My dead friend

In June, our museum opened an exhibition called Namedropping. David says that what he’s trying to do in this show is figure out what status is and why it is useful, in a deep sense—as part of our evolved biology. Namedropping is a light-hearted look at all that, with a few pauses for self-scrutiny. What follows is from the exhibition. Read more about Namedropping here.

What does a close friend become when a close friend becomes dead? I’ve had a few of those, including Stephen, whose suicide virtually guaranteed the absence of a legacy, and Robert, who knew everything, including how to die.

And then there’s Alex. Forty years ago Alex said, ‘I would happily die tomorrow if I could be world middleweight boxing champion today.’ Most evenings, I’d hang with Alex. We didn’t go to bars much; he didn’t drink. We played records, or went to Mummy’s for a toastie. Earlier each day, before we met, he would have done some weight training, and a run, and some sprints, and kickboxing, and boxing. I’d avoid most of that, but I was up for a cheese, bacon and pineapple toastie to share.

Alex didn’t become a boxing champion. That wasn’t going to happen even if he hadn’t defrauded social security and had to go on the lam. He changed his name (Moerd to Moore), and then became a drover. That ended when he won a boxing match in Queensland and got himself into the local paper. So he moved again, joined us gamblers, got rich, lived and died.

No one is telling me how he died, but it seems he started taking drugs, maybe ice, to heighten sexual pleasure, and eventually he suffered organ failure. I spoke to him a couple of days before his demise. He told me the surgeon had said there was some hope for him if he had a heart transplant. ‘Over my dead body,’ was Alex’s reply.

And he said he ‘wouldn’t change one nanosecond of it’. But then, a little later, there were some nanoseconds that I’d change. He must have drawn a breath, perhaps rasped a death rattle, and then breathed no more.

I didn’t see him much in his last decade or so. My memory is of nunchakus, and punching him in the stomach until my hands bled. He was unrelenting in his effort to be astonishingly good, but nowhere near good enough.

Good enough for what? Good enough to be loved and adored, to have status? And good enough to be remembered, not just by his wife and kids, but by strangers?

Good enough to satisfy the needs of genes, built into them by arbitrariness and avarice, and the statistical outcomes of differential survival. Alex died, perhaps because sex is fun, but sex is fun so that our genes survive.

So we survive, and propagate and do that fun thing that our genetic ancestry compels us to. I did it just now, with my wife, between the first and the second ‘good enoughs’. We did it despite the fact that I’ve had a vasectomy and the genes aren’t going to get what they want. We did it because it’s fun.

It’s so much fun because if it wasn’t we wouldn’t have 700 million generations of ancestors that ‘got lucky’. And Alex did it—perhaps too much—because fun is so compelling it can become pathological.

In Vain, 2022, Elmgreen & Dragset
Courtesy of the artists, Berlin, Germany
Photo: Elmar Vestner

Why would Alex choose to die young to be a champion, to be known, admired and feted? Well that’s a bit of a pathology too. But if you’re known, admired and feted, those who feel that way about you might help you have kids, and they might help those kids survive. This mechanism has been honed over hundreds of thousands of years in the savannahs of Africa, and it continues to work in the suburbs and cities of Australia. It continues to work because those suburbs and cities are organised around the very principles that evolution beat into us back in the savannahs. Our culture is in thrall of evolution.

It’s not just Alex, I’m part of this culture/biology complex of course, and I did all these things—this museum, this exhibition, and perhaps even this little essay—to enhance and broadcast my status. Outside the narrow confines of these paragraphs, I’m not normally aware that I’m such a status hound. Status is my ultimate motive, but usually I amplify my proximate motives: giving back to my community; experiencing beauty; making life worthwhile for me and my family—nebulous stuff that I can say in an interview to fill the void that my ultimate motives excavate. I decide why I do stuff after I do it.

While I’m strung out in this moment of self-awareness, I’ll ask myself a question while you eavesdrop. Would I sacrifice my status if that would alleviate my constant debilitating back pain, which I will probably suffer until I die? The answer is ‘no’. And I wouldn’t choose to be young, and healthy, and cognitively superior, over my life now.

