I finished this book about three weeks ago but haven’t had the time to write it up until now. Since then I’ve read a short work by Mortimer Adler, which I’ll write up in a day or two.
The name Lamont is in the news lately (As in Ned Lamont, the guy who beat Lieberman for the Dem nomination to run for the Senate in CT. Of course Senator Lieberman is now running as an independent in the general election and is leading in the polls) so I decided to read one of Corliss Lamont’s books. He is kind of the godfather philosopher of "Humanism".
Corliss is the great-uncle of Ned, and was a very wealthy man, inheriting a fortune from his father, Tom Lamont, who was the Chairman of JP Morgan and Co. His father used to take his yacht down the Hudson every morning and tie up near Wall Street to get to the office.
Corliss got a great education (Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard), and then decided he was a philosophical leftist and Marxist. In fact in 1952 he wrote a book entitled "The Myth of Soviet Aggression" (this book probably didn’t sell very well in places like Hungary or Poland). However, he said he wasn’t a communist and never joined the communist party in the U.S. I suppose it’s worth remembering that in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, it was pretty trendy to be a Leftist and a Marxist.
He was also quite a philanthropist, giving away large sums of money. Lamont was also a big supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), serving in a variety of capacities in the ACLU.
On to his book – The Illusion of Immortality is an expansion of his doctoral thesis. The point of the book is that we have only one life and we are living it right now, in the flesh. Immortality is wishful thinking, "an intellectual anachronism," although he admits that it is a long-held belief in many cultures throughout history.
Here is the heart of Corliss’ argument: We have a body, and we also have a personality, or what some would call a soul. However our personality is inextricably bound up with our bodies, and when our bodies are dead and rotting, well, that’s got to be the end of our personality!
Unfortunately for me, since I read the whole book, Corliss stretches out this argument for 278 pages. And he never really addresses the serious arguments that can be made against this simplistic view. Rather, he simply dismisses them.
Now the book was first written in 1935, so much of it is dated – for example his arguing against "spiritualists" and asking rhetorical question like why "Immortalists neglect" answering questions like "Will negroes be black in heaven." (P. 144)
Don’t get me wrong, Lamont is not nasty in his writing – in the way many avowed atheists are today – he is not an angry man. In one of the prefaces (page vii) he says "I would heartily welcome any concrete evidence… tending to establish man’s immortality."
But he’s not wishy-washy about his conclusions – not agnostic, saying we can’t prove it one way or another. He is dogmatic: he can prove there is no immortality for humankind, in the same way he can prove there is no God.
Corliss really makes the best you can of a bad argument. He puts forth his thesis, constructs a straw man opponent, and then doesn’t really answer the objections to his world view. The horror of this book is that he stretches it out for 278 pages, offering redundant arguments against his straw man.
The book should have been 40% shorter – as is, it’s a fine non-pharmacological substitute for Ambien. I can’t believe I read the whole thing.
Leave a Reply