The Immortalist

Man has all but lost his ability to accommodate himself to personal extinction; he must now proceed physically to overcome it. In short, to kill death: to put an end to his own mortality as a certain consequence of being born.

Our survival without the God we once knew comes down now to a race against time. The suspicion or conviction that God is dead has lately struck home not merely to a few hundred thousand freethinkers but to masses of the unprepared. Ancient orthodoxies may linger, but the content of worship has begun to collapse. This is what makes our situation urgent: Around the world, people are becoming increasingly less inclined to pray to a force that kills them.

The most imaginative philosophical and religious answers to the "problem" of death have become irrelevant to the fact that we die. Humanity's powers of self-deception seem to be running out. Modern theological word games may be pleasing to seminarians. Let jazz be permitted in the old spiritual gathering places. Such developments must be understood as gallant but altogether pathetic holding operations.

Emotionally, growing millions of us are in crisis. "Men are so necessarily mad," wrote Pascal, "that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Three hundred years later, with the mass communication of anxiety, and new weaponry and drugs in our possession, we need only open the morning paper or sit down to television, or look into our own lives, to observe signs of a growing spiritual insurrection. Life as it used to be seems in the process of slowly exploding. We wonder at the bursts of "senseless" violence that seem likely at any moment to invade our days and nights. Yet is this sort of behavior necessarily irrational? If sanity now calls upon us to accept death without hope, perhaps such recent ceremonials as smashing pianos and guitars on stage may be viewed as expressions of maddened realism.

We ought to say immediately that these outbreaks of distress, for the most part, afflict those who have time to think beyond the problem of barely staying alive. When economic misery exhausts the psyche, horizons draw in. The meaning of existence? God, as Gandhi pointed out, must reveal Himself to the destitute in the form of food.

Nor will oppressed people who have yet to win or regain their dignity suffer overly much from thoughts of death and meaninglessness, since for them death lives, remains present everywhere; and, therefore, speculation about it is redundant. In particular, the revolutionaries of today or any time, while the revolution is in prospect or actually going on, rise above this condition.

Who, then, has come to live "in fear and trembling"? I am talking about the great bulk of the rest not actively at war, within the reach of print and television; people of city, town and suburb getting along reasonably well, who, except during vacations, walk on pavement. Among this currently decisive majority, an unmistakable phenomenon may be observed taking place.

Civilized humanity is signaling. It seems to be both an SOS and a warning. In many languages and forms, the coded sign repeats: "Change this scene or we will!" The message has by no means gone unnoticed. Governments, the professions, universities, the clergy and social agencies of every description have paid close attention to the semaphore. (When they don't, their sanctums are frequently invaded by large crowds carrying signs and shouting obscenities.)

What does this violent mood portend? A revolution of some kind would seem already to be under way. Young people carry most of the signs. "The new majority," they seem to be taking over everything. They appear determined to seize the day, and possibly the world. But there is something desperate as well as knowing in the way they are going about it, for theirs has really been a revolt against meaninglessness-- which, at the present time, they are attempting tocover up by mass action, but which they covertly fear will outlast that action. And this mood is not confined to the young. Mature, wearying, old--so many of us are conducting our affairs in a peculiarly nervous fashion, as though time were short.

Quite evidently, the people of our time are reporting an emotional displacement; a condition not new but, some say, "aggravated by the complexities of modern life." The diagnosis, roughly speaking: angst, alienation. The treatment? Any public-library catalog offers an assortment of prescriptions. Also a host of new preachers and messiahs. Their life plans usually involve one or a combination of these choices: spiritual uplift; psychiatric consultation; group action; drunkenness; embracing the outdoors; making love as often as possible to the very edge of consciousness and forgetting about anything else; burying oneself in work, games or large families; trying to follow the complicated religio-philosophical excuses for what Reinhold Niebuhr described as man's "natural contingency"; and, in more recent years, the skillful employment of narcotics, blowing your mind and seeking rebirth in the psychedelic voyage.

Unfortunately, these panaceas have a single fault in common: They are all varieties of self-hypnosis. Without exception, they aim to cover up our condition, rather than change it. Tiptoeing around like the old man with a young bride, they dare not come to grips--because the bride is death.

The "problem," expressed in whatever form--feelings of isolation, aggressive behavior toward one another, massive paranoia and the common inability to believe, commit or care--derives from a single cause, which must be identified, simply and without sham, as the fact that we grow old and die. The fear of aging and death, and in the long run nothing else, is at the heart of our distress. All else is peripheral and finally unimportant. Hence, no therapeutic treatment, however inspirational, can do more than apply a coating of salve to our concern. The problem is neither social nor philosophical, not religious nor even psychiatric. Rather, it is based solidly on an intolerable recognition only now emerging to general consciousness: not merely the knowledge but the gut realization that the void is waiting for everybody and that each of us is going to vanish into it.

This is not to deny that life can be sunny and lusty, packed with fascinating hours; that everybody has the chance to turn his span into an adventure filled with achievement and lovemaking; and that we dance, sky-dive, float in space, build marvelous computers and climb mountains under the sea. Admit, too, that we have never had such music, and proliferating excitement, and varieties of challenge. Yet....

After the exuberance of being young, as young men and women grow only a little older, there begins to intrude on all our lives a faint disquiet. At first, it visits intermittently. The occasional feeling of a shadow seems not too important, perhaps an illusion. Then it reappears. In the beginning, the shadow may be mistaken for doubt about certain values, such as justice; about the prosperity of brutes; a child with leukemia; death to the volunteer, safety for the malingerer. But then the uneasiness grows into something more important than doubt.

An old Marxist cartoon showed languid dancers at a ball. A great worker fist had rammed up through the dance floor. Death to the aristocrats! But there has always been this larger fist bringing death to all classes. The great fist of death appears sooner or later to everyone, at first in dim outline, not necessarily brandished in our direction, often in repose, but still there.

We do our best to put the vision off somewhere, make it remote. Or close it off with black jokes. Any new religion is eagerly grasped for a little while. We must kick the vision by whatever means. The members of our species have never been reconciled to the brutal circumstance that we must die. Through the centuries, we have invented an incredible number of explanations to account for our individual forms decomposing in agony and returning to the earth. Hope of setting things right with the gods has driven us to lunacies of self-denial, cruelties, persecutions, elaborate ceremonies with incense and smoke, dancing around totem poles, the thumbscrewing of heretics; from Mexico to India, the casting of shrieking innocents into pits, and all kinds of psychotic, shameful and ludicrous practices such as would make whatever gods might be watching hide their eyes.

