—the Wisdom Narrative.

  UNCIVILIZED

  IN drawing the conclusions from the previous chapters we have so far mostly focused on the benefits of the immortality narratives, that which we stand to lose if these belief systems are rejected. But the effects of these narratives are far from purely positive: the struggle up the Mount of the Immortals has been as much one of bloodshed, atrocity and injustice as of growth and innovation. As Zygmunt Bauman wrote, “All too often … the audacious dream of killing death turns into the practice of killing people.”

  We saw this only too clearly with Alexander the Great and his snake-worshipping, dagger-wielding mother, Olympias. Their pursuit of legacy, in one case cultural, in the other biological, left hundreds of thousands of ruined lives in its wake. We might find civilization inconceivable without the artist’s pursuit of posterity, but it is worth remembering that many attempts at fame or glory are much less benign. Equally, we would not want to do without a mother’s love for her child, but the biological immortality narrative also frequently transmutes into racism, nationalism and xenophobia: expelling or killing the Other becomes a way of preserving one’s own purity and demonstrating that one’s own kind stands above death. Thus Ernest Becker argued that our “urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”

  So whereas many civilizations have arisen as means to immortal ends, just as many have met their downfall as a consequence of these narratives—those who stood in the way of Alexander, for example. Wars between cultures with differing immortality narratives are seen not just as matters of life and death but as matters of eternal life and death. Such wars therefore all become, in the words of the American philosopher Sam Keen, “holy wars” in which eternity is at stake. If you have given your life to furthering the revolution of the proletariat, then the victory of capitalism will destroy your part in posterity; if you wish to dedicate your life to Allah, the advance of secularism threatens to prevent you from finding your place in paradise. So we fight for the truth of our particular myth, and there are as many losers as winners.

  But the negative effects of the immortality narratives are not only confined to conflict between civilizations—they are just as manifest within each society. We saw in chapter 7 that these narratives play an important role in many ethical systems—providing everlasting sticks and carrots as punishment or reward for one’s peccadilloes on earth. But the flip side of these ethical systems is a rigid conservatism capable of condoning the most outrageous injustice. The clearest examples are the caste systems of South Asia, which are supported by a belief in reincarnation that teaches that if someone is born to a lowly station then it is only because they deserved it through bad deeds in a previous life.

  Many commentators have recognized the correlation between a focus on an eternal afterlife and a willingness to unquestioningly accept injustice and deprivation in this world. This is no doubt why medieval European rulers found Christianity so useful—
it taught their exploited subjects to avert their eyes from the horror of their daily lives and dream instead of a future paradise. This is what Nietzsche called the “slave morality,” as it causes the downtrodden to accept their miserable lot and fantasize about revenge and gratification in an imaginary world to come. It is frequently noted that the great social-reform movements of the last centuries—emancipation of slaves, equality between sexes and races, social welfare and so on—arose only when the preoccupation with the next world began to lose its grip on Western society. Justice and happiness need not be sought now if an eternity of righteous pleasure is to come.

  This focus on the next world can therefore exact a terrible price from those in this world: think only of the holy warriors who go to die in the expectation of a reward in paradise, whether as once with sword in hand or as now with explosives around their waist. If this life here on earth is regarded merely as a series of tests for a place in another life, then it is necessarily devalued: with eyes fixed firmly on future bliss, the immortalist fails to grasp the value of being now.

  Finally, it is worth noting that most immortality narratives foster a profound selfishness. Such doctrines teach you to obsess about the infinite survival of your own individual personality; all actions are then measured by whether they make your personal survival more or less likely or your expected eternity more or less pleasurable. Outwardly admirable actions—such as giving to the poor—are performed for the sake of your soul. Even where this contributes to a more stable society, it does nothing to cultivate real virtues such as empathy or compassion for others but focuses all attention purely on the implications of an action for you.

  Such a system teaches us to maintain the self-absorption of the infant motivated only by reward or punishment from its parent. What then passes as spirituality—with all the positive, elevated connotations of that word—often amounts largely to someone being so entirely obsessed with the state of their own immortal soul that they withdraw from society to cultivate its eternal prospects.

  So when we recognize that the four immortality narratives have contributed to making our civilizations what they are, we must equally recognize that this includes these civilizations’ profound flaws—their belligerence, their xenophobia, their injustice and the self-centeredness of their citizens. These are the downsides of the immortality narratives as they are, but there is more to add to the charge sheet—that is, what might happen if their promises were fulfilled and we really were to achieve personal immortality. For there is good reason to think that the effects on both sanity and civilization would be catastrophic.

  THE LONG DARK TEA-TIME OF THE SOUL

  IN chapter 2 we recalled the novelist Susan Ertz’s observation that “millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” Clearly there is something particularly sobering about the prospect of an eternity of Sunday afternoons; it is a prospect that can burst the bubble of all but the most ardent immortalist. Douglas Adams, in his five-part “trilogy” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, described a man who stumbled across immortality: “To begin with, it was fun … But in the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it … and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark tea-time of the soul.”

