Books: Sit-In on Olympus

THE IMMORTALIST by Alan Harrington. 324 pages. Random House. $6.95.

The thesis of this protest-placard of a book is that the time has come for man to stop tugging his forelock before the nonexistent authorities of the universe and openly admit that he will not settle for anything less than divine everlasting life.

Why not? The borders between science and science-fiction grow steadily less precise. Biophysics and medical engineering, as Alan Harrington notes, have begun to grope for the secrets of extending life. Organ transplants and artificial parts are already promising realities. The author also cites such wildly remote possibilities as quick-freezing incurables until cures can be found, administering rejuvenating shots of DNA and even duplicating an entire human body from genetically coded snippets. To exclamations that immortality achieved by such means is an impossible dream or a presumptuous nightmare, Harrington asserts that man is capable of anything.

From this stupendously optimistic point of view, immortality is not a fringe benefit but a gut issue. Death, says Harrington, is an unacceptable imposition on the human race. Having already invoked science to support his faith, Harrington lays hands on human irrationality and violence for the same purpose. Fear of extinction, he suggests, combined with the frustrated lust for eternal life, underlies the disturbed behavior that threatens humanity with madness and self-destruction. Had men only “world enough and time,” he argues, they could explore the endless varieties of love, work and play. The resulting fulfilled, relaxed race would be safe from itself once and for all.

Seen as sequential argument. The 1m-mortalist should stand or fall on the basis of such evidence. But because it is presented more as a loosely buttressed personal obsession, it is not obliged either to stand or fall. Instead, the book’s thesis simply sways provocatively to the ritual accompaniment of Harrington’s prose—a flexible alloy of Mao-revolutionary and Norman Vincent Peale-inspirational.

As the power of religion fades, moral values disappear into the formless, indiscriminate carp-mouth of technological progress. Inevitably, old spiritual terrain is left unprotected. Pseudo philosophers, crypto-religionists, pyrotechnical polemicists (all fuse and no bang) are bound to move in. The key question for all religions is how to cope with and justify the control over man of a universe that appears to be spectacularly indifferent. Death is the most conspicuous example of such control.

This is why Shaw asserted that the one thing all intelligent men are interested in is religion. This is why Harrington, a novelist and social critic (Life in the Crystal Palace), claims attention. Presenting Immortalism as the new salvation, he is at his most provocative when he evaluates the forces that play upon humanity.

Like Nietzsche, he regards as crippling devices all faiths that encourage human adjustment to mortality by separating the indestructible spirit from the bone and gristle of being. Such factors, he believes, separate man from natural pride in his fleshly individuality, humbling him and cutting him off from his true spiritual condition—what Harrington calls a “state of Permanent Revolution against Imaginary Gods.” The Devil, it follows, far from being the embodiment of evil, is man’s healthiest prototypical projection of his own radical intention to challenge the gods—in fact, to become God. All humbling conceptions of man’s relationship to the unknown, the author insists, are bad. Even the Hindu’s striving for the oblivion of nirvana, he asserts, is a subtle passive-resistance ploy to achieve godhood.

In the arts, Harrington condemns classical tragedy. It is “one of the most pernicious notions ever to occur to mankind,” he writes, because it “perpetuates the superstitious conviction that hubris must be punished.” For Harrington, pride is everything. All forms of upmanship are ambitious strategies. By diminishing others around him, the individual moves a notch toward divinity himself.

Whether Harrington’s hotly held bootstrap faith in salvation through medical engineering is conceived as atheistic Im-mortalism or accommodated under the umbrella of God’s will is a matter of choice. Even world-weary skeptics, though, should find comfort in the vision of a future in which man’s most fitting epitaph will be “Enough Is Enough.”