Conquering Death
by Julia M. Klein
MARCH 14, 2011 TAGS:
The British philosopher John Gray leads off his new book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), with a promising, if paradoxical, argument: Since Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged conventional religious beliefs, men and women longing for immortality had to invest their hopes elsewhere. And with science on the ascendancy, they looked there for answers.
“During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century science became a vehicle for an assault on death,” Gray writes. “The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science was used against science and became a channel for magic.”
Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science, describes two different movements, in late-Victorian Britain and the nascent Soviet Union. Britain’s involved an effort “to find scientific evidence that human personality survived bodily death.” Starting with séances and investigations into the paranormal, the movement culminated in thousands of pages of automatic writing by a loosely linked set of participants in the course of an astonishing 30 years.
The texts, Gray writes, were supposed to involve “cross-correspondences,” references possible to interpret only by collating them. They were considered “part of an experiment undertaken by deceased scientists, working in the after-world” — a scheme that included the conception of a “messianic child” who would inaugurate peace on earth.
This is weird, fascinating stuff – but no weirder, it seems, than what was going on in Revolutionary Russia. Gray discusses the “God-builders,” whom he defines as “a section of the Bolshevik intelligentsia that believed humans could someday, maybe quite soon, conquer death.” As adherents of this faith he lists, among others, the writer Maxim Gorky and Leonid Krasin, a key figure in the preservation of Lenin’s remains. The group that sought, through extensive embalming, to safeguard Lenin’s body was known as the Immortalization Commission, thus giving Gray’s book its title.
In Gray’s view, the impulses behind these movements were distinct: In Russia, the point was to defeat death through science, while, in Britain, science was appropriated as a methodology to prove the existence of an afterlife. “In both cases,” he writes, “the boundaries between science, religion and magic were blurred or nonexistent.”
This is the nub of an intriguing book – unfortunately, one yet to be written. Instead of fleshing out its argument logically, The Immortalization Commission is muddled, discursive and highly anecdotal. Many of the anecdotes have to do with the romantic and sexual lives of an assortment of protagonists, including the psychic researcher Frederic Myers, the novelist H.G. Wells, and a remarkable, seductive Russian woman known as Moura Budberg.
Myers (1843-1901) was in love with a married woman who eventually committed suicide, incentivizing his search for life-after-death. The twice-married Budberg (1891-1974), an agent of the Soviet regime and possibly of Britain as well, was the lover of Gorky, Wells, and Robert Bruce Lockhart, a Scot who served as “Britain’s unofficial representative in Russia.” If you’re wondering what Moura’s romantic exploits have to do with the book’s argument, you’re not alone. The threads of Gray’s narrative wind around like a maze, and it’s easy to get lost.
In Gray’s chapter on the God-builders, for example, he reports in chilling (though not entirely unfamiliar) detail on the various forms of mass murder committed by Lenin, Stalin and their disciples – the man-made famine in the Ukraine; the deaths by cold, hunger and overwork in the Gulag; the mass torture and executions. To connect the destruction of tens of millions of people – some regime opponents, but many simply unfortunate – to a vision of the conquest of death seems a stretch, at least without corroboration.
And yet this is what Gray asserts. For the new Russian regime, he writes, “Not only social institutions but also human nature had to be destroyed, and only then rebuilt. Once the power of science was fully harnessed, death could be overcome by force. But to achieve this, the human animal had to be remade, a task that required killing of tens of millions of people.” Is that in fact what Stalin and his minions, who caused the bulk of these deaths, believed? Or was the dictator just a paranoid, murderous tyrant? Gray never proves his case.
His final chapter, “Sweet Mortality,” isn’t any more satisfactory. He notes, correctly, that the impulse to use science to conquer death – through “cryonic suspension,” caloric restriction, or bio-engineering – endures. And he points out a flaw in all these ideas: Even if an individual somehow achieves a version of immortality, “human institutions are unalterably mortal.” And, from war to climate change, Gray expects the worst.
In any case, Gray doesn’t think what he calls “immortalism” is such a good idea – especially if it entails “intervening in the evolutionary process to create a new species.” He urges instead the acceptance of our mortal lot, even (in some cases) suicide. “Death means release from care,” he writes, “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.” Finally, he concludes, “the afterlife is like utopia, a place where no one wants to live…. Everlasting existence is a perpetual calm, the peace of the grave.” Nice turns of phrase, to be sure, but like the rest of this often provocative book, not entirely convincing.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently for Obit.
