Komise pro nesmrtelnost

by John Gray

Otázka smrti stála odedávna ve středu lidského zájmu. Ve své knize předkládá filozof John Gray brilantní, byť poněkud děsivý popis snahy dosáhnout nesmrtelnosti pomocí vědy a pokládá zásadní otázku, zda a jak takové úsilí ohrožuje samotnou podstatu člověka. Při svých úvahách vychází ze dvou naprosto odlišných příkladů.
Nejdříve sleduje víru rozšířenou mezi britskou intelektuální a politickou elitou přelomu století, že po smrti existuje život, do něhož lze nahlédnout prostřednictvím spiritistických médií a automatického psaní. Poté se zabývá ideologií komunistického Sovětského svazu, podle níž je za pomoci vědy možné přetvořit planetu, změnit lidstvo, osvobodit ho od smrti - a přivést revoluční vůdce, jako byl Lenin, zpátky k životu. Filozofové, politici, spiritisté, balzamovači, blázniví vynálezci, láskou stižení parapsychologové a novináři-špióni žili v zajetí nového světového názoru, podle něhož měla věda stvořit nepřemožitelné lidstvo. Jejich vzpoura proti smrti vyústila v řadu pokusů, z nichž některé zpustošily celé státy. Smrt a posmrtný život se staly součástí nových myšlenkových proudů od psychiatrie přes evoluci až ke komunismu a zdálo se, že osud lidí leží pouze v jejich rukou. Člověk přestane být zvířetem, porazí smrt a získá nesmrtelnost. Stane se Bohem.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Science, Nonfiction, Death, Religion, Politics

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

John Nicholas Gray is a English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.

Reviews

[Nikolai Nikiforov · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an awful book!
To begin with, its title comes from a mistranslation: there was never Lenin Immortalization Commission in Soviet Russia, only a Commision for the (Eternal) Preservation of his Memory — sort of a big difference, right?
Instead of an insteresting philosophical argument one would expect after reading the book's preface, what you get is a hodgepodge of historical trivia and random gossip and insinuation.
The author never resists a temptation for another digression that serves no purpose other than to show off his wide (actually not that wide) knowledge. Walter Duranty was a bastard, no doubt about that, but why spend pages talking about him, when his relevance to the book's topic is, approximately — none whatsoever?
If this were a W.G. Sebald's book, all those ramblings and digressions would not be a problem. But there's nothing resmbling Sebald's brilliance and insightfulness here, just bland and commonplace — though probably correct - philosophizing.

[Al Bità · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Gray has a name for being a kind of maverick philosopher, and this book continues the tradition. What makes it a pleasure to read is that he also writes cleverly and well. The combination always tends to make his works exciting and thrilling, not always in expected ways. His techniques appears to be the skilful application of an extremely sharp rational scalpel to reveal inconsistencies, contradictions, ironies, etc. in most if not all of one's cherished beliefs. As such, he is a post-modernist par excellence (a great irony, since he eschews postmodernism — how post-modern can you get!).

This books deals with the fascination humanity has with wanting to cheat death. It is presented in three parts: the first ('Cross-Correspondences') examines the late 19th-c fascination with spiritualism, and the attempts by the cognoscenti and literati of the times to conduct experiments to prove the existence of life after death through the study of seances, automatic writings, etc. They failed, of course; but the information Gray provides about the people involved is both very interesting and quite illuminating. The second part ('God-builders') concentrates on the early 20th-c equivalents, particularly in Russia, and the Soviet attempts to 'immortalise' Lenin. The information provided about the world of spies and political manoeuvrings, particularly between Britain and Russia, are again immensely illuminating and fascinating after reading about H G Wells, Lockhart and the enigmatic Moura (one may never quite look at the work of Wells, for example, in quite the same light again!). The third part ('Sweet Mortality') essentially asks for humanity to accept the fact that death is not only inevitable, but also, perhaps, 'a consummation devoutly to be wished' (with apologies to Shakespeare).

While not necessarily disagreeing with this conclusion, I feel that it is in this third part that Gray's intellectual scalpel has been dulled somewhat. For me, this section made me review my thoughts on the basic question allegedly raised by this book. The sub-title of this book is 'Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death'. What, if anything, does Gray mean by 'science' here? Conducting experiments in seances, clairvoyance, automatic writing, etc? Preserving Lenin's body after he has died? I suspect Gray's antagonism to 'science' is more akin to the misapplication of science by certain individuals to achieve some kind of misguided ideal of 'perfecting' humanity (the implication being that humanity is basically 'imperfect', a concept at the core of most if not all religions). Gray's assessment seems to be that all human activities, including 'science' and 'religion', are responses to certain dilemmas humanity faces in contemplating its existence. Within this interpretation 'science' seems to come out the loser (since its use has perpetuated pain and suffering) while the mythologies of the past, including those of religion, more of a winner (since these myths provide 'comfort'). For me, such a conclusion is not only dishonest but also a kind of wimping out (let's hang on to those warm and cuddly things which provide comfort rather than deal with all those nasty consequences technology has wreaked on us).

For me Science is Knowledge. Nescience (ignorance) is no way to survive in this world. It is through knowledge that we have been able to improve our lot: we live longer, healthier lives; we can keep in communication with our loved ones even when we are not actually present; we have technologies which assist us in our daily transactions; etc. Sure, misapplied knowledge is another matter altogether, but misapplied knowledge is not 'science', it is misapplied science. And if it is true that human beings like to kill and destroy (that is part of who we are) then using 'science' to do so does not condemn science as being evil. Gray is right in attacking all forms of -isms. But just as Christianism is not Christianity, Catholicism is not Catholic, Islamism is not Islam, etc. so Scientism is not Science.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the reviewers on Goodreads rightly points out that there never was an 'Immortalization' commission as such only one for perpetuation of memory and that the book really is not about cheating death but a random collection of digressions and anecdotes - I have to agree about these complaints - particularly about the book not really being about a quest to cheat death but I found the discursive digressions fascinating, fun and enlightening - so I would say ignore what the book says it is about and just enjoy what it is - exactly what that is I find hard to say but I have read the book twice (2015 and then in 2019) now and will probably do so again.

I strongly recommend reading the review in the Guardian by John Banville at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201....

[Phillip Ramm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This not the "Men Are From somewhere, Women From Somewhere Else... " John Gray. Different guy. You have been warned.

~~~~~~~

This book seems to be made up of left-over notes from his Black Mass, which was about millennialism and things eschatological. The take-home message from that book was: Don't get involved with groups which advocate solutions to the world's problems that involve killing huge swathes of "imperfect" people.

The take-home message from this current book: You are going to die, and mankind is going to become extinct. Might as well face up to it.

Harsh, but fair.

To warn you, Gray is not a scientist or a journalist. He is a philosopher. This is not some fact-filed, pop-sci expose destined for the best-seller shelves. It's not as much of hard slog as some have said, but it might not be what you are looking for, given the title. I have read a lot of Gray (am I a masochist?) so I knew what to expect.

Having said that, let's look at the book...

Through some potted biographies of well-known people such as H.G Wells, Maxim Gorky and Arthur Balfour (of the Balfour letter fame - the one that suggested giving Palestine to the Jewish people - it seemed a good idea a the time) and some incredibly less well-known ones, we look very unscientifically at the philosophy of pinning one's hopes on immortality (to avoid existential despair, I presume). There are so many off-topic digressions and barely on-topic discussion, that one might wonder if Gray had any idea what this book was going to be about while he was writing it.

First half concerns itself with the turn of the last's century's obsession with seances and automatic writing. The hope of contacting the dead through spiritualism could 'prove' there was continuance of the personality in the spirit world. Epic fail. Second half is about the crazy ideas in communist Russia that all of us become one mind, somehow. This is not explained well. Something to do with embalming Lenin.

It finishes off with that other nutter Allen Kurtzweil predicting that we will be living eternally in a nanorobot controlled Virtual World (cf Tron Reconfigured). Meanwhile the real world falls apart and is that virtual "I" really the same person as "me". Plus a despondent poet or two we have never heard of, happy (well maybe happy isn't the right word) to accept possible death by heading straight into trouble - 1st WW and communist Hungary.

I don't know how this last section fits in at all except to confirm that not everyone wants to live forever. One need only quote some suicide stats to make this point. I think Gray just wanted to transcribe some of his favorite pieces of writing - they are good, but only barely relevant.

His brief discussions on the laws of nature and man's place in the universe are thin, and I recommend a much more eloquent and elegant questioning of the philosophical difficulties here given by Michael Frayn (a journalist and novelist!) in The Human Touch.

This book is very unfocussed overall. However the insights into some of the personalities are instructive. Even smart people can be stupid. And they can go way off-topic.

[Williwaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book certainly deserves a closer, more thoughtful reading than I was able to give the first time through.

The biggest surprise for me was that this is primarily a history book. The first part delves into the activities of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and its attempts to prove that there is an afterlife. Such efforts began in the last quarter of the 19th century and continued well into the 20th century, but slowly petered out as it became clear that there was no such proof. Many SPR members were prominent scientists, philosophers, and statesmen, who became obsessed with this topic and engaged in seances and automatic writing sessions. They hoped (or pretended to hope?) that they could reconnect with lost loves. I had previously been aware of Conan Doyle's obsessions with Spiritualism, and the keen interest in it after WWI, but I was totally unaware of the earlier roots of the Spiritualist movement.

The second part of the book is a study of the Soviets and the so-called "God-Builders." Although the Soviets rejected religion, they anticipated Kurzweil's aspirations to the "Singularity." Under this view, religion always had it backwards. God did not create the universe. Instead, the universe created Humanity so it could aspire to create or become God. Materialism and technology, according to this view, can provide us the tools to triumph over matter and become immortal, incorporeal beings.

Unfortunately, the Soviet Union became the greatest killing machine the world has ever known. The ends justified the means. It was all in the name of the ultimate deification of humankind, so there was no need to feel any guilt.

The final section of The Immortalization Commission is what I really expected this book to be: namely, Gray's own perspective on the quest for immortality. It's quite brilliant, but gnomic. You'll find several profound statements in a single paragraph here, and each such statement easily deserves an hour or more of discussion.

If I had to sum it up, Gray seems to be saying that the quest for immortality is a fool's errand. Paradoxically, immortality would really be a kind of death. Nothing that lasts forever can really be "alive." Because birth, change, and death -- the whole life cycle -- is integral to life.

