Waiting for the Last Bus Read online

  The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

  The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

  Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

  And after many summers dies the swan.

  Me only cruel immortality

  Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms . . .

  A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream

  The ever-silent spaces of the East . . . 51

  Imagine what that would be like. Actually, it doesn’t take much imagination, because the karma of modern medicine keeps too many people alive long after any pleasure or meaning has gone from their lives. Sentenced to years of mournful dissolution, many of them long to be blown out like a candle.

  Sceptics are usually too quick to reject the narratives of religion, especially if they believe them to be as unlikely as the multiple elaborations of Hinduism. They fail to realise that they are one of the ways in which the human mind gives form to its fears and anxieties. That’s why the ideas of karma and samsara can carry meaning for people who continue to take them seriously long after they have ceased to take them literally. And it’s why the word karma has become shorthand for understanding important aspects of human behaviour. Our acts have consequences not only for ourselves but for others. And they can reverberate down the ages. Because our fathers ate sour grapes yesterday, our teeth are set on edge today.

  The soul’s wandering through samsara may be a weari-some prospect, but the alternative offered by the other two big religions in the world is, if anything, even more depressing. Hinduism promises an ultimate escape from existence after many false starts. However long it takes, one day our candle will be blown out because, in Hinduism, God or ultimate reality is infinitely patient. In the words of the poet A.S.J. Tessimond:

  He gives you time in heaven to do as you please,

  To climb love’s gradual ladder by slow degrees

  Gently to rise from sense to soul, to ascend

  To a world of timeless joy, world without end.52

  That’s not how it goes in Christianity and Islam. According to these religious systems, the human soul is a one-shot deal that is heavy with eternal consequences. What we make of ourselves in the single life we get on earth determines where and how we’ll spend it in the next. We don’t get to come back again and again till we finally achieve a pass and go on to the University of Nirvana. Our one life is an examination in which no re-sits are permitted. Heaven is the name of the destination for those who pass; hell for those who fail.

  Though it takes their existence for granted, Christianity’s scripture, the New Testament, is sparing in its descriptions of heaven and hell, a reserve that was more than compensated for by later preachers and theologians, as we’ll see. Where the New Testament was reticent, the Qur’an was clear from the beginning. It contains a number of chapters or ‘surahs’ in which heaven and hell are described. The most famous is Surah 56, On the Day of Judgement. Heaven or paradise is a Garden of Delight that might have been designed for the exclusive enjoyment of the male of the human species. As a reward for their sufferings on earth, there are springs of wine on tap that don’t intoxicate or cause a hangover, and beautiful, wide-eyed young women are available for their enjoyment. That’s what’s prepared for those the Qur’an calls Companions of the Right, the good. It’s a very different deal for those it calls the Companions of the Left, the wicked. It’s hell for them, ‘mid burning winds and boiling waters and the shadow of a smoking blaze . . .’53

  In both Christianity and Islam, just as heaven is a place of unending joy so is hell a place of unending torment. Hell is pain without any hope of respite or release. It is a furnace that never fails. Here’s a description of its chemistry from a sermon the Irish writer James Joyce heard when he was a schoolboy:

  . . . the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.54

  Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church’s greatest theologian, claimed that one of the attractions of heaven was that it had a convenient balcony from which its citizens could watch the torments of the damned down below: ‘The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, so that their bliss will be that much greater.’55 But Aquinas was also the theologian who offered a way to avoid hell with the invention of purgatory, the spiritual laundry system we thought about in Chapter One. This is an example of how the more thoughtful religions have been good at finding ways to soften their own doctrinal excesses. There have even been Christian theologians who believed that while hell existed in theory, in practice it had never acquired any inhabitants.

  It is worth noting here that those who invented these post-mortem destinations were never in agreement about the timings involved in the transitions between them. Some gave the impression that at death the transfer was immediate. One moment you were alive in this world. You died, and the next moment you faced the judge who would immediately determine your forthcoming destination – hell, purgatory or heaven. This is still the official position of the Roman Catholic Church. It teaches that just as the soul was created at the instant of conception so at the instant of death it immediately faces judgement. This is why it continues to warn the faithful against dying unconfessed and unprepared.

  There is an older tradition that saw judgement not as an individual but as a group process. All the world’s dead would hibernate in their graves until the Day of Judgement. The Last Trumpet would sound, their atoms would reassemble into resurrected bodies, and they would stand to hear their fate. The belief that the bodies as well as the souls of the dead would rise from their graves to be judged on the Last Day had a profound effect on Christian burial customs. Cremation was a problem because it made the re-assembling of the body hard to imagine. That was why in the Roman Empire, under the influence of Christianity, by the fifth century cremation had been abandoned. It was not revived in the West till the nineteenth century. Even then it took Christian churches a long time to accept it. The Roman Catholic Church did not permit its use till 1963. Uneasiness about it persists, reflected in a Vatican decree in 2016 forbidding Catholics from keeping the ashes of their departed at home, scattering them in nature or dividing them between members of the family. Ashes are only to be kept in holy places such as churches or cemeteries.

