Inventing Afterlives

The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death

Regina M. Janes

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231546294
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs.In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity's advent and Islam's rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.

1

CONCERNING THE PRESENT STATE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH

When a lot of different remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can’t be cured…I have plenty of remedies, any number of them, and that means I haven’t really got one.

—ANTONIN CHEKHOV, THE CHERRY ORCHARD

When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.

—LIVESON WEBSITE (A “SOON TO LAUNCH SERVICE THAT PROMISES TO TWEET ON YOUR BEHALF EVEN AFTER YOU DIE”), QUOTED IN EVGENY MOROZOV, “THE PERILS OF PERFECTION,” NEW YORK TIMES¹

All life is good, even if it is fictitious.

—ANITA BROOKNER, INCIDENTS IN THE RUE LAUGIER

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: there is no life after death. Saying so, I realize, costs me many readers. They are already closing this book, forgoing what remains of this sentence, hopeful that their lives will continue, somehow, beyond the grave. One could be coy and noncommittal, but let me not cheat anyone into hoping that beyond the next page lies an answer or a promise. I am no Dinesh D’Souza or Deepak Chopra nor even Mary Roach conceding a little hopeful uncertainty at the end of Spook. I do not practice the professional agnosticism of religious studies. There is, of course, lots of life after death; it is just not one’s own.

For something that does not exist, life after death has never been in better health than at present. Deservedly so, for in the afterlife human creativity manifests all its variety and much of its purpose, entertaining, instructing, and distracting us. What we imagine about the afterlife—and all afterlives are imaginary, especially those that do or do not exist—is fundamental to how we situate ourselves in our own lives and in the world in which that life takes place. We cannot think about any afterlife without defining a universe. Whether we trust in an afterlife or smash it by denying personal or impersonal immortality, we shape our place in a cosmos. These days, the afterlife is an extra room—a refinished attic play area or media space—added to the houses in which we live. So let us first check out the furnishings: current afterlife beliefs and their proliferating possibilities, erroneous but conventional assumptions about afterlife origins, and afterlives’ more probable cognitive origins and social, collective purposes.

Afterlives originate in a question the dead raise and do not answer: where did the person I knew as this body go? Something has gone missing from the body, absconded, kidnapped, set off on a journey, or gone into hiding. The most likely explanation is a journey; more hopeful or fearful is hiding nearby; frequent is theft by malevolent witchcraft. Where do the dead journey? To their own kind, probably, so as not to be lonely; they acquire a territory, though they may also cling to their bones, to us. Is their land like the land of the living, the only world we know, or unlike it, since it is occupied by the dead? Are the dead like the living or, being dead, their opposite? The body decaying, speculation feeds speculation. As Pliny observed, “After men are buried, great diversitie there is in opinion, what is become of their souls & ghosts, wandering some this way and others that.”² Originating with language, these questions are renewed every time someone dies. We are born into cultures that have already answered such questions for us.

Like all beliefs, beliefs about the afterlife originate in the human mind, working over certain features of human existence, in this case the complex tangle of the individual, society, and death. Nothing about the mind’s workings determines what those beliefs will be, but the intrusiveness of death demands some cognitive response. Unlike beliefs about, say, New York City or Paris, beliefs about the afterlife can neither be verified nor refuted. But like New York City or Paris, people who have never visited the afterlife may nevertheless have strong views: the world to come may be terrifying or idealized or even doubted. Why should I believe in a hive of glass towers, where the sunlight never reaches the ground? Or a bejeweled city of gold, constantly illuminated, with a river running through it? Like most of what we think we know, we take our beliefs on authority, regarding as our own what others make or know (my smartphone), rejecting one authority for another.

Most modern accounts of afterlife origins address either the individual or society, but fail to situate their own skepticism about the afterlife. At the level of the individual, afterlives are believed to console survivors, to soothe existential anxiety over dying, and to pander to psychological neediness by fulfilling unsatisfied desires. At the cultural level, morality is thought to require afterlives, and all cultures are thought to have them. Once afterlife beliefs develop, they do all these things, but they do not originate in these good deeds. They originate in recognizing death and thinking about past and future or, more precisely, in the human inability to think without thinking about the future. Once developed, afterlives proliferate in our consumer culture so vertiginously that a recent CBS/Vanity Fair poll asks not what respondents believe about immortality but what immortality they would prefer.³

“The psychic next door said that my sister is a new soul, but I am an old soul, so I’m really my own great-grandmother,” reports a skeptical modern-day undergraduate, otherwise quite certain that life ends at death.⁴ A recent Ipsos/Reuters poll finds that 51 percent of the world’s citizens say they believe in some form of afterlife. Claiming ignorance are 26 percent. The remaining 23 percent are sure “you simply cease to exist.” Among the believers, 23 percent believe in an afterlife “but not specifically in a heaven or hell”; 19 percent believe “you go to heaven or hell” (41 percent in the United States say they believe this); 7 percent believe “you are ultimately reincarnated,” and a surprisingly low 2 percent believe in “heaven but not hell” (here the United States ranks highest, at 4 percent). In 2014, more Americans believed in heaven (80 percent) than in life after death (73 percent). Polls differ, but Americans are more religious and more certain of their afterlife prospects than citizens of any other developed country.⁵

