Immortality (4 page)

This applies no matter how far into the future we attempt to
look: whether one or one thousand years from now, we cannot help but be present in what we see. There is no limit to just how far into the future we can project; it is not as if our imagination stops at a million years, or a billion. And so, to quote the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, God—or nature—“has set eternity in the hearts of men.” In our own minds, we are part of the very fabric of the universe, ineradicable, here forever. The great German writer Goethe is reported to have concluded that “in this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.” We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.

Modern cognitive psychology gives a scientific account of this ancient intuition. Our acceptance of new facts or possibilities depends upon our ability to imagine them—we accept, for example, that playing with matches could cause our house to burn down because this is something we can easily picture. But when our minds come across an obstacle to imagining a certain scenario, then we find it much more difficult to accept. Our own death is just such a scenario, as it involves the end of consciousness, and we cannot consciously simulate what it is like to not be conscious.

Research by the psychologist Jesse Bering has shown that even young children who have not yet been socialized into any particular religion or worldview believe that the mind survives bodily death. He and his colleagues argue that this is because the alternative—that the mind is extinguished—cannot be grasped. He concludes that we have “an innate sense of immortality” that stems from this cognitive quirk—that is, the seeming impossibility of our annihilation is hardwired into our brains.

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thus we have a paradox: when we peer into the future we find our wish to live forever fulfilled, as it seems inconceivable that we might one day cease to be. Thus we believe in our own immortality. Yet at the same time we are painfully aware of the countless possible
threats to our being, from poisonous snakes to avalanches, and we see all around how other living things inevitably meet a sticky end. And thus we believe in our own mortality. Our very same overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not, both that death is a fact and that it is impossible. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “the thought of death is—and is bound to remain—
a contradiction in terms
.” Both our immortality and our mortality present themselves to our minds with equal force.

Both these ideas, as we have seen, have found their champions among the poets, thinkers and myth makers: half suggest that we must live with the awareness of inevitable extinction, while the other half argue that we can never doubt that life is eternal. A few, of course, have also recognized the underlying paradox that both these ideas seem true. The Spanish-American philosopher and writer George Santayana, for example, captured it perfectly when he wrote of our clumsy struggle to reconcile “the observed fact of mortality and the native inconceivability of death.”

The paradox stems from two different ways of viewing ourselves—on the one hand, objectively, or from the outside, as it were, and on the other hand, subjectively, or from the inside. When we deploy reason to view ourselves as we do other living things around us, then we realize that we, like them, will fail, die and rot. From this outside, objective perspective, we are mortals. But when we switch to our own perspective and try to make sense of what this means subjectively, then we encounter the imaginative obstacle—the inability to accept the prospect of annihilation. Our introspection tells us we are as imperishable as the angels, indivisible and everlasting; yet when we look in the mirror we see ourselves as others see us, with sagging flesh and the first signs of decay—an imperfect and impermanent creature fated to a brief existence and a miserable end.

The difference between these two perspectives, the objective and the subjective, explains how the Mortality Paradox arises—but
it is one thing to explain it, another to resolve it. The paradox is composed of two contrary yet powerful intuitions about our ultimate fate; we cannot—and do not—live with such a tension. Such a state would be a continuous, paralyzing struggle between dread and hope. But that is not how most of us live; we are not, as a rule, paralyzed by the contradiction at the heart of the human condition. This is because we have developed stories that help us make sense of this existential impasse—and these are, of course, the immortality narratives.

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the 1990s, a group of American psychologists found that briefly reminding people of their own mortality had remarkable effects on their political and religious views. For example, they asked a group of Christian students to give their impressions of the personalities of two people. In all relevant respects, these two people were very similar—except one was a fellow Christian and the other Jewish. Under normal circumstances, participants rated them fairly equally. But if the students were first reminded of their mortality (e.g., by being asked to fill in a personality test that included questions about their attitude to their own death), then they were much more positive about their fellow Christian and more negative about the Jew.

These psychologists were testing the hypothesis that we have developed our cultural worldviews in order to protect ourselves from the fear of death. They reasoned that if this was true, then when reminded of their own mortality, people would cling more fiercely to the core beliefs of their worldview and would be more negative about those who threatened those beliefs. And this is exactly what their experiments found.

In another study, American students were asked to assess how “likeable and knowledgeable” they found the authors of two essays, one of which was positive about the U.S. political system and the
other critical. The students were invariably more positive about the pro-American writer and more negative about the critic—but this effect was hugely exaggerated after they had been reminded of their mortality. According to the authors of the study, this shows that it is not only religion to which we cling all the more tightly in the face of death—even the sense of belonging to a nation can provide us with existential comfort.

These researchers, now professors—Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski—were inspired as graduate students by reading Sigmund Freud and an American anthropologist called Ernest Becker. They were convinced by the idea that civilization provided psychological protection against the fear of oblivion and have since conducted more than four hundred experiments like those described above in order to test it. Their conclusion is that cultural worldviews, including our religions, national myths and values, “are humanly created beliefs about the nature of reality shared by groups of people that serve (at least in part) to manage the terror engendered by the uniquely human awareness of death.”

What they call Terror Management Theory of the development of human culture now has a wide and increasing following. It concerns our response to the realization that we must die—in our terms, the first part of the Mortality Paradox. Its supporters believe that this realization is potentially devastating: we must live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen to us one day surely will. Extinction—the ultimate trauma, a personal apocalypse, the end of our individual universe—seems inevitable. If people were fully mindful of this inescapable catastrophe, then, according to the proponents of Terror Management Theory, they would be “twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond to the demands of their immediate surroundings.”

