Page 13 - Ruminations

11. Here is thy sting: three mortal ironies

1. Morality. The modern wish for physical immortality, expressed in
the effort to discover the means of avoiding death, echoes the ancient
alchemists’ dream of finding the elixir of life. Biochemistry dangles the
possibility of cheating death as a technological fix, available first—or
only—to the wealthy. Endless life, however, must be its own reward:
if maintaining one’s own health is the highest goal, then altruism will
yield to selfishness. Ordinary mortals—believers in an afterlife as well
as atheists denying its existence—will behave morally to some extent;
for them, virtue is to be rewarded either in the hereafter or simply in
the satisfaction of doing the right thing. But neither type expects
unlimited earthly existence, and would have trouble justifying
unlimited self-protection to achieve it.

2. Banality. As a universal, death should be understood as a final rite
of passage, as one-sided as birth and as commonplace. For most of
one’s life awareness of death as an immediate possibility is placed on a
sliding scale of probability with other natural and manmade disasters;
yet one is never alone or unique in whatever category of risk one
places oneself. Ironically, the more esoteric religious teachings and
disciplines urge their followers to minimize fixation on their demise to
the point of it disappearing: it is an obstacle blocking progress to
higher and less ordinary achievements. For them, as for anyone
overcoming mortal anxiety, death becomes as banal as breathing. It is
popular superstition that raises dying (and the dead) to a realm of
cosmic importance and profound individual significance.

3. Finality. What is philosophically or logically necessary is precisely
what is psychologically impossible: nullity in the real world, or death
of the self. Some people finesse the problem by declaring the self
imaginary, and thus incapable of nullification; but that is a semantic
trick: “self” exists in the psychological activity of a person as much as
any other perceptions, subjective or not. Others abandon logic in
favor of fantasy, giving the self an impossible ontological status as a
nonphysical entity: again, it cannot be extinguished. For everyone else,
death remains a mystery owing to its absolute extinction of
consciousness; that is confusing for conscious beings who can see
how it ends but not what it is and how how it begins.