Last August I wrote (critically, of course) about a $5 million grant given to the University of California at Riverside by the Templeton Foundation. The subject was “Immortality,” and the lucky recipient was philosophy professor John Fischer. If you read my earlier post on this, you’ll know that much of the Templeton money was earmarked for studying ludicrous questions, including whether near-death experiences give us plausible evidence for an afterlife (we already know the answer to that), and whether perpetual existence in an afterlife would be “repetitive or boring.”

This is what we’ve come to expect from Templeton. How much more good that money would do were it used to buy food for starving African children!

At any rate, UCR Today, the publicity organ of the University, announced yesterday that the Immortality Project has awarded its first essay prize to Steven Cave, a writer based in Berlin.  You can see his essay, called “Death: Why we should be grateful for it,” on the New Scientist website (why is it there?) for free until August, though you have to register (a simple procedure requiring your name, email, and a password). It was published last October.

Although I know there are some readers who don’t mind dying, I’m not one of them. When I read this essay, I immediately thought of two quotes from Woody Allen (I’m recalling these from memory):

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work—I want to achieve it by not dying.

and

“I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Cave’s essay, however, is meant to make a virtue of this necessity. Death, he argues, is a good thing, and for numerous reasons. Well, maybe it’s good because when you’re old, decrepit, and ill, you are ready to go.  But in a world without death, that wouldn’t be the case, for death is the result of that decrepitude. (Cave doesn’t posit what shape we’d be in if we were immortal.)

Here are some of Cave’s arguments for why death is good (indented quotes are from the article):

. . . we work very hard to stave off death, to defy it for as long as possible or deny it altogether. All this frantic defiance and denial result in some of our greatest achievements.

This is perhaps most obvious when considering humanity’s material progress: agriculture, for example, was invented to give us the food we need to live. Clothes and buildings keep us warm and give us shelter, weapons allow us to hunt and defend ourselves, and medicine heals our sicknesses. The great majority of the material innovations that make up our civilisation are in essence life-extension technologies that we have been driven to invent by the spectre of oblivion.

Of all these achievements, perhaps the greatest is science. This, too, has always been motivated by the fear of death. Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism, described indefinite life extension as “the most noble goal”. He sacrificed his own life to the cause, dying of pneumonia contracted while attempting an experiment in cryopreservation involving a chicken and some snow. Science is the business of self-aware mortals – the gods would have no need of biochemistry.

This is almost religious in its blatant disregard of the facts. First of all, clothes, weapons, fire, buildings and agriculture weren’t contrived to stave off death, but to keep us comfortable. Those things would still have come about if we were immortal.  After all, who wants to spend eternity shivering and starving?

Yes, some medicine was contrived to stave off death, but if we didn’t have death, we wouldn’t need that kind of medicine! This is like saying that cancer is good because it enabled us to develop chemotherapy.

Further, a lot of medicine came from a wish to alleviate conditions that don’t kill us, like migraine headaches, sinus conditions, and the like.  As for the claim that “science. . has always been motivated by the fear of death,” that’s completely stupid.  Really? Did quantum mechanics come about from fear of death? The theory of evolution and of chemical bonds? Where does Cave get such an idea? Where is his evidence?

But there’s more. Death didn’t just give rise to science, but to civilization and culture, too!

. . . Despite the best efforts of science and technology and the very real improvements in life expectancy that they have achieved, the terrifying prospect of death still hangs over us. That is why humans invented culture as well as material civilisation. Many thinkers, from Georg Hegel to Martin Heidegger, have suggested that its purpose is to reassure us that even though the body will fail, we will still live on.

Who is he kidding? Yes, as Cave notes, some people create in the hopes of immortality, but there are many other reasons for producing culture, including the simple need for self-expression.  I doubt that the majority of artists or composers are driven more by the desire to leave something that will outlive them than to leave something that expresses their feelings and can be appreciated by their contemporaries.  After all, when you’re dead you don’t experience any approbation! Does Cave seriously think that if we were immortal that there would be no civilization?

