A Theology of Immortality

November 1

A Theology of Immortality

Rev. Linda Simmons

In Mountain View, California, Aubrey de Grey is on a crusade to inspire the world to embark on a scientific quest to eliminate aging and extend healthy lifespan indefinitely. It is a difficult job because he considers the world to be in a “pro-ageing trance,” happy to accept that aging is unavoidable, when he believes the reality is that it’s simply a “medical problem” that science can solve.[1]

His claims about the possibilities (he has said the first person who will live to 1,000 years is probably already alive), and some unconventional and unproven ideas about the science behind ageing, have long made de Grey unpopular with mainstream academics studying aging.

But says de Grey “There is an increasing number of people realising that the concept of anti-ageing medicine that actually works is going to be the biggest industry that ever existed by some huge margin and that it just might be foreseeable.”[2]

A digital copy of your brain turned into a low-cost, lifelike avatar, which doesn’t age. That’s the vision of Dmitry Itskov, a thirty-something Russian multi-millionaire internet mogul who founded an online media company New Media Stars. His 2045 Initiative, so-called for the year he hopes to complete it, aims to “create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality.”[3]

Though not from Silicon Valley himself, his ideas draw on those of Ray Kurzweil, a prominent futurist, who is director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil has predicted that scientists will one day find a way to download human consciousness, no longer necessitating the need for our bodies.[4]

What would this mean to us, to live another 50 or even 100 years? How about the ability to chose when to die? From where would compassion, interconnection and interdependence be woven if we needed no one else to survive, if even the environment was optional?

These questions also arise in the work of a project called Revive and Restore that works to revive lost species. Their mission statement:Thanks to the rapid advance of genomic technology, new tools are emerging for conservation. Endangered species that have lost their crucial genetic diversity may be restored to reproductive health.

It may even be possible to bring some extinct species back to life. The DNA of many extinct creatures is well preserved in museum specimens and some fossils. Their full genomes can now be read and analyzed. That data may be transferable as working genes into their closest living relatives, effectively bringing the extinct species back to life. The ultimate aim is to restore them to their former home in the wild.

Molecular biologists and conservation biologists all over the world are working on these techniques. The role of Revive & Restore is to help coordinate their efforts so that genomic conservation can move ahead with the best current science, plenty of public transparency, and the overall goal of enhancing biodiversity and ecological health worldwide.[5]

This sounds great at first glance right? Bring back extinct species and offer new genetic codes to those that are in danger of extinction?

But as Paul Kingsnorth in his Orion Magazine Article, In the Black Chamber: On Seeing the Sacred in Naturewrites,if we recreate a woolly mammoth, which would be done by genetically modifying the genes of elephants, where will they roam? They are inhabitants of the great steppes and plains that look quite different now than when they last roamed here. And rather than modifying the genes of elephants to create another species so that we can pretend that our live styles and desires have not had huge consequences on life, why not protect the much endangered elephant?[6]

Am I being a luddite, afraid of the changes science can engineer as so may of us became after the lessons of eugenics in Nazi prison camps, the crazed and horrific effort to create the perfect race? Is this the future of our world, one in which consequences do not have a direct relationship to actions on fragile ecosystems as we engineer ecosystems, including those of our very bodies, into that which do not react and do not rely on interaction to survive?

What will that create in us, in our consciousness? If the decisions we make do not impact our health or the health of the ecosystems around us, who will be become?

Untied from nature, what will become of empathy, compassion, the understanding of the limits to our actions, the knowledge of excess and how it corrupts and poisons? As importantly, untied from the unknown, who will be be, in what will our humanity be rooted?

There is another movement afoot called the transhumanist movement. I thought that perhaps this was related to transcendentalism and would offer us all some unique understanding of interconnection and interdependence. But this movement is the opposite of transcendentalism.

In the Utne Reader article, Humanity the Remix, James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Westview, 2004) writes, “Today human intelligence, in the form of technology, is about to make possible the elimination of pain and lives filled with unimaginable pleasure and contentment." His goal, he says, is to convince fellow liberals that a pro-technology, democratic form of transhumanism is the way of the "Next Left."[7]

In More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (Broadway, 2005), Ramez Naam, a software engineer turned futurist, catalogs the new developments that could soon put designer bodies, minds, and children within our reach. He sees them as our next step in the human journey from cave art to the stars. "This hunger, this reach that exceeds our grasp, this aspiration to attain something 'which cannot be attained in earthly life' is the force that has built our world," he writes. "Never to say enough, always to want more -- that is what it means to be human."[8]

The transhumanists hate death, see death as the enemy, see our bodies as flesh puppets that are meant to be overcome. In this we hear echoes of religious fundamentalists who see the body as full of sin and temptation, something to be tamed with fear and fantasies of a next life in which we are finally immortal.[9]

What all of these movements have in common is a resistance and even denial of death. And what is the consequence of denying death? As I see it, what we cannot control, the mystery of it all, brings us the very core of our humanity: empathy

The lack of control that mortality ultimately insists upon, forces us to reach out to each other, nature, the world. Forces us from our smallness to imagine what it is to be another. If we are all cyborgs, if the environment is not affected by us nor we by it, if we no longer need each other survive, we will lose what is most sacred about humanity, our ability to be empathically compassionate.

But before I mine this, I would like to consider what postmodernism can teach us about immortality and life. In order to do that, let me briefly unwind the unwieldy terrain of postmodernism.

The modernist model believed that we could see an oppression and name it and then create a force of resistance to it from outside of it, untouched and unshaped by what we resisted. For instance, we could see the ills of capitalism and then become Marxists, operating outside of capitalism, able to see it in its entirety and create something that was not it.

