The Immortalization Commission by John Gray

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I found this a fascinating book at a number of different levels. It has the sub-title “Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death” a topic it treats in two halves. The first is about a range of Victorian and early Twentieth century spiritualists, the second about certain movements with the Soviet Union.

With the “spiritualists” the focus is on their attempts to communicate with the dead. They are an eccentric group of people, but perhaps typical of a segment of the upper middle classes in that era. John Gray goes through the various ways in which their investigations failed.

However for the most part it would appear these were not charlatan, when they reported receiving messages they were not, consciously, making things up. There was instead at play a rich mix of over-interpretation of phenomena and the power of sub-conscious suggestion. Gray points to the fact that the ways in which the sub-conscious was at play might actually be more interesting area of enquiry than if they had been genuinely getting messages from beyond the grave.

We are familiar with the phrase that History is written by the winners, but what I found particularly interesting is the way that this story shows that science too is written by the winners. Whether you go down as a visionary pioneer or a deluded alchemist is probably more down to luck than genius. Certainly in the period under examination, an era when science was still the domain of the educated amateur many of our scientific heroes lived lives of even greater eccentricity than those recalled here by Gray.

There is quiet a jump to the second half and the settling of the Soviet Union in the inter-war years. Communism would claim to be over-turn the world of religion and superstition in favour of science. It is strange to think of the Soviet Union as a place looking for immortality in a period when famines and political purges between them took the lives of millions. There was a strong trend toward eugenics, that many died was unproblematic if it gave greater opportunity for “the strong” to flourish. But also stripped of religious, or other beliefs, the human being was reduced to a machine. To be used and when broken down discarded. This was a fact, not a cause for moralising or sentiment.

While Gray is not an advocate for religion he is equally sceptical about the idolisation of “Science”.He says at one point that “if we know anything it is that most of the theories that prevail at anyone time are false.” I think there was once an episode of QI which was make up entirely of questions which had featured in earlier series, but for which new discoveries had in the intervening years invalidate the answer first given. “Scientific facts” are always provisional, waiting for the exception that remakes the theory

It is easy to look but and see others a deluded, but looking around and there are plenty of behaviours that continue to seek to “Cheat Death” The Soviet's embalmed Lenin's corpse, with Botox increasing number are embalmed themselves. And there is a downbeat about Gray's writing, we seem to find a way to turn every scientific advance into a weapon of some kind, from atom bombs to cyber attacks. He writes “None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.”

He ends by saying “The afterlife is like utopia, a place where no one wants to live. Without seasons nothing ripens and drops to the ground, the leaves never change their colours or the sky its vacant blue. Nothing dies, so nothing is born. … Seekers after immortality look for a way out of chaos; but they are part of that chaos, natural or divine. Immortality is only the dimming soul projected on to a blank screen.” when he could equally have concluded by quoting Ecclesiastes 3.