Immortality (28 page)

I
N
chapter 7
we gave up the ghost of a hope that your mind might literally outlive your body and float to heaven—the conclusions of science are that there is no soul to save you from oblivion. But we also saw earlier that the chances of your dodging the Reaper and staying alive are vanishingly slim and that the very idea of physical resurrection is fundamentally flawed. Together these first three immortality narratives provide the core of all the world’s religions, from Taoism to Catholicism, as well as the inspiration for much material, economic and scientific progress. But though they might point toward the Mount of the Immortals, all three fall a long way short of reaching the summit.

The prospects of your living forever as a full person—that is, continuing indefinitely to enjoy a life something like the one you have now—are therefore not at all good. But there are other conceptions
of immortality that do not require the survival of the individual person as such. Such conceptions—which I have grouped together under the title of
Legacy
—are every bit as ancient and widespread as the first three immortality narratives and every bit as popular today. Indeed, many cultural commentators believe they are positively exploding.

I will distinguish between two forms of the Legacy Narrative—what I will call the
cultural
and the
biological
. This chapter will focus on the first, the pursuit of cultural immortality. Its influence is everywhere to be seen: alongside the effects of material progress, its products define the landscape of modern civilization. Paintings and poems, pop music and politics—all of these result from the effort of the individual to carve out some space in an undying cultural realm. And though Alexander’s exploits show everlasting fame to be a perennial pursuit, the modern cults of film stardom and TV celebrity, mass-market magazines and instant communications have transformed it from an elite occupation to the career of choice of thousands.

W
OODY
A
LLEN
, an unquestionably famous man, was nonetheless blunt in his assessment of fame as an immortality vehicle; he once wrote, “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” There are many—even among those who have achieved celebrity—who are inclined to see the Legacy Narrative as nothing more than a metaphor. It cannot be
true
immortality, they argue, if the individual does not survive. But understandable as this skepticism might be, the Legacy Narrative has some surprising and sophisticated answers. And in the end, legacy might not be as good as living on in your apartment, but if the other immortality narratives are dead ends, then it might be as good as it gets.

This certainly was the view of the Greek heroes who inspired Alexander. If a surer route to living forever had come their way, they
would have taken it. Standing on the battlefield of Troy, one nobleman fighting on the side of the Trojans admitted this to his companion: “My good friend, if, when we were once out of this war, we could escape old age and death forever, I should neither press myself forward in battle nor bid you do so,” records
The Iliad
. “But death in ten thousand forms hangs ever over our heads, and no man can elude him; therefore let us go forward and win glory.”

His message is clear: If there were some way of achieving eternal youth or cheating death, then he would gladly take it. But there isn’t. The position this warrior has reached is therefore much like our own, now that we have examined the first three immortality narratives and found them all wanting. Yet despite his realistic appraisal of his mortality, still the will to transcend this short span of life drives his thinking. His conclusion: In the absence of better options, our only route to eternal life is by winning glory—even at the price of falling in battle.

Yet on the face of it, this is a very odd conclusion. After all, to die young in war is not the only alternative open to someone who has given up on the other immortality narratives—some might argue that, on the contrary, taking very good care of what life one has would be much the better option. Achilles, greatest of the Greek heroes, on the eve of battle weighed up this existential choice: “I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death,” he said. “If I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans, I shall not return home, but my glory shall be everlasting; whereas if I return home to the beloved land of my father, my glory will be gone, but there will be long life left for me.”

It could be argued that many of the young men who go off to battle do not really believe that
they
will be the ones who take a spear to the neck. But Achilles
knew
—because it had been prophesied—that if he chose the warrior’s path then his life would be short, albeit crowned with eternal glory; whereas if he turned his back on soldiering then a long and happy life of hunting, feasting and siring children
awaited. He loved life, he said, “more than all the wealth of Troy,” yet still he chose to stay and spill his blood on a foreign battlefield for glory’s sake.

Alexander must have weighed up the same choice as his hero Achilles. He had every prospect of a long and happy life if he stayed at home to be king of his small but powerful state. But like Achilles, Alexander chose the path of glory. As Ernest Becker observed, “men seek to preserve their immortality rather than their lives.” In contrast to those such as Woody Allen who might wish to live on in their apartments, Alexander set sail to invade the Persian Empire at the age of twenty-one and never set foot in his homeland again.

Why? What good is eternal glory to a corpse? Is a famous dead person any less dead? Such heroes thought so. They prized fame more than happiness, love, wealth, more than this life itself—because they believed it opened the way to an existence beyond the flesh. But the heroes also knew that they could not achieve this existence on their own, which is why when he set sail, Alexander made sure that his entourage included the scribes, historians and sculptors who would do for him what Homer did for Achilles. He knew that it was these, not the priests and alchemists, who were the guardians of eternal life—they were the ones who controlled the realm of the symbolic, and it is only there that immortality is to be found.

A
LEXANDER THE
G
REAT
’
S
achievement was to step out of the natural realm—quite literally through an early death—and transfer himself completely into the realm of legend, where he still thrives today. For the ancient Greeks, this was the recipe for eternal life: to escape the course of nature, with its death and decay, and carve out a space in the symbolic realm of culture, which might survive from generation to generation—and perhaps forever.

Nature, as we have noted before, is the bringer of decay and dissolution, which is why we strive so hard to transcend our natural limits. If nature takes its course, we die and rot back into the earth, and soon nothing is left of us. But we humans are not only creatures of nature: we live in two worlds. The first is the natural world that we share with other organisms, but the other is a world unique to us—that of the symbolic. And here, in this world of our own making, we can achieve the permanence for which we yearn.

