Death and Culture
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Geoffrey Gorer’s study of the privatization of mourning practices in mid-twentieth-century Britain was germinal to Ariès’s concept of ‘invisible death’. Other historians, sociologists, philosophers and psychoanalysts contributed to the argument that post-war Western societies were in denial of death. For Gorer this resulted in a pathological ‘pornography of death’, as what is repressed escapes into public consciousness in the form of shallow and gratuitous entertainment. Death and dying are de-socialized and medicalized. The elderly are increasingly stigmatized by their proximity to life’s end and are quietly invalidated by a process of ‘social death’. Increases in life-expectancy translate into longer periods of retirement for some people. Those most accustomed to the affluent post-war conditions of reflexive individualism may then have more time to make sense of their lives and ‘legitimize’ their biographies. Yet as the process of biological decline is drawn out for longer, death as an event is displaced by the ubiquitous experience of what Lyn Lofland called ‘being dying’. As being dying is in turn medicalized and subject to ‘treatment’, the elderly today are deprived of a clear ‘dying role’ and, facing the stigma of their perceived obsolescence, may have no opportunity to share the story of their lives.
Philippe Ariès’s The Hour of Our Death (1982) is the most comprehensive and most widely cited historical study of changing attitudes to and understandings of death in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the post-war twentieth century. Supplemented by the contributions of other social historians, this chapter explores the different death mentalités identified by Ariès – the tame death, death of the self, remote and imminent death, death of the other, and, with more on this to come in the chapter that follows, invisible death (or what is more commonly referred to as the ‘denial’ of death). A glaring omission in Ariès’s account, which is equally apparent in Norbert Elias’s study of the ‘civilizing process’, is the way the Western management and pacification of death anxieties was accompanied by the barbaric treatment and brutal killing of indigenous people by colonialism. Ariès has also been criticized for romanticizing, and naturalizing, the ‘tame death’ of the Medieval world, for neglecting the troubled sense of mortality that was already apparent in Greek antiquity, and for treating as distinctly modern a transactional attitude to the management of the ‘good death’ which Allan Kellehear argues is as old as the formation of fixed human settlements.
The denial of death thesis, summarized in the previous chapter, has been criticized for reasons that are here discussed at length. It romanticizes the past, it confuses death’s repression with its institutional sequestration, and it ignores the revival of death – and what some have argued is a new age of ‘spectacular death’ – reflected in the extraordinary explosion in images, talk and studies about death and dying over the last 50 years, as well as in the ‘mediated death’ of social media mourning and the forms of immortality offered by digital legacies and generative AI. This chapter also explores attitudes to death in Victorian Britain, America and Australia, the rise of the rural cemetery movement, the history of modern embalming and cremation and their contested meanings, the theory of ‘anticipatory grief’, and related ideas about the well-managed medical death. As well as revisiting the concept of social death, the author cautions against a too hasty rejection of the theory of death’s denial, highlighting our impoverished understanding of the murderous conditions of the Anthropocene and emphasizing the barrenness of the idea that suffering, loss and responsibility for mortal others can be overcome by making us rights-bearing consumers of our own death and dying.
Anxiety and despair in the face of global heating, environmental degradation and species extinctions have, for many people, taken their toll on the meaning of life, and this can easily exacerbate the sense of powerlessness that always accompanies an honest awareness of our mortality. This chapter introduces the contested idea of the Anthropocene and explains its relevance to social theory in the era of the climate crisis. Concepts germinal to later discussions in the book, such as the midlife crisis, climate anxiety and what Harmut Rosa calls the ‘catastrophe of resonance’, are previewed. This is followed by an overview of the structure of the book, which begins with the ancient Greeks, progresses to the historians and sociologists of European attitudes to death, and ends by exploring the relevance of existential phenomenology and social theory to our understanding of meaning, mortality and responsibility today.
The classical sociological theories of anomie and disenchantment help elucidate the structural and ideological conditions that today relentlessly stoke people’s energies and desires and, just as relentlessly, make them feel that they are always missing out. Harmut Rosa conceptualizes this situation in terms of a logic of escalation, or ‘social acceleration’, in which we are both contributors to and victims of a race against time, a race which has become more desperate thanks to the deadly conditions of the Anthropocene. Rosa’s theory of ‘resonance’ is an attempt to prise the concepts of freedom and alienation free of their productivist premises, and to show how human fulfilment does not reside in practices of domination, appropriation and control. Meanwhile posthumanist, transhumanist and antihumanist thinkers are increasingly drawn to the prospect of hybridizing humans with machines, as if by mechanizing ourselves we can outlast a world we have made unliveable. The author argues, instead, that a life acquires meaning from the conviction that other kindred lives will continue after its death. This conviction explains the importance of an alternative hedonism as well as of the ancient wisdom of Socrates – that we need to live lightly in order to leave something worthwhile behind.
