Immortality (32 page)

A few further facts help to make this clear. Some of your cells, such as certain white blood cells, live largely autonomous lives roaming around your bloodstream waiting for a signal to attack their prey, such as unwelcome microbes. Such cells are an essential part of your immune system. Yet very similar cells can be found in any pond, where we call them amoebas and consider them to be independent
organisms. As the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it, “humans are integrated colonies of ameboid beings.”

Our cells are now too specialized to live outside of the collective that we call a human being, but that is not true of all animals. Some sponges (which are animals, albeit rather simple ones) can be pushed through a sieve and their cells will continue to live independently, eventually searching each other out and reassembling. In the case of such a sponge, the question of what the real agent is in all this—the genes, or the cell they control, or the multicellular collective—seems a matter of perspective. And the same is true of you.

It might seem obvious that a human is something over and above a lump of individual cells. But if this seems obvious when looking at a fully grown human being, it is much less obvious when looking at a newly conceived one. The fact is, you were quite literally once a single cell: you started out as the fusion of an egg cell produced by your mother and a (much smaller) sperm cell from your father. This cell then divided into two, and the two resulting cells then divided again, and so on and so on to produce the trillions of cells that make up your body. As it grew, this clump of cells slowly acquired new abilities as a collective, over and above what an individual cell could do alone—such as the capacities to do math and make music. This clump can also produce further cells—eggs or sperm—that are capable of fusing with another cell to produce a whole new clump carrying 50 percent of the first clump’s genes.

Therefore from the point of view of your genes, traveling the world in their little cells, the chain of life looks unbroken from generation to generation. There are no abrupt starts and stops such as we see at the level of the multicellular human. When a cell replicates, it first replicates its genetic code, then fully divides itself, ensuring both halves get a complete set of genes. Although we call the resulting cells “daughters,” each is really a direct continuation of the original. Nothing in this process
dies
or disappears or is lost;
there is no corpse. One living thing has become two, and it lives on in a quite literal, physical way in both the successors.

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.”

A
LTHOUGH
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.

T
HERE
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.

T
HE
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.”

N
OW
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?