In the East, we have been more subtle, attempting to placate destiny by an elaborate pretense of not wanting to survive, or preferring nirvana to the eternal return. But elsewhere, listen to the wails, songs, shouts, hymns and chants. The voices of Islam, Judaism, Christianity and atheism join as one. Massed units in Red Square as well as Vatican City combine their energies in a single mighty appeal: Save us. For the beauty and the cruelty in the world; the kindness and the murder; our art trying to illuminate this wilderness; speculations of philosophers; the descent into drugs and drunkenness; today's wildly emotional crowds rushing around the world's streets--all are organized around death and designed to protect each of us from annihilation here or elsewhere.

Dostoievsky penetrates our situation (continued on page 220)Immortalist(continued from page 118) with one quick thrust. In The Possessed, Kirillov, the engineer, about to become his own god by committing suicide, says: "Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the sum of universal history down to this moment."

Tracking our spiritual history, we can follow this path: From the beginning, human consciousness longs and plans to perpetuate itself. Man craves personal immortality but observes that everyone dies. He creates gods, and worships and placates them. Assuming that "we must have done something wrong," he constructs systems of self-punishment, an emotional mathematics of retribution, to pay for our primal crime: the impudence of being human. Still, everybody dies. Then, since placating divine authority hasn't worked, he more or less unknowingly resolves to knock down the gods or replace them--to steal divinity and everlasting life.

This must be done warily. We must take care not to excite the anger of the gods who inflict mortality on us until we are strong enough to overthrow them. Hence, men alternate between abject surrender and assertiveness, and we inform ourselves of what we are doing through myths. In these dream projections, the Promethean and satanic types, or the "foolish women" such as Eve, always undergo a chastising, but the idea of rebellion is thereby passed along. Above all, we must conceal from ourselves the existence of our underground drive against the cosmic establishment. Only by means of this functional hypocrisy has our species been able to keep the revolutionary program going. It has enabled man to plot against his gods as he worshiped them.

A disguised drive toward divinity, the creation of our own divinity, carries us forward. At certain times, we advance too quickly and the gods in our heads inflict a terrible revenge--sometimes on ourselves, more often on others. Galileo and Bruno move out too far in front of their day and are cut down. But in another country, in Jung's phrase, "the godly sense of curiosity strives for birth." Man, in the person of Francis Bacon, sets up the scientific method to dominate his environment, to remove all mysteries (divine property), in order to discover the base Archimedes sought, the place to stand from which he could move the world, and ultimately remove death.

Having lost faith, a great many men and women have returned to old superstitions now cloaked in new disguises. God may have retreated, but the gods today are by no means dead. Though disposed to destroy them, we simultaneously bow down to the weirdest assortment of deities ever known, such as History, Success and Statistics. We worship purveyors of Luck, Fashion and Publicity. We follow shifting gospels based on journalistic graffiti passing for honest news. We humbly receive the word from makeshift divinities seated at the heads of couches, sexual statisticians, psychological testers, poll takers, various merchants of paranoia, the manipulators of public relations, television personalities--the multiple gods of our quickening century.

This is to say that increasing numbers of civilized men and women are progressing, or retrogressing, to a pagan state of mind. The most sophisticated as well as humble people--and atheists most of all--live in fear of these gods and are guided by the need either to live up to their examples or to compete for their approval. What emerges, astonishingly, is that the old gods in new forms live on in our heads, not metaphorically but, for all practical purposes, alive, and that they exert a dominating influence over the great bulk of modern affairs. One development is new here. For want of any other way, the publicizing of one's excellence (fitness for survival beyond death)--publicity great and small--has become the path to immortality. The lust for do-it-yourself immortality has produced an emotional transformation in which the ideal of right conduct (formerly the passport to heaven) is being replaced everywhere by the ideal of printing one's image on all things.

Among the middle-class masses, God, supposedly dead, has reappeared in the form of a gigantic Computer of Excellence. The faith of the anxious, climbing mortal is that degrees of excellence, or at least public visibility, are somehow calibrated in the stars. If we are persistent enough, our presence can be Xeroxed all over heaven. Our scores are being tabulated and processed by a master calculator. Imaginary keepers of immortality pass our data into this system. By some nameless procedure, each of us will be tested out. Our reward, a passing grade, will be that of life beyond death; our punishment for failure, annihilation. This accounts for the intensified publicity hunting and status seeking we see around us today. The only way to make sense out of the immortality hunters in the crowd (to a varying degree, nearly everyone) is to understand that they are trying to post scores on an imaginary record.

Yet, seeking to remedy his condition, civilized man also wildly contradicts himself. Expending his energies at one and the same time to placate, impress, destroy and replace his gods, he also exhibits a craving to share consciousness with all other beings, including the divine. The attempt at spiritual fusion with others can take many forms--destructive, saintly (that is to say, charitable) and quiescent. Consider some recent effects.

Writing in the context of Nazism, Jacques Maritain heard "the voices of a base multitude whose baseness itself appears as an apocalyptic sign." These voices cry out: "'We have had enough of lying optimism and illusory morality, enough of freedom and personal dignity and justice and peace and faithfulness and goodness which make us mad with distress. Let us give ground to the infinite promises of evil, and of swarming death, and of blessed enslavement, and of triumphant despair.' "

In contrast--growing out of San Francisco and New York and spreading across the country--we have had the hippie subculture, originally based on the ideal of natural saintliness or, at any rate, of free-form living. This has been made possible by a union bringing together the wisdom of the East and Western pharmacology, with LSD and other substances providing the means for prolonged and repeated escapes from time (which marks the minutes leading to extinction). The movement should be understood--and generally is not--as an attempt to achieve immortality now: freedom from time, money, history and death. It also attempts to realize a general sharing of consciousness; in other words, collective immortality.