A central theme of this chapter is the birth of Tragedy as a theatrical art form in which death is the most important figure. It situates this amidst the emergence in Greek antiquity of a cult of the dead, with its accompanying belief in the psyche or soul and its attendant social rituals, festivals and legal edicts. Many classicists believe that, from as early as the eighth century BC, Greek societies underwent a social, cultural and psychological transformation not dissimilar to the European Renaissance. A sharper sense of individualism, and more exacting worries about fate, death and the afterlife, were features of this. The manifestations of this shift are tracked through the work of Homer and tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides. In Antigone and other plays we can detect a tension between the state’s concern to suppress the potentially inflammatory effects of women’s mourning practices and the need to show appropriate piety towards the psyche of the dead. In beliefs surrounding the actions and interests of returning souls or the ‘restless dead’, we can identify normative ideas of legitimate and illegitimate death. In Greek tragedy we can see how what was suppressed by law found sublimated expression in art.
Plato’s thoughts on death were formulated when the Eleusinian, Dionysian and Orphic mystery cults were inviting Greeks to consider the possibility that the soul might itself be, or become, divine. Plato’s Phaedo recounts the final hours of Socrates and his reflections on his own death. Socrates’s indifference to his death sentence derives, in Plato’s account, from the way philosophical contemplation attaches us to something immortal – the eternal world of Ideas. Plato’s Socrates was disdainful of tragedy, his cheerful rationalism later becoming the target of Nietzsche’s ire. But Socrates’s death was tragic, and we might still learn something from this tragedy in making sense of our own Anthropogenic predicament. The extinction of our own species is now a strong probability, but if, like Socrates, we live modestly and reflectively, we can still leave something worthwhile behind. This chapter also compares the extroverted individualism of the Greeks with the introspective egoism characteristic of later European rationalism. It shows how the notions of sin and guilt were the eventual offspring of this earlier individualism, and highlights the role that monotheistic religions, formed amidst the intellectual diffusion of Plato’s metaphysics, played in assuaging people’s moral and existential anxieties with the promise of eternal salvation.
Climate anxiety is at some level an anxiety about death, and about our destructive endangerment of the continuity of life after we are gone. It shares some features with the sense of anguish that often arises through the experience of ageing. This chapter explores the history of the concept of the ‘mid-life crisis’, before introducing Sartre’s existentialism as a way of thinking about the meaning of life in the face of escapable failure and extinction. Sartre, ironically, dismissed the significance of death to our sense of purpose and freedom. Heidegger, however, argued otherwise, claiming that assumption of one’s own mortality is a requirement of authenticity. Yet neither philosopher adequately theorized human embodiment, and the related experiences of mutability, vulnerability and senescence, and neither captured the way bodies give both rhythm and urgency to the passage of time. Embodiment, as Merleau-Ponty demonstrated, is what makes us social, impersonal beings. Marcel Mauss also showed how bodies always bear the imprint of society. A final flaw in the first-person perspective of existentialism is that it neglects our care for the death of others and for other forms of life, an omission that the author addresses by drawing on Levinas’s moral philosophy.
Are we accepting of death, or in denial of it, and what can we learn, that might help us think and act meaningfully amidst the climate emergency, from the different ways death has been imagined, theorized and organized in Western social and intellectual history? Beginning with the role of tragedy, and then philosophy, in Greek antiquity, before exploring the history of European attitudes to death and their increasing entanglement with colonial atrocities and politically organized killing, this interdisciplinary study probes the work of philosophers, sociologists, historians and psychoanalysts to help make sense of mortality in the Anthropocene. Examining the denial of death discourse that was hegemonic in earlier mortality studies, it critically analyses the opposing argument that we are today more reconciled with the realities of death. Drawing on existential philosophy, Levinas’s theory of our responsibility for the death of others, and Harmut Rosa’s account of social acceleration and the catastrophe of resonance, Bowring highlights notable points of contact between anomic feelings of disappointment and missing out, growing climate anxiety and despair over the future conditions of life on earth, and the sense of wasted efforts and lost purposes that is characteristic of the midlife crisis. In response to this malaise he argues that we need to think of mortality as more than just a life of finite time, to recognize instead our shared vulnerability and passivity, and to understand how this makes us both dependent on others and responsible for other equally precarious forms of life.
This chapter provides an overview of the most influential sociological and psychological treatments of humans’ engagement with their own mortality, including the experience of bereavement. It summarizes the contributions of classical sociologists and anthropologists, including Durkheim’s theory of mourning and Hertz’s analysis of double burial rites, and notes how the social organization of death is always stratified by power, as illustrated by the phenomenon of ‘disenfranchised grief’. Freud’s theory of the ‘ambivalence of feeling’, and his disconcerting claim that we gain unconscious gratification from the destruction of others, is explored. Otto Rank’s break with Freud, and his insistence on our psychological fear of death, is explained, and the influence this had on Ernest Becker and then on Terror Management Theory, is critically discussed. The chapter ends by emphasizing the importance of thinking of mortality not just as a condition of finitude (that is, having a limited amount of time to live), but also of vulnerability and embodiment. The full relevance of this will be expounded in Chapters 7 and 8.
