CHAPTER 1

A LOFTY THOUGHT

Imagining Mortality


Never to have been born at all:

None can conceive a loftier thought!

And second-best is this: Once born,

Quickly to return to the dust.

—Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 406 B.C.E.1

Where were you before you were born?

Come again? This question strikes most of us as nonsensical, because we didn’t exist before we were born. The same problem arises in imagining your death. Try it. What comes to mind? Do you see your body as part of a scene, perchance presented in a casket surrounded by family and friends at your funeral? Or maybe you see yourself in a hospital bed after expiring from an illness, or on the floor of your home following a fatal heart attack? None of these scenarios—or any others your imagination might conjure—are possible, because in all cases, in order to observe or imagine a scene you must be alive and conscious. If you are dead you are neither. You can no more visualize yourself after you die than you can picture yourself before you were born.

Existence doesn’t just precede essence, as Jean-Paul Sartre conjectured in one of the founding documents of the existentialist movement.2 Existence is essence. No existence, no essence. As the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe framed the problem, “It is quite impossible for a thinking being to imagine nonbeing, a cessation of thought and life. In this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”3 Sigmund Freud reflected on death in a similar vein: “We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators.”4

To experience something, you must be alive, so we cannot personally experience death. Yet we know it is real because every one of the hundred billion people who lived before us is gone. That presents us with something of a paradox.

THE MORTALITY PARADOX

In his now classic Pulitzer Prize–winning 1973 book The Denial of Death, the anthropologist Ernest Becker oriented our dualistic place in nature,

up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-grasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.5

Is it terrifying? I don’t think it is, but many people do. In his book Immortality, for example, the British philosopher Stephen Cave contends that the attempt to resolve the paradox of being aware of our own mortality and yet not being able to imagine nonexistence has led to four immortality narratives: (1) Staying Alive: “like all living systems, we strive to avoid death. The dream of doing so forever—physically, in this world—is the most basic of immortality narratives.” (2) Resurrection: “the belief that, although we must physically die, nonetheless we can physically rise again with the bodies we knew in life.” (3) Soul: The “dream of surviving as some kind of spiritual entity.” (4) Legacy: “More indirect ways of extending ourselves into the future” such as glory, reputation, historical impact, or children.6 Cave’s four-part schema is instructive, so a brief overview is in order to resolve the paradox provisionally.

First, staying alive is not presently possible. There are scientists working to extend our upper age ceiling through various medical technologies, but for now the bookmakers’ odds-on bet is that no one alive today will live beyond 125 years. Even if medical science raises the age roof by a few years or decades, the dream of living centuries or millennia is a vaporous one.

Second, resurrection harbors two logical problems with both religious and scientific forms of reconstituting your body: (1) The Transformation Problem: How could you be reassembled just as you were and yet this time be invulnerable to disease and death? To avoid these problems you would need to be resurrected in a much different state than you are now, so this new identity would not really be you. One work-around is to preserve your connectome—the brain’s equivalent to the genome—where your thoughts, memories, and “self” are stored, and then perhaps upload all that information into a computer. I am involved in one aspect of this research and will discuss it at length in chapter 7, but for here I will note that in addition to the technological hurdles, this option leads to a second difficulty. (2) The Duplication Problem: How would duplicates be different from twins? That is, even if a godlike supercomputer in the far future had virtually limitless digital power to make a perfect copy of you, it would be just that—a copy with the same thoughts and memories as you until it began its own independent existence. At that point your copy will have separate life experiences and memories, and you and your copy would thus be logically indistinguishable from identical twins, whom we legally treat as autonomous persons and not as duplicates of the same individual.

Third, the soul has been traditionally conceived as a separate entity (“soul stuff”) from the body, but neuroscience has demonstrated that the mind—consciousness, memory, and the sense of self representing “you”—cannot exist without a brain. When portions of the brain die as a result of injury, stroke, or Alzheimer’s, the corresponding functions we call “mind” die with them. No brain, no mind; no body, no soul. Scientists working to preserve the connectome are also considering techniques to either reawaken a frozen brain with its connectome intact (cryonics), or scan every last synapse in a brain and digitize it so that it can be “read” like a book or reawakened in a computer. This scientific soul would be the first form of soul stuff ever measured, but as we shall see, the obstacles to achieving this form of immortality are beyond extraordinary. I don’t think this will happen in my lifetime, or perhaps anyone’s lifetime, leaving us with …

Fourth, legacy isn’t strictly a form of immortality at all, but more of a type of memory—the remembrance of a life—and as Woody Allen quipped: “I don’t want to be immortal through my work; I want to be immortal by not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”7 At the moment this is the best we can do, but it’s something, given how important our lives can be in the lives of those we know and love (and even those we don’t), but it is understandably less emotionally satisfying than our desire to live literally forever.

