num_pages: 288
description: At the heart of human experience lies an obsession with the nature of death. Religion for most of history has provided an explanation for human life and a vision of what comes after it. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such beliefs came under relentless pressure as new ideasfrom psychiatry to evolution to communismseemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands: humans could cease to be animals defeat death and become immortal.In The Immortalization Commission the acclaimed political philosopher and critic John Gray takes a brilliant and frightening look at humankinds dangerous striving toward a scientific version of immortality. Probing the parallel faiths of Bolshevik God-builders who sought to reshape the planet and psychical researchers who believed they had evidence of a nonreligious form of life after death Gray raises fascinating questions about how such beliefs threaten the very nature of what it means to be human. He looks to philosophers journalists politicians charlatans and mass murderers who all felt driven by a specifically scientific and modern worldview and whose revolt against death resulted in a series of experiments that ravaged whole countries. An urgent examination of Darwins post-religious legacy The Immortalization Commission is an important work from one of Britains leading public intellectuals (The Wall Street Journal).
language: English
title: The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux