January 23, 2011
ONE HARDLY EXPECTS...:
The Immortalization Commission by John Gray: review: The Immortalization Commission by John Gray investigates the attempts of early 20th-century spiritualists and scientists to draw the sting of death (Michael Burleigh, 23 Jan 2011, The Telegraph)
The book’s quality deteriorates though, as it becomes a tract for our times. Gray is rightly dismissive of what he calls 'techno-immortalism’. This includes cryonic suspension. When would be the right moment to be deep frozen? At the first appearances of grey hairs, age spots, or wrinkles? The prospect of having some electronic remnant of one’s mind uploaded into the virtual reality of an immortal supercomputer also makes one shudder. Part of Gray’s problem is a penchant for such apodictic utterances as 'communism and belief in the free market have become museum pieces’. Having turned on every political creed he has alighted upon, Gray is nowadays sceptical of Green attempts to save the planet. He ends up sounding like Hamlet: 'The most rigorous investigation reveals a world riddled with chaos in which human will is finally powerless. All things may be possible, but not for us.’ Many of us got that point somewhere in childhood or adolescence as awareness of death made itself known in our spines.Gray’s deep pessimism prompts a final subversive thought. If human existence is so pointless, when measured on a cosmic scale, why does Gray bother to write so many books or expect his fellow humans to read them, since literature and thought are akin to the hubris of ants and gnats? Why not just stroke the cat?
...John Gray to be
