… that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘O that ’twere possible’
Science continues to be a channel for magic – the belief that for the human will, empowered by knowledge, nothing is impossible. This confusion of science with magic is not an ailment of a kind that has a remedy. It goes with modern life. Death is a provocation to this way of living, because it marks a boundary beyond which the will cannot go.
The psychical researchers turned to science looking for more than immortality, however. Like the God-builders, they wanted deliverance from a chaotic world. The plan for a posthumously designed messiah-child that is disclosed in the cross-correspondences is surely one of the most exotic dreams of human salvation ever. Yet it is no more bizarre than the dream of progressive thinkers who imagined a new type of human being born in the Soviet Union. Millions throughout the world waited for the arrival of this homunculus; but it never materialized. The new humanity was an apparition, more insubstantial even than the ectoplasm that appeared by sleight of hand in Spiritualist seances. Whether they fled or stayed in the Soviet Union, Russians led a posthumous existence in a deathly after-world. Only by killing their former selves – as Moura did – were a few able to live on.
H. G. Wells believed humans could escape extinction by seizing control of evolution. In The Time Machine Wells envisioned the traveller, near the end of his voyaging, as the last human in a darkening universe. It was in order to avoid such a dead end that Wells urged that evolution be directed by scientists. But how could the human animal transcend itself – a leap with no precedent in evolutionary history? As Wells had discovered, he could not transcend himself.
Yet Wells’ hopes for science have not disappeared. While the search for evidence of human survival of death has petered out, the belief that science can deliver a technological surrogate for immortality has grown stronger. More than ever, science is seen as a technique for solving the insoluble.
The decline of psychical research has not gone with a loss of interest in the paranormal. Research has continued on extrasensory perception, but its focus is on the powers of living minds. The capacity for remote viewing, a kind of clairvoyance in which information is gathered by means that seem impossible in the terms of current knowledge, has attracted interest for its uses in espionage, though the results have been inconclusive.
There have been attempts to continue the quest for evidence of survival. The Scole Experiment in the 1990s included a series of seances that produced episodes such as the appearance of old coins, images on photographic film, sounds on tape and messages from a spirit calling itself Manu. Myers made a late appearance, in March 1996, this time through film images of lines of verse. The experiment has been sharply criticized, by fellow psychical researchers among others. Even if fraud can be ruled out, interpreting the snatches of text is not a scientific procedure, any more than were attempts to elucidate the cross-correspondences. The experiment was in any case incomplete, terminating when sitters at the seance were informed that it was making time travel difficult for aliens in another galaxy.
The chief reason for the loss of interest in finding evidence for life after death is paradoxical: while Darwinism has sunk into popular consciousness, secular thinking has gone into retreat. The secular ideologies of the past century, such as communism and belief in the free market, have become museum pieces. There are few who now believe in any project of political salvation, and partly for this reason religion has revived.
Psychical research was a reaction against secular thinking. As secularization has lost momentum, the search for scientific evidence of the afterlife has been largely abandoned; but the attempt to cheat death continues. The hope of life after death has been replaced by the faith that death can be defeated. Leonid Krasin’s failed attempt to preserve Lenin’s body has been followed by other projects of technological resurrection.
Some have followed Krasin in his belief in cryonic suspension – freezing the cadaver until new technologies allow it to be resuscitated. The Prospect of Immortality, a volume by Robert Ettinger that became the bible of cryonics, was published in 1964, and in 1969 Alan Harrington published The Immortalist: An Approach to the Engineering of Man’s Divinity. In each book a version of Krasin’s programme was revived.
For Ettinger cryonic suspension will do more than conquer death. It will enable those who are de-frozen to remodel themselves according to their heart’s desire.
The key difference will be in people: we will remold, nearer to the heart’s desire, not just the world but ourselves … You and I, the frozen, the resuscitees, will be not merely revived and cured, but enlarged and improved, made fit to work, play and perhaps fight, on a grand scale and in a grand style.
Planning for immortality means spending your life thinking of death, and Ettinger’s ‘freezer-centred society’ is a strange way of overcoming mortality. But ‘the prize is Life – and not just more of the life we know, but a wider and deeper life of springtime growth, a grander and more glorious life unfolding in shapes, colours and textures we can yet but dimly sense’. Cryonics will overcome not only human mortality but the imperfections of human life.
