Immortality (29 page)

W
HAT
Diotima saw as mere senselessness, however, can take on a darker aspect in the intense competition for space in the cultural sphere. Not everyone has the skill or patience to create something of value or beauty, and it is far easier simply to destroy what others have made. There is therefore a temptation for the fame seeker to brand his or her name into the cultural sphere with some heinous deed and so through wickedness to become the stuff of legend. So tempting indeed is this route to posterity that it has its own name:
the Herostratus syndrome
.

On the night of Alexander the Great’s birth, July 21, 356
BCE
, a previously unknown man—a nobody—set fire to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. This temple, 120 years in the building, was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Visited by pilgrims, kings and tourists, it was over three hundred feet long and fifty feet high and on a site considered holy for millennia. The fire destroyed it utterly. The arsonist did nothing to hide his guilt but gave himself up freely. He was called Herostratus, and when asked why he had committed this terrible act, he replied: to become famous.

To discourage copycats, the Ephesians not only tortured and executed Herostratus but also subjected him to a
damnatio memoriae—
the damnation of a man’s memory through banning (on pain of death) all mention of his name. Yet here I am writing about him two thousand years later, while the names of the temple’s architects have long been lost. In a society such as his, obsessed with fame, the temptation was high to attain it through nefarious means: sacrilege, regicide, treachery. And equally, in a society such as ours, obsessed with celebrity, the temptation is high to immortalize one’s name through some wicked but dramatic act: assassinating a president or pop star, blowing up a building or gunning down fellow high school students.

Ancient writers speculated that Herostratus was motivated by a
sense of injustice—not injustice that the world was overlooking his great talents but, on the contrary, injustice that the fates should have given him no talents whatsoever. It was not fair that society should grant the immortality of fame only to those who were simply lucky enough to have been born with an artist’s eye, the silver tongue of the rhetorician or the strong arm of the warrior. Psychologists’ studies suggest that this combination of a sense of injustice and inadequacy is common to those who make their names by killing the talented or destroying their works.

This should be no surprise: the contest for cultural immortality is a highly competitive one that necessarily only rewards the exceptional. The “facelessness of the many gives meaning to the faces of the few,” as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it; the masses form the anonymous night sky against which the stars shine. Those who believe they have an equal right to a place in the firmament of fame but who do not have the talent to earn it are likely to become frustrated, neurotic and very, very dangerous—blazing comets crashing into the earth. We cannot all be heroes; most of us accept this fact, but some choose instead to be villains.

Still it is ironic—and a mark of our tendency to hero worship—that a figure like the pitiful Herostratus is necessary to hold up as a contrast to the great Alexander in illustrating the dark side of the quest for fame. Herostratus, after all, merely burned down a single building. This wanton act of destruction is child’s play compared to the deeds of the mighty conqueror. The people whose lands Alexander hacked his way through could tell you all about the dark side of the quest for glory: for them, Alexander is the destroyer, the accursed one, bringer of death and destruction—Alexander the Terrible.

The “pacifying” of Greece with which Alexander’s career began involved the utter destruction of the ancient city of Thebes, during which all the men were put to the sword and all the women and children sold into slavery. This established the pattern for how he was to deal with those who opposed him. The ruthless young king
had many such ancient cities pillaged and razed, countless men summarily executed, women raped and made slaves, civilians slaughtered, priests killed, temples sacked, show trials held, assassinations arranged, opponents tortured, whole peoples destroyed. His legacy is written with the blood of others.

We find those contemptible who feed their desire for notoriety by killing a handful of innocents, but Alexander, who cut and burned his way across a continent at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, we call “the Great.” As the French biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand wrote in 1939, “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

Of course, the desire for cultural legacy has contributed much that is positive to civilization. Many people seek a place in posterity by building bridges, curing disease or painting pictures. But what Herostratus and Alexander understood is that doing something saintly is by no means the most important entry requirement to the hall of fame. Rather, it is doing something
extraordinary
—whether extraordinarily good or extraordinarily wicked.

T
HIS
was also well understood by a famous couple who predate even Alexander and Achilles—two figures whose bid for immortality combined every form yet devised, including the cultural, and who unquestionably had a flair for the extraordinary: Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Their example provides a nice introduction to the two steps for achieving the transition into the symbolic realm.

In 1905, the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, one of the first scholars to examine the career of Akhenaten, astutely described him as “the first
individual
in human history.” All pharaohs were exalted as special, divine even—but their specialness came from their fulfilling the eternal role of the god-king. It was precisely
not
their individuality that made them special—indeed, their own personalities were entirely subsumed by their endless performance of ancient rituals and carefully prescribed duties. Their monuments make this clear: from the anonymity of the pyramids even to the colossal granite statues, it is their conformity to type that is emphasized—each pharaoh is as broad shouldered, square jawed and devoid of distinguishing characteristics as the next.

And then came Akhenaten. His statues not only portray but exaggerate his distinctive characteristics—a thin chest and bulbous belly, weak arms and a feminine chin. Frescoes even show naturalistic scenes of his relaxing at home with Nefertiti and their children. And, as we have seen, he abolished the ancient rites and, with Nefertiti, established his own—to an abstract god with whom only he could communicate. Akhenaten used the power of the pharaoh to break free of all the role’s traditional constraints and to become extraordinary even by pharaonic standards—to become therefore unique and individual. Thus he took the first step to symbolic immortality.

At a biological level we are born individuals: we are each a distinct organism. But at the symbolic level, we have to fight to carve out a distinctive identity in a space of shared words and ideas. This begins with a name—and it is noteworthy that Akhenaten chose this
unique
name for himself, rejecting being simply the next Amenhotep (the fourth) as his father had intended. We still talk about the acquisition of a reputation in terms of “making a name for oneself”—a name that serves to stake out space in the symbolic sphere on which a legend can then be built. The above-mentioned Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called this the “tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves,” and “it is this struggle,” he believed, “that gives its tone, color, and character to our society.”

But to establish oneself as an individual is only the first step. It is entirely possible that your name and individuality will still die with you when your biology fails; many an eccentric has gone this way.
The second step, therefore, is to project this individuality into the undying cultural realm and fix it there. This Akhenaten also attempted with estimable vigor: the evidence recovered from the new capital he and Nefertiti founded at Amarna suggests their images, statues and deeds adorned every spare space, public and private. The royal road was lined with huge statues of the heretic pharaoh, the royal couple alone were pictured in the temples to their god and even in private houses and tombs they appear, granting riches and eternal life to their loyal followers.

These statues, pictures and records are all what the psychologist David Giles calls “reproductions of the self.” We who are now awash with images—of ourselves, celebrities, models advertising toothpaste—find it difficult to appreciate the power these reproductions once held. Throughout history, access to the technology of cultural reproduction has been jealously guarded, the right to it a continual source of controversy. Alexander, for example, was the first man to feature his own face on official coinage—previously this was a privilege of deities; Julius Caesar was later to follow suit. With the upsurge of portraiture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ruling elites fought to control the uses of this technology, in particular as it applied to themselves. Elizabeth I of England, for example, redefined herself through a public image that mixed the symbolism of majesty, piety and power with elements proclaiming her as a unique and irreplaceable individual. Meanwhile you could be boiled alive for reproducing her image in the wrong way.

Today opportunities for symbolic reproduction are no longer available only to pharaohs and emperors. We are each reproduced in hundreds of baby photos, holiday snaps and home videos. Indeed, with the digital revolution, we are now living through the greatest opening of the cultural sphere since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. It has never been easier to leave an impression in the shared space of symbols: with the minimum of computing power and know-how, it can be achieved in minutes.

At the start of 2011, there were 158 million blogs (personal Web pages that are—in theory at least—updated regularly with the views of the blogger), with tens of thousands more being added every day. On top of this, there are hundreds of thousands of other personal websites on which people display their wares—photos, thoughts, stories, products. But even these are eclipsed by the number of people using online social networking services, which also allow the user to create a personalized space in the digital realm, connecting it to the similar spaces of friends and acquaintances. By spring 2011, Facebook, the most popular of these sites, had over 600 million active users and counting. One 2010 consumer report found that 92 percent of American children had an online presence by the age of two.

Some of these pages are known to no one but their creator; they are the digital equivalent of the fading holiday photo in the bottom drawer: not enough to earn symbolic immortality. But others attract hundreds of thousands of visitors or followers, allowing people with meager resources but a good idea to reach massive audiences. The paradox of this new ease of access to the cultural realm is that achieving significance requires a whole new scale of self-reproduction and exposure. Fame now requires vastly more than a few carefully painted portraits; to count as a celebrity, you must be virtually reproduced many thousands or even millions of times. This is a scale that might even have astonished Alexander.

Of course, all this activity brings this-worldy satisfactions, and social media websites have become part of everyday interactions. But there is also an underlying awareness that the digital realm has opened up a new dimension to posterity. Most social networking sites offer some kind of “memorialization” facility, which will preserve a user’s activity even after they have bodily departed this world. More sophisticated services offer to collect your data from across the Internet—blogs, photos, videos, Facebook posts and any other digital musings—to create a comprehensive memorial site.
One company even enables you to have this digital legacy embedded into a real, physical gravestone, whence it will be beamed to interested passersby. The increasing popularity of these services suggests that those who spend their time transmuting their thoughts and images into digital form hope that something of this will outlive their frail flesh. Those who are determined to achieve Alexander-like status today have no choice but to master the means of digital reproduction.

A major advantage of cultural reproduction in all forms is the possibility of creating a kind of ideal self. Early portrait artists knew well to flatter their powerful patrons, just as models present their best side to the camera and wise users think twice about what they post to their website. And crucially, these images, once made permanent in cultural form, do not age. That of course is the point, as the ancient Greeks recognized—that the symbolic realm does not suffer from the inherent decline and decay of the biological. Achilles and Alexander, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix all therefore in their ways achieved what the First Emperor and Linus Pauling could not—eternal youth.

“W
HY
should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?” asked Groucho Marx. It is an important question: before we sacrifice too much taking the two steps to cultural immortality, we ought to be sure that they are taking us to an immortality worth having.

Despite all the thousands of would-be Alexanders, Elvises and Marilyns, few thinkers have attempted to provide a thoroughgoing defense of the idea that fame or glory really can deliver everlasting life. There has been no equivalent of Plato or St. Paul to map out just how this path is supposed to lead up the Mount of the Immortals. The Homeric heroes and their successors seem to have gone to battle
on the basis of powerful intuitions rather than persuasive arguments. But a philosophical case could run something like this:

We have already concluded that you have no soul—no unchanging essence or immutable inner core. We could go farther and say that there is, in fact, nothing that is the “real you.” You are just a collection of disparate thoughts, memories, sense impressions and the like, all bundled up together in a package we conveniently label a person. What is more, all these disparate parts are continually changing, as some things are forgotten and others learned, opinions changed and new memories formed. The question is, then, if you are such an ever-changing bundle, what does it mean for “you” to survive?