There is one part of the argument (not considered by the author) that may be true. If we were immortal, we wouldn’t have evolved into humans unless we had children, and natural selection for bigger brains—and hence culture—would have been much more difficult without differential mortality, i.e., death. There still would have been selection via differential fertility, of course, but even then the world would fill up with people and we’d all die. In that sense, and that sense alone, death is good for our species. But Cave doesn’t take this critical issue on board.

And there’s another elephant in the room: for many, the main motivation for religion is bodily death and the attendant hope that we’ll live on plucking our harps on a cloud. The knowledge that our physical death would produce an afterlife was a motivation, for instance, for the 9/11 episode.  But somehow Cave manages to convert this into a positive, for afterlife isn’t what comes after our physical death, it is “the denial of death”:

. . . in over 400 studies, psychologists have shown that almost all aspects of our various world views are motivated by our attempt to come to terms with death. Nationalism, for example, allows us to believe we can live on as part of a greater whole. Sure enough, Greenberg and colleagues found that US students were much more critical of an anti-American writer after being reminded of their mortality. A further study, by Holly McGregor at the University of Arizona, showed that students prompted to think about death were not merely disapproving of those who challenged their world views, but willing to do violence to them in the form of giving them excessively large amounts of hot sauce (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 74, p 590).

These initial studies supported Becker’s bleak view that the denial of death is the route of all evil. It causes the creation of in-groups and out-groups, fosters prejudice and aggression, and stokes up support for wars and terrorism.

Of course, if we were immortal there would be no need to attack other people, for you couldn’t kill them! (If Cave thinks that we’d be naturally immortal, but still subject to death by violence, he doesn’t say so.) It is the realization of death, and the need to continue life on some other plane, that motivates religion.  Were we immortal, I doubt we’d be so religious.

Cave goes on to tout the Pyramids and other touristic tombs as benefits of death, but really, if I could live forever, I’d gladly do without the Pyramids—though I’d miss the Taj Mahal.

Finally, and, as an evolutionary biologist, I find this to be the most ludicrous argument: Cave claims that our desire to reproduce stems from our fear of death. Having kids is a “terror management strategy”, giving us solace that we will live on through our children:

Socrates saw this 2000 years ago, arguing that much of what men do can be understood as a desperate attempt to immortalise themselves; women, he thought, could take the more direct route of having children. Several studies suggest he was right to see founding a family as a terror management strategy: one showed that German volunteers expressed a greater desire to have children when reminded of death; another that Chinese participants were more likely to oppose their country’s one child policy when similarly primed.

There’s one problem with this: animals and plants, who don’t know they’re going to die, have precisely the same drive to reproduce. This, of course, is the sine qua non of natural selection: it gives us the drive to reproduce because genes that promote such drives—and of course they needn’t operate through conscious knowledge—are those genes that persist.  How much of our desire to have kids is based on our conscious knowledge of mortality, and how much is from our instinctive desire to reproduce, instilled by evolution, that is simply reified through consciousness? After all, many of our “conscious” decisions may simply be mental confabulations of things that our genes have already compelled us to do.

Cave ends up with a truly Templetonian positive conclusion:

Conscious death reminders, on the other hand, stimulate a more considered response, leading people to re-evaluate what really matters. The more we actively contemplate mortality, the more we reject socially imposed goals such as wealth or fame and focus instead on personal growth or the cultivation of positive relationships.

Orly? It seems to me that atheists are the ones who would be most likely to reject things like wealth and fame in favor of more meaningful goals. Does Cave really think that, in a world of immortals, we would strive far more avidly for wealth and fame than we do already.

There may be a good essay to be written on this topic, but Cave’s isn’t it.  He doesn’t lay out the conditions of immortality, specify whether we could still be killed or grow feeble, or discuss the implications for natural selection.  He ignores the fact that consciousness of mortality probably plays little role in our drive to reproduce, nor whether that drive is even a good thing in today’s overcrowded world. Finally, Cave doesn’t adduce the slightest bit of evidence that science, civilization, and culture spring largely from fear of death.

I don’t know how much money Cave got for his prize, but I suspect that, given Templeton’s largesse, it’s substantial. I look forward to further essays on why cancer, tsunamis, and strokes are good.  Thank the Lord that He gave us death! That, after all, is probably the hidden Templetonian message behind the prize.