For Harrington as for the God-builders conquering death is a project of self-divinization:
Our survival without the God we once knew comes down now to a race against time … Salvation by whatever means, and quickly. It has become the central passion that drives us, a need rapidly turning into an imperious demand to be rescued from nothingness … The time has come for men to turn into gods or perish … Only by subduing the processes that force us to grow old will we be able to exempt ourselves from death, the lot of beasts, and assume the status of gods, our rightful inheritance.
Like the anti-heroes of Dostoevsky admired by Stalin, believers in technological immortality want to become God.
Techno-immortalism comes in many varieties. Not all involve cryonic suspension, a process that involves damage to the body and brain. Calorie-restricted diets have also been advocated, on the ground that they could enable people to live and remain healthy until technology develops to the point where ageing can be reversed and death postponed indefinitely. This point may some day be reached. Yet all technical fixes for mortality suffer from a common limitation. They assume that the societies in which they are developed will survive intact, along with the planetary environment. Advocates of cryonic suspension who believe they will be resuscitated after centuries of technical progress imagine that the society into which they will be resurrected will be much as it was when they were frozen. But no modern society has enjoyed anything like that degree of stability. All have endured armed conflicts, economic depression and regime change, many suffering more than one of these upsets several times in a single century.
The trouble with the idea that science can deliver immortality is that human institutions are unalterably mortal. Those who expect a technical fix for death assume that scientific progress will continue along with something like the present pattern of life. A more likely scenario is that science will advance against a background of war and revolution. That is what happened in the twentieth century, when larger numbers died at the hands of other humans than at any time in history.
At the start of the twenty-first century technologies of mass killing have become more powerful and more widely dispersed. Not only nuclear weapons but also chemical and biological weapons are steadily becoming cheaper and more easily usable, while genetic engineering is sure to be used to develop methods of genocide that destroy human life selectively on a large scale. In a time when the spread of knowledge makes these technologies ever more accessible death rates could be very high, even among those whose longevity has been artificially enhanced.
Moreover, those who have benefited from life-extension techniques could find themselves in an environment that is increasingly inhospitable to human life. During the present century climate change may alter the conditions in which humans live radically and irreversibly. The survivors could find themselves in a world different from any in which humans have ever lived.
A side-effect of the growth of knowledge, global warming cannot be halted by further scientific advance. Using science, humans can adapt better to the changes that are coming. They cannot stop the climate shift they have set in motion. Science is a tool for problem-solving – the best that humans possess. But it has this peculiarity, that when it is most successful it creates new problems, some of which are insoluble. This is an unpopular conclusion, and it is not only those who believe technology can overcome mortality that resist it. So do Greens who support renewable technologies and sustainable development. If humans have caused climate change, Greens insist, humans can also stop it.
There were no humans around some fifty-five million years ago, at the start of the Eocene, when for reasons that are still unclear – volcanic activity or meteor impact have been suggested – the Earth became hotter. In contrast, the current global warming is humanly caused – a side-effect of worldwide industrialization. The spread of industrial production has gone with increasing use of fossil fuels, producing carbon emissions at levels not known for millions of years. In the same process human numbers have spiralled and humans have expanded into every available niche. Rainforest has been destroyed to allow farming and the manufacture of bio-fuels. The climate-regulating powers of the biosphere have been damaged, and the pace of climate change has quickened. There is a perverse process of feedback at work. Science makes possible an increasing human population, while destabilizing the environment on which humans depend for their survival.
The irony of scientific progress is that in solving human problems it creates problems that are not humanly soluble. Science has given humans a kind of power over the natural world achieved by no other animal. It has not given humans the ability to remodel the planet according to their wishes. The Earth is not a clock that can be wound up and stopped at will. A living system, the planet will surely rebalance itself. It will do so, however, without any regard for humans.
Echoing the Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, there are some who think humans should escape the planet they have gutted by migrating into outer space. Happily, there is no prospect of the human animal extending its destructive career in this way. The cost of sending a single human being to another planet is prohibitive, and planets in the solar system are more inhospitable than the desolated Earth from which humans would be escaping.
