Immortality (30 page)

One answer might be that you survive if enough of these disparate parts survive. So what makes me the same person as the Stephen Cave of last week is that I have inherited enough of that person’s bundle of ideas, memories et cetera. Following philosophical tradition, let us call this the “bundle theory” of the self.

Now, anyone pursuing cultural immortality is taking various bits of themselves and replicating those bits in the symbolic realm—say, for example, by ensuring that their deeds, thoughts and sayings are recorded by court historians and their images captured by statue makers. This can be seen as a way of ensuring that various bits of that particular bundle live on. And if enough of the bits of the bundle live on, then the person lives on—even if entirely in the world of symbols.

So if Alexander had not (biologically) died in Babylon in 323
BCE
, there would have continued to be a human being with certain ideas and memories more or less continuous with those of the earlier Alexander, and so we would say that he had survived. The physical, human Alexander, however, did die—but many aspects of the Alexander-bundle continued, for example, in the records of his deeds and sayings, in the many engravings of his image and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands whose lives he touched. Indeed, his image, ideas and reputation were replicated to such an extent that
we can argue the Alexander-bundle survived just as fully as it would have done if the original flesh-and-blood human being had survived.

And these images, these ideas and this reputation have survived to this day: Alexander therefore lives, albeit in a rather diffuse form, spread around the libraries, museums, video collections and Web servers of the world—and of course in the minds of other human beings. The route to immortality, therefore, is to ensure that as many of the component parts of your current self-bundle are continued in forms that are more robust than flesh and blood, and the more such parts that survive, the better. This might not sound much like really living on, but the supporter of this view might argue that it is just as good as ordinary day-to-day living on, which is itself just a mishmash of such overlapping continuities.

So might argue a metaphysically inclined celebrity. Of course, most celebrities are probably not quite so metaphysically inclined, but nonetheless some of the experiences they regularly describe fit well with the bundle theory of the self. David Giles, the above-mentioned psychologist of fame, notes that the famous often talk of a fragmentation of their identity as they increasingly find it difficult to distinguish between their public and private, real and manufactured selves. As they see themselves on television, read their own views in magazines—or what the PR people told them should be their views—or see their images on album covers, their sense of having an irreducible self over which they alone have ownership is rapidly eroded. For some, such as Ernest Hemingway, this is a problem that challenges their authenticity: Hemingway’s suicide was therefore his final attempt to reclaim and bring cohesion to a fracturing self. But to others, such as Picasso, this endless proliferation of perspectives on the self and reality is exactly what makes art possible and life interesting.

The idea that images or records capture something real and alive is an old one. Images in the form of statues have long been worshipped
in the belief they contain some aspect of the divine. In all three main Abrahamic religions such image making has been deeply controversial, as it mimics the act of creation that is the prerogative of God, thereby implying both hubris and idolatry. Yet even in Christianity, icons continue to be objects of veneration. Similarly, before such technologies as film and photography became ubiquitous, the idea that they and other image-making techniques actually captured a part of the person was widespread. In many cultures, from China to Native America, photographs were initially thought to peel off a layer of the person’s self and trap it on paper.

The bundle theory is therefore not as odd as it might at first sound. Indeed, the idea of a coherent, unchanging self has been under sustained attack for over a century, starting with the speculations of the psychoanalysts who divvied up our consciousness into various conflicting parts, and continuing with the revelations of neuroscience, which emphasize the brain’s multiple systems and structures. So is Alexander the Bundle still among us?

T
HERE
are good reasons to think not. Though it is a respectable idea, the bundle theory is controversial and has ample critics. Many philosophers argue, for example, that there cannot be memories, beliefs, desires etc. without there being
someone
doing the remembering, believing and desiring. Desires don’t just float about in bundles or any other way. But if there is a person doing my remembering, believing and desiring, then surely I am that person and not just the memories, beliefs and desires. In which case, I am not a collection of memories, beliefs, desires etc. after all, but rather I am
a person with
memories, beliefs, desires etc. That person might be a soul or a biological organism or something else. But it is not a book or a statue—no book or statue is a person. In which case, Alexander does not really live on in the history books after all.

But even if we accept the highly controversial bundle theory of the self, there are problems with trying to survive purely in the symbolic realm. The bundle theory claims that you live on if enough of your memories, beliefs, desires etc. do—but it is deeply questionable whether your memories live on in a literal sense just because they are written down in a book. Memories and desires are, after all, mental states, and a book does not have mental states. A book does not actually
remember
or
desire
. It merely has
descriptions
of mental states, and a description of a thing is not the same as the thing itself. A description of Alexander’s ambitions is not the same thing as Alexander’s actual yearnings, just as a picture of Alexander’s face on a coin is not really Alexander’s face. The replications of ourselves that we make in the symbolic realm are simply the wrong kinds of things to constitute a person—you don’t live on through pictures of you any more than you get fat by eating pictures of a hamburger.

It therefore looks very difficult to argue that cultural legacy can provide anything like literal survival. It is contentious enough to argue that your self is just a bundle, but even if it is, the things that make up this bundle do not themselves really survive in the cultural realm. But perhaps the greatest mystery with the pursuit of this kind of immortality is that the pursuers would mostly admit this. They
know
that they are not
really
living on in anything like the normal way by conquering foreign lands or painting pictures—yet they do it anyway.