"The basic unit of the culture," one young man calling himself Billy Digger says, "would be the commune, instead of a house with one man and one woman in it. The commune would not be owned by one person or one group but would be open to all people at all times, to do whatever they wish to do in it." (In a different way, searching for communal immortality through violence, California's Hell's Angels and the Red Guards of China have been into the same thing: knocking down the uncles of the world and putting dunce caps on them.)

If such movements appear to deny old-fashioned responsibility and traditional modes of achievement, it is not surprising. The ideal of achievement has to do with a reach for immortality, which, if you feel already in that state, even in simulation, is obviously no longer necessary.

Yet, these starts at saintly living (including, glibly, saintliness through violence), whether genuine or make-believe, fail to hide the phenomenon of flight. Saintliness in our time will not be able to generate corrective measures against our one long-range problem, which is death. Lacking a dynamic principle beyond that of shattering present life forms, it can only turn into another short-term holding operation. Saintliness can further charity, farming and simple craftsmanship. It can create motorcycles for the road to nowhere. It can promote measures to restore dignity at least temporarily, such as mass sweeping of refuse-strewn neighborhoods. It can sponsor brotherhood Happenings in the park; create sweet afternoons with flowers, balloons and kites; and encourage people to draw closer to one another. But finally, the uses of saintliness are defensive. Resisting technological inroads on the soul, they represent an attempt to deal with a neurotic industrial society by dropping out of it. Possibly the goal of all these efforts is that of agrarian return, or return to the small machine shop.

But with all the love and kindness in the world, no agrarian retreat or machine-shop rendezvous can prevail for long against the thought of death, except by encouraging the participants to ignore it--and as the body grows older, this cannot be done. The enlarged families of the "now" people will grow older. The measures they have undertaken are not wrong but right before their time. They must be reserved for the day when we gain utopia beyond time. They are eternally right but temporally inadequate. For the near future, dropout brotherhood will not be good enough, because the struggle against real death--as opposed to the simulated death and rebirth experienced under LSD and the other psychedelics--requires training and must be fought out industrially and in the laboratory.

As for the psychedelic trip, no one should doubt that it can prove rewarding, if it is not taken too far and too often. But resorted to as a complete way of life, it may hurt you in mysterious ways and achieve not much more than a temporarily helpful, and perhaps cowardly, cracking of identity. What makes widespread psychedelic dropping out as alarming as it can be is that--if the substances are used improperly--after a point, with each new voyage, return to the old identity and earthly purpose tends to seem increasingly less worth while. True, identity can become a cross when it is formed too rigidly; but ego identity is also our main source of power in the world--and only by organizing the power of our protesting intelligence can we hope to bring about the death-free life man must have.

Finally, by blowing their minds, young men and women hide from death. It is good sometimes to hide from death, and to go through simulated death and rebirth now and then. But too many trips, indiscriminately taken, can lead to an unearned passivity. If passivity takes hold, this society, undesirable as it may seem, will become far worse. Extremes of violence and mass passivity will build up, and when these two forces are polarized, violence nearly always wins.

It has already started to win again. The finest among us are shot in the head by half-crazed and, above all, lonely individuals. Not only assassins but the most advanced elements of our younger society can no longer stand being alone. Youth's quiescent and largely drug-oriented nihilism of a few years ago has quickly given way to the New Left's all-out freedom through violence. But quite apart from the justice of its causes, the New Left, as evidenced by its massive shock tactics, its theater, its enlarged family formations, is moving toward exactly the same goal as that of the psychedelic mutants--a collective and communal escape from time and death.

What happened is this: In the past quarter century, the public relations of death, as managed by theologians of all creeds and every secular orthodoxy, all but exhausted the ancient excuses for what Miguel de Unamuno called "the running away of life like water." Interestingly, the atomic bomb, LSD and the pill were developed at about the same time. Could this be the evolutionary crisis of our species? For centuries, men were able to hold onto their peace of mind by repetitive prayers, chants, rhythms and psalms set to music. But repetition, beauty and music no longer possess the force to distract us from meaninglessness.

Today, we are in a race against time--racing, as Maritain suggests, our own apocalypse. Man's inexorable though hardly remorseless drive to divinity is taking new, noninstitutionalized forms. This comes down to the simplest of propositions: The species must solve the problem of death very soon, blow itself up or blow its mind.

Medical help is on the way. But so, too, are firepower and despair. All have computer technology behind them. Any one of the three might win. Will medical advances to arrest the aging of human tissues prevail over weaponry and mass psychosis? That has become the question of our time, and conceivably of all time.

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." Art, too, insofar as it celebrates or merely bemoans our helplessness, has gone as far as it can. The beautiful device of tragedy ending in helplessness has become outmoded in our absurd time, no longer desirable and not to be glamorized. The art that embellishes death with visual beauty and celebrates it in music belongs to other centuries.

It comes as no surprise that traditional forms of art are being shattered, with the editing and fixing of life no longer allowed. Our participation is demanded in these works; we cannot be spectators. The discothèque takes its place as an electric art form. We loosen our anxieties with the help of enormous guitars in a temple of fragmentation. Kinetic and luminous forms that reach out and bring us into the action, declaimed poetry now so often set to music, multiple screens, Happenings that frequently involve orgy and obscenity--all have one purpose: to smash the separateness of everyone present; to expose feeling and break through thinking, to make us live, in the phrase Alan Watts has quoted from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "a perpetual uncalculated life in the present." And all this, too, amounts to one more attempt to hide from the end--this time by substituting Dionysian togetherness for romance, and a bombardment of the senses, lightworks of the soul, a sort of electronic Buddhism in place of sequential perception. In this environment, the lost self finds a comforting and protective nonexistence--if the self does not really exist, it cannot be killed. The use of kinetic environment as an art form thus removes death, creating the illusion of an eternal now--an illusion in that it seems to guarantee eternal youth, which, of course, is what this generation is really after.

The immortalist thesis is that the time has come for man to get rid of the intimidating gods in his own head. It is time for him to grow up out of his cosmic inferiority complex (no more "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"), bring his disguised desire into the open and go after what he wants, the only state of being he will settle for, which is divinity.

The moment has come also to stop yielding to hysteria, or to its opposite extreme, sinking into indifference and fashionable despair. Action, not passion, is called for to lift humanity out of this mortal predicament.