Cave resolves the paradox by contending that the legacy narrative we tell ourselves is the driving force behind art, music, literature, science, culture, architecture, and other artifacts of civilization—and even civilization itself. The legacy driver is terror, which has now a full-blown research paradigm called Terror Management Theory (TMT), proposed by the psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski in numerous scientific papers and more extensively in their book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.8 Inspired by Ernest Becker, the curious title comes from William James’s classic 1902 work The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which the psychologist conjectured “a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.”9 According to TMT, awareness of one’s mortality focuses the mind to produce positive emotions (and creations) to avoid the terror that comes from confronting one’s death. Solomon explains the theory:

Humans “manage” this terror by embracing cultural worldviews—beliefs about reality—shared with other group members to convey to each of us a sense that we are valuable individuals in a meaningful universe, and hence eligible for literal and/or symbolic immortality. Accordingly, people are highly motivated (albeit quite unconsciously) to maintain faith in their cultural worldviews and a confidence in their self-worth (i.e., self-esteem); and threats to cherished beliefs and/or self-esteem instigate defensive efforts to bolster their worldviews and self-esteem.10

Thus, we create and invent, build and construct, write and sing, perform and compete, to attenuate the terror of contemplating our own mortality. Civilization is the product not of ambition but of trepidation.

I have my doubts. First, it is not obvious why contemplating death should lead people to experience terror, get defensive about cultural worldviews, or feel the need to bolster self-esteem. It could just as well lead people to feel more sympathy for others who, after all, are in the same existential boat. Second, why wouldn’t such despair lead people to just give up on building or creating anything, since it is fruitless in the long run, if not the short? Third, TMT scientists admit that much of their theory depends on unconscious states of mind that are notoriously difficult to discern and require subtle priming of the brain to elicit.

TMT proponents even go so far as to conjecture that our Paleolithic ancestors died prematurely from death terror. How? Those hominid groups that developed religious rituals to quell their death terror were more likely to survive. “A creature with the dawning realization of its own mortality and no system of spiritual beliefs to quell the consequent fear would seem unlikely to venture forth and take the risks necessary for their own or their group’s survival,” Solomon and his colleagues conjecture:

Hominids with faith in some spiritual protection would be more bold and confident in engaging in the risky tasks necessary for survival in harsh dangerous environments. This suggests that with the dawn of awareness of mortality, hominid groups with particularly compelling spiritual beliefs and individuals particularly capable of sustaining faith in such beliefs would have had adaptive advantages.11

It’s a colorful story, but one lacking in empirical evidence and not as probable as competing hypotheses of the evolutionary origins of culture and religion and the psychological processes underlying it. Human behavior is multivariate in causality, and fear of death is only one of many drivers of creativity and productivity, if it is one at all. The capacity to reason is a feature of our brain that evolved to form patterns and make connections in the service of survival and reproduction in the environment of our evolutionary ancestry. Reason is part of our cognitive makeup, and once it is in place it can be put to use in analyzing problems it did not originally evolve to consider. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls this an open-ended combinatorial reasoning system, and he notes that “even if it evolved for mundane problems like preparing food and securing alliances, you can’t keep it from entertaining propositions that are consequences of other propositions.”12 The capacity to reason and communicate symbolically is employed in hunting, surely a more basic survival skill than the management of death terror. TMT theorists propose that “before venturing out on a hunt or exploring new territory, early Homo sapiens may have performed rituals and told stories about how the spirits would help them slay mammoths, leopards, and bears and protect them from potential dangers in the physical world.”13 Maybe, and some interpreters of the prehistoric cave paintings of Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet that feature bison, horses, aurochs, and deer attribute these images to hunting magic, but skeptics point out that many of these animals were not hunted in those regions (no bones of these beasts have been found there), and other animals that were commonly hunted (for which there are ample bones in the caves and nearby showing marks of being hunted) are not featured in the cave paintings.14 In any case, what does symbolic hunting magic have to do with death terror?