Here's a taste of the paradoxes that Gray brings up toward the end:

"Matter can be intelligent without ever being conscious (think of flocks of birds and ant colonies) while conscious beings may be so unintelligent that they destroy themselves."

"The notion that humans can attain immortality by merging in a cosmic consciousness is in any case muddled. In the theories of Myers and Lunacharsky the individual mind was absorbed into a world-soul, while in Kurzweil's it is uploaded in to a virtual universe. In both cases a speck of humanity becomes part of a cloud of consciousness or information. Whatever survives, the individual is extinguished. Death is not conquered but triumphs unnoticed."

I especially appreciated some of the powerful and poetic writings that Gray quotes from toward the end of the book. In particular, a long passage from Edward Thomas's "The Icknield Way" (1913) stunned me with its melancholy beauty. This, along with a description of Casablanca during WWII, by Gyorgy Faludy, added dimension and pathos to Gray's thesis.

[Dat-Dangk Vemucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents a really refreshing and interesting perspective.
According to Gray 'progress' is wholly illusory, based on the delusion that there is some future thing we are working towards as individuals and as a society. Scientific practices towards this imagined future are secular versions of the religious denial of death, the false claim that there is something more than this life that we can aim for. But as Gray convincingly argues every step taken to escape this life only worsens conditions for all of us. The religious delusion of an afterlife has condemned countless generations of misery in this life preparing for an imaginary afterlife. The scientific delusion of escape (whether through spiritualism in the victorian age, cryonics in the 80s, or virtual immortality in the cloud according to modern ideas of "singularity") has had even more devastating consequences, primarily by creating unsustainable technologies which have irreparably damaged the planets life support system and almost certainly condemned future generations to extinction. By living in denial of our mortality we have created a world where we commit genocides against undesirables in the name of a future-perfect society, where we destroy the planet on the false presumption that we will simply find another one.

This book is a strong rebuttal to the ideas put forward by Thomas Moynihan in his similar book "X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered its own Extinction." There Moynihan argued that we must keep attempting to escape death, the planet, even the heat death of the universe, and that any opposition to these aims is a neo-Luddite reactionism holding back our full potential.
Gray on the other hand is more realistic. Not only does basic common sense demonstrate that we are not advancing towards the defeat of death (like those poor saps who had themselves frozen back in the fifties hoped) but our efforts to do so create more novel forms of suffering for people who are actually living now. Medical advancement has created artificially prolonged lives, the advent of hideous new forms of suffering such as mass dementia and superbugs which rapidly evolve to resist our antibiotics. The spread of humans over the planet has increased mere life expectancy at the cost of destroying the biosphere and caging us within a prison of our own making. The idea of colonizing the future (or the afterlife) in a similar way, even it were possible, wouldn't be desirable given our history.

Ultimately Gray argues that we need to accept our temporariness, both as individuals and as a species, to live in the present and not in an imaginary future. Progress isn't possible and the future will not accommodate us forever, but that doesn't exempt us from being kind and making this small moment of Being as meaningful and pleasant for as many people as possible. Gray points out the zen of cats and Buddhist monks as ways to live well. He also comes out strongly against the likes of Richard Dawkins and other anti-theists despite his own critique of religious ideas. If they believe it and it gives them meaning and they ain't hurting anyone, why not let them be happy?

The book isn't perfect. The middle section is a mostly unrelated list of thousands of people killed under the Soviet regime. How exactly this is linked is unclear, and it seemed more like Gray having a Boomer moment - after all, most socialists don't approve of or wish to return to the USSR, so if this was meant to be a critique of distinctly socialist ideals of progress he needed to reset his aim.
There is also a lack of engagement with some of the ideas he glosses over. To pick another socialist example he makes the claim that Marx viewed the planet as a disposable resource for human exploitation. While this take isn't wrong it is a simplification of both Marx's thought and its interpretation in modern academia. Things like this made me question how thorough the scholarship was, which is the price to pay for the book's easy-to-read, pop-science style.

My other critique is that John Gray was a Thatcherite in the 80s and a New Labour shill in the 90s. This has no bearing on the book at all (except to explain his over-zealous boomer attitude toward socialism), just disappointing, especially given his clear passion for environmentalism, which is not typically high on the agenda for neoconservative free-market advocates nor centrist war profiteers like Blair.

Nonetheless, this was a good book and extremely refreshing to read in a time when the ideals of humanism are increasingly unviable. This is not a work of pessimism as many have said - it is a strongly pro-life work that encourages the reader to actually engage with the world, to be compassionate and maximize happiness for those in your life, to take stock of the little things which make up the real fabric of life.

Will definitely be seeking out more from this author, one of my favorite books I've read so far this year.

[john callahan · Rating 2 out of 5]

John Gray is a very prolific writer, a philosopher, and I suppose public intellectual. The amount of research he did for this book is enormous. However, it doesn't address the issue that it suggests it will: the use of science to cheat death.
The book addresses the activity of a group of British intellectuals associated in the late 19-century with the Society for Psychical Research, focusing on Henry Sidgwick and W. H. Myers. They did not, however, use science to try to cheat death: they were interested in proving that humans survived death in another world. Gray discusses at great length Sidgwick's philosophical work on the problem of morality and ethics if we do not survive our leaving of this world. Apparently, after these two died, many mediums began receiving messages from them through automatic writing. The amount of quasi-coherent verbiage produced was enormous, but there is no particular reason to believe that the messages were actually coming from the Summerland, or any other land.

