The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death - Hardcover

John Gray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846142199 ISBN 13: 9781846142192

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2011

Synopsis

This title was selected for "Sunday Times", "New Statesman" and "TLS" Books Of The Year. An obsession with the nature of death lies at the heart of the human experience. For most of our history religion provided a clear explanation for life and the afterlife. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this framework came under relentless pressure as new ideas - from psychiatry to evolution to Communism - seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. We would ourselves become God. The "Immortalization Commission" raises a host of fascinating questions about what it means to be human. The great and terrible implication of Darwin's ideas was that natural selection made humans into animals like any other, doomed one day to disappear from the face of an uncaring Earth. The refusal to follow this logic and to insist instead on our immortality resulted in a series of experiments that carry on to the present day, some of which ravaged whole countries and some of which generated more private forms of pain. The implications of Gray's book will haunt the reader for the rest of their lives - and perhaps beyond.

About this title

About the Author:

John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, he now writes full time.His books and articles have been translated into over thirty languages.His selected writings, Gray's Anatomy, were published by Penguin in 2009.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Immortalization Commission
1 Cross-correspondencesIt is an illusion that we were ever alive, Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves By our own motions in a freedom of air ... Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain. These lives lived in the mind are at an end. They never were ...Wallace Stevens 
The seance that Charles Darwin attended on 16 January 1874 at the house of his brother Erasmus at 6 Queen Anne Street, London, brought Darwin together with Francis Galton, anthropologist, eugenicist, Darwin's half cousin and one of the founders of the modern science of psychology, and George Eliot, the novelist who explored more deeply than any other the ambiguities of mid-Victorian life. All three were anxious that the rise of Spiritualism would block the advance of science. Darwin found the experience 'hot and tiring' and left before anything unusual happened - sparks were seen, table rapping heard and chairs lifted on to the table - and another seance was held,eleven days later, with his son George Darwin and T. H. Huxley acting as Darwin's representatives. After they reported that the mediums were using sleight of hand, Darwin wrote: 'now to my mind an enormous weight of evidence would be requisite to make one believe in anything beyond mere trickery ... I am pleased to think that I declared to all my family, the day before yesterday, that the more I thought of all that had happened at Queen Anne Street, the more convinced I was it was all imposture.'Others committed to scientific materialism had a similar reaction. Galton confessed he was 'utterly confounded' by some of the things he had witnessed at seances; but under the influence of Thomas Huxley, 'Darwin's bulldog' and a fervent materialist, Galton recanted, and in later life rejected Spiritualism entirely. Despite having a long interest in the equally doubtful creeds of phrenology and mesmerism, George Eliot was consistently hostile to Spiritualism, condemning it as 'either degrading folly, imbecile in the estimate of evidence, or else an impudent imposture'. Huxley, who coined the term 'agnosticism', was most dogmatic, declaring that he would refuse to investigate the phenomena even if they were genuine.The three missionaries of materialism would have been even more concerned had they known the future career of a fourth participant in the seance, F. W. H. Myers. The inventor of the word 'telepathy' and a pioneer in the investigation of subliminal mental processes, Frederic Myers went on to be one of the founders and presidentsof the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Henry Sidgwick, one of the most respected thinkers of the Victorian age, was its first president. Later presidents included the philosophers William James (the elder brother of the novelist Henry James), Henri Bergson and the Nobel-prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet. The Society attracted writers and poets such as John Ruskin and Alfred Lord Tennyson and politicians and prime ministers such as W. E. Gladstone and Arthur Balfour. Leading scientists joined, two of whom - Lord Rayleigh, the Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge who married Balfour's sister Evelyn, and Sir William Barrett, a physicist who believed he had demonstrated the reality of 'thought-transference' (in Myers' coinage, telepathy) - went on to become SPR presidents.The purpose of the SPR was to examine paranormal phenomena in 'an unbiased and scientific way'. These Victorian seekers believed the paranormal must be investigated using scientific methods, and demonstrated their commitment by exposing the fraudulent character of table-rapping, ectoplasm, spirit photography, letters materializing from mysterious mahatmas and the like. But their commitment was never to the whole range of scientific knowledge. It focused mainly on the question that preoccupied nearly all of them: whether death is the end for the conscious human individual. They pursued their inquiries indefatigably, continuing to communicate their findings to fellow researchers - if automatic writings are to be believed - even after they died.Myers died in a clinic in Rome in January 1901, where he had gone