A more pragmatic cognitive skill may be at work here, such as that proposed by a professional animal tracker (and historian of science) named Louis Liebenberg, who argues that our ability to reason and communicate symbolically is a by-product of fundamental skills developed by our ancestors for tracking game animals, starting with hypothesis testing. “As new factual information is gathered in the process of tracking, hypotheses may have to be revised or substituted by better ones. A hypothetical reconstruction of the animal’s behaviors may enable trackers to anticipate and predict the animal’s movements. These predictions provide ongoing testing of hypotheses.”15 The development of tracking also involves the cognitive process called theory of mind, or mind reading, in which trackers put themselves into the mind of the animal they are pursuing and imagine what it might be thinking in order to predict its actions.

This, it seems to me, is a far likelier explanation for the evolution of symbolic reason than death terror. Once the neural architecture is in place to deduce, say, that “a lion slept here last night,” a person can substitute any other animal or object for “lion” and can swap “here” with “there” and “last night” with “tomorrow night.” The objects and time elements of the reasoning process are fungible. As Pinker explains in How the Mind Works, this interchangeability is a by-product of neural systems that evolved for basic reasoning abilities such as tracking animals for food.16 It’s a bottom-up combinatorial reasoning process that includes induction (reasoning from specific facts to general conclusions) and deduction (reasoning from general principles to specific predictions) that allowed humans to scale up from basic survival skills such as hunting and gathering to more abstract concepts such as death, the afterlife, souls, and God. In this sense, then, religion is not a direct adaptation to living conditions but a by-product of these abstract reasoning abilities.

An even more elementary evolutionary driver of creativity and culture is sex and mating—sexual selection, in the parlance of evolutionary theory—in which organisms from bowerbirds to brainy bohemians engage in the production of magnificent works in order to attract mates. Big blue bowerbird nests constructed by males appeal to females, and the bigger and the bluer they are, the more offspring are in the offing. Likewise big-brained bohemians, whose orchestral music, epic poems, stirring novels, monumental architecture, and scientific discoveries may be motivated by the desire to attract mates and gain status. As the evolutionary psychologist David Buss noted in his critique of Terror Management Theory: “TMT is anchored in an outmoded evolutionary biology that stresses survival, but ignores reproduction,” it “fails to delineate precisely how the hypothesized psychological mechanisms help humans solve actual adaptive problems of survival and reproduction, and instead focuses nearly exclusively inwardly on psychological protection,” it “fails to consider why anxiety itself would have evolved,” and it “fails to account for known sex differences in social motivation, death rates, and the causes of death rates.”17 The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller reinforced the point in his aptly titled book The Mating Mind. Those who create and invent, build and construct, write and sing, perform and compete most effectively leave behind more offspring and thus pass their creative genes into future generations.18 As the belletrist extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens once told me, mastering the pen and the podium means never having to dine or sleep alone.

To this end, I am not at all sure that TMT proponents are even measuring what they think they are measuring in their experiments. In my opinion, the claim that people feel “terror” when contemplating mortality is an assertion, not an observation, and its dependence on unconscious states of mind makes it even more problematic when determining what, exactly, is being tested. “The really tricky thing with theories like this is not what to do with statistical refutations, but rather what to do with supposed statistical confirmations,” the psychologist Frank Sulloway told me when I queried him about TMT. “This problem previously arose in connection with psychoanalysis, and Hans Eysenck and others later wrote books showing that those zealous psychoanalytic devotees testing their psychoanalytic claims systematically failed to consider what other theories, besides the one researchers thought they were testing, would also be confirmed by the same evidence.” Context is key. “Change the context slightly and one often gets very different results in research on human behavior,” Sulloway continued. “So one needs to consider exactly how the context of any statistical test might be altering what you think you are actually testing. This problem is akin to the one about considering what alternative theories are also confirmed by the same evidence.”19

For example, in a study Sulloway and I conducted on why people say that they believe in God and why they think other people believe in God, although we were not testing TMT, we found what I would interpret as results contrary to the centrality of terror in TMT’s model.20 In our survey, in addition to collecting data on personal and family background and religious beliefs and commitments, we asked an open-ended essay question on why respondents believe or disbelieve in God, and why they think other people believe or disbelieve in God, which Sulloway and I independently coded, along with an independent judge who was blind to the purposes of the study. Together we assessed all responses as falling into one or more of fourteen belief categories and six nonbelief categories, which we subsequently had coded by a second set of five judges who were also blind to the study’s purpose. The twenty categories were then reclassified into one of three summary groups: emotional responses, intellectual responses, and undetermined responses. Figure 1-1 shows the results for the first category, which includes the fear of death.

Note that only 3 percent of our respondents listed “fear of death” or “fear of the unknown” in their reasons for their own belief in God, which I find revealing in the context of TMT’s central tenet; and it is telling that these same people attributed the fear of death or the unknown to other people’s reasons for belief. TMT may be more revealing of the theorists’ projections than their subjects’ fears.

The sociologist of religion Kevin McCaffree makes a similar point in putting death fears into context when I queried him about TMT. First, in our evolutionary past, anxiety evolved to direct our attention to survival-relevant concerns, such as hunting, mating, and maintaining a good reputation in one’s community. “It is important to notice that these concerns are survival-relevant, but they are not concerns about survival (or death) in itself. Hunter-gatherers’ concerns were more practical.” Today, McCaffree continues, “our anxieties are equally practical—car payments, student loans, divorce papers, unemployment and so on. We are certainly motivated to manage these anxieties, but, again, these are anxieties regarding concerns relevant to our survival and flourishing, not anxiety concerning survival (or death) in itself.” McCaffree also notes that studies show people in highly secularized countries like Sweden and Denmark, where rates of religiosity are among the lowest in the world, seem not to have much death anxiety at all, “not because they love death, but because they understand that there is little they can do about it, and so they choose to focus on aspects of life they can enjoy and exert control over.”21

WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK ABOUT WHEN FACING DEATH?

While slipping in and out of consciousness as he lay dying of cancer, the Nobel laureate physicist and raconteur Richard Feynman, after a life filled with enough clever sayings and charming stories to fill three volumes,22 managed only a final utterance of “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”23 Christopher Hitchens came to much the same conclusion about dying as Feynman did, recording his final thoughts while undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer in a series of Vanity Fair essays (“Topic of Cancer,” “Tumortown”), gathered posthumously in a starkly titled book, Mortality. After swiftly dispatching Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous (and flawed) stage theory of dying (not everyone goes through all five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, for example, or in that order if they do), Hitch reflected:

In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.24

Sadly, Hitch’s end came too soon, and as he told an audience at a public event we both attended shortly before his death, “I’m dying … but so are all of you.”

Transitioning from life to death through the dying process reminds us of what really matters in life, a point articulated by my first college professor, Richard Hardison, who taught me astronomy, philosophy, and psychology as an undergraduate and who educated me about life for decades after. He was one of the smartest and most cognitively dexterous people I’ve known, but like so many of his generation (the “silent generation,” born between 1925 and 1945), he was reticent with his emotions, rarely showing affection even for his closest friends, a personality trait he became painfully cognizant of near the end of his life, including an observation about it in a farewell letter he penned when he thought he was dying at age eighty-seven. He recovered and lived another three years, but at his memorial service another ex-student and friend, Russell Waters, circulated the letter, which began with Dick’s confession of the awareness of the possibility of his dying in his sleep: “Strangely, I felt no panic, no dread … only a concern that I might be left without the time to thank friends and family for the many wonderful things they have done to enhance the quality of my life.” His “death aura passed and the morning dawned as usual,” but “this served as a wake-up call and reminded me that I should write without further delay.” This he did, confessing that it was his friends and family that mattered most, at the acknowledgment of which “I’m finding that it’s already difficult to hold back the tears as I write.” His tear-stained letter ends:

Finally, “love” isn’t a word that comes easily to the American male, and looking back, my failure to use it a lot more was unfortunate. I should have expressed my fondness, and yes, my love, much more often. But at least in parting, I can hope that all of you, my friends and family, may know of the depth of my appreciation of the prominent role you have played in my life.

Love comes more easily to my generation of American males, and so I am not too taciturn to say that I loved Dick Hardison.

