John Gray with David Rieff: Can We Cheat Death?

John Gray is one of today's most interesting and unpredictable thinkers. Join him as he discusses his latest book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, with David Rieff. For most of our history, religion provided a clear explanation for life and the afterlife. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this framework came under relentless pressure as new ideas—from psychiatry to evolution to Communism—seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. We would ourselves become God. The refusal to follow Darwinian logic and to insist instead on our immortality resulted in a series of experiments that carry on to the present day, some of which ravaged whole countries and some of which generated more privat