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A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave’s Immortality investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to. But it also makes a powerful argument, which is that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization.
Central to this book is the metaphor of a mountaintop where one can find the Immortals. Since the dawn of humanity, everyone – whether they know it or not – has been trying to climb that mountain. But there are only four paths up its treacherous slope, and there have only ever been four paths. Throughout history, people have wagered everything on their choice of the correct path, and fought wars against those who’ve chosen differently.
While Immortality takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from the beginnings of civilization to the present day, the structure is not chronological. Rather it is path driven. As each path is revealed to us, an historical figure serves as our guide.
In drawing back the curtain on what compels humans to “keep on keeping on,” Cave engages the reader in a number of mind-bending thought experiments. He teases out the implications of each immortality gambit, asking, for example, how long a person would live if they did manage to acquire a perfectly disease-free body. Or what would happen if a super-being tried to round up the atomic constituents of all who’ve died in order to resurrect them. Or what our loved ones would really be doing in heaven if it does exist. Or what part of us actually lives in a work of art, and how long that work of art can survive.
Toward the the book’s end, we’re confronted with a series of brain-rattling questions: What would happen if tomorrow humanity discovered that there is no life but this one? Would people continue to care about their favorite sports team, please their boss, vie for the title of Year’s Best Salesman? Would three-hundred-year projects still get started? If the four paths up the Mount of the Immortals lead nowhere — if there is no getting up to the summit — is there still reason to live? And can civilization survive?
Immortality is a deeply satisfying book, as optimistic about the human condition as it is insightful about the true arc of history.
To say that Stephen Cave's metaphysically provocative Immortality is an extended gloss on the famous Woody Allen joke — "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work...I want to achieve it through not dying" — is both accurate and trivializing. Allen (actually quoted for a different quip in chapter 8) gets full props for succinctly and memorably encapsulating two paths to immortality, those that Cave dubs "Legacy" and "Staying Alive." But the comedian utterly neglects to reference the other two strategies of "Resurrection" and "Soul." Cave, however, considers every possible angle of humanity's eternal anti-death quest in his highly readable treatise. His impeccable, insightful, invigorating chain of reasoning about death and its role as the driving force behind nearly every cultural institution and action in human history leaves no tombstone unturned.
After laying out his clear-eyed and tightly reasoned thesis about the perpetual sting and lash of the "Mortality Paradox" at the heart of human activity (we know we must die, but our personal extinction is literally inconceivable to us), Cave dives right into an examination of the first of the four strategies for the perpetuation of life, "Staying Alive." His approach toward the search for physical immortality blends vibrantly recounted history (the quest by China's First Emperor for an elixir of immortality) with scientific journalism (the prospects of nanotechnology and the transhumanist philosophy). Myths and fiction are also shown in their supportive roles.
The next section concerns "Resurrection." The body dies, but can be reconstituted, good as new — or even better! Of course, Jesus Christ is the paradigm for many adherents of this belief, and Cave provides an empathetic rendering of the early Christian efforts to perfect this credo. That he manages to segue effortlessly into Star Trek and its teleporters (teleportation would actually work by killing and rebuilding, hence is a form of resurrection) is typical of his wide-ranging and inclusive theorizing. Throughout the book, science, religion and art will be shown as separate but allied handmaidens to immortality.
Dante and his poetic oeuvre form the main illustrative artistic thread in the "Soul" chapter, while scientific investigations into consciousness and near-death experiences are arrayed as they seek to prove or disprove the soul's existence from the other side of the intellectual fence. Cave looks separately at Western versus Eastern concepts of the soul, finding both similarities and differences. His merciless dissection of various conceptualized afterlives highlights his understated humor: "The aforementioned theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, for example, writes that heaven 'lies neither inside nor outside the space of our world' but rather is 'the new "space" of the body of Christ, the communion of saints.' Well, that clears that up, then."
The final section, "Legacy," begins with a summary of what we've so far discarded: "In chapter 7 we gave up the ghost of a hope that your mind might literally outlive your body and float up to heaven?we also saw earlier that the chances of your dodging the Reaper and staying alive are vanishingly slim and that the idea of physical resurrection is fundamentally flawed." So what of the two kinds of legacy, cultural and biological? Cave has a grand time using Alexander the Great's story as a teaching instance on the limitations of the former, and then he delves deeply into the notion of immortality through progeny and even as part of the planetary consciousness surmised as Gaia. This segment concludes as soberingly as the previous three, with no satisfactory outlets for the Mortality Paradox. "We have now examined all four immortality narratives and seen that none of them has a credible chance of delivering on its promise."
But then, in a final chapter, Cave builds up the Wisdom Narrative, a syncretic creed of mindfulness, stoicism, spirituality and existentialism that he believes can lead to "a civilization of those who face up to their mortality." Having much in common with certain current atheism-based arguments about the moral life without God, Cave's generous, selfless, ultimate lamp on a lurking darkness casts much hopeful light.
Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul Di Filippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award — all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, andThe San Francisco Chronicle.
Reviewer: Paul Di Filippo
Preface ix
1 A Beautiful Woman Has Come 1
The Four Paths to Immortality
Part I Staying Alive
2 Magic Barriers 31
Civilization and the Elixir of Life
3 The Vitamin Cure 55
Science Versus the Reaper
Part II Resurrection
4 ST. Pauls and the Cannibals 85
The Rise of Resurrection
5 Frankenstein Redux 113
The Modern Reanimators
Part III Soul
6 Beatrice's Smile 141
What Happens in Paradise
7 The Lost Soul 169
Reincarnation and the Evidence of Science
Part IV Legacy
8 Look on My Works, Ye Mighty 201
Everlasting Fame
9 The Immortal Seed 227
Genes, Gaia and the Things in Between
Conclusion
10 He Who Saw The Deep 253
Wisdom and Mortality
Acknowledgments 287
Notes and Further Reading 289
Index 311
Anonymous
Posted April 6, 2012
An engaging read and philosophical study on humanities quest for immortality. Highly recommended .
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Overview
A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave’s Immortality investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to. But it also makes a powerful argument, which is that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization.
Central to this book is the metaphor of a mountaintop where one can find the Immortals. ...