Our obsession with immortality

Recently my eldest son woke from a troubled dream seized by a fear of death. “How is it that I will die?” he cried, shaking with terror. “Why must my heart stop?” Repeatedly he took hold of his flawless skin. “Why will this grow wrinkled and loose? Why?” So genuine was his anguish, so badly was he in need of consoling that, secular minded as I am, I ran through some of the more familiar consolations. There are those, I said, who don’t believe that death is the end: we may die to this life but awake to another.

The philosopher John Gray’s latest book, The Immortalization Commission, takes as its theme an entire generation’s struggle to come to terms with something like my son’s anguished arrival of knowledge: the knowledge that death is final and without appeal. To the 19th century, Gray writes, “Science had disclosed a world in which humans were no different from other animals in facing final oblivion when they died and eventual extinction as a species.”

The first part of Gray’s fascinating study traces the impact of this excoriating knowledge on a small, high minded coterie of the late Victorian élite, including the Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour; the great moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick; and William James, US psychologist and brother of Henry, the novelist. So intolerable was the new knowledge, so devastating to human dignity and hope, that, according to Gray, they seized the very tools of science in an attempt to refute it. Under the banner of so called psychical research some of the leading figures of the day set out in search of “scientific evidence that the human personality survived bodily death.” And among the many pleasures of this unexpectedly moving book are the plans that these psychical researchers hatched in pursuit of their death defeating dreams. Facing death, the poet and philosopher F W H Myers made a pact with William James that, “whichever of them was to die first should send a message to the other as he passed over into the unknown.” There ensued decades of what came to be known as “cross-correspondences”—thousands of pages of text “transcribed” by a series of female practitioners of automatic writing who believed they were receiving messages from Myers.

Most extraordinary of all though was the hatching of “the Plan.” This involved the impregnation of one of their members with a child who was to be scientifically designed from beyond the grave. The task of this so called Christ-child was, according to Gray, “to deliver humanity from chaos. Scientifically programmed to perform its role, the child would develop into an extraordinary human being who would bring peace and justice to the world.”

Although this may now sound almost comically far fetched, another of the pleasures of this book is its compassion. Despite Gray’s almost glacially disillusioned world view, he refuses to patronise his characters, quietly sympathising with their all too human longings: to be reunited with those they had lost, and for a paradisiacal state in which their “fractured personalities” could become whole.

From Victorian England Gray makes a long leap, and if there is a problem with the book it might just be the length of that leap: to the intellectuals of Bolshevik Russia. For séances in genteel drawing rooms he exchanges the abattoir of history. Where an English élite was trying to disarm death through psychical research, the so called God builders of Russia were attempting to overcome it, by the destruction of human nature itself. The paradox is brutal. “To achieve this,” Gray writes, “the human animal had to be remade, a task that required killing tens of millions of people.” Again though, the book’s charm lies not in the anti-humanist philosophy that Gray teases from his tales, but in the characters and struggles that enliven them. The collision between H G Wells and Maria Ignatyevna Zakrevskaya (or Moura, as she was widely known), a woman of such sexual charisma and so many personas that she seems almost singlehandedly to have destroyed Wells’s faith in the mind’s ability to know the world, is flamboyantly novelistic.

In the final, meditative section, Gray moves from the Russian slaughterhouse to the present day. And in case we feel moved to look down on our mistaken forebears, he reminds us of a few of our contemporary death defiers. There is Ray Kurzweil, a so called techno-immortalist who will have us uploading our minds into computers and dispensing with the body’s corruptible shell, or there are those whose faith lies in cryogenics and future bodily resurrection.

“Science,” concludes Gray, “continues to be a channel for magic—the belief that for the human will, empowered by knowledge, nothing is impossible.” Although thankfully Gray seems sympathetic to our human folly, the book’s final message is implacable: it is time for us to stop panting after eternity, to stop looking to science or an afterlife to escape our mortality. We remain, in his words, the death defined creature. “Immortality is only the dimming soul projected onto a blank screen. There is more sunshine in the fall of a leaf.”