Stayin' alive

Humans have invented an endless series of strategies to try and outwit the Grim Reaper. Stephen Cave explores our fascination with immortality

New Humanist Magazine
Volume 127 Issue 2 March/April 2012

Stephen Cave

A group of American psychologists have discovered a simple way of turning ordinary people into fundamentalists and ideologues. Their method requires neither indoctrination nor isolation nor any form of brainwashing; indeed, it can be done anywhere and in a matter of minutes. It is just this: the researchers remind these ordinary folks that they will one day die.

In one experiment, for example, the psychologists asked a group of Christian students to give their impressions of the personalities of two people. In all relevant respects, these two people were very similar – except one was a fellow Christian and the other Jewish. Under normal circumstances, participants showed no inclination to treat the two people differently. But if the students were first reminded of their mortality (e.g., by being asked to fill in a personality test that included questions about their attitude to their own death) then they were much more positive about their fellow Christian and more negative about the Jew.

The researchers behind this work – Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski – were testing the hypothesis that most of what we do we do in order to protect us from the terror of death; what they call “Terror Management Theory”. Our sophisticated worldviews, they believe, exist primarily to convince us that we can defeat the Reaper. Therefore when he looms, scythe in hand, we cling all the more firmly to the shield of our beliefs.

This research, now spanning over 400 studies, shows what poets and philosophers have long known: that it is our struggle to defy death that gives shape to our civilisation. Or, as Socrates put it, the ways of men are incomprehensible until you see that they are striving for eternal life. This struggle to project ourselves into an unending future is the foundation of human achievement: the wellspring of religion, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts.

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2768/stayin-alive

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilisation by Stephen Cave is published by Biteback in April