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Books

The Immortalization Commission by John Gray

Karl White wants to live forever.

John Gray has established himself in the public consciousness as an iconoclast, a relentless critic, and an irreverent debunker of the orthodox utopias of the day, whether of Communists, Greens, liberals, or free-market capitalists. There are very few readers who are neutral towards him: his admirers revel in his disruptive thought, and his critics loathe his acerbic undermining of their orthodoxies.

Gray’s latest volume, The Immortalization Commission – Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death is an attack on another myth of our times (albeit one not as mainstream as his previous targets) – namely, the belief that science will one day enable us to achieve immortality, and thereby make life meaningful. The book is in essence a response to Wittgenstein’s famous line from the Tractatus: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, still the problems of life have not been touched at all.”

Victorian Revelations

The first part of the book concerns the lives and activities of an assortment of late 19th and early 20th century thinkers who sought to prove, through the use of spiritualists, mediums, automatic writing and other forms of occultism, that personal survival after death was a genuine possibility.

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