The Immortality Project

Fear does not prevent death, it prevents life.

-Naguib Mahfouz

Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer prize winning philosophical masterpiece The Denial of Death published in 1973 is an attempt to make sense of Mankind’s irrepressible need to create what he dubbed Immortality Projects; a means to deal with our knowledge of the ultimate end to life. The central theme is that our duality of being, as a physical being in the natural world and as a symbolic creature that inhabits a world of his own creation, where reality is what can be conceived. In times past structure rose to explain this conflicted sense of being. Churches and Divine leaders that could explain why there should be no fear of oblivion. The stories they constructed served to maintain stability in interpersonal relations of larger groups, to focus energies and direct efforts to goals in the future. Our entire civilization, he said, was built to serve as a bulwark against death, or more to the point, our awareness of it, to protect the fragile psyche of our species with an emotional and reasoned armor in the same way we clothe our soft and vulnerable bodies against the elements.

In the past year I have watched with a barely contained horror the lengths the establishment has gone to impose their current immortality project on the masses below them, but worse than that, the way the vast majority have submitted to it.

Becker observed that the natural world is both dangerous and terrifying and that our knowledge of this reality causes enormous levels of anxiety which must be allayed for us to function on a daily basis. We create belief systems that suppress this fear in order to convince ourselves that we are part of something transcendent that guarantees our immortality, and finally, perhaps more importantly, that these systems almost always pose a greater threat to us than the natural world. It summarizes the obvious reality of our constant need to escape the fear of death.

Two years ago I fell from a tree while removing limbs with a chainsaw. The injury was severe enough to confine me to my bed for the next three months. As a family farmer whose entire life revolved around my ability to be mobile, it was the loss of my efforts that caused the greatest pain and suffering rather than the trauma itself. In the moment when I lay on the ground aware of what had happened and the damage I had suffered, it became apparent that I was- for the foreseeable future- completely dependent upon others in order for our family to survive. My eldest son who had only recently returned from out west where he had been working with a family of Mennonite butchers immediately stepped up to the task and took on the full weight of my daily duties as his own. My wife took work cleaning houses to insure we had some cash income to cover the things we could not produce ourselves and the two younger children became the homemakers and caretakers looking out for all of the mundane tasks required to care for an injured parent and a house filled with chores. It would be difficult to fully express how deeply moving it was to see everyone I loved take on the additional burdens that I had carried on my adult male shoulders as if they were their own and I will never be able to explain the guilt I felt seeing them pick them up and carry them without me. And yet they gave me the confidence needed to mend my broken body and the assurance that no burden is too heavy when it is held up by love.

When my children were young, they loved to hear the stories of my own childhood, especially the ones about my broken bones and the stitches I’d received. Looking back it was probably some kind of proxy experience that they were after, the same way we enjoy a horror movie for the scares without the risk. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my parents to attend to all of those sessions where I arrived home covered in blood or they received a phone call from the hospital to come on down and sign some papers before the surgeons went to work, not only because they had to foot the bill, but because I was their flesh and blood. Yet somehow they managed to get through it without ever making a scene or going after me for my reckless behavior in a world filled with risk. It was simply the way that we were raised back then. We rode our bikes across the Delaware without helmets, floated through the huge waves of the Lambertville wing dam barefooted without a life preserver, shot .22’s after school, wrecked our bikes intentionally on the long sweeping lawns that edged Carnegie Lake on the Princeton campus, jumped out of second story windows into piles of dirt at construction sites on the weekends. Everyone I knew nursed some giant bruise, wore a well scribbled cast on a broken limb, proudly showed off scars or stitches at recess to the small knots of grubby boys. We took risks and suffered consequences, or not, came to understand our limitations or pushed the boundaries well beyond the prudent until we ran up against the immutable laws of the physical world. And in this way, we came to understand our vulnerabilities and the mortality that we all shared that hovered on the edge of our lives. Looking back over that time there was another equally present reality that shaped us as we grew and that was the infinitely beautiful and sublimely intoxicating feeling of freedom. We made our choices and suffered the consequences, but we also experienced the exhilaration and the triumph that came with trying something and succeeding. It gave me the kind of confidence that led me to a life filled with adventure and I was better for it. Had I spent my childhood planted in front of a television in complete safety nothing would have turned out as it did and I would have been the poorer for it. While my parents would by modern standards appear as uninvolved or negligent when they were in fact helping to build up in me the ability to survive in the world as it was; dangerous, unpredictable, sublime.

“I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me but is indeed very soothing and consoling, and I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.”

