Immortality Book Summary - Immortality Book explained in key points

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Immortality summary

Name: Immortality
Rating: 3.4 (15 reviews)
Author: Stephen Cave

Stephen Cave

The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization

3.4 (15 ratings)

15 mins

Table of Contents

Immortality
summarized in 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Learn how to manage your fear of death.

Have you ever pondered your existence after death? Or wondered what it would be like to live forever? If so, you certainly wouldn’t be the first! Ever since we human beings became aware of our inevitable end, we have struggled to cope with mortality and the inability to imagine our experience after death.

In fact, the desire for immortality is essential to the human condition in a way that not only shapes but actually underpins our civilizational development.

In these blinks, you’ll learn about the “immortality narratives” that we use to cope with our impending death, and to which all forms of culture owe their existence. In addition, you’ll read about how each of these narratives, for one reason or another, are ultimately unable to actually grant us the immortality we so desire.

Finally, these blinks will show you

what the great heroes of antiquity and modern techno-futurists have in common,
the strange way in which resurrection is related to cannibalism,
why immortality would turn you into an even worse procrastinator and
why, even if we were immortal, we’d “only” live around 5,775 years.

The knowledge of our own death is what separates us from all other life-forms.

Do you ever lie in bed contemplating your death – the moment the Grim Reaper finally knocks at your door? We know that it will come one day, yet we still hope it never will. Why is it that we suffer from these kinds of thoughts?

For starters, like all other living things, humans are “survival machines”; our ultimate aim is to stay alive at all costs. This struggle for survival is carried out through the evolutionary process of adaptation and reproduction: the individuals with the fittest genes are most likely to reproduce, thus extending its likeness into the future through its posterity.

What makes humans unique, however, is that we struggle to survive with the full knowledge that we will nonetheless die one day. This desire to survive and knowledge of our own demise leads to something called the mortality paradox.

On the one hand, surrounded by deaths of animals and other people, we know very well that we’re going to die at some point. On the other, we can’t actually imagine the experience of death, i.e., we cannot conceive non-existence.

Just try it: imagine your own death. What do you see? A tombstone? A funeral? You may think that you are imagining death, but in fact you aren’t. Being dead means that there is no you to consciously contemplate these situations; we have no way to experience or even imagine what it’s like to not exist.

Hence the paradox: our perception of death is both inevitable (as we all will die) and impossible (since we cannot imagine the experience of death).

So what do we do when faced with this paradox? Our desire to survive and our inability to comprehend what it is like to not exist makes us look for ways to cheat death altogether, i.e., strive for immortality. The following blinks will explain how we go about this.

Human society has invented “immortality narratives” to cope with the thought of death.

Can you imagine what life would be like if we were constantly focused on our inevitable demise? How would we get anything done? The devastating thought that all our life’s many deeds will have been futile after our death would make life seem absolutely meaningless, leaving us paralyzed.

This sort of tension is simply too much to bear over time. That’s why we’ve created immortality narratives, or stories that distract us from the death of our individual self and our communities.

The simplest immortality narrative is staying alive forever.

Have you ever been in a life-threatening situation? How did you react? You probably didn’t just give up and think, “Well, I guess it’s time to die.” Far more likely, you felt an incredible urge to stay alive, thus taking immediate action to save yourself.

The first immortality narrative plays off this primal urge to survive. In fact, humankind has always dreamed of an immortality elixir, i.e., some natural way to live forever. Staying alive forever is a natural extension of our biological impulse to survive and is, as such, the most profane method of seeking immortality.

Even resurrection offers no guarantee of “surviving” death.

If the methods to “stay alive” don’t pan out the way we’d hoped, what would be the most obvious alternative? The answer is found in the narrative that accepts death but refuses to leave it at that: resurrection.

The narrative of resurrection toys with the possibility of reviving a dead body. The biblical narration of Jesus of Nazareth’s death and resurrection is perhaps the most famous of such narratives.

While the belief in a soul helped create just societies, it likely won’t get us closer to immortality.

Because of the serious difficulties involved in reviving a cadaver, we’ll need a more sophisticated concept of a second, eternal life. The solution: believing in an undying soul.

A soul represents an individual’s immaterial being that survives even after the death of the body. In fact, the very concept of the soul brought forth the most influential idea of the modern Western world: the autonomous individual.

Legacies offer us a way to live on in a more abstract sense, but even they have problems.

The fourth immortality narrative is able to withstand the scrutiny of modern skepticism, and thus offer us some hope at eternal life. This is the concept of legacy.

One way to achieve this is by creating a cultural legacy through which we inscribe ourselves onto the everlasting realm of the symbolic. Simply put, we can continue to exist through society’s use of symbols – things such as written language, pictures, film or music – which are then used to pass on traditions.

Both immortality narratives and actual, lived immortality have serious downsides.

Immortality seems to be universally desirable, but is it really worth the effort? In fact, it has some pretty serious drawbacks.

For instance, even though immortality narratives have proven crucial for the progress of civilization, they also unleash more destructive forces. The most vivid evidence of this are the many wars fought in the name of specific belief systems. Whether Christianity, Islam, capitalism or communism, millions of people have died in wars between societies with differing immortality narratives.

We should adopt narratives that help us embrace mortality instead of trying to overcome it.

As we’ve seen, our means of coping with the inevitable end are all lacking in some way or another. Instead, we should simply embrace our finite time on the planet.

In fact, our inability to imagine the experience of being dead is our best chance to live happily in spite of our mortality. Rather than managing our fear of death by hoping for an afterlife, we should instead look at the positive aspects of our inability to experience death.

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

Since our bodies are hard-wired to reject our mortality, we’ve created stories about achievable immortality in order to cope. More than likely, however, immortality is impossible, so our time would be better spent striving to enjoy the moment instead of battling in vain against certain death.

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What is Immortality about?

Immortality explores humanity’s drive to live forever and the constructive and destructive forces that accompany it. The book elaborates on the various ways that we try to achieve eternal life, and ultimately offers us some advice on how to cope with our mortality.

Best quote from Immortality

Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.

—Stephen Cave

Who should read Immortality?

Anyone interested in the question of the meaning of life (and death)
Anyone who wants to know about what drives our civilization’s development
Anyone who laments their the short time they have left to spend on Earth

About the Author

Stephen Cave holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and worked as a diplomat before beginning his career in writing. He writes regularly for the Financial Times and has contributed to The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired and other publications.

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