Immortality (3 page)

This shook Egypt to its core. All good Egyptians were raised to respect the many deities that governed every aspect of life on the Nile. They turned to the goddess Isis when sick and thanked falcon-headed Horus for keeping Egypt’s borders strong; they prayed to the mummy-god Osiris to ensure safe passage for their loved ones in the life to come. For Egypt’s already ancient and conservative society this was a revolution far more dramatic than Christianity’s Reformation—more akin to the Pope today declaring himself the incarnation of Horus and swapping the Vatican for a pyramid. Not only must this blasphemy have filled ordinary folk with dread of divine retribution, but they would have believed, with the temples closed and the ancient rites banned, that their route to the next world was barred.

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such a powerful narrative as that of the old gods, so deeply embedded in the institutions and habits of Egyptian civilization, could not be so easily overturned. After fourteen years in power, one by one, the living embodiments of the Aten began to disappear. First, three of their daughters fell to a plague. Then, quite suddenly,
Nefertiti herself vanished from the records. Two years later, Akhenaten also simply disappeared.

Their dynasty was not quite over: one of their daughters was married to her half brother, the nine-year-old Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s son by a secondary wife. Together these children were permitted to rule while the old guard—the priests and generals—slowly dismantled everything their parents had done: the capital was moved back to Thebes, the temples reopened, Aten marginalized. When this young pharaoh died he was briefly succeeded by an aging adviser, before Horemheb, who had been commander in chief of the army, seized power and set about destroying all trace of the heretic and his dynasty. Ironic, then, that thanks to the discovery of his intact tomb, Tutankhamun is better known now than he was in life.

Scholars speculate about what happened to Nefertiti and Akhenaten, but the destruction wrought by Horemheb left little firm evidence. One theory is that Nefertiti changed her name in order to first become full coregent with her husband, then (briefly) to succeed him and rule alone. As to Akhenaten himself, some scholars have speculated that he was driven out of his own land and continued in exile to preach his monotheistic creed. It is indeed striking, as Sigmund Freud pointed out, that the Bible records a tale of an Egyptian prince—Moses, which in Egyptian mean “child of”—who around this time led believers in the one true god out of Egypt to a promised land.

We do not know how the Aten’s reign was brought to an end, whether a full-blooded rebellion, an assassin’s poison, or some more subtle pressure. But brought to an end it was. Osiris was put back on his throne in the Otherworld, and the mummifiers were put back in business. The city of the Aten, with its palaces and temples, was abandoned and left to sink back into the desert sands, ready to be discovered by intrepid archaeologists millennia later. Branded as “heretics” and “enemies,” Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children
were expunged from the records, their hieroglyphs excised from the monuments and their images everywhere erased. They were to be cut off from the land of the living; their spirits were not to be fed, and their names were not to be chanted.

They had usurped the immortality system that gave order, meaning and hope to their people, and that system had its revenge. With remarkable speed, Egypt’s ancient society healed its wounds and resumed the business of preparing for the next life—but the great queen and her heretic husband were to be forever excluded from it. Those who followed did their work so thoroughly that, for millennia, no one knew that this royal couple had ever existed. The vengeful priests must have believed Nefertiti had been destroyed for good. But they were wrong, for beneath the shifting sands of her ruined city, she was waiting.

“G
ROUPS
are always collectively seeking modes or combinations of modes of immortality and will celebrate them endlessly, fight and die in order to affirm them or put down rivals who threaten their immortality system,” wrote the psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton. So it was with Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who, despite having all the power and wealth of the royal house, were swept away by the currents of Egypt’s ancient immortality system.

But what is it that drives us first to create such systems and then to fight and even die to defend them? The sheer universality of immortality narratives, the fact that they seem to be central to every culture, suggests that the root is in human nature itself. Indeed, it is deep in the nature that we share with all living things: the urge simply to live on. But we alone of animals—at least, as far as we know—have developed religions, artistic traditions and honor systems that give expression to this urge and transform it into sophisticated
narratives. These are the result of the very particular way that we, with our outsized minds, regard life and death—a way that is deeply paradoxical.

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are skeptical when they first hear the claim that a will to immortality is the underlying driver of civilization; it sounds too metaphysical to be the instinct behind our everyday actions, too mystical to explain the behavior of a creature evolved from the apes. But the origin of our eternal longings is neither mystical nor metaphysical—on the contrary, nothing could be more natural. That we strive to project ourselves into the future is a direct consequence of our long evolutionary legacy.

