My two cents on the immortality thing

[maggie2]

The topic of the day is immortality and whether or not it's a good thing.  I tend to think it is not -- at least not if it's the sort that Spike or Angel has to look forward to, i.e. an unlimited number of days.

 

I should say before I start that I'm a theist, specifically of the Roman Catholic variety, and even more specifically of the variety that thinks that St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas pretty much have it right, though there are some modern theologians who don't completely suck (Baltahsar, Barth).

As a good theist, I think it is completey natural for us to desire immortality, because that is what we are built for.  What I don't believe is that immortality understood as an endless succession of days is the sort of immortality that would actually fulfill our deep desire.  We live in a culture that is all about desperately trying to get more.  More is always better.  More life.  More stuff.  More experiences. More sex.  etc. etc.  And for the last few hundred years, our culture has been quite good at churning out more.  We live longer.  We are more healthy.  We have more stuff.  We have more choices.  Woo Hoo.

We're not any happier.  Not by any measure we can find.  We have five times more income, adjusted for inflation, than our grandparents.  We are five times better off in a material sense -- across all dimensions -- bigger houses, more clothes, better and more varied food, more toys, faster transportation, etc. etc. etc.  Yet it is not the case that the average person is five times happier than their grandparents.   Indeed, we seem to be on average as happy with our lives as were our grandparents.  You can go back a few centuries and find writers extolling the opulence of their societies, yet the standard of living they are describing would strike us as the worst kind of impoverishment.  All this more-ness doesn't seem to do anything meaningful for us.  Indeed, if you look at measures of psychological health you could argue that we are worse off.  There's more depression, and anxiety and stress. 

I came to the view that the mistake was to think of the infinite or of immortality as "more".  We want life in abundance.  But if that's just a long string of days do we really get abundance of life?  It's not like you can add up the days and keep them in a jar somewhere.  If that were the case, old people would be envied because they've experienced more days than the young.  But we nowhere have that sense.  We see the young as enviable because not only are they sexier and healthier, but most importantly because they have more days ahead of them than behind them. How is it that the potential for days is better than the accumulated experience of actual days?  Seems to me that it's not unlike the Christmas phenonenon.  All the packages are so exciting because they could be *anything*.  But when you open them up they collapse into the one thing they are.  And  while they are often nice, even wonderful, that one finite thing is never as great as the infinite things the gift could have been before the package was opened.   Days ahead of us are unopened Christmas presents.  Days behind us are opened presents, finite, and wonderful -- but not satisfying.  I don't see that adding in thousands and thousands more presents or days changes the underlying phenomenon.    

Another way of looking at it is to notice that however long your life is, you only have that length in your memory or in your anticipation.  The place where you really have life is right now.   To find the abundance of life we crave, we should be as awake to *this* moment as possible.   Whether we have 1 year or 10 years or 100 years or 10000 years before us, the only day we actually have is today.  Be in it.  If you want to be fulfilled by time or by things (both of which are real goods) don't imagine that more unopened presents is what you want.  Open your present and treasure it.  There is an abundance of good there.  The mistake is to open the present, discard it and look out with anxious desire to make sure that there's a never-ending stream of packages to open.

I should add that one of the things I best love about Spike is that he gets it.  He throws himself into the moment.  Totally and completely alive now.  And Spike doesn't sit around moping about how awful it would be to get staked in battle and lose the shot at a thousand years.  He's not afraid of death because he's fully alive right now.

Related topics:

I don't think the fear of not-being is rational.  You can't fear something you will never experience and if you really end up not being, there will be no you to experience the not being. 

I do think you can think that being is better than non-being.  As a theist, I'm very strongly in the camp that thinks being is nothing but good.

But since you can't really add up all the days, the way to register the preference for being is to make sure you live now. 

My hope as a Christian is that someday I'll have the fullness of being I am made for in whatever it is that constitutes heaven.  As Augustine says, our hearts are restless until they rest in God.  My hope is that it is a rest which is not stasis or boredom, but rather an overabundance of everything present in the one moment of the now.  "Heaven" is a designation for "really good", yeah?  really really good.

My fear is of an afterlife that is not in the presence of God.  Since I'm pretty much a total schmuck, I've got no standing to say I deserve a great outcome.  But as of now I get to hope in the mercy of God.

I don't think nothing is on the menu.  But if it were, I don't know how to fear something that by definition I will never experience.

Comments

[next_to_normal]

Interesting thoughts. I think the whole concept of becoming a vampire is directly related to the "Christmas present" mentality you mention. Everyone envies the young - well, vampires get to be young forever. They're always sexy, always healthy, and no matter how many days they have behind them, they always have infinite presents to open ahead. But, as was mentioned on somebody's journal, immortality can get boring and more days isn't always better.

However, there is one big difference between you and vampires, namely: "My hope as a Christian is that someday I'll have the fullness of being I am made for in whatever it is that constitutes heaven." Vampires are definitely not going to heaven. If they're lucky, they go poof and then there's nothing. Angel and Spike seem to be convinced they're going to hell, which is decidedly worse. So, if that's the alternative, I can definitely see the appeal in wanting to live forever.

[enisy.livejournal.com]

Lovely post, and on a subject most LJers wouldn't touch with a twenty-foot pole. I agree with you on most things, as usual, even though my religion of choice is Buddhism. (Very happy to hear you're a theist, by the way; I had been under the impression that you're an existentialist, which, from my one week's worth of experience, is a very depressing worldview.)