LOVE ON DEATH ROW: TESTING EMOTIONAL PRIORITY THEORY

Knowing that the end may come sooner rather than later brings death awareness into sharper focus and motivates the mind to act with clarity about life’s deepest meanings, not out of terror but out of time. And love. An alternative to Terror Management Theory is one that might be called Emotional Priority Theory (EPT), or the prioritization of one’s emotions when confronted with mortality. As Samuel Johnson noted: “Depend on it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”25 Facing death focuses one’s mind on the most important emotions in life, love being arguably the deepest. In fact, love is so powerful an emotion that it can be addictive, like chocolate and cocaine, and the neurochemistry of it can be tracked.26 Lust is heightened by dopamine, a neurohormone produced by the hypothalamus and associated with learning and positive reinforcement, which also triggers the release of testosterone, another hormone intimately involved in driving sexual desire. Love is the emotion of attachment and bonding to another person that is reinforced by oxytocin, a hormone synthesized in the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood by the pituitary. This cocktail of hormones coursing through the brain leads people to feel so strongly bonded to others that they are willing to die or kill for love.

More focused than a cancer diagnosis or a late-night death premonition is an execution date on death row. Between 1982 and 2016 the state of Texas executed 537 inmates, 425 of whom issued a last oral statement, which the Texas Department of Criminal Justice recorded and posted on its website, along with other details such as name, age, education level, prior occupation, prison record, and the offense for which they were executed.27 This inadvertently created a database of the last thing these people (mostly men—only 7 of the 537 were women28) thought about just before they were put to death, on the gurney with the needles in their arms awaiting their lethal injections, in some cases as they were fading into unconsciousness narrating the end: “It’s coming. I can feel it coming. Goodbye.” And: “I feel it; I am going to sleep now. Goodnight, 1, 2 there it goes.” Some were resigned to their fate, issuing brief expletive-filled declarations such as “Let’s do it, man. Lock and load. Ain’t life a [expletive deleted]?” and “I just want everyone to know that the prosecutor and Bill Scott are sorry sons of bitches.” Other resignations were more dignified. “I’m an African warrior, born to breathe and born to die.” But these were rare compared to the outpouring of love, sorrow, forgiveness, and blissful anticipation of the afterlife that is evident in a content analysis I conducted of all 425 final statements.

I became curious about these death row final sentiments after reading a 2016 examination of this dataset by the psychologists Sarah Hirschmüller and Boris Egloff, who ran the statements through a computerized text analysis program called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). The prisoners ranged widely in the number of emotional words they uttered, from 0 to 50 positive emotion words per entry and from 0 to 27 negative emotion words per entry. To control for this variation the psychologists computed an overall positivity index for each death row inmate and found that 82.3 percent of them were above 0 in the use of positive emotion words. Comparing positive and negative emotion word usage, the biggest finding was a statistically significant difference between positive emotion words (9.64) and negative emotion words (2.65).29 Significant compared to what? To find out, Hirschmüller and Egloff contrasted these findings with those reported in another study of written words from a broad spectrum of sources, including scientific articles, novels, blogs, and diaries, consisting of over 168 million words composed by 23,173 people.30 The mean of 2.74 positive emotion words for each entry in this dataset was statistically significantly lower than that of the prisoners (9.64). In fact, these death row inmates were more positive than students asked to contemplate their own death and write down their thoughts,31 and even more positive than people who attempted and/or completed suicides and left notes.32

This finding makes sense, given the fact that people on the verge of committing suicide are in a different state of mind than those on death row about to be executed. According to the psychologist Thomas Joiner, in his book Why People Die by Suicide: “People desire death when two fundamental needs are frustrated to the point of extinction; namely, the need to belong with or connect to others, and the need to feel effective with or to influence others.”33 Death row inmates, by contrast, used far more social-orientation words, especially words referring to friends and family.34 After a decade or more on death row, these men develop relationships with other inmates and maintain connections with family and friends on the outside, all of which obviate the motives characteristic of those contemplating suicide.35 Far from being terrified at the prospect of their looming death, the outpourings of love in the Texas death row inmate final statements supports Emotional Priority Theory over Terror Management Theory.