I suspect that the story about these researchers and the messages they allegedly sent to mediums is a lot more interesting than Gray's treatment of them.

The second topic of the book is the belief in the process of making humans immortal that floated around pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. Gray discusses the "God-Builders," a group of Russian intellectual that included Anatoly Lunacharsky and Aleksandr Bogdanov, who worked on creating a religion-like practice that would support socialism; their efforts did not go beyond theorizing (Lunacharsky would later become the first People's Commissar of Education [or of Enlightenment, depending on your translation]). Gray also discusses the work of the early rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who believed and wrote about many occultish things, as well as space travel and making humans immortal.

Gray pays only the slightest attention to Nikolai Fedorov, the 19th century eccentric who promoted the imperative to use science to make humans immortal and to "resurrect the fathers," i.e., our ancestors. His influence on the belief that humans could be made immortal affected a lot more of the discussion of immortalization than Gray discusses. And it is frustrating to read Gray's comment that he expressed his ideas about Fedorov in another of his books, instead of having a more thorough discussion of his Fedorov's importance for having suggested that humans could achieve immortality through science.

The Immortalization Commission that gives the book its title was not aimed at immortalization in general; it was only the commission in charge of preserving revolutionary and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin's body after his 1924 death. While some involved in this commission may have entertained the idea that Lenin might one day be resurrected, it was not the purpose of the group.

Immortalization could be seen as part of the early Soviet effort to create a "new Soviet man," which was supposed to happen as the Soviet Union became more advanced. And it seems the Soviets used science (maybe) to attempt to make immortal Soviet citizens. It is reported by Katerina Clark that in the 1920s Soviet newspapers would report on advances in immortalization science; whether there actually were scientists working on the project or if the stories were made up is unknown to me (I don't have access to issues of Pravda that old). There also was once available online a short documentary made in the 1940s on reviving dead animals.

Gray does not discuss these matters at all, which was frustrating to me. For some reason, he finds it necessary to discuss the millions killed in the famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan and in the purges. His writing on these topics is really very good, but seems superfluous to his stated goal. And it is not at all clear why H. G. Wells' relations with Soviet leaders or some of his novels relate to Gray's stated topic. Finally, I do not see any connection between that topic and the life of one Moura, a Russian woman who worked for any number of Soviet conspirators in any number of schemes. She was a lover of Maxim Gorky, but told him the secret police told her to become just that. Despite all this intrigue, she actually died of old age. What she has to do with this book is unclear. (For more on her, see Nina Berberova's biography,Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg, translated by Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester, New York: New York Review Books, 2005.)

Gray concludes the book with a chapter called "Sweet Mortality," on how life is much better if we are mortal.

I know a little bit about the topic Gray addresses, at least when the argument turns to Russia. And I found the book to be a disappointment. Did I miss the point? Maybe, but the book could have used more editing, revision, and rethinking.

[Andres · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muy pero muy interesante. Este libro es una mezcla de intento filosófico por explicar la necesidad de algunos por darle razón a la muerte y al más allá, con mucha historia detallada de períodos específicos en que el tema fue crucial en círculos de poder o científicos. Destaco el inicio victoriano del libro, superior.
Es un ensayo lleno de información, donde los hechos van dando la pauta más que los comentarios o análisis del autor. Muy literario en su escritura el señor Gray.
Entretenido de leer. A varios seguramente le molestará la exposición de hechos terribles, o risibles, a la luz del hoy, pero a quién le importa.
¿Cómo ha sido enfrentada la racionalización de la muerte y una a veces idealizada inmortalidad? Una amplia pregunta La belleza de la vida, y la incontrolable realidad de la muerte.
Con razón hay varios fans de Gray dando vuelta por ahí. Buena experiencia.

[Dina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okuduğum kitabın dipnotunda görüp merak etmiştim. Merakıma teşekkür ediyorum. Başlangıçta ölümsüzlük merakını İngiliz ve Rus perspektifinden sunacağını düşündüm fakat keskin bir çizgi oluşturmadı. Gorki, Wells, Mauro, Stalin, Lenin etrafında dönen bir hikaye parçası okumuş gibiyim. Bunun yanında insanın Tanrı yerine insanlığı koyma çabasına, ölüm kaçışına, öteki dünya bakışına az da olsa ışık tuttuğunu düşünüyorum. Okült okuma meraklısı olduğum için sevdim tabii. Meraklısına çok şey katacaktır.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewers are rights in complaining that the title makes no sense. This work is extremely interesting and fits well with Gray's other works/themes, at times expands on them, but the original description is misleading, especially for someone looking for a work more like Homo Deus.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not what I expected but excellent. Deals with the occult amongst the Bolsheviks, automatic writing, H.G. Wells, Gorky, and the quest amongst materialists to either prove life after death or attain immortality through science. A weird set of topics joined together but somehow it works.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, John Gray gives the full attention to the ultimate standard of Progress: cheating death. For the initiated, there are few new ideas here, but fans of Gray's work may still find passages that reward their time.