I came to the view that the mistake was to think of the infinite or of immortality as "more". We want life in abundance. But if that's just a long string of days do we really get abundance of life?

It really bothers me that this is the common perception of the Christian afterlife in modern times, and I can only suppose that the people who embrace it must be of limited imagination. I'll quote David Darling on the "string of days" concept (even though I disagree with him that that's the proposed Christian afterlife): "Yes, it would be nice to be in paradise -- for a while. The problem is, it wouldn't end. Days there would stretch into weeks, weeks into years, and years into centuries. The novelty, it seems, would be bound to wear off. And the centuries would become millennia, and the millennia would become trillions upon trillions of years, because this is the life-everlasting -- the endless treadmill of the hereafter. In our desperation for a dash of excitement, a bit of daredevilry, we might almost be tempted to side with Mark Twain: 'Heaven for climate, hell for company.' The problem is -- time; there's just too much of it in eternity."

Which is one of the reasons I'm more amiable to the idea of a heaven as you described it in your third-to-last paragraph, or of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation (with a special fondness for the river metaphor Herman Hesse incorporated in "Siddhartha", if you've ever read that).

You're absolutely correct that carpe diem is where it's at, what we do in the here and now. As Siddhartha Gautama put it: "I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand."

I think the only thing I would disagree with is that the annihilation of consciousness is not a terrifying thought. There is nothing to be feared in non-being once you're there, but aren't you afraid of entering that state of non-being? I think it was joe_sweden (Wolfie Gilmore, if I'm not mistaken) who said that while the prospect of being dead is not terrifying, the prospect of dying is, which, yeah. ...I don't think that's what happens at death either, though. I even think Stephen King had a point when he said that it's "spiritually impossible to believe" and "logically, it is laughable -- the idea that we simply flick out like a light bulb and nothing happens".

[green-maia.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating! Thank you for posting!

I'm not a theist, but there's a lot here that I agree with.

[jamalov29.livejournal.com]

I don't think the fear of not-being is rational. I don't think it's rational either but sometimes people can't help having non-rational fears.

You can't fear something you will never experience maybe it's more about being afraid of the unknown , of the possible emptiness after life.(I'm not a theist )
if you really end up not being, there will be no you to experience the not being.Yes,when the times come for not being you won't , but you're aware of it now, and that's frightening.

I have no idea what 's on the menu once dead, I just know that I don't know and I live in hope that there's something .

[multi-facetedg.livejournal.com]

(linked here by sueworld)

As a Christian trying to get back to my faith and a Buffy fan this was a great read.

I agree that we have the desire for immorality hard wired in us so we will seek out God but we get lost in our gathering of days together and counting what we have and don't have. We stress ourselves out seeking perfection and out doing the next guy, instead of enjoying what we have.

Angel is stuck in the "what I don't have" loop. Sulking and brooding and punishing himself for what he did refusing happiness.

Like you said Spike is in the now having fun, enjoying the "happy meals on legs." When he loves someone he goes all out giving himself over to it, when he fights he does the same dives in giving it his all.

[shapinglight]

This is a very interesting post. Sorry. I don't have anything to add, but I thought you should know I read it and found it very thought provoking.

(not a Christian, btw).

[angearia.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily believe that greater wealth and wanting more correlates with the higher frequency of psychological issues in our era. Rather, I think the presence of disconnecting, escapist techonology and the temporal state of establishing communities is more to blame.

And yet underpinning these problems is the desire for wanting more, but more importantly being unsatisfied with what you have. This desire to immediately gratify needs means that we're always looking for the next best thing - we want our choices and we're so accustomed to rolling with the punches of change that change has become the mainstay. People aren't in it for the long haul with marriage, they give up and look for something new instead of trying to rebuild their connection. People change careers nearly half a dozen times in their lifetime. People change majors just as frequently in college. Compare this to past centuries where you lived in one town and most likely had one profession. Your profession was so much a foundation of who you are it became your last name. Smith, Baker, etc. Now also compare this to the greater communal ties of family in the past where your last name is determined by who your parents (most likely father was) - Gustafson, Paulson, Garretson, Von Frederick, Ibn Yassir.

Longitude of days doesn't ensure abundance of life. But merely living doesn't promise abundance of life either. The true key is connection through family, through community and purpose. And this is something not necessarily denied by immortality unless you are the only immortal. That by itself means you would be the only one of your kind and alone. But even then there are ways to connect yourself to life. The key is to consciously seek connection. And just being mortal doesn't ensure this either - that's what I see as the true cancer in our modern world. We don't connect. As surely as we are disconnected from nature by the advent of society over millennia and finally reaching a climax at the Industrial Revolution, we've become disconnected from each other in other natural and primal ways. We are intransigent. No man is an island. Until we choose the island of isolation over the world of community.

I don't think the fear of not-being is rational. You can't fear something you will never experience and if you really end up not being, there will be no you to experience the not being.

Yet isn't that the point? The most primal fears are irrational. And isn't the basis of emotion by definition irrational? That's what makes the fear powerful. It lacks reason. If we were always reasonable, we would never feel fear. We would merely calculate the odds then rationally realize we could do nothing about it and just accept the circumstances - no fear would enter this rationale.