We have circled the moon, harnessed nuclear energy, and now have the biochemical means to control birth; why must death itself, called in I Corinthians "the last enemy," be considered sacred and beyond conquest? A new act of faith is required of us: the kind of faith we might have had a few decades ago, and did not, when Dr. R. H. Goddard was bravely projecting his rockets into the atmosphere and a band of futurists was insisting that not just in comic strips but in reality we could lift ourselves beyond any space that could be seen from the earth. This new faith we must have is that with the technology at our disposal in the near future, death can be conquered. This faith must also weld salvation to medical engineering. We must drive away the gods of doubt and self-punishment.

Our new faith must accept as gospel that salvation belongs to medical engineering and nothing else; that man's fate depends first on the proper management of his technical proficiency; that we can only engineer our freedom from death, not pray for it; that our only messiahs will be wearing white coats, not in asylums but in chemical and biological laboratories.

• • •

Man, it has been said, is DNA's way of understanding itself. DNA, the deoxyribonucleic-acid molecule whose coiled threads, it appears, control not only all of us but all of life: We ourselves have now reproduced it. In the words of biophysics professor Robert L. Sinsheimer of the California Institute of Technology: "We had made then in a test tube the DNA which could serve as the progenitor of an indefinitely long chain of progeny virus from this day on throughout time." In other words, the human race has at last performed the feat of reproducing its own substance. Or, in terms of our theme, the pretender to the throne of the gods has moved toward genetic control over his own future divinity.

Has DNA planned its own transformation all along? If our species has evolved from some such mysterious project, then energy must be judged to have played a trick on its own nature, and for all time we have been the victims of this game.

At some point, energy either surpassed itself or possibly made a mistake by separating out and spinning off little subcreations. Practically forever after, these varied units rhythmically assembled and fell apart--we now say "lived" and "died"--knowing nothing. All this was evidently not pointless. Whatever created life seems to have improved its capability through the living and dying of its separated forms.

Thus, we may see ourselves as a fairly late development in energy's self-improvement program. By way of consolation, some biologists believe death to have been an evolutionary device. Energy's differentiated little subcreations could not remain immortal or there would have been no advance toward our present condition. Carrying this one step more, we may then be programed to die so that our descend-ants will eventually escape mortality and become gods.

Such an arrangement may be convenient for DNA, but, unfortunately, the master plan must have gone away as far as we are concerned. There has been a serious error in scheduling: We who live now have come down to the end of the river and find ourselves genetically deposited here before our intended time of arrival. This could be DNA's miscalculation: It carried us to the edge of immortality too swiftly. And now the old protective gods are gone. Technologically unready, we have been taken down to a wilderness surrounded by death. Members of the rebel species, refusing too soon to serve any longer as evolution fodder, back up like a lost wagon train in a small clearing, with nowhere to go and with no weapons powerful enough to accomplish anything more than a delaying action against the end.

The error in programing occurred when DNA apparently lost control over the nice balance between man's superstition and his scientific capability. If these forces had been brought down to the late 20th Century more or less evenly, the species could triumphantly have thrown away its protective myths at precisely the time it learned how to arrest the aging of its own cells.

The problem becomes one of negotiating the hazardous years between now and the time when indefinite living--freedom from inevitably growing old--will be made possible. How to manage it, with the race's powers of self-deception critically impaired? DNA has chosen to put the idea of the deepfreeze into our heads. This conception, identified particularly with Professor Robert C. W. Ettinger and promoted by recently emerging cryonics societies in the United States and France, calls for freezing the newly dead (and later on, when humanity gets used to it, freezing people about to die), rather than burying or incinerating them, in order that these individuals may be revived at some time in the future, as soon as technological means to do so have been developed and, of course, when a cure for the fatal disease has been found.

The prospect of cryonic suspension has been covered by playboy (especially in Intimations of Immortality, by Frederik Pohl, June 1964) and by Ettinger in numerous television appearances. But odds in favor of survival by this means remain, for the time being, very long. Ettinger himself has declared that freezing offers "a chance of debatable magnitude, but nevertheless some chance."

More important, the surfacing of such an idea at a critical time in history reveals the tremendous force of our determination somehow to become gods. Even though probably trapped, we ought never to underestimate ourselves. The human race is wily. Our transitional generations can be imagined belonging to a lost battalion with no alternative but to fight. I am not talking about a gung-ho charge into oblivion. We will be ingenious. What we are about to do, as soon as we assemble our talent and plan properly, is, first of all, to mount a continuing research assault on the processes that cause us to grow old and die. The following is from the June 9, 1967, New York Post:

Scientist Sees an end to Natural Death

Washington (A.P.)--A much-honored engineer predicts that by 1980 man may be able to choose in advance the sex of his children and slow down his own aging.

Still further in the future, writes Dr. Augustus B. Kinzel in the current issue of Science magazine, man may, by controlling hereditary factors, create supermen and abolish death from natural causes entirely....

After a long career in applied engineering, Kinzel now is president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego....

Looking into the long-term future, Kinzel predicts that "we will be really able to manipulate the DNA molecule and predetermine heredity.

"We will lick the problem of aging completely, so that accidents will be essentially the only cause of death...."

Can such optimism be justified? Dr. Carroll Williams, professor of biology at Harvard, famous for developing a "juvenile hormone" that has prolonged the life of American Polyphemus moths, is quoted by Robert Prehoda in Designing the Future as believing that "the day is not too far distant when we will be able to treat senescence as we now know how to treat pneumonia."

Prehoda also offers the meticulously qualified prophecy of an eminent authority on aging, Dr. Alex Comfort, director of the Medical Research Council at University College in London:

Once we get moving, the rate of scientific progress in life extension might conceivably become so rapid that, provided one was young enough for treatment, one might hope for a series of life-extending bonuses.

The study of aging (for some reason, many specialists prefer the Latin form senescence) goes back to alchemy. It is also one of our newer, least-organized sciences. Gerontology has become its proper name, with geriatrics referring to the treatment of debilitating symptoms common to old people. Currently, the field--hardly yet a discipline--finds itself in a state of enlightened confusion. The enlightenment, of a negative sort, arises from the awareness that we do not really know our enemy, have not even agreed upon a definition of senescence and have only the vaguest understanding of its underlying processes.