  If you are confident in your religious faith, these inconsistencies may not trouble you, but what are those of us who can’t take them literally to make of them? A good way to think about religion is as a Rorschach test that maps humanity’s psychic geography. It reveals us to ourselves. So the question is whether religion causes or just expresses and gives form to our obsession with death. The answer seems to be a bit of both. Religion emphasises our fear of death in order to assuage it. It frightens in order to save. Because it takes death very seriously and thinks we should as well. Catholicism has been pastorally more skilful at managing these complexities than the severer versions of Protestantism. Catholicism’s descriptions of hell were terrifying, but they were always followed by helpful directions on how to avoid it. And the reassurance of their Last Rites took a lot of the anguish out of dying. That’s why Catholic Army Chaplains were thought to be more effective than Protestants in ministering to dying soldiers in No Man’s Land in the First World War. They had a rite, a formal mechanism of mercy and forgiveness that reassured the dying in their last moments in terrible circumstances. I have ministered these rites myself and seen the peace they can bring at the end. I have sent good friends into the arms of a merciful God I was no longer sure I believed in. And I was convinced not only of the efficacy but of the honesty of what I was doing. I was not there to ventilate my doubts but to help the dying find the strength to cast off and take the
tide that was pulling them out.

  I have also been helpless to assuage the fear of a dying friend because the dread that paralysed him allowed me no way to console him. Brought up in a strict Calvinist sect, on his death bed he reverted to the Predestinarianism he had been schooled in as a child. God, he had been taught, predestined some to heaven and some to hell, not for any good or ill they had done but simply according to his mysterious will. How could he be certain what God intended for him, heaven or hell? I tried to batter through the fear that gripped him to open him to the loving God of the parables of Jesus, but he died in fear not in hope.

  Whatever we make of the different responses of religion to death and what may follow, they show that from the beginning death has obsessed humanity. It continues to obsess us. It is what the theologian Paul Tillich called an ‘ultimate concern’. It comes with being human. We can’t help wondering about it. But in our day it is no longer just religion that offers us a way to transcend death and achieve everlasting life. Modern science has now entered the game. But there’s a big difference between its approach and religion’s. It is no longer God who offers us eternal life; it is science-based technology. And when it comes, it won’t be lived in heaven. It will happen right here on earth. The plan is to conquer or outrun death so completely that we’ll postpone it indefinitely. It will be immortality on the instalment plan. The scientists who are working on it tell us they are not there yet, but they’re speeding along nicely. Meanwhile, for those of us unfortunate enough to die before death has been finally conquered, the best bet is to have our corpses preserved by freezing them – cryo-preserved in the jargon – so that science can resurrect them when it has perfected the technology. It is reminiscent of religious eschatology, but without the supernatural element. The last trump won’t be blown by the Archangel Gabriel. A guy in a white coat will do it. It will be a secular salvation, the only one that’ll work, according to its evangelists, because we are alone in the universe, and if we want to live forever we’ll have to see to it ourselves.

  So what will they do to us if we sign on for this eternal life plan? And where do we go to get it done? There are four companies that offer the service, three in the United States and one in Russia. The largest is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation near Phoenix in Arizona. Alcor offers two procedures to customers who have signed up for its version of eternal life. In the basic procedure, which costs $200,000, Alcor’s technicians drain the blood from the corpse – ‘patient’ in their lexicon – and replace it with anti-freeze and other organ-preserving chemicals. It is then lowered head first into a tank or flask filled with liquid nitrogen where it is preserved at a temperature of minus 190 Centigrade. There it will rest until secular resurrection day when it will be thawed and re-animated to emerge blinking into the world of whatever century it happens to be at the time. There’s a cheaper option at $80,000 called ‘neuro-only’, in which the head alone is preserved. The deal here is that on cryo-resurrection day the brain and the mind it carries will be digitally scanned, purged of any unnecessary neuro-junk, and the good stuff left will be uploaded onto an artificial body or robotic prosthesis where it will exist for ever unimpeded by the ills that mortal flesh is heir to.56

  It is reckoned that hundreds of people have already availed themselves of the opportunity and hang suspended in cold storage, waiting for resurrection day, some of them having taken their pets along with them for the ride. And it is reported that several thousand people still alive have signed up for the process and paid their deposit. Doubtless, cryo-preservation will soon be an option in private health insurance plans, but it may not be the way to go in the long run. Better than dying and being cryo-preserved till resurrection day would be not to die at all or to live so long that you’d hardly know the difference. That’s what the Founder and Director of Alcor is betting on. In a conversation with the writer Mark O’Connell, he explained it like this:

  ‘I’m hoping to avoid having to be preserved. My ideal scenario is I stay healthy and take care of myself, and more funding goes into life-extension research, and we actually achieve longevity escape velocity.’ He was referring here to the scenario projected by the life-extension impresario Aubrey de Grey, a scientific advisor to Alcor, whereby for every year that passes, the process of longevity research is such that average human life expectancy increases by more than a year – a situation that would, in theory, lead to our effectively outrunning death.57

  Many scientists doubt the effectiveness of the processes on offer and believe that the brain will be irreversibly damaged by the anti-freeze pumped into it. And they think it highly unlikely that we will achieve enough ‘longevity escape velocity’ to outrun death forever. But it’s not the science that bothers me. Clever humans are constantly breaking the sound barrier of what’s achievable. So who is to say that bringing the frozen dead back to life will never happen? Or extracting the human mind from its perishable container of flesh and uploading it onto an imperishable machine? Or outrunning death so effectively that the CEO of Alcor will get the thousand years he desires? It’s what comes next that worries me. We are a clever and revolutionary species, and we have spent our history achieving the impossible. But we have been bad at anticipating the effect of our inventiveness, not only on our own health and happiness but also on the health of the planet that is – still – our only viable home. So it’s worth giving the anti-death movement some thought.

  We should certainly be concerned about the cryopreserved individuals who will emerge blinking into the light of a world that may be beyond their comprehension and for which they will be totally unprepared. I suppose it is possible that a government of the future might organise some kind of reception process for these refugees from the past. They might cluster them together in communities of the ex-dead, because who else could possibly understand their situation? But I wouldn’t bet on their getting a generous reception from the not-yet-dead section of the population. Humanity has a bad record when it comes to welcoming strangers, especially if they are considered strange or different. And strange these returnees from death will certainly be. If it works, the problems will soon pile up.

  How many cryonic cycles will be permitted for each individual? Will people keep dying and coming back? And what about the poor, how are they going to respond to yet another privilege only the wealthy will be able to afford? The process is expensive, so the poor will have to stay dead when they die or opt for an inferior resurrection deal, stoking rebellion at yet another form of discrimination. Traditional forms of discrimination based on race, gender, class and wealth are dangerous and unhealthy for humanity, but at least they are finite. Death cancels them. In the grave all are equal. But if even the grave can be bought off, in the future we will have created the ultimate form of inequality. And we already know from our history how inequality promotes violence and revolt. The more daring and angry among the poor will organise themselves into protest movements to raid the cryonic-storage facilities and drain the privileged dead of their anti-freeze. They are also likely to turn their violence on the new strangers in their midst, the cryonically resurrected. As well as becoming victims of social tumult, the ex-dead will almost certainly suffer from psychological problems that will present the psychiatric community with yet another intractable human sorrow. Suicides will become epidemic amongst them, the ultimate irony: death as the friend of the ex-dead.

  But the danger will go far beyond the pain of individuals and communities. Suppose we muddle towards some sort of resolution of the problems the ex-dead will create for society. Suppose we slowly come to an accommodation with the reality of regiments of the ex-dead returning to life in our midst either in their old bodies or transplanted into machines. We will have succeeded in fashioning a global boa constrictor that will slowly squeeze us all to death. Our already depleted planet will find it impossible to sustain an exponentially growing population of humans. And while the rest of humanity suffocates, the wealthy will gate themselves into fortified enclaves while they
prepare rockets to get them off earth onto palatial space satellites from which they’ll watch the disintegration of our once-hospitable blue planet – all because of our denial of death.

  I have delivered an apocalyptic scenario here, but it is mirrored in many of the dystopian fictions of our time, artists being our most reliable futurists. That’s why it is worth contemplating where our denial of death might yet take us. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a prayer that was intended to instil a sense of realism in the way we manage human affairs. God, grant us the courage to change what can be changed; the serenity to accept what cannot be changed; and the wisdom to know the difference. A new clause might be added to the prayer to give it more relevance to the theme of this book: God, keep us from the folly of interfering too much with the imperatives and contingencies of nature. We are a clever but not always a wise species, so our battle not only to delay death but to reverse it may turn out to be the greatest folly in the long record of folly that is human history. If we refuse the paradox that it is through death that life is constantly renewed, we may end in the paradox that our denial of death has made life unbearable. It will take all our wisdom to help us navigate the difference.

  ***

  Thinking about these rival eschatologies, the secular and the supernatural, the scientific or the religious, makes me wonder what it is that prompts us to want eternal life in either form. Is it a kind of fear? Not wanting to die too soon or before I am ready to leave the party I can understand, but to fear leaving it? What’s that about? I can understand the fear of death that religion might induce, given its descriptions of what might happen next. But why would unbelievers who reject any idea of an afterlife also fear death? And we know they do. We know that fear of death is an entirely ecumenical emotion. It is found in unbelievers as well as believers. The novelist Julian Barnes is one of them. He is an unbeliever who fears death and has written about it. Here’s what he says in his book, Nothing to be Frightened Of: