Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  “I’m not afraid of death,” said Woody Allen. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” He can rest assured: he won’t be. As Utnapishtim said, “No one at all sees Death”; when he reaches out for us, we are already gone. We therefore cannot miss, regret or suffer from that which is outside the bounds of our life. We do not linger like uninvited guests at our own funeral, nor are we plunged into the lonely void. We stop. The conscious experiences we have had are the totality of our lives; death, like birth, is just a term that defines the bounds of those experiences, like the frame of a painting that serves to delineate and accentuate the image within.

  THE second step along the path of wisdom is therefore this realization that we can never be dead, that fearing being dead is therefore a nonsense. Combining this with the first step—realizing the problems of immortality—we can now conclude that neither is living forever so good nor death so bad as our intuitions would have us believe. Still, powerful instincts are at work that distort our perceptions of mortality and the way we use what time we have. The third step of the Wisdom Narrative is to cultivate virtues that hold these instincts in check.

  THE THREE VIRTUES

  WE noted in chapter 1 that we of all creatures have certain highly developed cognitive capacities, of which three in particular influence our view of life and death: a refined consciousness of self, an ability to conceive of an indefinite future, and the capacity to imagine possible threatening scenarios. These three faculties allow us to picture all the endless ways in which our cherished selves could be done grievous harm—which, as we noted, has considerable evolutionary advantages, as we can then plan to avoid such harms.

  But these three capacities also come at a high price. They lead directly to the Mortality Paradox—awareness of our mortality and an inability to conceive of ourselves as not existing—and thus to the fear of death. Instead of focusing on death itself, this next step of the Wisdom Narrative attempts to confront the way these three faculties lead us alone of creatures to so obsess about mortality. The aim is not to do away with these faculties, which are of course enormously useful, but rather to maintain them in a proper perspective.

  So: awareness of self might be important, but excessive concern with the self only exacerbates the fear of death, or loss of self, and leads one to a life of self-absorption. In order to combat this, we should cultivate selflessness, or identifying with others. Similarly, picturing the future helps us to plan a successful life, but excessive concern with the future causes us to focus on the tribulations that lie ahead of us—and we forget to live now. Therefore we should learn to live more in the present moment. And third, imagining all the things that could threaten our existence might help us to avoid them, but in excess it leads us only to worry about what we might lose rather than appreciate what we have. Therefore we should cultivate gratitude.

  In varying ways and to varying extents, I suggest these are the three main themes of wisdom literature from Gilgamesh through the Bible and the Greeks to the present day. It is worth looking at each of these in a little more detail to see how they together add up to a coherent Wisdom Narrative; then we will look at the effect they might have on civilization.

  Identifying with Others

  Excessive focus on oneself is a powerful cause of the fear of death. Concern for the self has of course evolved to help us perpetuate that self—if our ancestors were not concerned for themselves, they would likely not have lived long enough to reproduce, and we as a consequence would not be here. But in excess, this self-obsession can become morbid and debilitating. Unfortunately, just such excess is encouraged by modern societies.

  The social psychologist Roy Baumeister, a leading researcher on ideas of the self, observed that “the increasing use of selfhood as the major value base for legitimizing and justifying human striving is a trend that aggravates the threat of death.” In chapter 6, we saw that this obsession with the self grew out of the doctrine of the immortal soul. We in the developed world who have inherited this inflated sense of self but do not believe in the immortality narrative from which it comes are consequently in the worst possible position—we are effectively facing the end of the only thing we hold dear: ourselves. For us moderns, it is all the more difficult but all the more urgent that we actively seek causes and others with which or whom we can identify to help us get over ourselves.

  Fortunately, in humans, as in other social animals, our concern for self is balanced by concern for offspring, family or tribe, and in humans in particular, by concern for other interests too, such as justice, science or the local football team. By focusing more on these other interests, the end of the individual self can come to seem a lot less important.

  This is an important part of the barmaid’s lesson, expressed through her instruction to Gilgamesh: “Gaze on the child who holds your hand, / let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!” And the poem ends with his returning to Uruk and finding pride and joy in his city. In the Greek tradition, this virtue was most prominent in Stoicism, which considered full engagement with the community and love of all mankind to be a foremost duty. This was partly a product of the cosmopolitan and empathetic outlook that this philosophy encouraged. Using phrases that would be familiar to any Taoist, Marcus Aurelius summed this outlook up so: “Think often of the bond that unites all things in the universe, and their dependence upon one another. All are, as it were, interwoven, and in consequence linked in mutual affection.”

  The idea of identifying with others and engaging with wider interests sounds somewhat like the Legacy Narrative, and in a sense it is indeed taking what is insightful from that approach while leaving behind its immortalist rhetoric. Neither the barmaid nor the Stoics were suggesting that this engagement would make you live forever; rather, their point was that it would make your own mortality seem less important to you. Bertrand Russell put it well in an essay on growing old (and he grew to be ninety-seven): “The fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”

  The success of this approach is borne out by experience. The psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom concluded after a career working with the terminally ill that connecting to others was the single most important method for ameliorating death anxiety. And psychologist Roy Baumeister recommends a similar antidote to the problem he is quoted above as identifying: “The most effective solution to this threat [of death] is to place one’s life in some context that will outlast the self. If one’s efforts are devoted to goals and values that project many generations into the future, then death does not undermine them.”

  Focus on the Present

  The virtue of connecting with others will help to put our own selves in proper perspective. This is intimately connected with the next problem: our tendency to fill our hours with thoughts of what might become of us in the future and so fail to appreciate the present. When left to their own devices, our minds busy themselves with plans, plots, worries and idle speculation—much of it about things that might go badly for us. The capacity to think about the future is of course enormously useful, but it can also foster angst and seriously undermine our prospects of happiness. By dwelling on all manner of possible threats, we bring death into life, only then to die without having really lived.

  This was the position of Gilgamesh when he met the barmaid: squandering his life with worry that ahead of him lay only death. Her response—“Make merry each day”—is an attempt to pull him back into the present. For as many sages have known, happiness is only to be found in the present moment, as only the present moment is real. The past is gone, the future mere speculation. If you are happy now, then you are happy always, as there is only now. But equally, if you spend each moment worrying about your future happiness, then happiness will always elude you, and your life will be one of anxiety. And, as we have seen, worr
ying about death—something we can never experience—is the most foolish worry of all.

  The French historian Pierre Hadot described the goal of Epicureanism and Stoicism as “to allow people to free themselves from the past and the future, so that they could live within the present.” This would be instantly recognizable to followers of many other religious and philosophical traditions. In Buddhism, for example, it is known as “mindfulness” and is one of the key steps on the path to enlightenment. Buddhists cultivate this virtue through the ancient practice of meditation, which anyone can take up—and which is now also recommended by Western science.

  Clinical psychologists have adopted Buddhist mindfulness techniques in order to treat stress, anxiety and depression. Like the practice of gratitude, learning to live more in the moment is proven to bring many benefits. The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first documented the phenomenon of being “in the flow,” was perhaps the first to demonstrate this, proving an association between focusing full attention on a task in the present moment and the experience of “pleasure, happiness, satisfaction and enjoyment.” A 2010 Harvard study reinforced this, gathering a great deal of evidence to show that people all around the world make themselves unhappy by continually imagining possible future scenarios, many of them anxiety inducing, and that those who are happiest spend the most time wholly in the moment.

  This thought is sometimes expressed as living each day as if it would be your last. Indeed an awareness that this day might be your last (and who knows, it might be—one day surely will be) does help to focus the mind on the present. But it could of course also lead to abandoning anything that might contribute to longer-term projects. And that you might regret: after all, this day also might not be your last. We must find a way of appreciating the present while acknowledging that the stream of moments might extend some way yet. This is a balance. We could put it like this: live so you will have no regrets if you die tomorrow but also no regrets if you don’t. The first part might prompt you to quit the job you hate, but the second should stop you from punching your boss on the way out.

  Gratitude

  Third, the wisdom literature addresses our natural tendency to focus on the dark side of life. True enough, we have a powerful drive to live on, and true enough, it will be thwarted. That is our curse. But let us look at the flip side of those facts. This urge is part of our evolutionary inheritance, without which our ancestors would not have survived or undergone the trials of childbirth—in other words, without which we would not be here. That an unbroken chain of many millions of ancestors over billions of years all managed to do their bit to bring us into existence, that is our blessing. And it is an extraordinary one, involving more strokes of luck and cosmic coincidences than are possibly countable.

  We can barely begin to measure the good fortune that led to the development first of life, then of animals, of mammals, of humans, of your family, and, finally, of you. Complex life—and in particular the life of any individual—is remarkable. Astonishing. Wondrous. And it would not have happened without the cycle of birth and death. If our fishy ancestors some few hundred million years ago had attained immortality instead of making way for the next generation, we would never have come to be. A long, long history of death has made possible the incredible fact that you are alive now.

  Added to that, the very faculties that make you aware of death also enable you to love, experience the sublime, appreciate art, connect with other people and with nature, to build and create and understand. Modern science has if anything taught us that these facts—of life and mind—are even more extraordinary than our ancestors might have thought. And what these facts suggest is that before we rue our plight of a short life overshadowed by death, we should be grateful—very, very grateful—that we have a shot at life at all, and with a brain capable of appreciating and creating so much wonder.