  We noted in chapter 3 that achieving immortality on earth could lead to problems like overpopulation and our destruction at the hands of the very technologies designed to make us live forever, and we saw subsequently that it is anyway extremely unlikely to happen. But suspending disbelief for a moment, I want here to focus on the psychological effects of eternity—on the long dark tea-time of the soul. There are as I see it two sets of problems: on the one hand, the boredom and apathy that would result from having done and seen everything there is to do—that is, from having already lived a very long time—and on the other hand, the paralysis that would result from having an infinite future in which to do any further things. Both these problems, the backward looking and the forward looking, threaten to suck the meaning out of life and leave one wishing for a terminal deadline.

  WE should not deny that life as we know it on earth for many people ends too soon. Most of us could write a list of things we would do with a little extra time—or even with a lot of extra time. But, as we have noted before, infinity is not simply extra time, it is endless time. We might love travel and dearly wish to live long enough to visit the thousand most beautiful or interesting places on earth, but we might be less inspired subsequently to visit the thousand slightly less beautiful and interesting places. Or the thousand after that. In the great scheme of infinity, it would not be long before we were left only with the thousand dullest places on the planet, at which point we might find our motivation seriously flagging.

  Of course, there are some pleasures we enjoy more than once. A good meal or conversation with friends or taking part in a favorite sport or hearing a favorite piece of music—these things seem at least as good the second, third or hundredth time. But a man who eats caviar every day will grow sick of it eventually, and we will one day—even if a million years hence—tire of all our friends’ jokes. After we have enjoyed them long enough, all luxuries become commonplace and dull. Given endless repetition, whatever activities we pursue we would eventually feel like Sisyphus, the ancient Greek king condemned by the gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill only for it continually to roll back down.

  It is easy to see why many immortality narratives promise some kind of radical transformation—either of us or our surroundings, or both. We might enjoy our lives now—but the prospect not just of more of the same but of infinitely more of the same is a chastening one, as the philosophically inclined Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges captured in his 1949 story “The Immortal.” It tells of a soldier of ancient Rome who seeks a river “which cleanses men of death.” After a long and terrible journey, he finds a land of “troglodytes” who live in shallow pits, naked, withered and subsisting on snake meat. They are indifferent and apathetic: one stood up so rarely that a bird had nested on his chest.

  These troglodytes, it turns out, are the immortals. One of them—who happens to be the legendary poet Homer—explains to the Roman why they live as they do. They had realized that, given infinite time, all men would become great and all pathetic; they would each perform every goodness and every perversity. “Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.”

  Borges’s hypothesis is that, given an infinite amount of time, any event with a finite probability would happen. You would inevitably one day be a TV chef, at another time prime minister of Belgium and at some point a stripper in a go-go bar. And possibly all these things many times over. And as all things would happen to all of us, there would be nothing to distinguish us one from another: “No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men,” Borges writes. After we had many times been both victim and perpetrator, monarch and subject, we would cease to regard anything as better or worse than anything else; meaning would collapse. Faced with infinity, life would become a joke—and we would already know the punch line.

  The most ardent immortal might see a way around these problems: our memories are not perfect, they could argue; perhaps, by the time we have seen all the interesting places there are to see and tried all the delicious dishes or studied all the subjects under the sun we will have forgotten what the first most interesting place was like, or how caviar tastes, or the finer points of quantum physics, and so will be able to begin the whole journey once again. In other words, with the proper pacing of our pleasures—whether over months or millennia—we could ensure
they always seemed fresh.

  Perhaps this is so; there is nothing logically incoherent in the idea of a temporal wheel of happiness, involving continuous discovering, forgetting and rediscovering. But such an elaborate cycle of delightful experiences is unlikely to be the reality for billions of immortals on an overcrowded planet, should we tomorrow find the elixir of life. Nor is it the vision of the afterlife promised by most religions (recall the book of Revelation’s description of heaven as a place whose inhabitants “are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night”). In the end, the problem of boredom might be one of personality: there might be those whose natural joie de vivre carries them through eternity, while the rest of us grow weary of the world and—most of all—ourselves.

  BUT even more troubling for the immortal than the problem of having so much time behind them is how much time they would still have ahead of them. The constraint of finite time shapes our every decision. It is what drives us to get out of bed in the morning, to finish studying and get into the world, to earn money for a decent retirement. The dread that, on our deathbed, we might look back on a wasted life propels us to realize our dreams. The clock that steals a second of our lives with every tick reminds us that the time to act is now. In other words: death is the source of all our deadlines.

  What happens if we find an elixir and this deadline disappears? For a start, those who leave everything to the last minute would be in trouble—as there would never be one. Procrastination could be taken to a whole new level. If it looked to be a rainy millennium, you could spend the thousand years in bed. If your time were infinite, it would no longer make sense to talk of it being wasted: life as we know it may be too short to watch daytime TV, but eternity wouldn’t be.

  The deep problem is this: the value of a thing is related to its scarcity—people conscious of their mortality value their time and aim to spend it wisely because they know their days are numbered. But if our days were not numbered, this incentive would disappear: given infinity, time would lose its worth. And once time is worthless, it becomes impossible to make rational decisions about how to spend it. The consequences of this for an individual would be bad enough; for a civilization of such ditherers it would be disastrous.