David Giles, in his inquiry into the motivation of fame seekers, dismisses the possibility that famous people have some psychological or genetic trait that explains their quest for prominence—no such quality has been found. And other alternative theories, such as that we seek renown for the immediate wealth and status it brings, he concludes are “inadequate to account fully for the long-standing and desperate desire for fame.” Of course, fame can bring significant this-worldly benefits—but, as we have seen, a mark in the symbolic
realm is often made at the expense of a long and happy life, as in the case of Alexander or the countless pop and film stars who have lived fast and died young. Achilles, the paradigm of the Western hero, even
knew
that his pursuit of glory would cost him his life, so this pursuit cannot have been a means to this-worldly profit.

So what were the great names of history hoping for in dedicating their lives to eternal renown? It is highly likely that here the Mortality Paradox is at work—or rather, the second half of it, the inability to imagine our own nonexistence. Even if the aspiring hero claims to know rationally that he will not be around to reap the glory of some suicidal mission, still he cannot help picturing the laurels being heaped on his memory. That act of imagining, which makes him present as the observer, makes it
seem
like he will still be there in the future to receive the back-slaps and plaudits. So even if Achilles claimed to know consciously that he would die on his path to glory, a powerful, nonrational cognitive process made it feel to him that he would still be around to profit from it.

We might add to this that at a subconscious or emotional level we do not really distinguish between the material and symbolic realms. As symbolic animals, so entirely immersed in a symbolic understanding of the world, we transfer our will to immortality instinctively from the physical to the cultural. This is what Giles calls “the evolutionary rationale” for the pursuit of posterity: the urge to reproduce ourselves into the future is so strong that it will be satisfied even if that reproduction is only a picture in a magazine.

The reason why no Plato or St. Paul has attempted to show how cultural legacy can deliver a satisfactory immortality is therefore that the strong arguments are not to be found. The motivation for the pursuit of glory is instinctive and intuitive, and those instincts and intuitions are misled: the inability to imagine our own nonexistence suggests to us we will be around to reap the glory, but reason suggests the opposite. Achilles and Alexander succeeded in becoming
extraordinary and succeeded in stamping their names onto the cultural sphere, but they are still as dead as their countless anonymous victims.

The conclusive damper on aspirations to cultural legacy has nothing to do with the bundle theory; it is the entirely practical point that memories are not forever. Indeed, very few people are remembered for long at all—the psychologist Roy Baumeister has estimated the length of time for which most of us can expect to be remembered as seventy years. He points out that not many people can even
name
their great-grandparents—and if their own progeny know nothing about them, it is unlikely that anyone else does.

Of course, some people like Alexander do achieve great fame. But the cultures that hold them in esteem will not last eternally. The glories of Greece still shine, but the heroes of countless other ancient cultures have long been forgotten. Marcus Aurelius was aware of this when he wrote in his journal in 190
CE
, “Soon you will have forgotten the world; and soon the world will have forgotten you,” and he was an emperor of Rome, with a good deal more reason to expect lasting fame than most of us.

We do still remember Achilles and Alexander and even Marcus Aurelius, despite his prediction. But one day they will have to contend with the end of the Western civilization that values their deeds, and beyond that the end of our species and the eventual end of the world. Culture might outlive a single human, but it will not outlive humanity. No matter how great our glory, it could only ever be a postponement of oblivion. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the 1818 poem “Ozymandias” by Mary Shelley’s poet husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. A traveler reports finding a ruined colossus in the desert:

A
LEXANDER
has been seen by many as the shining embodiment of ancient Greek values. We saw earlier that he was raised on the heroic myths, was tutored by Aristotle and carried
The Iliad
with him wherever he went. But despite this training in the classics, we might conclude that Alexander did not read his Homer closely enough.

Both
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
are filled with pathos, as Homer chronicles the toll of the hero culture. The plot of
The Iliad
begins with Achilles being snubbed by the Greek commander Agamemnon and as a consequence refusing to fight, even calling on the gods to favor the Trojans. The grimly ironic result of Achilles’s petulance is that his closest friend, Patroclus, falls to the spear of the Trojan prince Hector. At this, Achilles goes on a rampage, cutting down swaths of young Trojan warriors: “As a fire raging in some mountain glen after long drought … even so furiously did Achilles rage, wielding his spear as though he were a god, and giving chase to those whom he would slay, till the dark earth ran with blood … but the son of Peleus pressed on to win still further glory, defiling his invincible hands with bloody gore.”

In his rage, Achilles loses all humanity, killing those who are unarmed, some who beg for mercy, and, when he finally kills Hector, defiling the corpse. Homer does not write of him with admiration but has the god of the river that Achilles is filling with corpses rise up against him with the words, “Achilles, if you exceed all in strength, so do you also in wickedness.”

Later, in
The Odyssey
, while on his homeward voyage after Troy has finally fallen, Odysseus goes down to Hades to visit the
shades—the gloomy spirits of the dead. There among them, he finds Achilles, who finally fell to an arrow shot by Hector’s brother Paris, fulfilling the prophecy that if his life was glorious then it would also be short. Odysseus is shocked when Achilles describes his miserable existence in Hades amid the “mindless, disembodied ghosts.” Odysseus remonstrates with him—surely Achilles, most renowned of all warriors, most celebrated of heroes, cannot regret the path he chose, sacrificing long life for glory? “Do not you make light of death, illustrious Odysseus,” Achilles replies. “I would rather work the soil as a serf to some landless impoverished peasant than be king of all these lifeless dead.”

And so in the end it was all for nothing. After all the young blood that drenched the dust around Troy, all the women left widowed and the parents left grieving, after the deaths of Patroclus, Hector and even Achilles himself—after all that, the great hero is condemned to the dark and empty realm of death like everyone else. Homer saw the futility of seeking glory through bloodshed. Perhaps Alexander should have taken heed.