at the suggestion of William James to receive an experimental treatment for Bright's disease. According to the doctor who treated Myers, James and Myers had made 'a solemn pact' that 'whichever of them was to die first should send a message to the other as he passed over into the unknown - they believed in the possibility of such communication'. James, who was also at the clinic receiving treatment, was so grief-stricken that he could not bring himself to stay in the room where Myers was dying. Even so, he tried to receive the message his friend had promised to send:he sank down on a chair by the open door, his note-book on his knees, pen in hand, ready to take down the message with his usual methodical exactitude ... When I went away William James was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open note-book on his knees. The page was blank.A further attempt also seemed to draw a blank, when another sealed envelope Myers had left with the psychical investigator Sir Oliver Lodge was opened in December 1904. The letter failed to correspond with messages automatists claimed to have been receiving from Myers, though it did contain a reference to a formative episode in Myers' life, long kept secret, which would feature prominently in later scripts.The efforts of Sidgwick and Myers to communicate from beyond the grave had come to nothing. That did not dampen the hope that he would continue the attempt.Myers was among several ostensible authors of a series of interconnected automatic writings produced over several decades by mediums in different parts of the world, seemingly with the aim of demonstrating the fact that human personality survived the death of the body. Another ostensible author of the scripts was Edmund Gurney, a gifted musician, classical scholar and SPR founder-member. Gurney suffered a devastating loss when three of his sisters were drowned in an accident on the Nile, and he died in 1888 at the age of forty-one, most likely by accident, while using chloroform. A third was Sidgwick himself, one of the presiding sages of the Victorian age. Other purported communicators included Francis Maitland Balfour, a Cambridge biologist and brother of Arthur Balfour, who died in a climbing accident in 1882; Annie Marshall, the wife of a cousin of Myers with whom Myers had fallen in love, who committed suicide in 1876; Mary Lyttelton, with whom Arthur Balfour had been in love, who died of typhus in 1875; and Laura Lyttelton, Mary's sister-in-law, who died in childbirth in 1886.The 'cross-correspondences' seem to have begun in 1901, when the first of a number of practitioners of automatic writing, all of them women but only one a professional medium, began to receive texts claiming to come from Myers. The automatists included Mrs Verrall, the wife of a Cambridge classical scholar; Mrs Verrall's daughter Helen, wife of W. H. Salter, a lawyer who became president of the SPR; 'Mrs Holland', a pseudonym usedby psychical researchers to conceal the identity of Alice Fleming, the wife of the British army officer John Fleming stationed in India and sister of Rudyard Kipling, who is believed to have authored or co-authored some of Kipling's early Indian tales; 'Mrs Willett', the pseudonym of Winifred Coombe-Tennant, suffragist and British representative at the League of Nations, who took up automatic writing while trying to communicate with a beloved daughter who had died; and the one professional medium, Mrs Piper.It was Mrs Verrall who, on 5 March 1901, received the first decipherable script. Though at that point doubtful of the reality of survival, she had begun practising automatic writing earlier that year in the belief that if Myers had survived she could be a channel for his post-mortem communications. Over the following years a number of other automatists joined her in receiving texts claiming to be authored by Myers. In 1902 Mrs Verrall received messages that seemed to link up with those received by Mrs Piper, then in America, and in 1903 'Mrs Holland', at the time in India, sent a script addressed to Mrs Verrall in Cambridge. 'Mrs Holland', who suffered a mental breakdown in 1898 that the Kipling family attributed to her experiments in automatic writing, had given up the practice for several years. She resumed after reading Myers' book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, in which Myers had suggested that only clear evidence of intention on the part of a group of people acting together from beyond the grave could ever prove survival beyond reasonabledoubt. Not long after, 'Mrs Holland' began to receive scripts signed 'FWHM'.Leading psychical researchers soon came to believe that Myers was engaged in the experiment he had proposed in his book. In 1908 Eleanor Sidgwick, the wife of Henry Sidgwick and also a leading psychical researcher, asked:have we got into relation with minds which have survived bodily death, and endeavouring by means of the cross-correspondences to provide evidence of their operation? If this ... hypothesis be the true one it would mean that intelligent cooperation between other than embodied human minds and our own, in experiments of a new kind intended to prove continued existence, has become possible.Even when they were themselves firmly convinced, psychical researchers knew that none of the phenomena they studied proved survival to be a fact. Only clearly interlinked communications coming through several channels over a period of time could show that post-mortem minds were at work. The result was a deeply puzzling body of texts, in which - as one psychical researcher who studied it carefully wrote - 'the material to be investigated experimented on itself'.The theory that the scripts contained cross-corresponde...

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846142199
• ISBN 13: 9781846142192
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 273