To ensure that I did not cherry-pick examples in support of my thesis, I collaborated with my psychologist colleagues Anondah Saide and Kevin McCaffree to enter all the statements into a database and then had two raters (Albert Ly and Liana Petraki) code each one based on preliminary categories I established after reading through all the statements myself, and a third rater (Marisa Montoya) reconcile any disagreements between the other two raters. From this we were able to compute inter-rater reliability correlations between coders that ranged from 0.50 to 0.83 and were all statistically significantly correlated at the 0.01 level of confidence. In other words, the coders consistently interpreted the statements in a manner significantly similar to one another and to my original analysis.36

Confirming my Emotional Priority Theory prediction, of the 425 death row inmates who made a statement, 68.2 percent used the word “love” (or a synonym for love) in reference to named girlfriends and wives, family and friends, and even to their fellow inmates. We excluded those indicating that they love God, Jesus, or Allah, which we included in a “religion” category. And although we did not count how many of them said they loved their mother, conspicuous by its absence is the fact that only one said he loved his father. I suspect (but cannot know for certain) that this is likely the result of so many of these men being raised in fatherless homes, a factor in the development of criminal behavior.37 Figure 1-2 presents the results of our content analysis on the Texas death row inmates’ final statements. I narrate each of these categories below.

Figure 1-2. Content Analysis of Texas Death Row Inmates’ Final Statements

Of the 537 inmates executed by the state of Texas between 1982 and 2016, 425 issued a final statement. My colleagues Anondah Saide and Kevin McCaffree and I entered all statements into a database; I had two raters code each one based on preliminary categories I established after reading through all the statements myself, and a third rater reconcile any disagreements between the other two raters. The symbol k denotes the inter-rater reliability score between the coders and the p < .01 value signifies that the coders’ ratings were statistically significantly correlated. The third figure for each category represents the percentage of statements made that included these expressed emotions and thoughts.

Love (k = .832, p < .01): 68.2%

Used the word “love” (or a synonym for love) in reference to family, friends, or other inmates (excluding those indicating that they love God, Jesus, or Allah).

Sorry (for Crime Committed) (k = .790, p < .01): 29.2%

Used the word “sorry” (or another synonym) in reference to committing the act or crime, but only if there was an admission of guilt. It was not counted if they were sorry for an “accident,” or sorry that someone else committed the crime, or apologized to someone not involved with the crime (e.g., warden).

Forgiveness Requested (k = .786, p < .01): 14.1%

Asked for “forgiveness” from the family members of the victim(s), many apparently present to witness the execution.

Religion (k = .831, p < .01): 54.4%

Reference to or commentary about Jesus, God, Allah, Muhammad, or religion generally, not covered in the other categories.

Heaven or Afterlife (k = .751, p < .01): 33.6%

Reference to heaven, the afterlife, or another synonym referencing the hereafter.

Hell (k = .496, p < .01): 8.5%

Used the words “hell” or “evil” (or a synonym) in reference to the consequence of their crime.

Professed Innocence (k = .842, p < .01): 14.8%

Any claim about being innocent of their crime(s).

Capital Punishment Opinion (k = .577, p < .01): For: 2.8%; Against: 12.2%

Read the following excerpts from the death row inmates’ final statements and ask yourself: Do these men sound as if they’re in a state of terror, subconscious or otherwise? I think not. These statements read like expressions of emotions offered up as a final testament to what matters most to humans—love. Emotional Priority Theory better explains these sentiments:

To my family, to my mom, I love you. God bless you, stay strong. I’m done.

—Gustavo Garcia, February 16, 2016

I love you Renee, I am gonna carry your heart and always carry my heart in your heart. I am ready.

—Richard Masterson, January 20, 2016

I appreciate everybody for their love and support. You all keep strong, thank you for showing me love and teaching me how to love.

—Kevin Watts, October 16, 2008

I want to tell my sons I love them; I have always loved them—they were my greatest gift from God. I want to tell my witnesses, Tannie, Rebecca, Al, Leo, and Dr. Blackwell that I love all of you and I am thankful for your support.

—Hilton Crawford, July 2, 2003

As the ocean always returns to itself, love always returns to itself. So does consciousness, always returns to itself. And I do so with love on my lips.

—James Ronald Meanes, December 15, 1998

I would like to tell my son, daughter and wife that I love them.

—Jesse Jacobs, January 4, 1995

To my loved ones, I extend my undying love. To those close to me, know in your hearts I love you one and all.

—Ronald Clark O’Bryan, March 30, 1984

Following a preliminary discussion of my initial content analysis in one of my monthly Scientific American columns,38 I received a letter from an artist and writer named Luis Camnitzer, who in 2008 produced an exhibition for the New York Gallery Alexander Gray Associates titled Last Words, featuring six human-sized prints in reddish-brown ink featuring some of these excerpts related to love.39 The artist’s intuitions about the importance of this emotion, so powerfully exhibited in the gallery (and partially reproduced in figure 1-3), is borne out by the data. Love matters, even to hardened criminals.

As a post hoc confirmation of Emotional Priority Theory, in 2016 a similar study was published on the last statements of 46 capital punishment inmates in the state of Missouri between 1995 and 2011, in which the researchers cataloged the statements into sixteen themes, the most common of which was love, which garnered 54 percent. For example: “To my beloved children I want you to know I love you.” “Tell my children and family and relatives, I love ’em.” And “I can never express how much my wife means to me and how much I love her.”41

On human-sized sheets of paper in a 2008 exhibition at the Alexander Gray Associates gallery in New York City the conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer reproduced excerpts from the last words of the Texas death row inmates of their expressions of love. Photo courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates and Luis Camnitzer / Artists Rights Society (ARS).40

In my own study, in addition to expressions of love, other emotional priorities evident in these final statements were admissions of sorrow for the crime committed (29.2 percent) and requests for forgiveness from the victims’ families (14.1 percent).42 Here is an archetypal example:

I’d like to apologize and ask forgiveness for any pain and suffering I have inflicted upon all of you, including my family. All of you, I am very sorry. There is a point where a man wants to die in judgment. Though my judgment is merciful, I hope and pray that all those involved as well as the judgment upon y’all, will one day be more merciful than mine. God bless you all. God speed. I love you. Remain strong. Ask God to have mercy. I love you all, too. I’m very sorry. I’ve got to go now. I love you.

—John Glenn Moody, January 5, 1999

Also evident was how much religious language appears in these statements. A majority (54.4 percent) indicated that they were religious, almost all Christian.43 Here are a few typical statements:

I thank God that he died for my sins on the cross, and I thank Him for saving my soul, so I will know when my body lays back in the grave, my soul goes to be with the Lord. Praise God. I hope whoever hears my voice tonight will turn to the Lord. I give my spirit back to Him. Praise the Lord. Praise Jesus. Hallelujah.

—Hai Vuong, December 7, 1995

Into your hands Oh Lord, I commend my spirit. Amen.

—Peter Miniel, October 06, 2004

I love you and I will see all of you in Heaven. I love you very much. Praise Jesus.

—Troy Kunkle, January 25, 2005

Jesus, thank you for your love and saving grace. Thank you for shedding your blood on Calvary for me. Thank you Jesus for the love you have shown me.

—George Hopper, March 8, 2005

Given the power of such religious sentiments, it is not surprising that many of these men facing their death were not only not terrified at the prospect of death; they were looking forward to transitioning to the other side. Specifically, 33.6 percent of the statements included references to the afterlife in uplifting terms and phrases such as “going home,” “going to a better place,” going to the “other side,” to “somewhere better,” looking forward to “see[ing] each other again,” “see you in eternity,” “see you when you get there,” “I’ll be there waiting for you,” “it’s not the end, only the beginning,” and of course references to heaven (but only 8.5 percent referenced hell). To wit:

I know most of you are here to see me suffer and die but you’re in for a big disappointment because today is a day of joy. Today is the day I’ll be set free from all this pain and suffering. Today I’m going home to HEAVEN to live for all eternity with my HEAVENLY FATHER JESUS CHRIST, and as I lay here taking my last breath, I’ll be praying for all of you because you’re here today with anger and hatred in your hearts letting Satan deceive you into believing that what you’re doing is right and just.

—Clifton E. Belyeu, May 16, 1997

I just wanted to say to all of those that have supported me over the years that I appreciate it and I love you. And I just want to tell my mom that I love her and I will see her in Heaven.

—Demarco Markeith McCullum, November 9, 2004

Take care, give everybody my regards. I love you, and I’ll see you in eternity. Father take me home. I am ready to go.

—Lonnie Johnson, July 24, 2007

This entry sums up all the emotional elements in one short dispatch:

To the West Family, I would just like to apologize for your loss. I hope that you can forgive me. To my family and loved ones and friends, I thank all of you all for your support and I am sorry for the pain and hurt I have caused you. I love you all and I will see you on the other side. O.K. Warden.