They therefore hypothesized that we have created cultural institutions,
philosophies and religions that protect us from this terror by denying or at least distracting us from the finality of death—and this is just what their experiments have borne out. These death-denying institutions and religions vary enormously across time and space, from the polytheism of ancient Babylon to the consumerism of the contemporary West. But they all provide some account of why it is that we don’t really need to worry about dying, from the claim that we are really spirits who will live on in another realm to the belief that with enough vitamins and jogging we can outrun the Reaper.

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is therefore a modern scientific account of how the first part of the Mortality Paradox, the awareness of our own mortality, motivates the development of immortality narratives. But we have also seen that the second part of the Mortality Paradox, that we cannot imagine our own nonexistence, already predisposes us to believe that we cannot die. That, after all, is why we have a paradox. This second intuition—that we cannot ever truly be annihilated—is very useful for someone seeking to develop a death-defying story. It provides a kind of conceptual peg on which narratives can be hung that explain how it is that we do not really die.

The belief in an immortal soul, for example, admits that our bodies will expire—in line with the first part of the Mortality Paradox—but then runs with the second part of the paradox, that we cannot completely cease to exist, in order to make the claim that we survive bodily death and live on in spirit form.
Both
parts of the paradox are therefore accepted and made part of a story that removes their apparent contradiction. Our fear of death is assuaged, and the story has an intuitive plausibility because it is based on ideas we are predisposed to believe.

Thus are immortality narratives created. Each one finds some way of resolving the Mortality Paradox, some way of convincing us
that, contrary to appearances, we really will live on, that bodily death is either not inevitable or not what it seems, that we are
right
to believe in the impossibility of our extinction.

In the competitive environment of academic psychology, experts ferociously debate which of these two sides of the Mortality Paradox is primary in explaining human culture. Social psychologists, such as the supporters of Terror Management Theory, passionately advocate the primacy of death denial in shaping our worldviews. Whereas cognitive psychologists such as the aforementioned Jesse Bering emphasize that our inability to imagine our nonexistence suffices to explain the kind of religious beliefs we see all around us. But we can see that the effects of these two halves of the paradox are complementary: the fear of death provides a strong motivation to develop worldviews that promise immortality, and the sense of our own psychological permanence provides the peg on which such views can be hung.

Some aspects of our culture are straightforwardly products of our insatiable will to live. Agriculture, defense, housing, et cetera, all help us simply to survive. But religion, for example, or poetry is not the best way of putting food on the table or keeping enemies at bay. From the perspective of straightforward survival, self-flagellating monks or starving would-be artists are hard to explain, let alone dying for glory or sacrificing it all for posthumous fame. These distinctive features of human society can only be understood as attempts to resolve our paradoxical perspective on mortality. The writer Bryan Appleyard summed it up: “Everybody dies, therefore I must die. This being inconceivable, we invent immortality and these inventions are civilisation.”

Progress itself is a product of our lust for indefinite life: not only are individual civilizations shaped by our attempts to live forever but so are their interactions, their rise and fall. “History is what man does with death,” observed Hegel, the nineteenth-century German philosopher. The aforementioned psychiatrist Robert Jay
Lifton explained what this means: “Much of history can be understood as the struggle to achieve, maintain, and reaffirm a collective sense of immortality under constantly changing psychic and material conditions.” Almost all facets of humanity’s development can be understood as expressions of the will to live forever.

I say “almost” all facets can be explained by our will to live forever because there are other prisms through which we must also view human culture. First, each civilization is as much a product of untold historical contingencies as of the core underlying currents. A painter might paint because of prevailing immortality narratives about art as an assertion of the individual’s timeless uniqueness, or about the self-transcending power of the creative process, but to understand why she paints that particular painting, we must look through the prism of art history or individual biography.

Second, some thinkers, aware and critical of our instinctive attraction to these immortality stories, have even attempted to develop alternative worldviews—but as these are the exception, they can still best be understood in terms of the rule that they are breaking.

And third, as Freud is rumored to have said, a cigar is just a cigar—a particularly telling example, as smoking is seriously detrimental to our survival prospects (Freud, who smoked cigars daily, died of mouth cancer). But smoking does provide an immediate—and indeed addictive—pleasure. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain do not need any grand scheme or deep psychology to explain them: such actions speak for themselves. It is entirely possible that we might plant a rose bush neither to serve as a memorial to our spirit once we’re gone nor to attract a mate who will help us pass on our genes into the future, but just because we like the smell of roses. It is what goes beyond simple pleasure seeking and pain avoidance that makes human civilization distinctive and that must be understood in terms of the quest for eternal projection. It is not sufficient to understand civilization from the perspective of these
death-defying narratives—but it is necessary. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, “Without mortality, no history, no culture—no humanity.”

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the following chapters we will examine each of the four immortality narratives. We will see how each has contributed to making our civilization what it is, but equally we will ask which of these four paths might actually deliver on its promise. That they are motivated by deep-seated aspects of the human condition tells us nothing about whether or not these narratives are true. They could be genuine discoveries made by humanity at the dawn of history or elaborate products of wishful thinking; we could have been driven by the Mortality Paradox to uncover the secrets of immortality or to invent them. Each path has had millions, if not billions, of followers throughout history—and still does today; each has been defended by thousands of philosophers, theologians or sages. We will look to see whether one, none or all of them might lead us through the thick forest, beyond the clouds and up to the sunny peak of the Mount of the Immortals.