When I was young, I was in a car with friends driving past a large Veteran’s cemetery, and noting all the tombstones, sparked gales of ridiculing laughter when I exclaimed, “Wow, there sure are a lot of dead people in the world!”
Knowledge of our own death is one of the things that makes human life so exceptional. It presents us with a real opportunity, for regardless of transhumanist dreams, knowing that none of us will be drinking a latte at Starbuck’s in the not too distant future has the power to focus us to better living now. Indeed, Christian monastics are instructed by their spiritual fathers and mothers to keep their own deaths constantly in mind as an essential ingredient in their quest for salvation. Ditto Buddhists in the drive toward Enlightenment. Religious or not, up until the last one hundred years, there was no way to escape being aware of death because it was all around in the dying of the old at home, the young from childhood diseases, and women in childbirth, and from pandemics such as the Spanish Flu that could take millions. That remains the reality for billions of us.
Then, in the developed world, medicine pushed death more into the shadows. Over time, the West became what is sometimes called a “death denying” culture. But studies show, that isn’t healthy. From the science blog Inkfish:
A new paper published in Personality and Social Psychology Review looks over the accumulated evidence and concludes that thinking about death can make your life better. Previous terror management research has focused on the dark side of our psychological protections: Psychologists say that reminders of death can make us more hostile toward people we see as outside our own group. But researchers led by Kenneth E. Vail III at the University of Missouri, Columbia, say the perks of morbid thinking are too great to ignore.
Conscious reminders of death can encourage people to stay healthy and pursue their goals. In various studies, subjects smoked less, planned to exercise more, and were more conscientious about sunscreen after being made to think about death.
In other words, cemeteries and columbariums have their place beyond honoring the dead. Perhaps we should remember this when contemplating being liquefied and put into the sewer system as a means of body disposal. Inkfish continues:
Tapping into the benefits of our fear of death, the authors say, could make people “more inclusive, cooperative, and peaceful.” The downside of our psychological response to death is hostility toward outsiders. But as long as people view themselves as part of a larger community, thinking about our mortality can encourage us to clean up our acts. We may be more helpful to others, more committed to our relationships, more focused on healthy habits, and more thoughtful about our long-term goals.
But I think it is more fundamental than whether remembering death helps us live more political correctly, which as the late Christopher Hitchens believed, also takes a lot of the fun out of existence. Rather, I think that death-knowledge—which gets easier for me with every new ache and pain occasioned by having 60+ year old knees—is key to correct living, in which doing what is right matters more than doing what I want. Yes, there are ways of living that are right and wrong, and death should remind us to figure out which is which.
If one has the precious gift/delusion of faith (depending on your perspective), this process is helped because it comes with the desire to please God and/or with the understanding that there will be an accounting. For Christians, it is the defense before the “dread judgment seat of Christ.” For non theistic Buddhists, karmic debts will be paid and reincarnation looms. Etc.
Those without faith also know that how they live matters after they enter non being. Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan, when confronting his immoral and expedient friend Yale for “being too easy on yourself,” points to a chimp skeleton, notes that “this is what happens to us,” and exclaims, “I want to make sure that when I ‘thin out,’ I’m well thought of.” In other words, even if life is just atoms coming together into interesting and ephemeral forms, we leave legacies that ricochet down the generations.
We know that how we live matters, in part, because death stalks us without rest or mercy.