Visionaries like Wells imagined the last human in a dying world, while environmentalists talk of saving the planet. Certainly the Earth – the planetary system that includes the biosphere – is not immortal. One day it too will die. In any realistic scenario, however, the Earth will far outlast the ephemeral human animal. Unnumbered species have perished as a result of human expansion, and countless more will die out as a consequence of humanly caused climate change. But the planet will recover as it has done in the past, and life will flourish for hundreds of millions of years, long after humans have disappeared for ever.
Drunk on the emptied wine-cup of the earth
I grasped at people, objects and at thoughts
as drunkards cling to lamp-posts for support.
And so my world became a lovely place,
became a gallery bedecked by stars
and draped with three-dimensional tapestries,
a warehouse stacked with bales of wonder where
my wrist-watch was a table laid for twelve
and seconds passed in heavy honeyed drops.
György Faludy, Soliloquy on Life and Death,
Recsk Prison, 1952
The pursuit of immortality through science is only incidentally a project aiming to defeat death. At bottom it is an attempt to escape contingency and mystery. Contingency means humans will always be subject to fate and chance, mystery that they will always be surrounded by the unknowable. For many this state of affairs is intolerable, even unthinkable. Using advancing knowledge, they insist, the human animal can transcend the human condition.
A contemporary example is the American visionary Ray Kurzweil. In The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil suggests that a world-transforming increase in the growth of knowledge is imminent. Human ingenuity has created machines with exponentially increasing capacity to process information. Given the law of accelerating returns it cannot be long before artificial intelligence overtakes its human inventors. At that point the Singularity will be such that:
technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed. Of course, from a mathematical perspective, there is no discontinuity, no rupture, and the growth rates remain finite, though extraordinarily large. But from our currently limited framework, this imminent event appears to be an acute and abrupt break in the continuity of progress.
The immediate effect will be a sharp acceleration in the rate of scientific progress. Humans will ‘change their own thought processes to enable them to think even faster. When scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century’s progress (in today’s terms).’ Machines will go further, pooling their intelligence and memories. ‘Humans call this falling in love,’ Kurzweil notes, ‘but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.’ Fusing themselves with machines, humans can leave the flesh behind.
Even now, Kurzweil believes, people can extend their lives long enough to ensure that they will never die. In Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, he sets out a plan of diet, exercise, vitamin supplementation and preventive medical care he believes will enhance longevity to the point where technology can overcome mortality. ‘Biology has inherent limitations,’ he believes, and in order to overcome these limitations the human organism will need to be remodelled: ‘We will be able to reengineer all of the organs and systems in our biological bodies and brains to be vastly more capable.’ Nanotechnology will allow the invention of nanobots – minuscule robots operating at molecular level, with the ability to reverse ageing processes and enhance brain function. A fusion of human and artificial intelligence will follow, in which ‘the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will ultimately predominate’. (Along the way, Kurzweil tells the reader, nanobots will ‘reverse pollution from earlier industrialization’.)
Having ceased to be biological organisms, humans will lack the vulnerabilities of natural life-forms. They will acquire ‘bodies’, but the bodies will be virtual entities, or foglets – clusters of nanobots that can change their shape at will – and ‘these nanoengineered bodies will be far more capable and durable than biological human bodies’. This machine–human hybrid will live most of its life outside or beyond the material world. ‘Our experiences,’ Kurzweil predicts, ‘will increasingly take place in virtual environments.’
Inhabiting a virtual afterlife, post-human minds will have the bodies they always wanted: ‘In virtual reality, we can be a different person both physically and emotionally. In fact, other people (such as your romantic partner) will be able to select a different body for you than you might select for yourself (and vice versa).’ Post-humans can be whatever they want to be – for ever.
Like Ettinger’s and Harrington’s, Kurzweil’s programme reaches well beyond immortality. The Singularity is an eschatological event, ending the world as it has always been:
The law of accelerating returns will continue until nonbiological intelligence comes close to ‘saturating’ the matter and energy in our vicinity of the universe with our human-machine intelligence … Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.
Enlarged by conscious machines, the human mind will swallow the cosmos.
The Singularity is expected as a consequence of technologies that until recently could not be imagined. But the change Kurzweil imagines resulting is not new. It is not essentially different from Gorky’s fantasy of humans evolving to become pure thought, or Tsiolkovsky’s dream of deathless space voyagers. The virtual afterlife is a high-tech variant of the Spiritualist Summerland, while accelerated evolution in cyber-space is an updated version of Myers’ Victorian dream of progress in the after-world.
Overall, the Singularity is best understood as a version of process theology. Just as the Bolshevik God-builders imagined a deified humanity, so a number of twentieth-century theologians, mostly American, imagined God emerging from within the human world. Rather than an eternal reality, God was seen as the end-point of evolution. In this version of theism it is not God that creates humans. Rather, humans are God in the making.
Process theology is one more philosophy of progress – an attempt to solve the problem of evil by positing its disappearance over time. Since God is not fully actualized in the world, evil cannot be eradicated in one all-encompassing transformation; but evil can be gradually overcome, as God comes more fully into being. Meliorism – the belief that human life can be gradually improved – is usually seen as a secular world-view. But the idea of progress originated in religion, in the view of history as a story of redemption from evil. Philosophies of progress are secular religions of salvation in time, and so, too, is the Singularity.
As Kurzweil writes it, the history of the universe is divided up into epochs of increasing self-awareness. In the coming epoch, which is imminent, ‘the universe will become sublimely intelligent’. Human consciousness will become cosmic consciousness. This is the occultist world-view of Myers and Lunacharsky, derived from Theosophy and ultimately from ancient Gnosticism, restated in the materialist terms of twenty-first century computer theory.
A common view is that science has consistently been correcting our overly inflated view of our own significance … But it turns out we are central after all. Our ability to create models – virtual realities – in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our finger-tips.
Evolution may be producing conscious machines. As George Dyson has written, ‘Computers may turn out to be less important as an end product of technological evolution and more important as catalysts facilitating evolutionary processes through the incubation and propagation of self-replicating filaments of code.’ But consciousness is not the end-point of the evolutionary process. Evolution has no end-point, and the same process that is producing conscious machines will also at some point destroy them.
That does not mean the world will then be devoid of intelligence. Matter can be intelligent without ever being conscious (think of flocks of birds and ant colonies) while conscious beings may be so unintelligent that they destroy themselves. The idea of Gaia, according to which the Earth functions in some ways like a single organism, has been attacked on the ground that it ascribes intelligent purposes to the planet. Actually Gaia theory does not require the idea of purpose, and can be formulated in strictly Darwinian terms. But even when understood reductively the Earth has a greater capacity for intelligent action than the human animal. Whereas the Earth is a functioning system, ‘humanity’ is a phantom. It makes more sense to ascribe intelligence to the unknowing planet than it does to witless humankind.
Evolution may renew intelligence without in any way preserving consciousness. The notion that humans can attain immortality by merging in a cosmic consciousness is in any case muddled. In the theories of Myers and Lunacharsky, the individual mind was absorbed into a world-soul, while in Kurzweil’s it is uploaded into a virtual universe. In both cases a speck of humanity becomes part of a cloud of consciousness or information. Whatever survives, the individual is extinguished. Death is not conquered but triumphs unnoticed.
Immortalism is a programme for human extinction, a vanishing act more complete than any that seems likely in the natural course of events. Humans will surely disappear; but extinction means no more than returning to the undying chaos from which they came. In the immortalist scenario humans engineer their own extinction: intervening in the evolutionary process to create a new species, the animal that yearned to live for ever puts an end to its own existence.
If I had to tell what the world is for me
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theatre seat one evening
and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout,
would listen to what he says about the spotlights,
sounds of the music, and movements of the dance
Czeslaw Milosz
Science and occultism differ at many points, but at one they converge: both view the world as being governed by laws. The goal of the scientist is empirical knowledge; humans gain power over nature by understanding and obeying its laws. The aim of the occultist is to acquire secret knowledge and use it to revolt against natural laws. In each case it is taken for granted that laws of nature exist. But why should anyone imagine the world is ruled by laws, or that these laws can be known by humans?
Theism has an answer. The world was created by a divine mind, of which the human mind is an imperfect copy. The laws of nature are knowable by humans because they reflect the mind that created humans. The world is rational because God is rational.
This was the argument of Arthur Balfour, when he questioned whether science was possible on naturalistic assumptions. Only the faith that the world is orderly can support the ideal of science as a law-seeking enterprise; but the orderliness of the world cannot be scientifically demonstrated. As Balfour summarized his conclusion, ‘I do not believe that any escape from these perplexities is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the presupposition that it was the work of a rational Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same time made us, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand it.’
Balfour asks of science a question very like the one Sidgwick asked about morality: What must be true for it to be possible? Sidgwick concluded that for morality to be possible theism must be true. Balfour reaches the same conclusion about science. Naturalists have never properly reflected on what they mean when they talk about natural laws. They:
habitually use phraseology which, strictly interpreted, seems to imply that a ‘law of Nature’, as it is called, is a sort of self-subsisting entity, to whose charge is confided some department in the world of phenomena, over which it rules with undisputed sway. Of course this is not so. In the world of phenomena, Reality is exhausted by what is and what happens. Beyond this there is nothing. These ‘laws’ are merely abstractions devised by us for our own guidance through the complexities of fact. They possess neither independent powers nor actual existence.
Balfour presents a paradox: scientific naturalism is inconsistent with the belief that science can discover laws of nature. In Platonism and Christianity the laws of nature belong in a different realm from the natural world – a domain of timeless ideas, or the mind of God. If naturalism is true, there is no other realm. Science cannot uncover universal laws, only search for regularities that may not exist. The universe may be chaotic at bottom, with patterns emerging then melting away. In a world where chaos is primordial paranormal phenomena may be less puzzling. If science allows for ultimate irregularities, inexplicable phenomena can be accepted as ultimate facts. But if paranormal phenomena are results of gaps in the order of nature, they cannot be used to increase human power.
For some of its practitioners psychical research – a new science, as they liked to think of it – was in fact a type of magical thinking. Faith and magic are opposites. Faith means surrendering to a higher power, while the magician dreams of a triumph of the will – if only they are able to penetrate the secret order of things, humans can overleap natural laws. All varieties of occultism promise this magical freedom, as do some philosophies of science. But there is no hidden order in things. The most rigorous investigation reveals a world riddled with chaos in which human will is finally powerless. All things may be possible, but not for us.
This is not a conclusion many people are ready to accept. There is a persisting need to believe that the order that is supposed to exist in the human mind reflects one that exists in the world. A contrary view seems more plausible: the more pleasing any view of things is to the human mind, the less likely it is to reflect reality.
Take the Argument from Design, which says that the order humans find in the world could not have come about by itself. If the world is ordered in a way that can be grasped by the human mind, the world must have been created by something like the human mind – or so defenders of design believe. Sometimes they invoke the anthropic principle – the idea that humans could only come into being in a universe of roughly the sort that actually exists. But the anthropic principle points the other way, especially when the multi-world theory is taken into account. If our universe is one of many, unlike others in containing observers like ourselves, there is no need to posit a designer. Most universes will be too chaotic to allow the emergence of life or mind. In that case, the fact that humans exist in this universe needs no special explanation.
The idea of the multiverse may sound far-fetched. But it was much discussed in Renaissance Europe, and features prominently in Hindu and Buddhist cosmogonies, where an endless cycle of universes is posited, along with the possibility that some or all of them might be fakes – dreams in an impersonal super-mind. This view of things was revived by Schopenhauer, who invoked the unreality of space and time to account for ghosts and premonitions.
The standard line of scientific naturalists – Thomas Huxley in the nineteenth century, Richard Dawkins in the twenty-first – is that science subverts belief in God. Balfour and later defenders of design argue that the true situation is the reverse: if science is the search for natural laws, science presupposes the existence of God. Far from science destroying faith, science is impossible without it.
As has been seen, however, the existence of God cannot guarantee that the universe will be friendly to humans. Having created the world, a divine mind might have nothing further to do with it, and even – as Hume suggested – forget that it had created a world at all. A God-created cosmos might be as indifferent to humanity as the empty universe that so terrified the Victorians.
A law-governed universe may presuppose a divine mind, but the very idea that the world is governed by laws is questionable. In some versions of Christianity natural laws are seen as God’s commands, which can be revoked to permit miracles. In Aristotle laws of nature make a universe that strives for perfection, while for Plato the physical world is a shadowy image of eternal forms. In these classical and Christian philosophies a human conception of order is built into the universe. Once we put these systems on one side, however, there is no reason to suppose the world is ruled by laws. There are simply regularities, possibly evanescent, which have nothing to do with human ideas of law.