Part of the difficulty has stemmed from a dearth of support. The most generous estimates, according to Prehoda, indicate that only one percent of the biological research funds available in the United States has been allocated to aging studies. As of January 1967, he reported in Designing the Future that the Child Health and Human Development Institute of the National Institutes of Health, the Government agency responsible for funding gerontological research, was supporting grants explicitly for fundamental studies on biological aging totaling about $3,000,000 per year. (During 1967, the three leading producers of canned and packaged dog food in the United States--General Foods, Ralston Purina and Quaker Oats--together spent $19,700,000 on advertising in all media for this product alone.)

There are now a few signs of change. In June 1968, for example, a $7,500,000 Gerontology Research Center was opened in Baltimore by the Child Health and Human Development Institute. The research center--under the direction of the man who has been called the dean of aging research, Dr. Nathan W. Shock--was designed for a staff of 300 researchers and an attached 38-bed research clinic.

The processes of development and aging remain mysterious, but by no means hopelessly so. For instance, in a limited way, we already know how to interfere with them. The life span of laboratory animals can be extended by four methods: (1) underfeeding, (2) the inhibition of "free radicals" (oxidizing agents in the body), (3) immunosup-pression (inhibiting the destructive activities of antibodies), (4) poikilothermy (cooling of body temperature).

The classic experiment disproving the inevitability of a fixed life span was performed in 1934 by Dr. Clive M. McCay at Cornell. By subjecting rats to nutritional deprivation--feeding them a proper amount of vitamins, minerals and proteins but a greatly reduced number of calories--he slowed down their rate of maturing and also extended their life spans. In some instances, rats whose growth had been retarded lived twice as long as those maturing on a standard diet. According to Chemical and Engineering News:

After 1000 days, the underfed rats still looked young, while the normally fed ones seldom lived more than 965 days. Some of the starved rats lived as long as 1400 days.... As one of his prime contributions, Dr. McCay showed that the known maximum life span of rats was not the upper limit rigidly set by heredity.... Other research workers have found that the lives of silkworms, fruit flies, bees, chickens and other animals can be prolonged by under-feeding.

What may be a remarkable development along the same line of research was announced on October 27, 1961, by the Monsanto Company. Dr. Richard S. Gordon, it was disclosed, succeeded in arresting the growth of baby chicks and mice altogether, suspending their physiological maturation over a period of from six to nine months. When the amino acid, tryptophan, was reduced to 15-25 percent of the normal daily requirement, baby chicks and newly weaned mice simply stopped developing. As soon as the imbalance was corrected, they returned to normal growth processes, maturing without ill effects.

The Gordon experiments bear out an observation by Dr. McCay following an earlier study with brook trout in 1927 that "something was consumed in growth that is essential for the maintenance of life." That something, whatever it may be, evidently disappears. Tryptophan deprivation in the Monsanto laboratory prolonged life only insofar as it delayed maturity. This avenue of research does allow us to entertain one fantasy. If underfeeding of one kind or another can also someday indefinitely delay the physical maturing of human beings--while the accumulation of experience and information continues--we might conceivably produce a grouping of "immortal" boy-men and girl-women, held indefinitely in early childhood or on the brink of adolescence, with formidable, ever-growing intelligences and the bodies of children. For such an elite group, of course, once its members chose to release themselves from the biological suspension, the onset of maturity would mean rejoining the human race and an irrevocable commitment to the mortal life span.

Biochemist Denham Harman of the University of Nebraska Medical School has called attention to a "striking" prolongation of life among male mice fed with a diet including an antioxidant chemical, butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT). The median life span of a short-lived strain of mice was extended over 50 percent by this diet. Harman thinks that oxidizing agents in the body bring about such aging changes as hardening of the arteries. The addition of similar chemicals to a man's diet, he believes, may become "an acceptable, practical means of significantly increasing his useful life."

A promising experiment in immuno-suppression conducted by Dr. Roy L. Walford, professor of pathology at UCLA, has resulted so far in a 20-30 percent prolongation of life in longer-lived mouse strains. An older line of research, that of poikilothermy, has demonstrated many times that the life span can be extended at lower temperatures. Animals that hibernate, in cool sleep, live longer than related groups. Annual fish kept at 16 degrees centigrade live about twice as long as those kept at 22 degrees centigrade. Fence lizards of New England live two years; in Florida, one year. It has been suggested that a drug to lower sleeping temperature by two degrees might extend the human life span; by how much is not certain.

Today, gerontology appears to be a science waiting for its Einstein, someone who will establish a structure of agreed-upon first principles. Or possibly, even more important, a sudden advance will be achieved in the study of aging by a researcher like Sir Alexander Fleming, happening to notice mold growing in a container on the window sill or laboratory shelf. Perhaps, too, a young Korzybski will be needed to help pin down the essence of each new theory, to determine how much it really differs from all the others.

The student of aging, engaged in a combined fight for life and bounty hunt, will find good reasons to become discouraged. The human body turns out to be such an unstable repository of ills. Moving out from what he imagines to be a secure base of understanding, he encounters one mystery after another. Everywhere he finds impossibilities. From all sides voices warn, caution and discourage him. Now and then he passes by the encampments of older specialists, who are shaking their heads in bafflement. All over the jungle, blind men seem to be feeling an elephant, and this immense mystery of the slowly dying body endures.

Yet he will keep on. In time, he will have new weapons more powerful and precise than the laser or the electron microscope. Sooner or later, with persistence, he can practically count on luck. Somewhere inside the tangle of speculation and error, a researcher is going to stumble across a clue.

The young gerontologist must not let himself be intimidated. He will, of course, listen to his seniors, and learn from them, but he will also find that they contradict one another, have not discovered very much and need him. As Dr. Comfort observed 12 years ago, during a symposium on aging held at Gatlinburg, Tennessee: "The more we beat the drums of senescence to students, the more we will find out."

Even though emergency action is needed--for the race's emotional health depends on it--advances toward the ultimate prevention of death are bound to be tentative and slow. Help will almost surely arrive too late for everyone now alive.

The frozen casket does hold out a faint promise, and currently the only promise, of survival. Another hope might be that of regenerating a person someday from the preserved snipping of his own flesh. But these offer faraway prospects, with the present chance of our returning to consciousness seemingly quite remote. In the face of unadorned death, now or tomorrow, how will we content ourselves?