The postmodernist model says that we are already shaped by every dominant ideology around us, that there is no outside to occupy. We cannot resist but that we can reconfigure is everything.

An example of this reconfiguration and the power of reconfiguration is given on the back of your order of service with the image and mission statement of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. What occupying the garb of Catholic sisters offers is a look at the judgment, punishment and fear that the ideology of Catholicism has enacted on queer bodies. When the faces of this oppression, the faces in this case of nuns (all of whom are certainly not punishing or oppressive), are reconfigured to make room for new identities, they can be forces for liberating the very people they once had power to silence.

Postmodernism suggests that identities are not something we contain or own but that which we express through our cultural activities, protests, lifestyles and community involvements. Less important are titles. More important is how we show up.

Jean Luc Nancy, a French Postmodern philosopher, writes of the singular plural which means that everything that is singular, or individual, can only know and be known through relationship. Said differently, self is a combination of all that we touch, see, create and are created by. Nothing make sense outside of this constant interaction/connection.[10]

What if rather than resisting what we have lost: species, parts of ourselves to the poisoning of the environment: what if rather than resisting these by recreating species, organs, life spans, environments: we were rather to assess the cost of what being human has been for us and make decisions about how to live with and within that cost, how to reconfigure our lives and our deaths so that we might gracefully come to terms with the limitation and holiness of our lives and our deaths? For this unknowing that death forces upon us, also forces us toward the holy, the unknowable, the ultimately fragile and tender.

If we can build human beings that are perfect, that do not suffer, that do not exist in relationship to their environments or actions, then who would be? Utterly lost is my assessment. It is our very frailty that makes us beautiful, holy, deeply unknowable and therefore always seeking, always reaching out to touch the unknown, to bring more light into this world, to allow each other more room to live and die.

I have been reflecting on fear of death as my brother faces terminal cancer and the end of his life approaches. I heard him say the other day, “We all die alone Linda.”

I thought about that for a long time. It is such a common phrase in our culture that I almost didn’t hear it, just nodded in agreement within myself. So true, I thought.

And then I reflected on the 20 or so people I have midwifed to their deaths, mostly strangers whose lives I become part of through work as a chaplain in various hospitals and here on island. And I recognized that almost everyone I have walked toward death has been accompanied, has in their consciousness been surrounded by the stories and people of their lives. They have reached out, had conversations, intelligible and unintelligible, said they are ready to go home, smiled, fought, laughed with others they have walked this path of life with who left it before them.

I do not believe we die alone. We die the way we live, singular and plural, only known to ourselves through our relationships, our interdependences, our connections. And then what happens when death takes hold? We cannot know. There again the unknown forces us back into each other’s arms, this life, this moment with tenderness, with love, with excruciating knowing that this time, so brief, is sacred.

Is the woolly mammoth the teacher we need right now to remind us of where we are and what relationships, actions, engagements and witnesses we need to create?

I venture to say that the teacher we need right now is our very mortality. The reconfiguring I think we need is a radical mortality. What if we did our own mortality bending, like the gender bending of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, naming mortality as something that is sacred, beautiful, full of possibility, that which connects us to our vulnerability, empathy, limitations and loss.

We avoid these things but what if they are the woolly mammoths we seek? What if we were to look into our mortality and find there freedom, not just the obvious freedoms of leaving bodies that ail and minds too full and a world gone askew but the freedom to know that our very temporariness is what brings us here,

to this place where we question and doubt and seek each other? What if our mortality is what allows us love, gives us the heart-wrenching ability to empathize, to imagine what it is to be another? What if our mortality is what keeps us dreaming, asking, reaching, seeking, wanting so much more than we can hold?

Could this transhuman perfection in which our mortal bodies are loathed offer us this much? If we become so beautiful, perfect, free of suffering and unpredictability, will we still empathize, will we still recognize the limits of our power, the necessity of seeing the earth and nature as part of who we are in order to continue to protect, love and be protected by it?

Today I celebrate mortality and write a new theology of immortality that is not seeking to bring back species that have died or habilitate ecosystems so that we might live there when we have made this planet unlivable, not wishing for pills that add another 50 or 100 years to life. What would we do with those 50 or 100 years? This is what we would do.

What we are doing this very day. And those 50 years would pass and we would say, Time goes past so quickly? Where did those 50 years go?

We must wake up to this frail moment that is before us today, and realize that our immortality is always before us. Who we are, the imprint of our lives, will always roam this island, this wide earth, the hearts and minds we have changed. And our actions, what we said and what we did will go on in the minds of those who live and die and those who live and die forever and ever.

What makes us immortal is not how long we live but how we understand life, how we know ourselves to be made of each other, how we assess our limitations as that which offer us a reflection of the holy when we reach and reach and still cannot touch the mystery. This reminder of who we are, of our fragility, of the fragility of all of life is the gift of humanity, one that makes us, one that we cannot resist from any outside.

We live as we die. One with all that is. May this theology of immortality be enough to inspire in us lives that are touched and touch with love.

Amen.

1

[1]Zoe Corbyn, “Live for ever: Scientists say they’ll soon be extending life ‘Well Beyond 120.’ The Guardian, January 11, 2015,

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid.

[4]Ibid.

[5]

[6]Paul Kingsnorth, “In the Black Chamber: On Seeing the Sacred in Nature,” Orion Magazine, March/April 2014, 33.

[7]Alyssa Ford, Humanity: The Remix, Utne Reader, May/June 2005,

[8]Ibid.

[9]Rev. Barbara Wells ten Hove, “Why Die? The Quest for Immortality” Cedars Unitarian Universalist Church, Bainbridge Island & Greater Kitsap County, WA, Aug. 9, 2015.

[10]Marie-Eve Morin, Jean Luc Nancy (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 2.