Sidgwick argued that morality was impossible without theism, and if morality means categorical principles of right and wrong he was correct. Balfour argued that without theism science was impossible, and if science means discovering laws of nature he was also correct. But just as there are other ways of thinking about ethics, so there are alternative views of science.
For a consistent naturalist science can only be a refinement of animal exploration, a practice humans have devised for finding their way in the bit of the universe in which they have so far survived. Instead of thinking of science as a law-seeking activity, we can think of it as a tool humans use to cope with a world they will never understand. If this is accepted the conflict between Darwinism and naturalism identified by Balfour is resolved.
Though it is often assumed that naturalism must be hostile to religion, the opposite is true. Enemies of religion think of it as an intellectual error, which humanity will eventually grow out of. It is hard to square this view with Darwinian science – why should religion be practically universal, if it has no evolutionary value? But as the evangelical zeal of contemporary atheists shows, it is not science that is at issue here. No form of human behaviour is more religious than the attempt to convert the world to unbelief, and none is more irrational, for belief has no particular importance in either science or religion.
Science and religion serve different human needs – religion the need for meaning, science for control. The assumption is that each is busy constructing a picture of the world. Evangelical atheists preach the need for a scientific view of things, but a settled view does not go with scientific method. If we know anything it is that most of the theories that prevail at any one time are false. Scientific theories are not components of a world-view but tools we use to tinker with the world.
We do not have to believe in scientific theories – if they help us deal with our environment, we can use them until better ones come along. Science contains several ways of making better theories – most importantly, the search for falsifying evidence. Falsification is generally more useful than verification, if only because it is easy to find evidence in support of established views, whereas when we falsify a theory we learn something new. If some theories can be discarded as false, however, it does not follow that we can settle on one theory as the truth. At the end of all our inquiries there might still be several theories in contention – several Theories of Everything, even. We are free to use any of these theories – the one that is most aesthetically pleasing, for example. We need not imagine that it mirrors the world.
If science is not a system of beliefs, neither is religion. Deformed by Greek philosophy, Western Christianity has confused belief with faith. But religions are no more made up of beliefs than poetry is composed from arguments. Think of Sidgwick, sadly pondering whether he could assent to the Thirty-nine Articles. Inevitably he could not, and spent the rest of his life vainly searching for evidence of survival. If the cross-correspondences are to be credited he was none the wiser when he had found what he was looking for. Searching for meaning, he found only fact.
The heart of all religions is practice – ritual and meditation. Practice comes with myths, but myths are not theories in need of rational development. The story of Icarus has not been rendered redundant by progress in psychology. The Genesis story is not obsolete because there have been advances in palaeontology. Myths like these will endure for as long as humans remain human. Myths are narratives that deal with unchanging features of human experience. It is the story of Jesus dying on the cross and his miraculous resurrection that gives meaning to the lives of Christians. Atheists who question whether this story is based on fact are making the same mistake as believers who insist that it is literally true. Here, as is often the case, rationalism and fundamentalism go together.
Ever since the rise of Positivism a legend has been repeated in which myth-making belongs in the infancy of the species. The Golden Bough (1890), a collection assembled by the anthropologist J. G. Frazer, propagated this Positivist legend: mythic thinking is typical of children and primitives; adulthood lies with science. In fact, as Wittgenstein remarked, ‘Frazer is much more savage than most of these savages.’ Modern myths are further from reality than any that can be found among traditional peoples, while the absurdities of faith are less offensive to reason than the claims made on behalf of science. The resurrection of the dead at the end of time is not as incredible as the idea that humanity, equipped with growing knowledge, is marching toward a better world.
Religion is not a primitive type of scientific theorizing, any more than science is a superior kind of belief-system. Just as rationalists have misunderstood myths as protoversions of scientific theories, they have made the mistake of believing that scientific theories can be literally true. Both are systems of symbols, metaphors for a reality that cannot be rendered in literal terms. Every spiritual quest concludes in silence, and science also comes to a stop, if by another route. As George Santayana has written, ‘a really naked spirit cannot assume that the world is thoroughly intelligible. There may be surds, there may be hard facts, there may be dark abysses before which intelligence must be silent for fear of going mad.’