-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Human societies have frightened themselves into fits of hysteria before; witches, devils, monsters and hobgoblins. They hung, pressed, and burned alive their own neighbors for offenses such as consorting with cats or spoiling the milk. They have accused old women of being sorcerers, and young men of being vampires. There have been eras when people avoided one another like the plague, hunted down random strangers and murdered them without remorse for the unforgiveable sin of being from a cursed village or for wearing an improper garment. Entire cultures have crafted elaborate fictions to help them cope with the calamitous afflictions of Nature herself; the Icelandic belief in fairies, capable of spreading disease or causing afflictions were as firmly believed in their time as the spreading of a virus through a soup made of bats is today. In Bedburg, Germany during the 16th century the slaughter of first livestock and eventually children and women was attributed to werewolves and even in their descriptions of the apprehension of the true culprit, an early serial murderer named Peter Stumpp, they claimed that he had most assuredly been a wolf who turned back into a man after his capture before his gruesome execution put to rest his insatiable thirst for human prey. Most of us are aware of the violent upheaval that swept away the French aristocracy during the Reign of Terror, but are unaware of the multitude of fantastic myths and byzantine conspiracies that presaged the event. The people believed that their crops had been cursed, and a widespread paranoia driven in part by a fungus that grew on rye which led to ‘The Great Fear’ drove the lower classes into a frenzy which only abated with the slaughter that followed on the heels of the revolution itself.

“Wretched indeed is the man who in the course of a long life has not learned that death is nothing to be feared. For death either completely destroys the human soul, in which case it is negligible, or takes the soul to a place where it can live forever, which makes it desirable. There is no third possibility.”

-Cicero

We live in precedented times contrary to prevailing public opinion. Humanity has a narrow range of observable behaviors over the long run and one of these is a collective descent into irrational madness. There is no cure for this malady other than the passage of time and the eventual dissolution of this toxic atmosphere that is almost always accompanied by a massive bloodletting. ‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.’ wrote Charles MacKay, author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The evidence of this condition is ubiquitous and needs no examples for clarification. If you do not see it, then you are in its thrall and even if presented with the evidence would deny its existence. That’s how powerful popular delusions are, and as they absorb more adherents they increase in intensity until the most irrational and absurd beliefs become gospel. Remember that in towns and villages not many miles from where I write this morning mobs of old friends and neighbors murdered their old acquaintances for witchcraft only a short while ago in historical terms. The cult of the masks is but an indication of just how quickly entire swaths of the population can succumb to the pervasive fear of death, its ever-present knowledge percolating just beneath our consciousness, kept in check by whatever immortality project holds sway at any given time. With the fading influence of God in American life, the collapse of organized religion and the waning conviction in the existence of a heavenly future, America has embraced a new faith rooted in the sterile soil of Science! Experts are the new clergy handing out advice in the same way priests once sold dispensations, vacillating wildly from month to month as the devout don the garments of their faith. The new promise of immortality is rooted in the fiction of The Singularity, a concept where our technological advance will one day eliminate death by turning us into technological hybrids capable of living forever in ease. The pronouncements of the Cathedral, slogans created by groups like the World Economic Forum like “In the future you will own nothing and be happy” do not sound at all different from the teachings of Christ- “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth” and appeal to the same anxieties and fear present in all of us.

Last week I slaughtered a sow in the snow. She was a big one, well over 500 pounds and before I did what I had come to do I felt the same old sense of dread that accompanies me every time I carry the rifle out back to the hog shed. My heart rate increased and with it the elevated senses; the sound of my footsteps on the frozen rime, an awareness of the ice crystals floating in the frozen air. I always talk myself through what I am about to do one step at a time because for all the experience and history behind me there is something much larger that looms when death is imminent. On that morning I took a page from the Bosnians who come up to slaughter their steers each fall and recited a silent prayer. I asked for steadiness, to make the shot a good one, to remember to clear the rifle and step in surely and to cut accurately allowing her a quick end. And almost instantly I could feel my breathing slow, and my heartbeat drop back to a normal range and afterward I finished what I had come out to do without a hitch. I stood by her and watched the bright red blood spread out across the pure white snow as she left this earth leaving only her body behind her for the nourishment of my family in the dark months to come. Later when I shared this experience with my son, he told me that maybe what was causing me anxiety was that it made me think about my own death. I was grateful for his insight because while I do not fear death consciously, perhaps that is only because of the power of my own Immortality Project, my faith in God and the belief that energy cannot simply disappear but must go somewhere. Perhaps I am wrong on both counts, but they are as deeply ingrained in me as the sound of my own voice when it tells me what is right and what is wrong and so I hold fast to it throughout the trials and tribulations of life.

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

—Seneca

And so I am drawn to the stoics yet again for their counsel, not because I know that they are right, but because their reflections calm my spirit while I make my way through this life. And just as the throngs wear their masks to forestall the inevitable end that we must all face, it provides me with not only some comfort, but it reinforces the Immortality Project that I have made to clothe my naked psyche from the ever-present reality of a certain demise. And as we move into precedented times once again we should remind ourselves that what we are observing isn’t political conflict or an ideological difference, but an existential threat to competing projects. To be wrong is to die forever, to overcome the is to live in eternity.