The Immortalist: Appreciation for a classic book

Alan Harrington's curious book about abolishing death

“Spend the money, hire the scientists and hunt down death like an outlaw.”

-- Alan Harrington

Alan Harrington’s headstone says; “Get me out of here.”

Alas, that is the headstone of a grave and not a plaque on a cryocapsule. Despite Harrington’s enthusiasm about cryonics, he never followed through with it. He died of leukemia in 1997 and was not cryopreserved.

Harrington was the author of a fascinating and little-known 1969 book, The Immortalist: How Science Could Give Humanity Eternal Life as well as his peculiar but sometimes brilliant novel Paradise One. I read The Immortalist in June 1982, one year after Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger in which Wilson mentioned the murder and cryopreservation of his daughter, Luna – the first time I realized that cryonics was a real practice. Apparently, Harrington helped raise money to pay for Luna Wilson’s cryopreservation.

The Immortalist has perhaps my favorite opening to a book: “Death is an imposition on the human race and no longer acceptable.”

The book also ends powerfully: “Research is not going to be called off. The day will arrive when somebody wearing glasses and a sterilized apron will run through a laboratory yelling wildly and waving a test tube. Provided that the species refrains from destroying itself, there will be no way for this not to happen.”

Harrington was born in 1918, graduated in 1939 from Harvard College, and was in the Army Air Forces in Newfoundland during World War II. From 1946 to 1960 he held jobs as a journalist, editor, and public relations man. He also wrote for Harper's and other magazines and taught writing at the University of Arizona. Although he was a working journalist he spent much of his writing career writing novels. These were positively reviewed but became obscure. His first novel, The Revelations of Dr. Modesto (1955), brought him to attention as an early “black humorist.” He was friends with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary, as well as longevity pioneer and my friend Roy Walford.

Harrington’s thesis is that the fear of death is the primary motivator behind human behavior and culture. He proposes that overcoming death should be humanity’s central goal. I will go into a bit more detail later but here I want to note that Harrington’s thinking pre-dated and inspired Ernest Becker’s influential The Denial of Death and Terror Management Theory (TMT). Harrington’s thesis makes sense of much human behavior – whether or not it is accurate in the final analysis – but he did not present it as a testable theory.

The Immortalist is not just an analysis of the human situation; it is, at heart, a call to action.

At its core, The Immortalist is a call to action. Harrington argues that the evolved man has recognized his greatest enemy is death and that he should declare war upon it. He gives us a number of stirring declarations such as these:

In short, to kill death; to put an end to mortality as a certain consequence of being born. (p.3)

The immortalist argument holds this ground and will not step back from it: that death from deterioration of the body is an outrage and should be unceremoniously treated as such. “Do not go gentle into that good night” does not apply here. Rather aim not to go at all; mobilize the scientists, spend the money, and hunt death down like an outlaw. (208)

The Immortalist Solution is simply this: the time has come for man to get over his cosmic inferiority complex. To rise above his condition – and to use technology to extend himself beyond his biological limitations… We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.

Harrington relates an idea that sounds much like the concept of longevity escape velocity (LEV). “Intensified research can prolong life and buy time for everyone. Whenever you buy time, you buy a new geometrical progression of medical advances. The prolongation of life buys discoveries not yet known. Over two or three decades, in fact, you will probably find yourself living in an entirely new medical frame of reference…” (271) I wrote about another – even closer – early reference to what is now call LEV.

Immortality?

As a life extension and advocate of biostasis, I am not a fan of the word “immortality.” While I’m not going to rule out immortality completely, it seems almost certain that we will die eventually even after we have complete control over aging. Literal immortality may not be achievable but we can take it as something to aspire to. One meaning of the term that is academically respectable is biological immortality which is a feasible goal. Biological immortality does not mean invulnerability. It is a state in which the rate of mortality from senescence is stable or decreasing, decoupling it from chronological age. In other words, you may still die but the mortality rate does not increase over time and may fall. A stronger form of the term would mean we completely stop aging and no one dies from old age.

Harrington does not mean the classic form of immortality-as-invulnerability. His usage is more compatible with the end of death from aging while remaining mortal. On page 22, he writes: “Our conception of immortality now requires precise definition. What must be eliminated from the human situation is the inevitability of death as a result and natural end of the aging process… But we must clearly understand that any given unit of life – my individual existence and yours – can never be guaranteed eternity… But the distress felt by men and women today does not arise from the fear of such hazards [dying in a plane crash or sudden virus]. Rather, it comes from the certainty of aging and physical degeneration leading to death.”

And on page 23: “In our conception immortality is being alive now, ungoverned by span, cycle or inevitability.”

The unbearable awareness of death

Famously or infamously, Nietzsche declared that “God is dead.” He did mean it literally. God had not died of old age or been hit by a celestial car as he crossed the galaxy. The idea of God was becoming increasingly difficult for people to accept. The loss of the potential guidance we imagined coming from gods combined with our awareness of our mortality puts us in a difficult, painful situation.

Harrington says that humans have gone a bit insane because we know that our existence is temporary and doomed. Our awareness of our mortality shapes all our actions and our culture. Like Colonel Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men we can’t handle the truth. To defend ourselves psychologically we invent a variety of lies, each of which promises immortality in its own way. These commonly take the form of religions that promise us eternal life in an invisible realm or that we will be reincarnated, or spiritual practices insisting that we can become one with the universe.

Harrington cites other “opiates of the masses” such as psychiatric treatment, drunkenness, group action to live as part of an immortal collective, blotting out the world with sex or drugs, and burying yourself in work or family. These “are all varieties of self-hypnosis. Without exception they aim to cover up our condition rather than change it.”

We compete to show off before “the Computer of Excellence.” The computer – which Harrington considers a metaphor that was fresh in 1969 – determines which of us becomes immortal. The computer tabulates all the good things a person has done in their life in order to determine whether that person should gain immortality. We take actions that we hope will imprint us on the record of the world and immortalize us. Harrington didn’t believe in the reality of a Computer of Excellence or other overlords but he did believe that humans subconsciously act as if we believe in them.

This desperate need to ward off mortality can take the form of seeking or worshipping celebrity. Today, the powerful need to be known and followed by others seems to be stronger and more pervasive than ever. It also explains a radically different behavior: acts of wartime heroism and the habit of retrieving the bodies of soldiers even at considerable risk to the still living. We seek to be read into the permanent record. This explains why the prospect of an anonymous death is especially fearful. This drive also explains humans who do appalling things to be famous.

When Harrington declares “At the heart of this distress, the illness may be identified, simply and without sham, as the fear of aging and death. All else is peripheral and finally unimportant,” he exaggerates. As do TMT theorists. But mortality awareness –or “salience” in TMT terms – surely has an effect on us especially as we get older. It is hard for me to believe that young people’s behavior is significantly shaped by mortality salience because death is, most of the time, not salient for them. It’s something we see in movies and read in books but it’s not personal. We become increasingly aware of personal extinction not only as we age but as we deal with dangerous medical conditions.

In Harrington’s view we each favor one of four styles of consciousness in the face of death:

1. The way of standing out against the laws of creation and decay.

2. The way of retracting the self, yielding up one’s being to the management of others, or sharing it with others, settling for collective immortality.

3. The way of deliberately dulling one’s awareness of things…. Seeking safety in the familiar.

4. The way of trying to bypass death through the gentle diffusion or violent shattering of the self.

Reject death

According to Harrington, accepting death as inevitable is psychologically damaging. Extending life is an ethical imperative. “We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.” He has no time for philosophy that promotes acceptance of death. He would be gladdened to know of today’s transhumanist philosophers.

The philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.

The immortalist position is that the usefulness of philosophy has come to an end, because all philosophy teaches accommodation to death and grants it static finality as “the human condition.” (20)

We should resist those who embellish “nothingness.” “Voices preaching false consolation will not help us, no matter how skillfully and soothingly they arrange nothingness.” Harrington described death-accepting writing such as that of his contemporary, Alan Watts, as verbal valium as one reviewer put it. “This may be appraised as fine writing, but it serves also to glamorize death, and therefore, in the context of humanity’s mission to conquer death, to weaken and tranquilize our rebellion.”

If we declare our intent to hunt down death like an outlaw some will protest that we are playing god. As Steve Martin’s character said in The Man With Two Brains, “Somebody has to!) Harrington puts it directly: “The truth is, of course, that death should no more be considered an acceptable part of life than smallpox or polio, both of which we have managed to bring under control without denouncing ourselves as pretentious.”

On cryonics

Chapter 18 on The Cryonics Underground provides interesting early historical notes on the earliest days of cryonics. Harrington’s account reminds us of the awful very early description “cryonic interment.” The book gives us a perspective from just five years after Ettinger published The Prospect of Immortality. Harrington realistically notes the difference between an ideal situation for cryopreservation and the difficulties facing us in the actual world.

Harrington’s (friendly) repeated reference to the “cryonics faith” is annoying but not completely unreasonable if applied to the practice of preserved extremely damaged people with the faint hope that the future can, somehow, help them. He discusses population challenges and the cost and what would happen if only a few people could afford it. Harrington was writing just a couple of years after global fertility peaked and started to fall – a shift he would not have known about at the time.

A world without death

In Harrington’s concluding chapters he looks forward to a world transformed by the elimination of certain death. We must push hard a revolution to overthrow the inevitability of death. “But there remains a catch: members of the transitional generations will almost surely not live to experience the immortal state.” For some reason here Harrington forgets about cryonics.

He examines and dismisses tedious assertions that we “will go mad in the face of eternity.” These fears “arise from the… assumption that… scarcity and urgency are required to make people do anything.” He considers how people could periodically go into biostasis and emerge to continue living – what he calls designed sleeps and programmed reincarnations. (The latter term is inappropriate since there is no disincarnation.)

Many things will be different in a post-death world. (Again, death will not be gone but will no longer an inevitable biological outcome of life.) The nature of love will change. Harrington explores how overcoming death would change fundamental aspects of the human condition and considers questions of meaning and purpose in a potentially infinite lifespan. “Beyond time and death, all creative play will be gratuitous and accomplishment in any field, or in any game, an act of exuberance rather than a duty.”

Freud’s view that civilized humans’ project is to recover our lost childhood will be outdated. We will instead develop the adult equivalent: an immortal present free from the fear of aging and death.

I think that Harrington goes too far in insisting that the awareness of death is responsible for pretty much everything. But he is surely partly right and his thoughts deserve consideration. We can want to make a mark on the world for reasons other than death anxiety.

55 years after he wrote The Immortalist, Harrington’s book remains no less insightful and valuable than it was then. It should also serve as a caution about over-optimism about conquering aging. Staying healthy and securing a biostasis contract remains imperative for those of intent on overthrowing the tyranny of death.