Science is like religion, an effort at transcendence that ends by accepting a world that is beyond understanding. All our inquiries come to rest in groundless facts. Just like faith, reason must at last submit; the final end of science is a revelation of the absurd.
When at last I had disabused my mind of the enormous imposture of a design, an object, and an end, a purpose or a system, I began to see dimly how much more grandeur, beauty and hope there is in a divine chaos – not chaos in the sense of disorder or confusion, but simply the absence of order – than there is in a universe made by pattern … Logically, that which has a design or a purpose has a limit. The very idea of a design or purpose has grown repulsive to me on account of its littleness. I do not venture, for a moment, even to attempt to supply a reason to take the place of the exploded plan … I look at the sunshine, and feel that there is no contracted order: there is divine chaos, and, in it, limitless hope and possibilities.
Richard Jefferies
There have always been people who are glad that death is the end. The early twentieth-century English poet Edward Thomas was a lover of nature and had many happy hours walking in the countryside. He was also prone to melancholy. In one of the books he wrote about his country walks, The Icknield Way (1913), he records listening to the rain and thinking of death:
I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgement. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more. I have been glad of the sound of rain, and wildly sad of it in the past; but that is all over as if it had never been; my eye is dull and my heart beating evenly and quietly; I stir neither foot nor head; I shall not be quieter when I lie under the wet grass and the rain falls, and I of less account than the grass. The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything. I stay because I am too weak to go. I crawl on because it is easier than to stop. I put my face to the window. There is nothing out there but the blackness and sound of rain. Neither when I shut my eyes can I see anything. I am alone. Once I heard through the rain a bird’s questioning watery cry – once only and suddenly. It seemed content, and the solitary note brought up against me the order of nature, all its beauty, exuberance, and everlastingness like an accusation. I am not part of nature. I am alone … For a moment the mind’s eye and ear pretend to see and hear what the eye and ear themselves once knew with delight. The rain denies. There is nothing to be seen or heard, and there never was. Memory, the last chord of the lute, is broken. The rain has been and will be for ever over the earth. There never was anything but the dark rain. Beauty and strength are as nothing to it. Eyes could not flash in it.
I have been lying dreaming until now, and now I have awakened, and there is still nothing but the rain … There is no room for anything in the world but the rain. It alone is great and strong. It alone knows joy. It chants monotonous praise of the order of nature, which I have disobeyed or slipped out of … The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.’
Thomas’ voice is that of someone cut off from the world. He longed for the unthinking life he found in nature but could not live himself. He tried psychoanalysis, but it only made him more introspective. Everywhere he was accompanied by a spectre he called ‘the Other’ – in other words, himself. Unable to escape self-consciousness he came to look fondly on the oblivion that comes with death, an image of which appears when he writes:
The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
In silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
Thomas wrote these lines in 1916, when he decided to join the army and fight in the First World War. After training as an officer cadet he was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in June 1916 and left for France in January 1917. He was killed in a shell-blast in April 1917.
Though we cannot know, it is hard to resist the suspicion that Thomas enlisted in order to die. He had come to believe that freedom could come only by a change of nature, something that cannot be brought about by an act of will. So he bequeathed his troubles, and himself, to death’s discretion.
Death means release from care, and it may be that you will live more happily if you are ready to welcome death when it comes, and call it to you when it is late in arriving. Before Christianity suicide was not in any way troubling. Our lives were our own, and when we tired of them we were at liberty to end them. One might think that as Christianity has declined, this freedom would be reclaimed. Instead secular creeds have sprung up, in which each person’s life belongs to everyone else. To hand back the gift of life because it does not please is still condemned as a kind of blasphemy, though the offended deity is now humanity instead of God.