This determination to survive and reproduce—to extend into the future—is the one thing that all life forms have in common. The mightiest mountain passively allows its own erosion, no different from the grain of sand washed over by the sea. But the tiniest organism will fight with all it has against the assaults of elements and predators—against the descent into disorder that otherwise characterizes the universe. Living things are by their very nature dynamic systems for sustaining themselves against the odds. Whether dogs, worms or amoebas, they continually struggle with what seems to be a single purpose: to just keep going. This striving to perpetuate is the essence of life. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put it, “We are survival machines, but ‘we’ does not mean just people. It embraces all animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses.”

This has become a truism in modern biology—the preservation and reproduction of self in some form belongs to all definitions of what life is. The process of evolution by natural selection tells us just why this should be so: in a varied population, those creatures best able to survive and reproduce are those that will pass on their genes to the next generation. Every cat, tree and dung beetle that we see around us exists only because its ancestors were the best at preserving themselves and their offspring. Successfully projecting themselves
into the future, through surviving and reproducing, is therefore exactly what distinguishes evolutionary winners from losers.

To make this clearer, just imagine for a moment the opposite: a life form indifferent to its own future prospects. The apathetic mouse that makes no effort to hide from snakes and owls would quickly be gobbled up, and its lugubrious germ line would die with it. We would never meet such indifferent creatures because their genes would never have survived. Its striving cousins, on the other hand, who do everything to live on and fill the world with their offspring, would pass on their striving genes. Soon enough, the world would be full of only those mice with fighting spirit. Natural selection produces self-perpetuators.

As a consequence, as the sociologist Raymond D. Gastil wrote, “all forms of life behave as if persistence into the future—immortality—were the basic goal of their existence.” Everything that living things do is directed toward this goal. The leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that gut feelings, complex emotions and our sophisticated reasoning processes all exist to contribute, directly or indirectly, to the aim of survival. The biological anthropologist James Chisholm deduced further that all values—all ideas of good and bad, right and wrong—arise from this single goal, as he put it, “the complex action for the sake of which bodies exist: indefinite continuance.”

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called this primal urge simply “the will to live.” Given, however, that it is not limited in time—that, as Chisholm said, the continuance we desire is “indefinite”—we should instead call it the will to live
forever
, or the will to immortality.

This drive can explain a great deal of what we do, including much of civilization. The first of the four basic immortality narratives—Staying Alive—is simply the will to live forever in its basic form, and staying alive is something we humans have become very good at, spreading across the globe to countless different
climates and habitats, where we enjoy, by mammalian standards, exceptionally long lifespans. But the other three forms of immortality narrative go far beyond the animal urges to flee from fire or store food for the winter—and, indeed, sometimes run contrary to them. Although motivated by the will to immortality, these narratives are the products not only of what we have in common with other living things but also of what sets us apart.

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HAT
sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the
Mortality Paradox
, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization.

Both halves of this paradox arise from the same set of impressive cognitive faculties. Since the advent some two and a half million years ago of the genus
Homo
, the immediate ancestors of modern humans, our brain size has tripled. This has come with a series of crucial conceptual innovations: First, we are aware of ourselves as distinct individuals, a trait limited to only a handful of large-brained species and considered to be essential for sophisticated social interaction. Second, we have an intricate idea of the future, allowing us to premeditate and vary our plans—also an
ability unseen in the vast majority of other species (one of the rare exceptions being the case of the chimpanzee in Furuvik, Sweden, who collected stones by night to throw at zoo visitors by day). And third, we can imagine different scenarios, playing with possibilities and generalizing from what we have seen, enabling us to learn, reason and extrapolate.

The survival benefits of these faculties are obvious: from mammoth traps to supermarket supply chains, we can plan, coordinate and cooperate to ensure our needs are met. But these powers come at a cost. If you have an idea of yourself and of the future and can extrapolate and generalize from what you see around you, then if you see your comrade killed by a lion, you realize that you too could be killed by a lion. This is useful if it causes you to sharpen your spear in readiness, but it also brings anxiety—it summons the future possibility of death in the present. The next day you might see a different comrade killed by a snake, another by disease and yet another by fire. You see that there are
countless
ways in which you could be killed, and they could strike at any time: prepare as you will, death’s onslaught is relentless.

And so we realize, as we see the other living things around us fall one by one, that no one is spared. We recognize that death is the real enemy; with our powerful minds we can stave him off for a while with sharp spears or strong gates, full larders and hospitals, but at the same time, we see that it is all ultimately fruitless, that one day we not only can but surely will die. This is what the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously described as “being-toward-death,” which he considered to define the human condition.

We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. “Man has created death,” wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. “Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,”
wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.

This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die—mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, “death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.” No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.

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the second idea—and the other half of the Mortality Paradox—tells us quite the opposite: that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the
reality
of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there—the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.

We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,” wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that “at bottom no one believes in his own death … [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: “All men think all men mortal, but themselves.”