I would choose to have my life now, even if that guaranteed it would end tomorrow. I am the foolish middleweight world-title holder of Alex’s dreams. I have achieved a grand legacy; I have achieved symbolic immortality.

That’s clearly a pathology for me, but it isn’t for my genes. Mona, my capital-hungry legacy beast, promotes my genes through those I love. My children share my genes, but my wife and my friends and my colleagues are all captured by this vision, this legacy, and they will compel its future. By compelling its future, they indulge my genetic material with a strong hand in this grand statistical arbitrage, the game of life.

Persuasion Mask, 2018, Brian Jungen
Cc Foundation Collection, Shanghai, China

The desire to leave a legacy is compelling, even in the absence of children, in the same way that sex is compelling: because it’s fun. Apparently it’s been enough fun for me to abjure my need for physical life. Symbolic immortality enhances the chance of my genes persevering. Stephen and Robert, my dead mates from the first paragraph, didn’t have children. Their genes can still survive, in diluted form, if their relatives propagate. From the genes’ point of view (and from my point of view), they didn’t live and die for nothing. But they didn’t stack the genetic deck.

I’m not an athlete, and I made my name (can you drop your own name?) with the judicious (hopefully, but doubtfully) application of money. The rewards of athletic success are immense and obvious, however. And athletes know it. When a test group were offered the hypothetical of a magic pill that would enable them to win every competition they entered for the next five years but die immediately thereafter, 52 per cent indicated they would take it. ¹

Is that stupid? Well I wouldn’t take that deal (I’ll come back to that in a moment), but it makes sense from their genes’ point of view. Firstly, through those five years, I suspect their genes would be offered many chances to get into the next generation. Successful athletes are attractive. But also, the legacy of successful athletes has perseverance. I can think of the names of athletes who’ve been dead for ages. Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Donald Bradman, Fanny Blankers-Koen—and I’m not that interested in sport. And Shane bloody Warne is even more everywhere than he was when he was alive. Anecdotally, the symbolic immortality athletes achieve really works. Greta Bradman, Donald’s granddaughter, is well known to me as an opera singer, and I’m not much interested in opera either.

A decision that seems stupid for the individual making it isn’t necessarily stupid from the point of view of their genes. So, let me ask: who’s making the decision? You, or your genes?

Memory, 2018, Vipoo Srivilasa
Australian Sports Museum, Melbourne
Donated by Mr Dean Netherton

Before, I said I wouldn’t take the killer magic pill to make me a super athlete for a while. If the genes are making the decision, why wouldn’t I?

Because I don’t want to attract potential partners and friends interested in sport. My tastes and aspirations express themselves, and the people I’m likely to care about, and bond with, should share those tastes. I want, and my genes want, to attract people who are compatible with me. If we’re sufficiently compatible, we might stay friends, or lovers, for a long time, and we might promote the interests of those we care about, even after they are dead. I’m doing that now. There’s Mona, of course, but I’m also (slightly) immortalising Stephen, Robert and Alex. Stephen and Robert are both eulogised in the big version of my autobiography. Alex wasn’t dead then, so I’m subverting the purposes of these works of art to his and my end.

Genes make us, and they make us care. And the things, and the people, we care about help to propagate our tastes, and our desires, and our genes. Culture bootstraps itself from our needs, in particular our need to proselytise what we believe in, and what we care about. And that helps our genes survive, and it keeps helping, when we’re no longer around. All this through the subtle combinatorics of fun. So, the circle stays unbroken.

Humans enjoy sex. Rape and coercion are a couple of the many pathologies of the pleasure sex brings. But so is love. Alex didn’t achieve symbolic immortality through sport, but he did demonstrate that, even to the point of pathology, we sometimes behave in the short-term interest of our genes even if it’s not in our individual long-term interest.

Because sex is fun, Alex literally took that magic killer pill.

1. B. Goldman, P. Bush and R. Klatz, Death in the Locker Room: Steroids, Cocaine and Sports, The Body Press, Tucson, 1984, cited by Brett Jordan Waggoner, ‘Legacy: Motivations and mechanisms for a desire to be remembered’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, New Zealand, 2022, p. 41, ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/handle/10523/14115.

Header Image: The new Round Room, 2010–12, Michael Zavros
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Bulgari Art Award, 2012