How to Make the Best of Life: A Visionary Victorian Recipe for Enduring Actualization
Even if we recognize the statistical-existential fact that death is an emblem of our luckiness, most living beings are emphatically averse to the idea of dying. Since the dawn of our species, in our poems and our psalms and our dreams of eternal life, we humans have been petitioning entropy for mercy, for exception, for a felicitous violation of the laws of physics. In prior ages, this was the task of religion, and it was a necessary task — all major religions arose at a time when most children never survived childhood, most people had lost a panoply of parents, children, siblings, and spouses by the end of their twenties, and most never lived past their forties. People needed a pleasing consolation just to live with such staggering levels of loss, and they found it in the soothing notion of an immortal soul that survives the body. In our own epoch, secular notions like cryogenics, transhumanism, and technological singularity have taken on that role, trying to get to immortality through the wormhole of some very slippery semi-science.
But what if the key to immortality was already ours, hidden in the very heart of our humanity, not in our science but in our art? So argues the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler (December 4, 1835–June 18, 1902) — a writer of uncommon foresight into our common future, epochs ahead of his time in his thinking, and still ahead of ours — in a lecture he delivered under the brief “How to Make the Best of Life.”
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