Immortality

Stephen Cave “Immortality: The Quest To Live Forever & How It Drives Civilization”  Crown Publishers, 2012, 286 pp. plus 24 pgs of notes 

This is a book of philosophy and history.  The author investigates whether it is really possible to maintain some form of existence forever and whether we would even want to once we carefully think it through.  He makes the argument that the preoccupation with defying mortality is the engine that has driven civilization and our striving to project ourselves into the future is a direct consequence of our long evolutionary legacy.  But, this same book establishes that this drive for immortality is not necessary for the maintenance of civilizations and all four paths to immortality are false.  Of course, people have fought wars against those who’ve chosen an immortality path different than theirs. 

The four paths to immortality are:

Staying alive (cryonics, longevity, etc.). 

·        Immortality of a soul (the seat of consciousness)

·        Resurrection (where the body is reassembled)

·        Legacy (through others, art, etc.)

My Notes:

Pg. ix:  Book aims to show how we, like all living things, are driven to pursue life without end; but also how we, alone of living things, have in the process created spectacular civilizations, with stunning artworks, rich religious traditions and the material and intellectual achievements of science.  All of this we have done through following four paths that promise immortality. 

Pg. 2:  Humans seek to perpetuate themselves forever.  This will to immortality is the foundation of human achievement; it is the wellspring of religion, the use of philosophy, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts. It is embedded in our very nature, and its result is what we know as civilization.

Pg. 7:  The Egyptians’ pantheon of gods was only finally suppressed when their Roman conquerors converted en masse in 380 CE to Christianity (only for it to be replaced a few hundred years later by its close cousin Islam).

Pg. 21:  A psychological study found that when people are reminded of their own mortality they then cling more fiercely to the core beliefs of their worldview and are more negative about those who threaten those beliefs.

Pg. 52:  A fourteen thousand acre Qin Chinese Emperor’s grave site from 210 BCE was discovered in 1974.  So far 8,000 life sized terra-cotta soldiers have been found on the site and the main grave has not even been explored yet. 

Pg. 61:  Around the time of the French Revolution, life expectancy in France and the rest of the world was around thirty years.  Now, children born at the end of the twentieth century in France, as in most of the Western world, can expect to live to over eighty years of age.  A host of discoveries came together to make this leap possible.  One of the most important was that deadly infectious diseases were caused by microbes—tiny organisms that could be spread through contaminated water or bodily fluids.  This led to the development of the first vaccines, as well as huge programs of sanitation to clean up cities of the newly industrialized world.  Combined with the discovery in 1928 of the antibiotic penicillin, this sent infectious diseases into raid retreat: whooping cough, measles, diphtheria and scarlet fever, for example, together accounted for thirty-four thousand deaths in England in 1901, and exactly none in 2001.

Pg. 67:  The Tithonus Problem.  According to ancient Greek legend, Tithonus was a handsome youth kidnapped by Eos, goddess of the dawn.  Terrified at the prospect of his one day dying, Eos begged Zeus to make Tithonus immortal like her.  This the god did; but Eos had forgotten to ask that her lover also be granted eternal youth.  As he aged, Tithonus lost all his strength, becoming weak and demented.  The Tithonus problem is that we are succeeding in postponing death but are still being struck down by debilitating illnesses.  We are unleashing a host of diseases that were once rare, such as dementia.

Pg. 89:  The practice of ritual and religion in the broadest sense is as old as our species—which is to say, at least 150,000 years old.  Evidence for this is centered on what people did with their dead—burying them in particular ways with particular tools or weapons as if they might have a life beyond the grave.  These finds led the historian of religion Karen Armstrong to conclude that belief systems are “nearly always rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction.”  By the time recognizable civilizations emerged, with writing, agriculture and so on, the afterlife had already long been a fundamental part of the human experience. 

Pg. 95:  Christianity as we know it is largely Christianity as it was understood by Paul.  The letters he wrote to the churches he established were the earliest Christian documents to be considered canonical, written even before the Gospels.  They total half of the New Testament and strongly influenced the other half.  It was a Christianity based on the promise of resurrection.

Pg. 102:  One of the core beliefs of the three Abrahamic religions (involving half the worlds’ population) is the physical resurrection of the bodies they have known in this life.  In reality, however, the figure is much smaller.  One 2006 survey showed that, although 80 percent of Americans belong to one of the three Abrahamic religions, only just over 30 percent of Americans believe they will be resurrected.  This means a majority of believers—totaling half of all Americans—do not believe one of the core dogmas of their faith. 

Pg. 142:  The problems of resurrection are largely those of ensuring the deceased and the risen again really are the same person.  The solution to these problems leads naturally on to the third fundamental form of immortality narrative: the Soul.  The soul bridges the gap between this world and the next; it permits us to fly directly to the next world without an embarrassing interim as a hapless pile of bones.  The idea of a soul remains hugely attractive: in America, for example, 71 percent of people believe they have one, whereas Europeans are only slightly more skeptical, around 60 percent.  In Africa and India the figures are close to 100 percent and 90 percent, respectively.  (Plato was the first person in the West to clearly defend the claim that the soul was the essential part of us.).  St. Augustine proposed that our bodies will arise on the last day but he believed that we each also have a soul.  The body would reunite with the soul when the End Times arrived.  However, the idea of the soul is slowly becoming thinner and thinner, as science shaves off the functions once claimed for it.  Thus the soul has lost its claim to be the animating principle, it is losing its claim to be the bearer of the mind and it will soon lose any claim to be the maintainer of consciousness or awareness of any kind. 

Pg. 158:  The Copernican revolution was only the first of two revolutions that threatened both the Soul Narrative and our hopes of going to heaven.  The second was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which placed us humans firmly on the family tree with apes, pigs, lizards and plankton.  The most difficult question was: if we are just one of countless species in the complex web of life, what makes us so special that we think we have been picked out to live forever?  Most of the history of life has been dominated by single-celled bacteria, and indeed they form most of the organisms currently alive today. 

Pg. 174:  Buddhism and Hinduism belief in reincarnation has one particularly unfair result.  That is that the caste system should not be tampered with.  Lameness, poor teeth and a weak constitution are all thought to be just deserts for some prior sin.  If you are born a dung shoveler, son of a dung shoveler, then you have only your (prior) self to blame.