Although the symbolic world is one of our collective making, it is every bit as real as deserts and mountains. Many of the things that govern our actions—success, status, even money—belong to this realm. Those who spend their days at desks or in studios, in libraries or offices, are dedicating their lives to the symbolic. Symbols are the component parts of language and culture, of what makes us different from each other and at the same time what we have in common as a species and makes us different from all other living things. Homo sapiens is, as the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer put it, the symbolic animal.

The societies of Achilles and Alexander, where no one worked in offices or at computers and food was frequently still hunted for, might at first seem to us simple. However, they were anything but: just as much as ours, they had complex status systems, poetic and musical traditions, religious beliefs and ideas of history and their place in the world. They might have been more sensitive to natural rhythms than we are, but this seems only to have heightened their awareness of the distinction between the natural and symbolic realms.

On the one hand, they knew well that the
bios
, the ordinary human lifespan, was finite—that, as one Trojan warrior put it, generations of men are like leaves on the trees: as one grows, another wilts and is gone. And in contrast, it was equally clear that the
symbolic
realm did
not
follow this pattern, that kingdoms, titles, wealth and honor survived to be passed from one generation to the next,
that stories persisted to be told by new generations of minstrels and bards. Culture did not seem susceptible to the natural process of decline and death. As the Harvard classics professor Gregory Nagy puts it, for the ancient Greeks, “death and immortality are presented in terms of nature and culture respectively.” The natural way was mere death; immortality lay in transferring oneself entirely into the symbolic realm of culture.

This is just what Achilles and Alexander and the other Greek heroes achieved, thereby showing the way for Western civilization. Naively, we are sometimes tempted to see such heroes as the most courageous among us, as they seem to face physical danger so fearlessly. But on the contrary, says the anthropologist Ernest Becker—“heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.” Heroes are motivated to sacrifice their natural life by the dread of utter oblivion, and their heroic deeds grant them instead a more permanent existence as part of culture. Heroism, in the words of the historian of fame Leo Braudy, “enables the individual to step outside of human time.”

One might have thought that the long dominance of Christianity in Europe would have dampened this glory seeking; we have seen that the Soul Narrative grants cosmic significance—a kind of heroism—even to the lowly and obscure through a personal relationship with God. But the literature of Christian Europe suggests otherwise: Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, for example, is obsessed with the question of who in the afterworld properly deserves to be remembered by posterity, and Geoffrey Chaucer in 1380 dedicated a major poem to examining the inhabitants of the “House of Fame.” Not even the prospect of heaven could reduce the desire for posthumous renown.

We might of course suspect that these works not only were
about
fame but also were attempts to achieve it. The Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno put it pithily when he wrote that “the man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying
rascal.” Clearly the attempt to impress posterity is a powerful productive impulse that has given us some of the pinnacles of human achievement. One man of letters, John Milton, author of
Paradise Lost
, was clear about what got him up in the morning: “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise … to scorn delights and live laborious days,” he wrote in 1637.

The symbolic realm enables the projection of ourselves beyond the biological with all its shortcomings, and so we scramble toward it, proliferating images and artworks as we compete for ground in cultural space. This is what drives civilization onward, producing the
Mona Lisa
and the Taj Mahal,
Citizen Kane
and the great American novel. A place in posterity can come through invention, entrepreneurship or teaching—anything that might either seem exceptional or last beyond the lifespan of the individual to shape the future. As the philosopher and historian Corliss Lamont wrote, “The economic and social effects of this sentiment … have been and are immense and incalculable.”

In the scientific community talk of immortality is largely frowned upon, yet many are driven by the prospect of a great discovery that might etch their name in the annals, perhaps even a theory named after them or the immortalizing epithet “Nobel laureate.” French thinkers are less circumspect: the motto of the preeminent French learned society, the Académie Française, is “
à l’immortalité
,” and members are known as “the Immortals.”

Of course, not all bids for renown are as worthy. The mass media of film, television, radio and Internet have enabled a whole new degree of instant, global stardom for those of dubious talent. As a result, our society is drowning in a flood of celebrities, products of a fame industry of lavish scale. The media portrayal of their glittering lifestyle seduces millions to see renown as the only measure of worth. The singer Morrissey reflected the aspirations of millions of would-be pop stars when he admitted, “I always thought that being famous was the only thing worth doing in life.” Of course, celebrity
can have many fringe benefits, but the film star James Dean made clear what its real purpose is when he said, “To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality.”

James Dean is also notable in that his life parallels those of Achilles and Alexander for shortness and intensity, demonstrating how the cultural immortality narrative can cause people to act in ways entirely contrary to purely biological survival. Achilles and Alexander also not only died early but did nothing to ensure the well-being of the children they left behind. Their classically heroic behavior, which has inspired so many since, seems to have been deeply detrimental to their own prospects of living on. But we have seen that the will to immortality was not oddly weak in these heroes, such that they should happily die young—rather it was uncommonly strong, driving them to carve their names into our cultural space. Our craving to live forever has its roots in the most natural of all instincts but can take an entirely unnatural course when transferred to the realm of the symbolic.

The pursuit of the eternal through the Legacy Narrative can therefore explain a great many of the curious, often seemingly counterproductive things that humans do, from soldiers accepting suicide missions on the battlefield to artists wasting away in their garrets. There is nothing people have not sacrificed for a place in posterity—freedom, wealth, happiness. Or as Socrates put it, approvingly relating the words of his teacher and lover Diotima, “Think of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal.”