  This is part of what the barmaid was trying to tell Gilgamesh: appreciate what you have. The Bible too, like almost every other religious tradition, contains enjoinders to be thankful. With the Epicureans and the Stoics, gratitude became part of a systematic philosophy. The Greek Epicurean Philodemus, for example, wrote, “Receive each additional moment of time in a manner appropriate to its value; as if one were having an incredible stroke of luck”—something that should be even easier now we know that each moment of life really is an incredible stroke of luck. Instead of being resentful that it will end, we should be grateful for every minute of it. Then when your time comes, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, “go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.”

  We have evolved to focus on what we stand to lose—ultimately on the threat of death—causing us to live in fear instead of reveling in the extraordinary good fortune of being. Overcoming such an instinct is not easy: it takes continual work, lest we drift back to the evolved norm. Religions from Christianity to Buddhism have developed practices that help people internalize a grateful attitude, such as daily prayers of thanks. Modern positive psychologists advocate various secular equivalents, such as keeping a daily journal of things for which one might be grateful.

  Tacky as this might sound to some, the effects can be extraordinary.

  Robert Emmons, a leading researcher into the effects of gratitude, after surveying the evidence concluded that “gratitude is positively related to such critical outcomes as life satisfaction, vitality, happiness, self-esteem, optimism, hope, empathy, and the willingness to provide emotional and tangible support for other people, whereas being ungrateful is related to anxiety, depression, envy, materialism, and loneliness.” It is no coincidence that gratitude is one of the common themes throughout the world’s wisdom literature and a powerful antidote to the fear of death. As the Greek Stoic Epictetus put it, “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”

  “WISDOM GIVETH LIFE” (Ecclesiastes 7:12)

  THE difference between those who swallow 250 dietary supplements per day and the rest of us is not that they will live forever and we will not. No: we will all die, even the transhumanists. The difference is that they tell themselves a story about achieving “longevity escape velocity,” which helps them to alleviate their existential angst. They are therefore following a long tradition of elixir seekers, resurrectionists, reincarnationists and others who have attempted to deny the fact of death.

  Most of this book has been concerned with exploring how these immortality narratives have shaped civilization—for good and ill—and whether they have any plausibility. The conclusion is that whatever plausibility they have, it is not enough: they are all fatally (if you excuse the pun) flawed. But more than that, we have seen that by taking the fear of death at face value, all four immortality narratives exacerbate the very attitudes that underpin that fear. By encouraging people to obsess about their own health, or the state of their own soul, or their particular legacy, they encourage the very self-centered, future-oriented and negative view that caused the fear in the first place.

  The fact is, we have not evolved to be carefree and joyful; we have evolved to strive to perpetuate ourselves—at the expense of everything else, including our happiness. The immortality narratives only fuel this striving and its underlying causes. Although these narratives might sometimes succeed in assuaging our existential angst, they are not otherwise a recipe for contentment. The Wisdom Narrative is different: instead of dismissing existential anxiety by denying death, it attacks the underlying attitudes that make us think we ought to be afraid of death in the first place. By doing so, it aims to cultivate an appreciation of this life and this world, as it is, right now.

  This is not easy: as we have seen, the attitudes and virtues we need run contrary to powerful impulses. They must therefore be actively developed. This is something the ancient philosophers knew: the Stoic teacher Epictetus, for example, believed that any do
ctrine that was merely theoretical was pseudo-philosophy—the real thing had to be practiced daily. Stoics therefore followed daily exercises to train themselves in wisdom—an approach to life that will be familiar to many religious practitioners. Even the Dalai Lama will tell you that compassion for all living things does not always come easily.

  I am not claiming that all people would be happier if they gave up their immortality narratives. No doubt some people are muddling along just fine with, for example, their reassuring belief in an immortal soul. But I am claiming that giving up these narratives need not lead to nihilism and despair—that, contrary to Tennyson, we need not hurl ourselves into the sea. The Wisdom Narrative is a powerful alternative to these beliefs, one that balances a positive love of life with managing the fear of that life’s end. And by focusing our attention on the here and now and on the world outside of the self, it might also help to make the one life we have a better, richer, more meaningful one.

  But will civilization grind to a halt if the masses stop their ceaseless pursuit of eternity? We have seen many times in this study how the pursuit of immortality has motivated almost every aspect of our cultural development. Nonetheless, this need not mean that if we accept mortality we will all be back living in caves. For a start, there is nothing in the Wisdom Narrative that undermines the value of a long and secure life: we still have a reason to build strong houses and take our medicine, even to pursue a cure for cancer. And we will still have reason to partake in those civilized activities that bring us joy, whether making music, playing football or tending roses. Some of these pursuits might have developed as means to perpetuate ourselves into the future, but that does not mean we can’t enjoy them knowing they won’t. If we have evolved to take pleasure in having children, then we should continue to do so—and relieved of the illusion that they are our immortality vehicle, we (and they) might even enjoy it all the more.