—Donald Aldrich, October 12, 2004

DEATH AND THE DEATH PENALTY: MORALISTIC PUNISHMENT AND MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Also revealing in our content analysis was the number of the men who said they were innocent or mistakenly convicted, set up by other criminals, wrongly accused by the police, or mistried by the courts, and were going to their deaths knowing that they didn’t commit the crimes for which they were being executed. These were 14.8 percent of the total (not including the handful who said they were innocent because the murder they committed was an “accident”). For example:

I am innocent, innocent, innocent. Make no mistake about this; I owe society nothing. Continue the struggle for human rights, helping those who are innocent, especially Mr. Graham. I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight. May God bless you all. I am ready.

—Leonel Torres Herrera, May 12, 1993

I charge the people of the jury. Trial Judge, the Prosecutor that cheated to get this conviction. I charge each and every one of you with the murder of an innocent man. All the way to the CCA, Federal Court, 5th Circuit and Supreme Court. You will answer to your Maker when God has found out that you executed an innocent man. May God have mercy on you … Go ahead Warden, murder me. Jesus take me home.

—Roy Pippin, March 29, 2007

This brings me to the difficult topic of the death penalty in the context of thinking about the quest for human and social perfection that, given the fact that humans are not angels, necessarily requires a criminal justice system. A number of prisoners (15 percent) expressed their opinions on capital punishment, with 12.2 percent against it and 2.8 percent for it. Here is an example of an inmate statement in support of his execution:

My death began on August 2, 1991 and continued when I began to see the beautiful and innocent life that I had taken. I am so terribly sorry. I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am. I have said in interviews, if you want to hurt me and choke me, that’s how terrible I felt before this crime. May God be with us all. May God have mercy on us all. I am ready. Please do not hate anybody because … [end of statement].

—Karl Chamberlain, June 11, 2008

Example of inmates’ statements against the death penalty include:

I hope people understand the grave injustice by the state. There are 300 people on death row, and everyone is not a monster. Texas is carrying out a very inhumane and injustice. It’s not right to kill anybody just because I killed your people. Everyone changes, right? Life is about experience and people change.

—Lee Taylor, June 16, 2011

This execution is not justice. This execution is an act of revenge! If this is justice, then justice is blind. Killing R.J. will not bring Anil back, it only justifies “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

—Richard J. Wilkerson, August 31, 1993

What about the perspective of the families of the victims and their understandable desire for retributive justice? According to many of the death row inmates’ final statements I read, prison was the hell from which death was a reprieve. Maybe life in prison is worse than execution. That’s something to consider in the natural desire for justice.

Regardless of your beliefs about heaven and hell or your position on capital punishment, in this context it is clear that we all believe justice should be served in the here and now instead of (or in addition to) the hereafter. Perhaps this context explains the first and most famous Terror Management Theory study involving judges who were primed to think about their own mortality, after which they issued significantly harsher punishments than judges who were not so primed.44 Maybe they do so not to reinforce cultural values as a means of attenuating personal death terror (the proposed explanation), but because humans have a deep-seated need to punish transgressors in order to maintain social harmony.

In his book Moral Origins,45 the anthropologist Christopher Boehm argues that the emotion of moralistic punishment evolved in our Paleolithic ancestors to solve the problem of how relatively equitable hunter-gatherer societies remain stable when free riders could game the system by taking more than they put in. If everyone (or a majority of group members) cheated, lied, stole, or bullied, social harmony would disintegrate. To work around this problem, all fifty modern hunter-gatherer groups that Boehm studied employ sanctions to deal with deviants, free riders, and bullies, ranging from social pressure and criticism to shaming, ostracism, ejection, and even execution for unrepentant and irredeemable bullies. Of course, no justice system is one hundred percent efficient at preventing all violations, but in an evolutionary context, free riders and cheaters who respond to sanctions maintain their genetic fitness and pass on their genes for modest levels of free riding and cheating, which is what we see in all societies today. From this system we evolved a moral conscience, an “inner voice” of self-control.

In the context of Emotional Priority Theory, instead of the management of death terror, perhaps priming judges of their impending death triggered their moral conscience and reminded them to prioritize their sense of moralistic punishment, an emotion we all carry over from our evolutionary ancestry.

* * *

ONE OF THE most profound thoughts any of us can have is awareness of our own mortality, but it is not the primary driving force behind human thought and behavior, creativity and productivity. Our inability to imagine our own nonexistence means that an ultimate understanding of our own mortality will forever elude us, leaving us to live for the here and now even while the hereafter beckons us. Who were the first people to become aware of their own mortality, and to dream of immortality?


Copyright © 2018 by Michael Shermer