The Source of Morality

A excerpt from Amol Rajan's review of a new book by the British author John Gray, "The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death."

But stick around for the last paragraph because it frames the point I've been thinking about the past three days. I'm watching Joan of Arcadia, a long-cancelled TV show that came up in the "Religion As Media" course I'm auditing at NYU. Joan gets visits from God. He tells her to do things that are often outside of her interests and capabilities and often illogical (even while telling her to be herself). She pursues them grudgingly -- and not without a hefty dose of sass. Sometimes bad things happen but most times great things happen: a friend stays in school after she smashes his artwork; she tries out for cheerleading and aids an investigation into a young girl who threw her newborn in the trash; she takes piano lessons and reunites her father with his estranged brother and her teacher with Bach. She never knows why she's doing what God has asked her but she does it anyway because faith means obeying. (For more on the show, read Angela Zito's "The Theology of Joan of Arcadia.")

How did I get here from a book review about scientific attempts to cheat death? Because Rajan asks us to consider that simply acting according to moral outlines (religious laws) may not be the best way to form a moral society. Something to be considered as we look for a moral ethics in medicine:

Gray's life was changed by his reading of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium. (It happens to all of us). In that seminal work, Cohn argues that the millenarian movements of medieval times and secular totalitarianisms of the 20th century shared a foundational characteristic with the Abrahamic religions. They saw history as teleological. More than that: they considered history rectilinear, and so possessing both a direction and a destination. The secular totalitarianisms were essentially religious, because in sponsoring this teleology they saw human history as a moral drama whose final act is salvation. But whereas traditional religion is animated by faith in God, these secular religions are animated by faith in progress, as delivered by science.

Yet science, Gray contends, cannot deliver what we want it to, which is salvation from ourselves. Scientific knowledge grows incrementally, but moral knowledge can be lost as easily as it is gained. The cult of progress suggests that our values and goals will converge as knowledge grows, but 20th-century history suggests that the opposite is true.

And what is the search for immortality, but the quest for salvation from ourselves? It fits neatly into Gray's scheme of animosity, and shows that we are yet to heed the central lesson of Darwin's work: humanity is no different from other species in being doomed to extinction on an unforgiving planet.

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In documenting this history, he exposes the tawdry relationship between theology and ethics. Many immortalists, like the great ethicist Henry Sidgwick, think that without an afterlife there is no point in acting morally: the promise of heaven is the sole incentive to be good. Yet this view is a first step on the path to tyranny, because it empties moral actions of their true worth. Being good must be good in and of itself – rather than merely instrumental to some future experience – if people are to be convinced to act ethically. Gray's debunking of theology's grip on ethics is therefore timely and timeless.