The book is cut into three distinct but related sections. Of the three, the last section is by far the shortest, but the nearest to my expectations. I'd been interested in the John Gray perspective on Ray Kurzweil, whose his ilk and ideology seem to me indicative of the times. There was little explicit examination of that but what there was was articulate and thought provoking, especially in the context of the main portions of the book.

The first section is on Victorian period elites seeking knowledge of the afterlife by a bizarre interweaving of occult rituals via pseudoscience and psychology. Having only read Heresies, which compiles articles written for The New Statesman, I found Gray's writing more elegant here than before. His biographical renderings of F.W.H. Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Arthur Balfour were usually interesting, if not exactly riveting. They did serve to provide a human dimension to all of the idealizing about life, death and afterlife. That the occult was popular with many Victorians is common knowledge now. Their methods were almost comical, of course, but at times their earnestness was heart breaking. I found myself having more sympathy for them the stranger and more desperate their quest became. Gray examines their ideas and their mission articulately and respectfully, never dismissing them out of hand simply because they were silly or unconventional. What comes clear is that, behind all the seances and automatic writing there is a human longing quite universal and not at all abstruse.

The second section explores similar themes of conquering death through technology and a bastardized science-as-religion in Communist Russia. I found it less interesting, and often digressive. The Stalinist mission of "progress" at all costs certainly holds relevant lessons for Gray's topic here, but the biographical bits about H.G. Wells and especially Moura Budberg seemed overdrawn and largely irrelevant despite their being interesting characters. The meander through the perils of living in Russia during this period seemed unjustified, given that it's all been explored so much more thoroughly in many, many other books. Perhaps the ideology that Gray discusses here has it's most extreme historical example in this period, but there were many other factors involved in these atrocities that he can hardly explore here. I got the feeling he lingered on certain bits here just to give the book a little more meat.

The last section was a short but superb conclusion in which Gray gives his own ideas center stage. I have my particular bones of contention with his philosophy, but this is hardly the place to get into that. One never agrees entirely with any writer, and it's usually beneficial to be at odds on at least a few things. The two previous stories present humanity desperately seeking certainty and control, loathe to tolerate long any conditions that undermine the feelings of either. Should those Victorian characters seem distant from the 21st century, Gray reminds us that the same messianic view of technology is alive and well today in many new forms. The methods may have changed, but the mission bears frightening resemblance to the justifications that spawned the follies and horrors of the past. In the quest for absolute control over nature and fate, the human race has proven itself capable terrors our ancestors would never have imagined. Gray also makes the excellent point, so often ignored or downplayed by the new atheists, that science and progress have been just as guilty of engendering these terrors as religion ever was. Perhaps more so, when one considers that the greatest calamities of the twentieth century(which also happen to be the greatest in recorded history) happened at the hands of progressive regimes.

I've often felt that if our progress in the sciences demonstrates one thing for sure, it's the ultimate ignorance and finitude of human beings. Every new truth discovered undermines a previous one, and yet we remain so sure of ourselves. Contradiction and even ignorance are nothing to be ashamed of, once you recognize how unavoidable they are. In fact, the recognition of it allows for humility, and the retention of a sense of mystery and curiosity. The last portion of this book quotes from several poems, which are complimented by Gray's own occasionally eloquent prose. It reminds us that, as much as death may make life appear absurd at times, life without death would be at least as absurd. In a way, it's the ending that grants our lives with so much of their beauty and their novelty. Here, Gray says it better than I -

"Without seasons nothing ripens and drops to the ground, the leaves never change their colors nor the sky its vacant blue. Nothing dies, so nothing is born."

[Stephen Hull · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a puzzling book. The title (and particularly the subtitle) feels like an attempt after the fact to impose some sort of theme on what is a rather arbitrary set of pieces. At the same time it was a very enjoyable book which I'm glad I read, it being very well written and not overly long.

The book starts by looking at the psychic researchers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, as well as providing portraits of some quite interesting and curious people, gives a fascinating perspective on their work: in particular, the idea that their work wasn't rejecting science but quite the opposite, based on a firm belief that science was the way to establish the truth of existence beyond the grave. He unfortunatly assumes that the reader already has a good understanding of automatic writing and could perhaps be a bit more detailed when he explains the theory of cross-correspondences, but these are minor quibbles.

So far, so good. Then, in the next section he seems to start an entirely different book. He tells the story of Moura, the mistress of H.G. Wells, in particular her struggles for survival in Bolshevik Russia and the allure she had for Wells and others. The only connection that this has to the subtitle is that death is something she came close to but managed to evade on several occasions. He goes on to look at Wells and Maxim Gorky, another of Moura's conquests (though perhaps not sexually) and someone whom the author classifies as a God-builder, one of the Soviet intellectuals of that period whose philosophy of existence mixed occultism and science, although this feels more like a footnote to the chapter rather than its theme.

The author then looks more closely at the eary Soviet era, focusing on the government-imposed terrorism, the murder of literally millions in the cause of establishing the state. It briefly looks at the story behind the embalming of Lenin, and here he seems to return to what is supposed to be the theme of the book. In this case, the cheating of death refers to the firm belief that at some point Lenin could be brought back to life if his body were sufficiently well preserved.

Ths book is then concluded with a brief chapter which, once you get past the beautifully crafted prose, feels like little more than a rant against science, and not a terribly well-informed one. He sets up scentific straw men which he then knocks down. In particular, he attacks scientists' belief that they can discover the laws which govern the entire universe. The problem with this for me is that I don't personally know any scientist who actually believe this. He also (and to be fair I am simplifying here) suggests that the belief that there are patterns ot the universe is equivalent to theism, so for science to deny the existence of God is absurd.

He finally concludes the book with some reflections on how our entire existence is built upon our relationship to death. While this is perhaps not terribly new, it is nonetheless beautifully presented.

And that's for me the key thing about this book. I may be puzzled at why it contains what it does and I may be a bit exasperated at the author's various soapboxes, but I nevertheless enjoyed reading it a lot -- and that's far more important than anything else as far as I'm concerned.

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is divided into three parts. An Edwardian romp documenting an esoteric search for evidence of an afterlife by way of communicating with the dead using something called "automatic writing". Probably automatic writing is more likely evidence of the subconscious at work or a split-mind writing activity, if it was not in actual fact a fraud perpetrated on the gullible survivors of lost loves and untimely death. The search for evidence of life after death was certainly a folly, especially if you imagined you could get some cryptic messages, written by some Medium on behalf of the dead, to be proof. Subjective and wishful bias should have ended the project from the get go, but dreams of evidence for an afterlife are powerful draws to those caught between science and religion. (A false dichotomy discussed later in the book.) But there you have it, this was not an attempt to cheat death, but to "scientifically" prove death is not the end. This first part is an exceptionally detailed account of the "minds and times" that brought forth this doomed project. I found this part of the book tough going, perhaps because many of the characters are better known to the English, although I know Americans were as much devoted to the idea of communicating with the dearly departed. You can probably rush through the gossipy bits, with tedious details and endless accounts, that I don't think advanced the arguments John Gray is documenting in "The Immortaliztion Commission". The book picked up steam for me in part 2, with an account of a Soviet project to cheat death, by preserving the body of Lenin. This is actually the backdrop to a larger story about communism's attempt to reform humans into Demi-gods, and the results of thinking the ends justify the means... a story all too familiar with any ideology that uses social engineering to bend human nature. The best part of this book is the ending 3rd part, where Gray argues that humanity's quest to be divorced from the forces of nature, that all animals encounter, including the recent efforts of science's attempts to cheat death and to make our individual consciousness immortal in cyberspace, are equally dubious ventures. The rewards of the 3rd section are well worth some slower parts. Full of fascinating characters you know and many you may have never have heard of, this is a fantastic book, poetic at times, that shakes the tree of knowledge in science, religion and occultism, with plenty of rotten fruit falling to the ground. Embracing the reality of a final end, both to humankind and with each individual's death, John Gray returns to what we all struggle with, accepting we only have now.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointing and somewhat of a slog, the book suffers not so much from a lack of or poor quality of ideas (though I have disagreements with those), but the lackluster execution of the prose which surrounds them. The first chapter details occultism amongst the upper classes of victorian/edwardian England, and consists mainly of charmless page after page of expositional detail about people who may not have been particularly interesting in themselves, and are rendered even duller here. All this is meant to illustrate the difficulties a largely protestant society had coming to terms with the accelerating scientific revolution and the devastating implications of darwinian thought, but is excruciatingly lumpen and inadequate to the task.
The second chapter eschews any adherence to the central thesis of the book in lieu of Page after page of regurgitated facts about the horror of the soviet Union. The details are excoriating, but widely covered elsewhere, and are repeated here without any real attempt to frame them within the critique of the modes of thought that he takes issue with.
The third chapter takes the concept of progress more firmly in its sights, specifically with the modern belief in science as a conduit for progress. Whilst this is the most substantive chapter of the book in terms of critique of ideology, it is also the shortest, less than a third of the length of the other chapters, and also attempts a summing up and synthesis of the previous chapters, and a conclusion and send off. Therefore the more weighty questions and attempt to find their historical origins, logical implications, and intellectual flaws (and perhaps a better alternative system) are given over to very few pages of text.
More than anything it seems that Gray had been reading a bunch of books about the occult in victorian England, a bunch of books about soviet atrocities, and wrote an essay about each which tried to shoehorn his standard reproachment of the idea of progression and it's various manifestations. Each of these essays could well have been extended to a whole book, but as it is they remain self-serving rehashes of Gary's old (and repeating) material against a paltry background of poorly painted character sketches and shallow historical investigation.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a very nice article about the post-Coronavirus world by John Gray and enjoyed the Bolshevik-era comparisons. As far as my knowledge of human tragedy goes, Russian history is a blackhole and I've been sitting on a 1000pg Stalin biography for many months now. This quick 180pp came as a welcome foot in the door, tying in both my interest in that era of Russia and a general search for a more refined view of theism for the 21st century to replace a lifetime of unquestioned atheism. The first third of the book wasn't very encouraging and I flicked past it very quickly, but when it got to HG Wells, Gorky, and the Bolsheviks, I was hanging on every word. In hindsight it was a good idea not to know too much about this book in advance, because I don't believe I got answers specifically to the questions it is purportedly about, but I got many other answers I didn't know I was looking for and that's certainly a much bigger joy.

Notes
Secular humanism (August Comte, Mill), Victorian thinkers thought theism could leave and humanism would leave moralism intact. But why morality instead of beauty, pleasure etc? Like Greeks, for whom ethics was living good life of beauty and art. Nietzsche thought theism and morality was linked.

Nietzsche’s Ubermensch and occult’s version of science revealing deep truths captured Bolshevik imagination. Believers of Darwin, they couldn’t reconcile evolution with man’s special place, so instead shifted to Lamarckianism. Lysenko head of Soviet science.

Lysenko believed in self-making, like Stalin. Human organisms are born, but people are created.

Gorky supported idea of remaking humanity. Have to shed moralities of experimenting on humans.

300,000 prison laborers finished White Sea Canal in just 20 months. 1/3rd died.

For Marx, the natural world had no intrinsic worth. Only by being imprinted with human meaning could the Earth acquire value. Praised British rule for destroying village life in India. Gorky: 35M famine, half-savage, stupid illiterate villagers will die out, leaving new tribe of literate, intelligent and vigorous.

The Trust, ‘anti-Bolshevik’ sham created by Dzerzhinsky to convince ‘White Russians’ (anti-Bolshevik movement, emigres) and West that there was powerful anti-Soviet regime inside Russia. Funds poured in.

Dostoevsky big fan of Fedorov, Russian Orthodox leader: human race must transform soulless pointless universe into one informed by spirit, reason and will of all resurrected generations. Defeat death through technology.

Krasin, God-builder influenced by Fedorov. Negotiated with Lloyd George to remove British trade embargo that might have destroyed Soviet during economic collapse after civil war. Sold all art objects etc to West, raised equivalent of $160B

Stalin wanted Lenin embalmed, to use Russian Orthodox beliefs of immortal saints to help the regime. Funeral commission for Lenin was called Immortalization Commission. Cubic tomb, geometric shape transcended our reality.

Lenin continued to be treated like a living person. 1973 Politburo reissue of cards, first card was given to Lenin. Boris Yeltsin’s proposal to finally bury the body was protested down.

Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, first head of Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), admired Jacobins ferocity during French Revolution. Use of terror to remake humanity.

Stalin took Dzerzh’s idea that aim of revolutionary isn’t to alleviate suffering but to create a man who cannot suffer, and put his own spin to it. Weakness/Stupidity are vices. Virtue is power.

Show-trials with strangely convincing fake-confessions, engineered by student of Konstantin Stanislavsky who revolutionized acting from old theater-style melodrama to method-acting, which was appropriated by secret police. Trials totally fooled the western journalists.

Idea of scientific progress is a religious idea, salvation against evil. Dawkins/Huxley say science subverts god. But Balfour et al say science’s search for universal laws already assumes existence of god via existence of universal laws.

Science, Occult agree that world operates by laws. Science wants to find natural laws. Occult wants to find secret laws that supersede natural laws. But why should there be laws at all. Theism says divine mind of which we are imperfect copies.

Hume’s idea of god, having created universe, either doesn’t have anything more to do with it or even forgot it exists.

We don’t need to believe in a scientific theory, we can simply use it while it works, and discard it once it stops working or when we get something better.

But even religion isn’t about belief, it’s about practice - ritual and meditation.

Before Christianity, once we got tired of life we let ourselves die. Now through religion and secular means we’ve created a taboo against our own deaths, idealizing immortality and after-life.

Modern science begins not with elevating rationality but questioning it. Elevating empiricism even if its results are counter intuitive.

Augustine etc knew genesis was myth allegory, but when science grew stature genesis became more explanatory in reaction.

Late 19th century Victorian Britain flourishing uranian love scene. Bloomsbury group. Even Walt Whitman had pederasty poems removed from leaves grass later editions.

Helios lets son Phaeton drive sun chariot. Horses feel weak driver and go wild. Zeus kills Phaeton. Metaphor for our hold on our own minds.

Joseph Conrad loved humanity but no hope of changing it. Thought HG Wells didn't care for humanity but wanted to change it nonetheless.

HG Wells racist extraordinaire and social Darwinist: swarms of black and brown and yellow. The world is a world, not a charitable insritution, so they will have to die out.

Struggled with contradictory ideas of social Darwinism, rationality, doomed mankind, biological tyranny.

Time machine: mankind wiped out. War of worlds: humble bacteria not man that inherits earth, but likely the martians. Island dr.moreau: creates man out of beast, how to tell difference between him and any other man. Star begotten: martians seed intelligence on earth to grow themselves using terran bodies.

Gorky: every year more thought-energy accumulates in world, like light/electricity will effect things one day we can't imagine.

God building - bogostroitel'tsvo that attracted Bolsheviks. True revolutionary defies not society but humanity.

[Theodoros Vassiliadis · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Gray a rather interesting personality who had been a counsel for the
Thatcher administration , a man that had theorized on liberalism as a field he knew lot
and furthermore to the other political corps , had withdrew from the area to reside in LSE
elaborating in political theory initially and orderly to the mingling of religion and politics ,which
was a main focal point to many of his following books.
This title remains loyal to the pronouncement of the book jacket ;
The struggle to cheat death .
In it one can see the attempts in contemporary and post Victorian Britain , communist USSR , present times - of groups or individuals through spirituality , magic , religion , sciences and the AI to engender an everlasting human existence through multiple interpretations of death and the after-life by seizing the opportunities that arise from their knowledge .
The half or totally failing attempts are pictured and elaborated while the battle is not manifested over yet .