First, we must live one day at a time and hope for one piece of good luck at a time. This means looking forward to the prolongation of life, someday to become the prelude to indefinite living or immortality itself. It means going after--perhaps for peace of mind even counting on--the "series of life-extending bonuses" cited by Dr. Comfort. These certainly are not out of reach; some, in crude form, we already have with us, such as the implanting of new hearts and, in time, all of the body's major organs--eventually without fear of tissue rejection. Progress in this field has already moved beyond the most euphoric expectations of, say, five years ago. For instance, the recent recommendation by a special faculty committee at Harvard that the medical community redefine death in terms of irreversible brain damage, even though the heart continues to beat, will undoubtedly help clear the way to the routine transplantation of "live" organs.

By such means--the eventual growing of duplicate organs for each of us in vitro; elimination of substances that quicken aging, such as Harman's free radicals, from the everyday diet; and by other measures that, if the past is any indication, will unexpectedly be revealed at some forthcoming medical conference--we may arrive at a legitimate hope.

Intensified research can prolong life and buy time for everyone. Whenever you buy time, you buy a new geometric 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. In successive decades, your life may have been saved by sulfanilamide, penicillin, cortisone, reserpine. Today, if you can buy 50 years, you may look forward to more than a prayer of buying eternity. Even 15 to 25 years, with good luck, could provide booster shots well into the 21st Century. And at some time, just beyond a horizon that is no longer receding, extensions of life will, with luck, merge into an immortal present.

Then we will have nothing less than the self-created mutation of a species achieved by its own members, who refused to be victims of a master design. Man's disguised drive to immortality will at last have prevailed over his biological destiny. Born to die, the rebel will have taken a stand against his own nature, said "No!" to his own faulty cells and countermanded the lower-level evolutionary orders that consigned him to oblivion. The simulated death and rebirth rhythms moving through all the life we know may be seen in retrospect as those of a species in labor, giving birth to a divine form of itself.

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. I am speaking of the inescapable parabolic arching from birth to death. We must clearly understand that any given unit of life--my individual existence and yours--can never be guaranteed eternity. Our special identities will always be subject to being hit by a truck or dying in a plane crash; a sudden virus or heart seizure, even in the body's newly regained youth, may carry us off. But the important thing will be to free ourselves not from the random chance of dying, which is fair enough, but from the certainty of death. Experienced in this way, immortality is the state of being alive now, ungoverned by span, cycle or inevitability.

This pursuit of death's secret should not be undertaken glumly. We will press on but avoid crabbed fanaticism, hunting down the quarry with exuberance and, above all, with relief that our disguised desire has come out in the open. The primary source of our fears, and of all evil and meanness afflicting the human spirit, has been acknowledged and publicly identified. It was death all the time, and nothing else. What a fabulous liberation not merely to know but to realize that! Anxiety falls away. The main point is that in understanding what we fear, we may perhaps act less violently against one another and direct our aggressions against death itself.

The false gods to whom the immortality hunter formerly bowed down will be reduced to artifacts. He will no longer injure his fellow men in the struggle for the gods' imaginary favors. The Computer of Excellence will have vanished and the pathetic and vainglorious competition to ring up scores for the record will come to an end. The old mathematics of retribution will stand exposed as an empty threat of our own making.

Meaninglessness--the state of mind that currently renders humanity either inert or vicious--will make no more trouble. We will have something to do. Our mission will be simply, first, to attack death and all of its natural causes and, second, to prepare for immortality, or the state of indefinite living, which is the divine state. To become divine will mean at last the freedom to play eternally beyond death's shadow.

But there remains the catch: Members of the transitional generations will almost surely not live to experience the immortal state. Knowing this, we will have to psych ourselves, like athletes, into a superior performance. This could begin with a self-congratulatory religion, rather than a humbling one. We may spread abroad a new faith honoring our race instead of punishing it for an imaginary primal crime. Through our efforts, we honor the human species by helping to turn it into the divine species.

We may fairly consider ourselves the heroes and heroines of the evolutionary process. Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will look back and know that we, the last of the old mortals, held the world together even in the full knowledge that death was waiting for us. We did not blow our minds after all, nor, out of frustration and forsakenness, blow up the planet, destroying their inheritance. We showed the grace not to take revenge for our own permanent loss by imposing suicide on mankind. These will be reasonable enough grounds for self-worship, and will permit us all indulgences, so that during the final hours of the hunt, we may enjoy every pleasure that mortal life has to offer.

What we are hunting, and hope to secure for our grandchildren, is really nothing less than the long-promised kingdom of heaven. The Gospel According to Matthew--which may be accepted as an evolutionary foretelling--warns that the Kingdom of God will come as a thief in the night. "Watch therefore," Matthew counsels us, "for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come."

He will arrive in a caravan with certain precious medicines. Meanwhile, we may at least start planning the utopia to follow.

• • •

It is said that men and women will go mad in the face of eternity and--with infinite time ahead of them--lie around like lotus-eaters, succumb to indolence and despair, give up work projects, cease to love because there is no urgency, and finally kill each other through sheer boredom.

Alan Watts has bemoaned the "terrible monotony of everlasting pleasure" and conjectured that "there would be no joy in being alive save in relation to the awesome prospect of death." The Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev refers to "evil infinity." These fears are understandable but based on old-style temporal thinking. They arise from the surprisingly Western assumption, for Watts, that scarcity and urgency are required to make people do anything. True, with death the fact, men have organized their activities to race the sunset, hoping to rise above the human condition and escape judgement. But with death no longer the fact, another kind of man will evolve--a man whose nervous system (after a period of adjustment) will have been freed of anxiety. Having no clock to race and nothing to prove, this divine man will be free to play, with no more fear of meaninglessness than a football or baseball player, an actor, a lamb or a puppy.

Besides, in the immortalist state, the citizens of eternity will be living on different levels of time, taking part in one historical game or another as they please. Since endless existence on a single plane would, indeed, be a bore, the utopia beyond time will extend the Hindu conception so beautifully adapted to Western concerns in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf: that each of us can, if we try, lead many lives in one. Most men, like the Steppenwolf of the novel, live out only a tiny portion of their potential existence. The Hindu model, following Buddha's journey, provides for a life in which the traveler plays successive roles: that of student, youthful explorer in the wilderness, rake and wastrel, merchant, family man, hermit and, finally, beggar and holy man. Through these stages, the soul progresses toward the unknowable and one day (it is pretended), with luck, will escape the eternal return.

