The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray – review

In Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi movie Blade Runner, a retired police officer called Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is hired to chase down and "retire" biologically engineered humanoids called replicants who serve as soldiers and slaves in off-world colonies. To prevent them developing emotions and the longing for independence that might ensue, the replicants have been engineered to have four-year lifespans, and it is feared that several have escaped to Earth to try to find ways to lengthen their lives. The replicants are built by the Tyrell Corporation, whose logo declares their product to be "More Human than Human". During an investigative visit to the Tyrell HQ, Deckard meets Rachael, played by Sean Young, an experimental replicant who believes she is human, because her consciousness has been enhanced with memories from the life of Tyrell's niece. Rachael is devastated when Deckard tells her that she is not what she thinks she is. Her memories are not real; they are implants. She is not human; she is a replicant. Normally not the most expressive of actors, on this occasion Sean Young perfectly captures the anguish of Rachael's doubts about her own identity.

At its best, sci-fi has the power of myth to explore the dilemmas of the human condition, so it was not surprising that Blade Runner insisted itself into my mind as I read John Gray's enthralling meditation on death and the attempt by humans to defeat its power over them. In particular, his discussion of the impact of Darwinism on the Victorian mind reminded me of Rachael's dilemma in Blade Runner. He writes: "Science had disclosed a world in which humans were no different from other animals in facing final oblivion when they died and eventual extinction as a species."

The shock of this to the Victorian mind was unbearable. Under the influence of millennia of religious teaching, humanity had got used to thinking of itself as a special creation made in the image of God, and one that was destined to spend eternity with Him in Heaven. Darwin destroyed the idea of our spiritual uniqueness, but in doing so bequeathed to us a tragic new uniqueness: the knowledge of our own finitude. Given our capacity for reflection and self-consciousness, we now know that, like the other species on the planet, we are all animals facing what Philip Larkin called the "sure extinction that we travel to/ And shall be lost in always". So intolerable was this idea to the Victorians that they turned to the very science that proclaimed it in order to try to disprove it. It is this turning of science against itself that is the focus of the first part of Gray's fascinating book.

Eminent Victorians, such as Frederick Myers, inventor of the word "telepathy", and the respected philosopher Henry Sidgwick, got together with the great American pragmatist William James, and the Nobel prize-winning physiologist Charles Richer, to promote the Society for Psychical Research, whose purpose was to examine paranormal phenomena in an "unbiased and scientific way" to discover whether it could prove the existence of life beyond the grave. Apart from the desire to establish evidence for immortality, the protagonists of the society all had other motives for their quest. In particular, Henry Sidgwick, author of a still-influential book on ethics, believed that unless human personality survived bodily death, morality was pointless, a belief that is still dominant in religious circles and was most dramatically expressed by Dostoevsky's maxim that "If God does not exist, everything is permitted".

Another researcher was the aloof Arthur Balfour, former foreign secretary and prime minister. Though Balfour shared the researchers' resistance to scientific materialism, he did not expect science to vault over its own shadow and re-establish some kind of transcendental meaning for life. Instead, he used science's own methods against itself and doubted his way to belief in a divine mind, the existence of which alone could save the universe from absurdity.

Apart from its other pleasures, Gray's book offers us an absorbing look at the lives of a high-minded Victorian elite. The device they adopted to gather proof of continuing consciousness on the other side was a carefully worked out system of automatic or spirit-writing called cross-correspondence, by which departed members of the society would communicate with those still on earth, thus enabling them to cross-check any claims made. The experiment endured into the 1930s and gave rise to an enormous body of material, of which Gray gives us a sometimes moving, sometimes amusing, interpretation. Inevitably, the experiments, carefully designed to establish facts about the hereafter, only succeed in giving us entry to the unconscious longings and moral complexities of the lives of the earthly researchers.

However, something more sinister began to disturb the poignancy of this Victorian experiment, and it points the way to the second and darker part of Gray's book. Operating on the edges of the Victorians' search for reassurance about life on the other side, believers in the occult arose who sought to bring the powers of that imagined other world to bear on this one. From this obsession derive all those movements that are dedicated to the birth of a new consciousness and the evolution of a new species of enlightened humans. Gray believes that in revolutionary Russia these occult energies segued into a horrifying terror whose effects are still with us. The leaders of the revolution secularised humanity's eschatological longings into the pitiless doctrine that humankind advances through catastrophe, and a rolling series of catastrophes in which unnumbered millions were destroyed like rodents is precisely what the Bolshevists engineered. In addition to the monsters Lenin and Stalin, Gray brings on to the stage a large cast of political occultists and techno-immortalists, all intent on establishing a new collective heaven here on earth – and in the process unleashing hell.

It may seem like an enormous leap from a group of Victorian intellectuals dabbling in psychic research to the purges and exterminations of Bolshevist Russia, but Gray is surely right to locate both impulses in humanity's reluctance to accept its own tragic finitude. While he is sympathetic to religion's attempt to provide the universe with a transcendent meaning, he does not think there is one; but he is particularly scathing about the attempts of the new atheists to offer progressive rationality as a substitute for this ancient longing. He would agree with the poet AE Housman that the troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity and shall not fail. His vision is a fierce one, but it is ultimately one of compassion for poor deluded humanity. We flourish briefly like the flowers of the field and are cut down like the grass. Let us not waste our brief flourishing in vain longings. "Immortality is only the dimming soul projected on to a blank screen. There is more sunshine in the fall of a leaf."

Richard Holloway was bishop of Edinburgh 1986-2000 and is the author of Between the Monster and the Saint (Canongate)