Second Photo: Moura Budberg, via MyHeritage.com
“During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century science became a vehicle for an assault on death,” Gray writes. “The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science was used against science and became a channel for magic.”Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science, describes two different movements, in late-Victorian Britain and the nascent Soviet Union. Britain’s involved an effort “to find scientific evidence that human personality survived bodily death.” Starting with séances and investigations into the paranormal, the movement culminated in thousands of pages of automatic writing by a loosely linked set of participants in the course of an astonishing 30 years.
The texts, Gray writes, were supposed to involve “cross-correspondences,” references possible to interpret only by collating them. They were considered “part of an experiment undertaken by deceased scientists, working in the after-world” — a scheme that included the conception of a “messianic child” who would inaugurate peace on earth.
This is weird, fascinating stuff – but no weirder, it seems, than what was going on in Revolutionary Russia. Gray discusses the “God-builders,” whom he defines as “a section of the Bolshevik intelligentsia that believed humans could someday, maybe quite soon, conquer death.” As adherents of this faith he lists, among others, the writer Maxim Gorky and Leonid Krasin, a key figure in the preservation of Lenin’s remains. The group that sought, through extensive embalming, to safeguard Lenin’s body was known as the Immortalization Commission, thus giving Gray’s book its title.
In Gray’s view, the impulses behind these movements were distinct: In Russia, the point was to defeat death through science, while, in Britain, science was appropriated as a methodology to prove the existence of an afterlife. “In both cases,” he writes, “the boundaries between science, religion and magic were blurred or nonexistent.”
This is the nub of an intriguing book – unfortunately, one yet to be written. Instead of fleshing out its argument logically, The Immortalization Commission is muddled, discursive and highly anecdotal. Many of the anecdotes have to do with the romantic and sexual lives of an assortment of protagonists, including the psychic researcher Frederic Myers, the novelist H.G. Wells, and a remarkable, seductive Russian woman known as Moura Budberg.
Myers (1843-1901) was in love with a married woman who eventually committed suicide, incentivizing his search for life-after-death. The twice-married Budberg (1891-1974), an agent of the Soviet regime and possibly of Britain as well, was the lover of Gorky, Wells, and Robert Bruce Lockhart, a Scot who served as “Britain’s unofficial representative in Russia.” If you’re wondering what Moura’s romantic exploits have to do with the book’s argument, you’re not alone. The threads of Gray’s narrative wind around like a maze, and it’s easy to get lost.
In Gray’s chapter on the God-builders, for example, he reports in chilling (though not entirely unfamiliar) detail on the various forms of mass murder committed by Lenin, Stalin and their disciples – the man-made famine in the Ukraine; the deaths by cold, hunger and overwork in the Gulag; the mass torture and executions. To connect the destruction of tens of millions of people – some regime opponents, but many simply unfortunate – to a vision of the conquest of death seems a stretch, at least without corroboration. And yet this is what Gray asserts. For the new Russian regime, he writes, “Not only social institutions but also human nature had to be destroyed, and only then rebuilt. Once the power of science was fully harnessed, death could be overcome by force. But to achieve this, the human animal had to be remade, a task that required killing of tens of millions of people.” Is that in fact what Stalin and his minions, who caused the bulk of these deaths, believed? Or was the dictator just a paranoid, murderous tyrant? Gray never proves his case.
His final chapter, “Sweet Mortality,” isn’t any more satisfactory. He notes, correctly, that the impulse to use science to conquer death – through “cryonic suspension,” caloric restriction, or bio-engineering – endures. And he points out a flaw in all these ideas: Even if an individual somehow achieves a version of immortality, “human institutions are unalterably mortal.” And, from war to climate change, Gray expects the worst.
In any case, Gray doesn’t think what he calls “immortalism” is such a good idea – especially if it entails “intervening in the evolutionary process to create a new species.” He urges instead the acceptance of our mortal lot, even (in some cases) suicide. “Death means release from care,” he writes, “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.” Finally, he concludes, “the afterlife is like utopia, a place where no one wants to live…. Everlasting existence is a perpetual calm, the peace of the grave.” Nice turns of phrase, to be sure, but like the rest of this often provocative book, not entirely convincing.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently for Obit.
Second Photo: Moura Budberg, via MyHeritage.com
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