In the immortalist view, this is an elaborate fake: The eternal return is desperately wanted. It can be made possible in our world beyond death and time by a system of designed sleeps and programed reincarnations. Techniques of freezing or administered hibernation will permit us to rest for designated periods in between an endless variety of lives and careers. In eternity--always excepting the possibility of accident--men and women will have the chance to live out all the unlived lives and travel the untraveled paths that they wish they had explored.

Assuming that the aging of cells and tissues has been arrested and can be reversed during the period of sleep, the body may be returned to whatever age the person desires--presumably, this side of puberty, since a return to physical childhood might well prove to be impossible. The individual may rest in peace for 10, 20, 75 years, or for centuries, before being wakened to his new existence.

By such means, each of us may pursue lost dreams and careers, becoming doctor, space explorer, artist, athlete, scientist--fleshing out in free play all of the myths that have ever occurred to mankind, being in our turn Apollo, Diony-sius, Loki, Gilgamesh, Helen, the Wife of Bath and Isadora Duncan. And if we lack the talent to carry off one role or the other--being, say, a mediocre athlete or actor 100 years from now as well as today--well, then, we will have had our try, and perhaps failed; but the penalty for failure will not be annihilation from the world's memory, as we now fear. There will always be fresh chances to project our being in new ways.

There will no longer be one linear history of the species. History will not be going anywhere in particular. Instead, we will live in a mosaic of histories, crossing over from one to another in each incarnation. "Side-by-side" lives will go on in separate frames of reference, like circus acts under the same tent. Executing their mythic patterns, people will be in different phases of exploration and different blocks of time. Imagine a group of friends--one in his voluptuary stage, another scientifically obsessed, a third mystical and contemplative, a fourth all business. A century later, they might meet and find their roles interchanged. Or an individual dedicated to exploits in his last incarnation might seek to rest and reflect. Arising from his cool sleep, he might then enjoy an interlude as teacher and scholar, and devote himself for the next 50 years to tending, watching over and guiding the life lines of others.

Part of the population will be playing these varied world games, another part hibernating and a third part engaged in some sort of training, briefing or debriefing, in between lives. The one who has just "waked up" will not, of course, be a child, but in his new surroundings--decades or centuries later--he will be as a child, requiring re-education for the new scene into which he has been reborn. The reorientation will not only acquaint him with utopia's current ground rules, cultural and scientific developments that have taken place since he went to sleep, and news of this sort; it will also be designed to prepare him for new emotional settings in the lifetime to come. Eternity will contain many kinds of time and possibilities for action, as each rebirth confronts the traveler with different game values. Each time, he will have to care about new things; even if there is no death, he should not feel completely secure. For men turned into gods, stress and anxiety in reasonable amounts must be provided--like artificial gravity in a spaceship.

Our present-day faith in games should carry us through. For divine people, the questions of why we are here, why we exist, will be unimportant. Once we have learned to move in and out of different kinds of time at will, the "meaning of life" becomes our business, not that of a cosmic authority that has refused to reveal itself. As gods, we no longer ask about meaning; we determine it. We make the rules and are meaning. Life has become our sport, like football, which simply is and has no reason why. In their ontological significance, comets, rocks, dust and solar flares do not concern us, except as matter to be controlled. We, the individual forms through which the river of energy passes, are responsible for our own significance. With the conquest of aging to death, we will have qualified to become our own deities, lords of creation by default, fully able to dictate life's meaning as we see fit.

Yet, without the pressure of time passing (and the idea that we have only one life to live), might not our drive to create, learn and explore wither for lack of urgency? Perhaps. Conceivably, with life ending in a temporary slumber rather than in death, we would not try as hard as so many of us do now--pushing for salvation achieved by scores registered on the imaginary cosmic machine. But trying hard, in itself, is not an absolute virtue, nor progress an eternal ideal. Immortality has always been the ultimate goal of progress. Once death has been rendered obsolete for our species, the journey along that old road will be unnecessary, except for pleasure. 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. There will be no moral need to create, learn or explore, any more than we need to go skiing or skindiving. Yet think how many make a virtual religion out of these forms of free play.

It is true that we could eventually grow tired of our games, but not for many lifetimes. Meanwhile, a greater danger to the utopia beyond time will be likely to come from a lingering physiological disorientation: For many centuries, the body may not realize that parabolic aging to death is no longer a threat. It may continue reacting to the human condition that doesn't exist any longer. During this period, liberation from death may make our nervous systems uneasy. Vestigial fears and reactive aggressions may contend in the individual's dreams. Under this kind of stress, cosmic delinquents may go as far as to attempt a disruption of paradise and even try to bring back death, perhaps by means of random murders.

The immortalist view is that the early feeling of disorientation in eternity would not lead to such evil extremes or, in any event, that incidents of this kind would probably be rare. Since, as far as we know, the desire to injure others relates to one's own fear of death, most rebels beyond time would stop short of killing. (By this time, of course, chemical control of personality [as detailed in Psychochemistry: Personality by Prescription, by Ernest Havemann, Playboy, November 1968] will be possible, but we are assuming, or hoping, that in the immortalist state such control would be used sparingly, only to upgrade intelligence or, as a last resort, to prevent psychopathic violence.)

To be on the safe side, facsimiles of conflict must be devised for nervous systems temporarily disoriented by the abolition of death. Nervously aggressive individuals should be encouraged to compete in tournaments, offered dangerous assignments, for example, in exploration and permitted to take part in institutionalized bloodletting. If the risk of death attracts these people, so be it. Let there be chivalric games with artificial dragons.

For less extreme but still normally competitive men and women, the illusion of ratings will continue to be essential. Reflexively showing off before the old gods, even though immortality has been won, they may come back in all their incarnations--playing a succession of human seasons within the divine framework--as athletes return year after year to play in the National and American leagues, with the ups and downs of their career averages and their standings in the sky recorded through eternity by our utopian statisticians.

