Sermon

William Rimmer

Toward the end of Sapiens, the phenomenal history of the species by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari the account turns to the question of immortality (my bold italics):

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms. Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes. A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).

Let's hope the "cause for optimism" that Harari refers to is all the researchers'.  It's certainly not mine.

I spent the first 8 years of my life subject to Sunday school teachings of the protestant variety of Christianity-- the latter 4 of them in a particularly joyless and blanched sect of it.  When I was 9 my inquisitive mother experienced a severe de-conversion, which necessarily meant that my Christian education ceased.  To that point I had been thoroughly indoctrinated (with a child's darkly outlined coloring-book-and-crayon doctrine), to the point that I was occasionally caught trying to preach the gospel to Jewish friends.  Though I was chastised for it by my mother, I had been taught to seriously fear for their life, not in this world but in the next.

For myself, I was already convinced that if my immortality was in the hands of an authority, even if that authority was the squeaky clean holy nerd Jesus Christ, I was doomed.  The effect this had on me in those formative years was a panic about eternity.  That's the beauty of the concept of Hell.  In my brand of Christianity it wasn't a question of whether you were going to get immortality but where you were going to have to spend it.  By the doctrines of the faith, if one person lived a life of strict virtue, and another a life of wickedness, but you knew only one would make it to heaven, you could not say which since it all came down to one final judgment-- a judgment which could be swayed by a single sin;  possibly merely the sin of doubt.  In my case that meant that no matter how I spent my life, I risked at least (but with my luck, probably better than) a 50% chance of hell.

In my circumstances, I needed all the help I could get, which to that point had taken the form of weekly cod-liver oil flavored doses of Jesus preached at us in a baby voice by a cold and distant, personality-deprived mother of one of my fellow sheep, before I rejoined my parents for an interminable hour of agony in the "sanctuary" on hard wooden pews, frequently reminded not to squirm, while the monotoned, crew-cutted "pastor" (wow do I hate that word!) droned at the adults, punctuated by inscrutably paced stretches when the congregation was instructed to stand, grab a hymnal, turn to a random page and soldier through an invariably long and boring song-- usually so long that the initial excitement of finally getting off the pew was soon replaced by a desire to lie down under it. How could this sort of torture not help my case?  And when I was 9, my mother took it away from me.

As the book title goes: First you cry.  I pleaded with my mother to not screw up the only shot I had of avoiding hell.  I don't think she had any idea how full of the fear of hell I'd been filled by my Christian education.  But in the end, her status as caretaker won out.  I came to realize that the only thing going for church was its never-assured part in the case for the immortality of my soul.  Literally everything else about it sucked.  Our lives outside of church had already become pretty non-Christian.  Once I worked through the shock that perhaps the dichotomy between eternity in horrific hell versus bland, fun-less immortality in heaven was a false one, the panic subsided and was replaced by an indifference to the question of what happened after one's life on this planet came to an end.

I think this experience of mine overcoming concern about immortality may somehow underlie my shrug at news of the promise of actual a-mortality in this life for some.  I realize it's not the same category of perpetual life as what Jesus promises for a different kind of price, but isn't the attraction of it (for those who are attracted by it) the same?  If those who seek immortality are not hooked on life, they are afraid of death-- neither of which is a particularly laudable motivation.  As Harari's book argues, it's only been within the past 200 years that it had even occured to anyone that it might actually be possible to prolong life indefinitely by medicine.  For some possessed of money, ambition and in my opinion a severe lack of, if not imagination itself, certainly depth of imagination, the scientific quest for perpetual life joins a long list of other pursuits that haven't aged as well with me as skepticism has: AI, the singularity, interplanetary colonization.  Bad sci-fi.

This week we learned from a UN report  -- the work of 91 climate scientists-- that the planet has about 12 years left in which to avoid reaching the point of no return on Global Warming, beyond which the effects of it will result in even more volatile weather patterns, drought, food shortages, rising waters, changing coastlines, accelerated destruction of habitat, extinction of species and spreading of global misery and poverty.  Should we fail, those who survive for however long survival remains possible will be in Hell.

The response to the news has been predictably underwhelming from the American power elite.  Predictably, the media have chosen to remain focused on the cash cow of the antics of Trump.  For its part the Trump administration has once again gone the "Ignorance-Is-Strength" route with Trump first not knowing what body the study came from before confidently shrugging it off with the assertion that he could come up with reports that reach the opposite conclusion. (No shit!  You wouldn't be you if you couldn't!)  We've been well-trained by propaganda and experience to expect challenges to the future of humanity to be met by infuriating indifference on the part of our leaders.  Trump as usual takes it to the extreme.

While I find myself naturally in the camp of those who bypassed the combative early stages of grief and went right to acceptance and mourning, I was made aware by internet wanderings this week of what I suspect is going to be an increasingly common response, especially in capitalist America: Bring it on!  There's a certain mindset that sees opportunity in every calamity.  If you believe in science and hope for progress, the news is a challenge to optimism, if not an outright excuse for dread of the chaos to come.  If you believe in yourself and the free market and are bolstered in your confidence by your stockpile of weaponry that ought to give you an edge in the tightening competition for survival and believe that your struggles in this life are merely a prelude to eternity in paradise anyway, why wouldn't you face the news with eagerness?  What chance do pragmatists have of persuading those of such a mindset (and arsenal) to set aside their selfish concerns and join in the struggle to save the planet and the future of the species.  Talk till you're blue in the face. Nothing wins an intellectual argument like extreme violence.

Which raises the question of what happens to the quest for immortality in light of impending shortages of resources and manpower and increasing unforeseeable chaos on Earth in the coming decades.  For all of their wealth, access and power, couldn't the billionaire geniuses obsessed with a-mortality and with the only sort of means at their disposal that could possibly bring it about* have seen this coming and done something to prevent it?  And then it occurs to me: but they already have!  Of course they saw this coming.  That's why they've put their wagers onto a laundry list of shallow sci-fi schemes: interplanetary travel to get the hell out of dodge before the shit hits the fan; immortality and perpetual youth to keep themselves alive for as long as it takes to get out into space and onto viable new worlds; and as a backup plan, AI to get their consciousness uploaded to the singularity before anything unfixable happens to their mortal coil.  We can forget their participation.  As far as they're concerned the rest of us can go to hell!

These are the people you want to spend eternity with?

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* And let’s face it a-mortality may be the only way some of these sexually unappealing nerds can perpetuate their genes into the future indefinitely. Is a woman-less (and thus a necessarily rather than involuntarily celibate) future a motivation?