Gray is delightful while at the same time brings attributes unknown to the wide reading men of the inner psychological tendencies of the powerful of the world

[Ryan Murdock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This time, Gray turns his lens on attempts to evade our inevitable, inescapable fate.

From seances and scientific attempts to prove the existence of an afterlife in Victorian England to the Bolshevik's attempts to evade death through science, to the most recent talk of cryogenic suspension and uploading our consciousness into computers, each of these movements sought to place humans above or somehow beyond nature, and in doing so, created untold misery for both the individuals involved and the societies that were the subjects of their experiments.

"As secularization lost momentum," he writes, "the search for scientific evidence of the afterlife has been largely abandoned; but the attempt to cheat death continues. The hope of life after death has been replaced by the faith that death can be defeated."

This was an interesting expansion of his core themes through examining a specific thread of history.

As Gray has shown in all his work, "The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are."

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the strangest books I've read in a long time, and one of the most intriguing. From Bolshevik crucifixions to Darwin's attendance at a seance, there's a bit of everything here.

It's basically an extended meditation on mortality. The first half is rooted in late Victorian England and a group of well-educated upper class folks who engaged in more than a decade of automatic writing experiments to prove that consciousness transcended death. This was a desperate response to Darwin, whose theory of evolution, they feared, threatened to destroy the meaning of existence.

The second half of the book looks at the Russian revolution and what Gray argues were the occult or 'religious' motivations of that bloody effort to make gods out of men. The Immortalization Commission was the name given to the committee established to create Lenin's tomb, and those who went to such great lengths to embalm and preserve the corpse.

[Sam Eccleston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting look at secular attempts to achieve immortality. Gray's analysis is penetrating, unmasking in the last chapter the pretensions of secular ideologies to an un-adulterated basis in rationality and facticity. His conclusion is, perhaps refreshingly, un-waveringly pessimistic, and one is left with a sense of the honesty and consistency of his approach to critical thought. His exploration of the historical and philosophical subject matter is fascinating and his prose is compelling, but I am sometimes left with the feeling that his exploration of the topic could have been much more rigorous and detailed without losing any of the appeal of the text, and that he occasionally dismisses ideas he doesn't endorse too easily, or propounds what is actually a rather controversial historical opinion as if it were the object of consensus. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating read.

[José Uría · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aunque tiene momentos muy buenos, y goza de las virtudes y defectos propios de este autor, el gran problema que tiene este ensayo es la completa desconexión de las dos líneas argumentales principales. Y es que no sería tan difícil conectar las historias de los constructores de Dios soviéticos y los investigadores psíquicos victorianos. Quizá el problema es que, a pesar de todo, Gray es demasiado mainstream para encontrar un único hilo conductor, sea desde una perspectiva materialista u ocultista, que el tema se presta a ambas.

En su momento la lectura de este libro fue una pequeña decepción. Menos mal que su origen fue el de la biblioteca y no una compra. Quizá guste a otros lectores, pero yo no lo recomiendo. No obstante sí que tiene algunos pasajes intensos e interesantes que consiguen que al menos le aporte dos estrellas.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really great book about the human quest for immortality and why it is so absurd. I loved the mixture of politics, philosophy and history, focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, the United States, and Russia. The only part I didn't "get" was the very long description of the bloody extremes of the Russian revolution - I wasn't sure why Gray included that except maybe to hammer home that some of the humans who believed in a "Superman" were actually some of the worst humans.

[Justina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I have always loved John Gray's clearly thought out analyses of various situations and conditions but this one was full of information I had never come across. Very much worth the time it took to read it - I'll be thinking about the things in here for a long time to come. His take on science and the way in which the individuals concerned in its development have pushed ideas as a result of their personal crises is intriguing and compelling.

[Pieter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides a helpful insight in the evil ideology of communism and the fact that the latter is more than a pure focus on radical redistribution. Communism is an attempt to redesign mankind, to engineer the soul. Without any success but with dreadful consequences for society.

But to be honest, I was hoping to read more about the different ways scientists and would-be scientists try to escape from death, especially since modern generations have abandoned God.

[Doreen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Peculiar book about the search for immortality in different forms and milieus, including late 19thC scientists investigating the possibility of an afterlife from profoundly personal motives and the preservation by embalming of Communist leaders against the possibility that the secret of restoring life might be found in the future.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great meditation on the enlightenment/modernist obsessions with overcoming death and what the says about how philosophical and scientific efforts have come to be a stand-in for religion amongst the same type of people who, despite claiming secularism, are nothing but the same frightened peasants which once weekly flocked to church.

[Daniel B-G · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not Gray’s best effort, not even close. It feels like he had a subject, but then not enough data to cover that subject so spread it really thin. This is a shame, as I think there are other areas that could have been brought into scope for the book, if examples were taken from the 20th century as a whole and not just the late Victorian and early 20th.

[Steve Redhead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all of Gray's recent books, a very good guide to problems with humanism, religion and science.

[Joanna b · Rating 4 out of 5]

This reads like John Gray channeling Adam Curtis. It's a strange story of Victorian and Edwardian occultists, attempts cheating death, and horrible genocide all in one. Odd but engrossing.

[Larry Koester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to know what to say about this book. Interesting if you have thought about the subject. Makes some good points. But leaves me flare.