Coordinators of the world societies will be restricted to one term, one lifetime of authority, so that a self-perpetuating bureaucracy can make no bid for eternal power. The trust assigned to them will be to keep watch over all wheels of being. They will make sure that the interests of the basket weavers and the atomic scientists do not interfere with one another, and that space rugby teams do not drop the ball amid flocks of sheep. The governing cadres must serve as spiritual traffic consultants and guardians of the eternal return, as educators and keepers of every history. They will maintain a record of all developments, advances and setbacks. Most important, they are to be charged with creating simulations of bygone events that the newly awakened voyager might want to re-experience as part of his education the next time around.

In a world beyond death, there will probably be more nonconformists than ever before. Great numbers of such people may choose to live outside of history altogether and spend their days gardening, weaving and tending animals. Others will reject eternal life, preferring to mature and die in the old way; and certainly no attempt will be made to change their minds. With severe overpopulation problems likely in the earlier years, the more citizens who opt for mortality, the easier it will be for everyone else. (By the time physical immortality is possible, in those underdeveloped nations where overpopulation was still a very real problem in the Sixties, survival will have necessitated a total attack on its root causes: ignorance, religion and superstition, nationalist political doctrine and machismo, the need to prove manhood. In the United States, Japan and parts of Europe, where such causes are on their way to being overcome, birth rates have already started to decline. Besides, not every savant detects an overwhelming emergency in this regard. "Fortunately," R. Buckminster Fuller observed a few years ago, "population explosion is only the momentary social hysteria's cocktail conversation game. Real population crisis is fundamentally remote. There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world's population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average night-club proximity. There is ample room in the New York streets for one half of the world's population to amble about in, leaving room enough inside buildings for the other half to lie down and sleep....")

Children in the immortalist state will be treated as immigrants, requiring visas to be admitted to the new society. This should cause no great hardship for anyone. After all, we have children mainly to perpetuate genetic repetitions of ourselves in eternity, to "keep the family going." Now, when we can move into an indefinitely extended future ourselves, in person, the longing to have children may, for many couples, be moderated. And if the aging process has been stabilized, why hurry? With indefinite time ahead, the parents-to-be can well afford to wait until the attrition of the accidental dead leaves an opening.

In these circumstances, children will become a welcome and beloved minority treated with great tenderness by everyone. Born free of time and death, the newcomers will probably form a slightly different class, having no memory of the old days, when people fell sick and died. The veterans who knew time and death and barely escaped it will regale these beautiful and fortunate young people with tales of that bygone purgatory.

In the immortalist state, the nature of love as we know it will almost necessarily change. Already in transition today, love will have nothing much to do with social contracts nor have a form supposed to last forever. All erotic events can take place free of time and can last indefinitely. In fact, some people might choose to spend an entire incarnation in one stupendous erotic event. Andrew Marvell's vision summoned up for his coy mistress--"Had we but world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime" --will suddenly come true, and it will be possible for our love to grow "vaster than empires, and more slow."

If love--especially romantic love--has been attempting to share consciousness in a simulated eternity, what will happen to it in real eternity? If love now serves to stop time, what will be its role when time and aging have, in fact, been stopped? If love has conveyed a longing for rebirth out of time, how will it fare when rebirth into many successive lives is routinely guaranteed? More often than not, the individual will probably pursue a new way of loving. Hence, if marriage in its present form should survive the conquest of death (which it very well may not), the best arrangement will probably be for the contract between husband and wife to terminate automatically after each existence. This offers no problem to the couple who have been happy together in their last incarnation: A simple renewal of marriage vows can unite them as young man and woman together again a lifetime later.

The young man coming down the road may be one's grandfather, and the old man nearing his time of sleep one's son. In eternity--assuming that members of the family still want to communicate with one another--the son and the grandson will sometimes be "older" than the reborn father. With reference to a given incarnation, they may be more experienced and wiser and, therefore, unhesitatingly counsel the fledgling parent. The old lament "If youth knew, if age could ..." will be forgotten and, since no man or woman will really be older than another, traditional authority, in and out of the family, will give way to brotherhood. But sooner or later, the small unit that we know now will be likely to break apart. Expanded families of 20 or more, increasingly common among younger people, may become the rule. Yet, though we go on to live in different blocks of time, family records will be carefully maintained through the centuries--to avoid an orphaned feeling and to prevent inbreeding.

Even when we no longer age and die, the need to worship some sort of mystery will undoubtedly remain. What symbols then will represent the essential mystery? This is impossible to forecast, but the children of eternity may worship variations of luck, or that which cannot be controlled. There will be no point in worshiping anything else, since they will have everything else. Or, if they do not possess it, they will have endless time to try for it. But luck--the only thing that can kill them--will be different; and for this reason, they may go down on their knees before it.

The philosopher will revere the principle of indeterminacy. Others may conduct ceremonies before the future equivalent of a giant slot machine or roulette wheel. This curious and enigmatic element, the mystery of luck containing through all eternity the chance of death--perhaps, beyond time, offering the mathematical certainty of a terminal accident--will probably, as suggested earlier, fascinate many members of the race and tempt them into strange deeds daring annihilation. This in no way contravenes immortalist principles, since it is the once-unavoidable passage through aging and illness into oblivion that will have been rendered obsolete, not the voluntary risking of death if the spirit so pleases.

Berdyaev has suggested that "the crowning point of world creation is the end of this world. The world must be turned into an image of beauty, it must be dissolved in creative ecstasy."

This hardly seems desirable or necessary. Why should the world be dissolved at all? Because the writer himself is going to die--for no other reason. Göt-terdämmerungs need not be invoked, no matter how beautiful. True, in the immortalist state, death might occasionally be summoned. It is conceivable that an older traveler, tired of his divinity--after having lived out dozens of lives and explored every desire--could slip from personal to general consciousness and drift into his long-sought nirvana with eyes. The individual would give himself up and simply rest. He would not be a fixed person anymore and he would care only to sleep. A sweet weariness might pervade his being. Then his eyes would close, not in forced death but in voluntary leave-taking, because he had lived enough.

Such an ending gives mystical satisfaction. But the prospect is also that this sweet suicide might never appeal to him. He could perfectly well live on and on, without apology or contrived abandonment of himself--and, after each life cycle and period of sleep, look forward to beginning again, always to begin again.