Who wants to live forever? We do, apparently, and if religion no longer offers us a credible way to achieve it, we will turn to science instead. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of John Gray’s short, entertaining but overpriced book The Immortalization Commission.
Third Way has interviewed John Gray and reviewed a number of his books so readers may well be familiar with the arguments that underpin this one. The first half tells the story of a number of late Victorian and early Edwardian intellectuals who tried to prove that death is not the end and that meaningful human personality continues post mortem. By means of various mediums and séances, of which there was a craze at the time, they produced “scripts” of “automatic writings” which supposedly originated on the other side of the grave. These became the vehicle for hopeful experiments that attempted to show the dead, like the poor, remained always with us.
This was more than just wackiness or charlatanism. Some involved in this “cross-correspondences” project had lost both their Christian faith and close relatives, and found the ensuing grief unbearable. For them, the experiments “became a vehicle for unresolved personal loss”. Others were caught up in the scientific hubris of the age and genuinely felt that science could achieve what religion had seemingly failed to, providing an unstable, hurting world with a sure basis for morality and eternal hope. Some dreams, it seems, just never die.
None of this is to claim that there was no wackiness involved, however. In perhaps the most bizarre element of the whole experiment, a “Plan” was hatched (in part, it seems, by deceased participants of the circle) to “design” a special “spirit-child”, a “great Incarnation of Divine Efulgence” who would deliver humanity from chaos. The result, one Henry Coombe-Tennant, seems not to have been told of his messianic future, and lived a pleasantly ordinary life, before – in a delightful irony – converting to Catholicism and ending his life a monk in Downside.
Part two of the book tells the story of Soviet ‘God builders’ who also sought to harness the power of science to perfect humanity (basically by killing off those who were deemed imperfect or hostile) or, in Lenin’s case, to preserve the dead. This part is less original, the tale of Soviet (pseudo-)science having been well told already, and certainly less comic, but it is nonetheless compellingly readable.
The book then closes with what is, in effect, a short postscript in which Gray updates the story with a couple of contemporary examples of people who claim that science will allow them to cheat death, and muses generally on humanity and death.
This Immortalization Commission is vintage Gray, and will excite and disappoint according to taste. His strength, in this reviewer’s opinion, is his acute understanding of human fallibility, which allows him to puncture the superficialities and inanities of many modern creeds. His weakness is that he is so fixated on this message that he systematically fails to notice that he is, paradoxically, guilty of precisely the same error of which he accuses desperate Edwardians or naïve Bolsheviks, namely confusing what is science and what it isn’t.
He repeatedly insists that Darwinism has no direction, that it demonstrates that human life has no purpose and that it “cannot be reconciled with any idea of a post-mortem world.” He is wrong on the first account (natural selection in fact has many directions, some of which converge in the sort of organism that is reading this review) and simply confused about the other two (science simply cannot pronounce on questions of purpose or immortality).
That is not to say that he does not ask some searching questions of the Christian view of eternal life, such as “how… could only one species go on to a world beyond the grave… Surely… all sentient beings stand or fall together”? I have yet to read a theologian with a really convincing answer to this, and Gray’s questions are more than simply a failure of imagination. Should we expect a resurrection of dogs, cats, mice and microbes? Still, to claim that Darwinian evolution disproves the resurrection of the dead, rather than simply posing it some awkward questions (or, rather, sharpening up some already awkward questions) is to go too far and to confuse what science and cannot achieve.
The Immortalization Commission probably won’t change minds (and, to be fair, it doesn’t set out to). Nor will its “implications…haunt the reader for the rest of their lives”, as the dust jacket claims. But it may serve to remind the reader of Chesterton’s quip that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing but believe in anything.
The Immortalization Commission by John Gray is published by Penguin (2011)
