The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death
John Gray
Allen Lane, 288pp, £18.99

One of these days, John Gray ought to write an autobiography. Oxford University in the 1960s must have been interesting, to say the least,
for a working-class boy from South Shields, but he made a success of it, establishing himself as an A-list academic and one of Britain's leading political thinkers. He has since become a true public intellectual - an engaging writer, an entertaining historian and a controversialist whose opinions can never be taken for granted. Recently he gave up university life in order to have more freedom to write.

Given his background, he could have made a career as a truculent, salt-of-the-earth leftist, but he chose to do the opposite, coming out first as a liberal individualist, next as a no-bullshit Thatcherite, and then, for a while, as an eloquent supporter of New Labour. It would be unfair, however, to accuse him of being inconsistent. Like his master Isaiah Berlin, he has always thought of the modern world as living off the divided inheritance of the Enlightenment: on the one hand a healthy scepticism about myth, tradition, sentiment and superstition, and on the other a dangerous optimism about the chances of reorganising the world along perfectly rational lines. All of Gray's political positions flow from his suspicion of neat-and-tidy utopias, and his conviction that only an acceptance of contingency, impermanence and compromise can save us from the politics of well-intentioned murder.

About ten years ago his thoughts turned to metaphysics. Charles Darwin replaced Berlin as hero-in-chief, and Gray became fascinated by the idea that human history as a whole is no more than an accidental smudge on the surface of an undistinguished planet hurtling towards oblivion. He was not the only one to take such a turn around that time; but most of his fellow Darwinians - Christopher Hitchens, for example - believed that once the human race freed itself from religion it would be able to take control of its destiny at last.

Not so Gray; for him, Darwinism had dealt a fatal blow to "humanism", or the idea that the human race, unlike everything else in the natural world, is capable of self-fashioning and self-redemption. In Straw Dogs and Black Mass, he argued that humanism is just a continuation of religion by other means, an attempt to smuggle afanatical belief in transcendent salvation past the controls of natural science. We will never get rid of God, as Nietzsche realised long ago, until we get rid of human exceptionalism.

In The Immortalisation Commission, Gray continues his assault on humanist optimism by investigating two attempts to salvage a hope of immortality from the devastation wreaked by Darwin. The first half of the book tells the story of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 to investigate the work of mediums, mesmerists and occultists, and Gray has fun documenting the antics of upper-class "ghostologists" and their fantas­ies of cheating death with messages from the "other side".

The second half exposes similar follies in tsarist Russia, and then suggests that they were recycled as articles of technological faith in the Soviet Union. Desperate attempts to preserve Lenin's body after his death in 1924 were, as Gray sees it, part of the same daffy quest for eternal life. But, as always with Gray, high hopes turn out to pave the way to tyranny, and soon we are observing the British Leninophile H G Wells offering a defence of the Stalinist state for killing its citizens only "for a reason and for an end". Judging by Gray's method of reasoning, Soviet policies of extermination were only the other face of the proposed immortalisation of Lenin: "It was the same enchantment with technology," he argues, "that produced the Soviet death machine."

Its range is admirably wide, but The Immortalisation Commission reads like a book with attention deficit disorder. Gray's scattergun will not persuade many of us that state-sponsored murder, which he regards as a "genuine Marxist attitude", can be reduced to an attempt to evade the "true lessons of Darwinism". We are also likely to be wearied by his relentless tone of worldly sarcasm - more Ian Fleming than Darwin - as when a Soviet interrogator is described as treating women "with old-fashioned courtesy as he despatched them for torture, rape and execution". Despite his paeans to mere contingency, Gray appears to find the evil consequences of humanism so predictable that they make him yawn; and yawning can be infectious.

One of these days, Gray may come to recognise that his ventures in pessimistic metaphysics have been based on a mighty non sequitur. He is entitled to think that we live in “a world riddled with chaos in which human will is finally powerless", and that our future is "like that of every other species, a journey leading to extinction".

Yet, even if he is right, it does not follow that we should join him in a chorus of jaded cynicism. If the will has no power, and nothing we do makes any difference, then deluded hopes are no more dangerous than beady-eyed despair. And if we know we are never going to be right, we should not get too worried about being wrong. I hope that when Gray gets round to writing the story of his life, he will put his recent bout of biliousness behind him and learn to be more light-hearted.

Jonathan Rée is a freelance philosopher and historian