Edward Thomas sought out death because he was tired of life, but weariness is not the only reason death can be courted. When the Hungarian-Jewish poet György Faludy describes arriving in Casablanca after escaping from Nazi-occupied Paris, he recalls savouring with delight the scent of mortality he found there:
I had discerned this light, coquettish, almost obscene odour of putrefaction emitted by the town while I was still in the harbour. There was nothing disagreeable, nothing repulsive in it; rather it conjured up the fragrant, humid and mystical decomposition of autumn leaves, it was as if it were in some way related to the secret transubstantiation of fermenting grape-juice. Not a sickly sweet, nauseating, cadaverous smell, only its discreet forerunner, a stimulating spice placed by Death on the table of the living … In this town – I thought to myself – Death sits among the guests at every feast and lies in bed with the lovers. He is present, always and everywhere, like in the woodcuts of Holbein’s Totentanz, but not in the same capacity. In Holbein’s works Death is the uninvited guest whose appearance causes terror and vain despair. Here, he is not regarded as a trap to be avoided by clever men. Here, they do not expect to live to be a hundred and hope to live to be five hundred. Here, no one would dye his hair and beard at the age of fifty, do gymnastics with weights every morning to remain fit. Here, death is a welcome guest at the table of friends and when he sits on the edge of the lovers’ bed he does so only to inspire them to even more passionate embraces.
Here, people have accepted the smell of decay and instead of holding their noses, they draw their conclusions and live more intensely, more greedily and yet more calmly. They do not struggle against death because they know they are doomed to defeat. They need not make friends with death because they have never quarrelled with it, and they do not demand pious lies from their doctors because they are not afraid of dying. Young, they look death bravely in the eye; old, they walk slowly and with dignity towards the grave, as if it were a comfortable armchair in which to rest.
Faludy had fled to Paris after receiving a prison sentence in Hungary for translating a poem of Heine’s which contained the lines ‘Beware the Germans’. Escaping to Morocco in 1938, he travelled to America and served as a gunner in the US Army Air Force. After the war he returned to Hungary, where in 1948 he was sent to the Recsk prison camp for declining to write a poem celebrating Stalin’s birthday. In prison Faludy confessed that he had been recruited as an American spy by Captain E. A. Poe and Colonel Walt Whitman.
After Stalin died in 1953 Faludy was freed and following the revolution of 1956 left Hungary again. He spent most of the rest of his life in America and Canada, publishing his autobiography, My Happy Days in Hell, in 1962, living with a male partner for over thirty years, remarrying at the age of ninety-one and dying in 2006 at the age of ninety-five.
Faludy and death were on intimate terms. One of only twenty-one men from several hundred in his section of the camp who survived long enough to be released, he was a friend to the dead and the dying. It would be untrue to say he did not fear dying – the prospect of annihilation, he confessed, stalked his dreams for years, as did the thought of the second annihilation that would occur when life on earth would come to an end. He overcame these fears, it seems, by risking death – returning to Hungary after the war, when all his friends advised against it and rejecting collaboration with the communist regime when refusal meant being beaten, starved or tortured to death in the camps. He knew dying is rarely dignified or beautiful. Yet he saw clearly the dangers of spending his days running away from it. So instead he entered the death machine, faced its perils and then stepped away. The risks he faced only kept him more keenly alive. It is hard to know whether he thought his survival was the result of his own agility, or simply luck. Maybe, like Moura, Faludy believed events overflowed his personality. Then again, it is hard to deny his wilfulness.
Risking an ugly death in order to quicken the sensation of life is not for most of us. But we might live more calmly, and also more pleasantly, if we could see more clearly that the self we want to save from dying is itself dead. Unhappily, we are too glued to the image we have made of ourselves to think of living in the present. Nothing is more changeable than the self that is preserved in memory. Yet most people yearn for permanence and try to project the person they think they have been (or would like to have been) into the future. A shadowy double called up from memory, this ghostly self haunts them wherever they go.
The hopes that led to Lenin’s corpse being sealed in a Cubist mausoleum have not been surrendered. Cheating ageing by a low-calorie diet, uploading one’s mind into a super-computer, migrating into outer space … Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.
The end-result of scientific inquiry is to return humankind to its own intractable existence. Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.
While most people may never give up dreaming of immortality, individuals here and there can loosen the hold of the dream on their lives. If you understand that in wanting to live for ever you are trying to preserve a lifeless image of yourself, you may not want to be resurrected or to survive in a post-mortem paradise. What could be more deadly than being unable to die?
The afterlife is like utopia, a place where no one wants to live. Without seasons nothing ripens and drops to the ground, the leaves never change their colours or the sky its vacant blue. Nothing dies, so nothing is born. Everlasting existence is a perpetual calm, the peace of the grave. Seekers after immortality look for a way out of chaos; but they are part of that chaos, natural or divine. Immortality is only the dimming soul projected on to a blank screen. There is more sunshine in the fall of a leaf.
