Death and Dying

Death and Dying

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Death is as much a cultural reality as it is a biological one. The only creature known to be aware of its inevitable demise, humans have dealt with their unique insight with considerable creative ritual and belief. Many have argued that religion, philosophy, consumerism, and even civilization itself were all created as antidotes to this terrifying insight (Becker 1973). Mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) hypothesized that mythmaking began with the first awareness of mortality, forcing early humans to seek purpose, to rationalize the irrational, and to deny death’s finality. Perhaps it should thus be of no surprise that much of what we know of past cultures is based on funerary artifacts—their attempts at death transcendence.

A culture’s death system, or death ethos, determines such widely ranging phenomena as a people’s militancy and suicide rate; their preferences for bullfights, gladiator battles, or horror movies; their fears of or hopes for reincarnation and resurrection; their willingness to perform organ transplants or purchase life insurance; their decisions to bury, cremate, or eat their dead; and their attitudes toward capital punishment, abortion, and what constitutes a “good death.”

Cultures have been classified in terms of their death systems, shedding light on the meanings they give to life. Historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), for example, categorized cultures by whether they are death-accepting or death-denying, hold a hedonistic or pessimistic view toward life, perceive death to be the end of existence or a transition to some personal or collective form of immortality, view corpses as sacred or profane objects, and whether or not the dead are believed to play an active role in the affairs of the living (and whether in a positive or negative way). In the death-defying West, for instance, strategies for salvation have historically featured activism and asceticism, whereas in the East they have often been more contemplative and mystical. In the West, postdeath conceptions typically involve the integrity and continuity of one’s personal self; in the East, the ultimate goal is often an undifferentiated and impersonal oneness with the universe.

Changes in social solidarities (i.e., urbanization, religious pluralism), in selfhood (i.e., the shift from collectivist to individualistic identities), and in who dies and why, have historically produced several recognized epochs in the West, each featuring distinctive conceptions of death and funerary ritual. For most of human history, when life was short and “death in the midst of life” was a literal and not a figurative notion, cultural rituals and social systems were oriented to this fact. People were constantly reminded about time’s invariable passage and their inevitable mortal fate. Ancient Egyptians would have skeletons brought to their feasts; colonial Americans would daily walk past their church cemeteries, whose tombstones were adorned with skulls and crossbones. Death was “tame,” according to social historian Philippe Ariès (1914-1984). Deathbeds were community gathering places; public meeting spaces were often adjacent to mass graves whose contents were often partially visible. In early colonial America, realizing that two or three of their children would not survive until age ten, Puritan parents would send their offspring to family and friends as apprentices to avoid excessive attachments with them and the grief their deaths would cause (Stannard 1977).

According to Ariès, the contemporary era in the West features death denials and “invisible death,” fueling the illusion of immortality with institutions that conceal the dying (over 70 percent of Americans currently die within institutionalized settings) and that make the dead appear lifelike for funerary services. Those most likely to die are the old (nearly eight in ten deaths in the United States are those sixty and older), who are largely disengaged from many of their roles and physically segregated from other age groups in retirement communities and long-term care facilities. Gerontophobia, or fear of aging, has become interwoven with cultural thanatophobia, the fear of death.

So great is the power of an ethos, this construction of meaning thrown up against the terror of death, that social agencies invariably seek to harness its energy as a means of social control—and to enhance the social status of their members. For instance, consider religion’s traditional threats of agonizing hells or bad reincarnations as a means for keeping the living in line. The power and status of the medical establishment increased dramatically during the last century with its growing ability to postpone death. Because of scientific breakthroughs, modern medicine has largely eliminated many traditional causes of premature death, especially infectious disease, and the medical establishment competes with religion’s traditional control over the dying process. Accordingly, death is shifting from being a moral rite of passage to a technological one. Traditional fears of postmortem judgment are morphing into fears of dying; those most likely to die, the old, fear being institutionalized within nursing homes more than they fear death.

With most premature death now the result of man-made and hence theoretically avoidable causes (e.g., accidents, homicides, and suicides), its occurrence has become increasingly tragic and highly politicized. Political rulers have long enforced their control through death squads, pogroms, war, capital punishment, and campaigns of fear. Disdaining such strategies, modern regimes instead establish legitimacy and citizen loyalty by thwarting (or at least predicting) the death threats of enemies with the country’s military forces, of lethal microbes with health care systems, of violent storms with weather satellites, of possible earthquakes or volcanic eruptions with seismic monitoring stations, and of potential asteroid or meteor collisions with telescope arrays.

Some of the most contentious moral debates in the contemporary United States center on the right to end life (e.g., capital punishment, physician-assisted suicide, and civilian casualties in military campaigns) and precisely where the line between life and death occurs, as in the controversies over abortion and euthanasia.

Materialism, individualism, secularism, and the distractions of consumer and popular cultures have not eliminated individuals’ fears of death nor their desires to transcend it. The proportion of Americans believing in an afterlife has generally increased over recent decades, with more than seven in ten confident that their existence does not conclude with death. At a minimum, cultural death systems promise at least symbolic immortality (Lifton 1979), such as being remembered through one’s progeny or works of art, or surviving through the preservation of political or natural orders. Thus we witness the proliferation of such projects as halls of fame, the Social Security Administration’s online database of deceased Americans, and Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of top-earning deceased celebrities.

SEE ALSO Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide; Funerals; Suicide

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ariès, Philippe. 1981. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Knopf.

Becker, Ernest. 1973. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Campbell, Joseph. 1974. The Mythic Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lifton, Robert. 1979. The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Stannard, David. 1977. The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

Toynbee, Arnold. 1980. Various Ways in Which Human Beings Have Sought to Reconcile Themselves to the Fact of Death. In Death: Current Perspectives, ed. Edwin Shneidman, 11-34. 2nd ed. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield.

Michael C. Kearl