As belief prospers, disbelief surfaces, and representations of afterlives diversify. From the pulpit, clergy still assure their congregants that the dead shall again see each other in God, and Southern billboards promise eternal life, John 6:47: “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.” From these familiar traditions, afterlives have broken free. Now they course through movies (Defending Your Life, Wristcutters: A Love Story, What Dreams May Come, A Ghost Story, Coco), TV series (Six Feet Under, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dead Like Me, The Good Place), young adult novels (Sabriel), popular and serious fiction (Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven; Julian Barnes, History of the World in 10½ Chapters; George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo; Nadine Gordimer’s essay “Afterlife” and John Updike’s short story collection The Afterlife and Other Stories), plays (Conor McPherson, Seafarer; Michael Frayn, Afterlife; Daniel Alexander Jones, Duat), graphic novels (Anders Brekhus Nilsen, Big Questions, Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway?), nonfiction (Mary Roach, Spook), comic nonfiction (Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates), memoirs (Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven; Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of), scientific accounts of near-death experiences, or NDEs (Raymond Moody, Life After Life; Kenneth Ring, Life at Death; Lee Bailey and Jenny Yates, eds., The Near-Death Experience; Bruce Greyson and C. P. Flynn, eds., The Near-Death Experience), or incidental accounts of NDEs (Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia). Thanks to Dante, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Peg Boyers, Billy Collins, and others, poems still outnumber internet sites. Orpheus’s descent has long been an operatic subgenre while musical comedies such as Carousel share stages with chamber operas, such as Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.

To make the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, a positive report from the afterlife helps. September 2011 saw at number one Heaven Is for Real: “A boy’s encounter with Jesus and the angels”; at number eight The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: “A boy who awoke from a coma two months after a car accident had an incredible story to share”; and at number nineteen bringing up the rear but on the list for 209 weeks, 90 Minutes in Heaven: “A Baptist minister describes the otherworldly experience he had after a car accident.”⁶ By April 2013, Heaven Is for Real had sunk to number sixteen (on the list for ninety-six weeks), the boy and the minister had disappeared, but a neurologist was making a strong showing at number two, on the list for twenty-three weeks, with his return from death in Proof of Heaven.⁷

An afterlife ex machina wraps up the mysterious, long-running, obsession-creating TV series Lost.⁸ In Sum: Tales from the Afterlives, David Eagleman invents forty fascinating new afterlives, forty thieves of time. Like Orpheus pursuing Eurydice into the underworld (Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach, Glass), Sum is soon to be an opera. Equally orphic, Eagleman has generated a new religious orientation, “possibilianism,” with at least one convert and a website.⁹ Economic theorists ponder the role of scarcity in heaven (Scott Gordon, “Economics of the Afterlife”) or question the invention of hell (Brooks B. Hull and Frederick Bold, “Hell, Religion and Cultural Change”). Moral philosophers debate the desirability of immortality (Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”) or affirm that we need an afterlife for our species more than we need personal immortality (Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife). Vampires and zombies, ghosts and ancestors stalk through subgenres of immortality. It was once said that in the midst of life we are in death; we are now certainly in the midst of afterlives.

What are afterlives that we should be surrounded and invaded by them? As narratives that adjust an individual’s and a society’s relationship to death, afterlives are as inescapable as death itself, but—also like death—they need not take up very much attention. “O Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind!” The medieval Everyman was healthily oblivious to death’s certainty, and that obliviousness does him no harm in his play (Everyman, c. 1500): his Good Deed saves him handily. Jesus himself commented testily on men’s preferring to plan great new barns as they lie down on the last night of their lives, indifferent to storehouses in heaven or anywhere other than here (Luke 12:16–21). Memento mori would be unnecessary if people were not inclined to forget death in the midst of life. Death always comes as a surprise, being in equal parts inevitable and astonishing. As these examples suggest, if we are inclined to forget about death, some spoilsport will leap forward to remind us or someone will die.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, death intrudes in new ways as a public-policy issue. The demographic bulge of the postwar period, its members now entering old age, approaches death, puzzles over the unconscionable survival rate of their parents, and dooms younger cohorts to monotonous meditations on mortality. The numbers, political slant, and discursive freedom are new; the process is ancient. Durable traditions deliver afterlives to us, but their hegemony has collapsed while the questions they addressed persist. As a society, we are engaged in renegotiating our contract with death, individually, collectively, and globally. Remembering death may terrify or depress, but, as we will see below, it also invigorates. It jolts the system into attention and activity.

Afterlives are neither as eternal nor as universal as they seem. For the last two thousand years, today’s major religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, have endorsed various forms of life’s continuing after death. Christianity and Islam are specifically predicated on promises of eternal life and personal immortality. Hinduism and Buddhism are premised on the impersonal immortality of rebirth; some variants (Vaishnavism, Pure Land) accommodate continuing personal identity in a heaven. Two thousand years is as close to eternity as most of us can imagine. Thus we tend to assume that afterlives are universal and all cultures at all times have had them.¹⁰ Folded into that assumption are desire and the democratic criterion of truth: the more people who believe something, the more likely it is to be true. So, if belief in an afterlife is as universal as, say, the belief that the sun rises every day in the east and sets in the west, then it must be as true.

Since the seventeenth century, however, explorers and anthropologists have turned up cultures in which nothing happens after death. Seventeenth-century Sami (Laplanders) infuriated European explorers by declining to know anything of an afterlife. They hold that “men and beasts go the same way, and will not be persuaded that there is any life after this.”¹¹ Today’s A’rna of Nigeria mock their Muslim neighbors’ afterlife certainties and wonder how they can know what happens beyond death: “If one of our ancestors would come back and tell us, we could tell you; but if one has never seen an ancestor, how can he know that his ancestors are yet alive somewhere, much less what lies on the other side of death?”¹² One eighteenth-century response was that the general views of mankind should not be called into question by a handful of obscure savages.

More recently, Human Relations Area Files anthropological data from nonindustrial cultures, past and present, report only 2 percent of cultures fail to elaborate an afterlife. Another 18 percent propose a simple afterlife of sleep or joining the spirits that is the same for everyone (as in ancient Israel and Shinto); another 30 percent propose an afterlife that is uniformly pleasant or unpleasant for everyone. Gilgamesh and Homer fall into this category, ...