I lack the time at this moment to write responses to every thoughtful question you've posed, but you've hit a very interesting point regarding what our culture has at say, to the extent that it addresses the issue at all, about death.
There is a deep contradiction I think between what most people might still say, versus what we see from Hollywood, the media, academia, and many activists and politicians united by a "progressive" perspective. I think most people would still generally agree that life is a good thing, even an Inherently, Objectively, Good, even if they lack the arguments to articulate or support that thought since it has been so self-evident to so many for so long that it naturally fit into our culture as an indisputable premise needing no defense.
OTOH, there has emerged another contrary thought, almost a dark twin of Tolkien's framing of Death as a gift (after all, a recurrent theme of Tolkien is that evil cannot create, it merely mimics and corrupts the created). Death IS a gift because it is the End; not in any sense that the temporality of our mortal condition inspires a greater appreciation of life and beauty due to its very scarcity, but rather the opposite: Life is suffering and Death therefore a release. Death is a mercy. Death is dignity. Death is justice. Death is ease. I can't say whether these are the thoughts of people so terrified of Death that they desperately seek to clothe it in a more comforting light or the genuine thoughts of people seeking Death, nor do I see much difference in practice.
Death is embraced across our culture. Action movies and war correspondence promise the vicarious thrill of watching our enemies perish. Abortion, 'assisted dying', and Capital Punishment serve to remove 'inconvenient' people from our experience. DNRs and suicides proliferate while organ donation and fertility alike falls as people come to implicitly believe that life is not worth living. Mass shooters choose to commit suicide by cop while taking an escort of innocents (or, as they see it, the Guilty) with them in a spectacle of nihilistic vengeance. The choice to bring children into this world becomes condemned somehow as simultaneously a sign of selfishness in environmental terms and selling oneself into indentured servitude for the next two decades to rear a life that will both reject you and itself be rejected by the world. When Life is viewed as no more than a state of being trapped in suffering and a burden on the World, Death even takes on an aspect of moral obligation: that sometimes the best thing humanity can do is to simply die out quietly without inflicting any more damage upon an uncaring planet.
I read a long time ago in a book ('On Killing') that folks 100 years ago were surrounded by life (animal births, family members having sex, siblings being born) and death (animal slaughtering, grandparents dying, the sick and injured passing away at home and being buried in the yard) in ways which are simply foreign to us now. We regard killing the way a porn addict regards sex... and we try to think about DEATH as infrequently as possible. Not a healthy state of affairs.
Yes, by Dave Grossman. Excellent book, highly recommend. Good point. Death has become unfamiliar to us in a historically unprecedented way.
I'd add two other drivers I suspect contribute to the phenomena.
The first is the loss of religion from our culture. Even those people who were not particularly devout or clear on the finer points of doctrine used to have at least a vague notion of "Good people go to heaven and bad people go to Hell". There was often, if not explicit certainty as to what comes after Death, at minimum an implicit idea that 'Something' comes after Death, that it is not necessarily 'The End'.
The second is the logical end of hedonistic pursuit of novelty. In the richest country in the richest period of history, there are seemingly endless amusements, an infinite variety of shows to watch and items to buy, and a near complete lack of limits. Sex, drugs, gambling, gaming, social media, it's trivial to go down the rabbit hole of any addiction you choose today... But hedonistic adaptation always catches up. I think there's a sort of latent transgressive desire to find a boundary just so you have a boundary to transgress. Death is the ultimate boundary, the one thing not tried yet. To die becomes a luxury experience of sorts, limit one per person. It reminds me of another book I likewise highly recommend:
"Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!"
I lack the time at this moment to write responses to every thoughtful question you've posed, but you've hit a very interesting point regarding what our culture has at say, to the extent that it addresses the issue at all, about death.
There is a deep contradiction I think between what most people might still say, versus what we see from Hollywood, the media, academia, and many activists and politicians united by a "progressive" perspective. I think most people would still generally agree that life is a good thing, even an Inherently, Objectively, Good, even if they lack the arguments to articulate or support that thought since it has been so self-evident to so many for so long that it naturally fit into our culture as an indisputable premise needing no defense.
OTOH, there has emerged another contrary thought, almost a dark twin of Tolkien's framing of Death as a gift (after all, a recurrent theme of Tolkien is that evil cannot create, it merely mimics and corrupts the created). Death IS a gift because it is the End; not in any sense that the temporality of our mortal condition inspires a greater appreciation of life and beauty due to its very scarcity, but rather the opposite: Life is suffering and Death therefore a release. Death is a mercy. Death is dignity. Death is justice. Death is ease. I can't say whether these are the thoughts of people so terrified of Death that they desperately seek to clothe it in a more comforting light or the genuine thoughts of people seeking Death, nor do I see much difference in practice.
Death is embraced across our culture. Action movies and war correspondence promise the vicarious thrill of watching our enemies perish. Abortion, 'assisted dying', and Capital Punishment serve to remove 'inconvenient' people from our experience. DNRs and suicides proliferate while organ donation and fertility alike falls as people come to implicitly believe that life is not worth living. Mass shooters choose to commit suicide by cop while taking an escort of innocents (or, as they see it, the Guilty) with them in a spectacle of nihilistic vengeance. The choice to bring children into this world becomes condemned somehow as simultaneously a sign of selfishness in environmental terms and selling oneself into indentured servitude for the next two decades to rear a life that will both reject you and itself be rejected by the world. When Life is viewed as no more than a state of being trapped in suffering and a burden on the World, Death even takes on an aspect of moral obligation: that sometimes the best thing humanity can do is to simply die out quietly without inflicting any more damage upon an uncaring planet.
I read a long time ago in a book ('On Killing') that folks 100 years ago were surrounded by life (animal births, family members having sex, siblings being born) and death (animal slaughtering, grandparents dying, the sick and injured passing away at home and being buried in the yard) in ways which are simply foreign to us now. We regard killing the way a porn addict regards sex... and we try to think about DEATH as infrequently as possible. Not a healthy state of affairs.
Yes, by Dave Grossman. Excellent book, highly recommend. Good point. Death has become unfamiliar to us in a historically unprecedented way.
I'd add two other drivers I suspect contribute to the phenomena.
The first is the loss of religion from our culture. Even those people who were not particularly devout or clear on the finer points of doctrine used to have at least a vague notion of "Good people go to heaven and bad people go to Hell". There was often, if not explicit certainty as to what comes after Death, at minimum an implicit idea that 'Something' comes after Death, that it is not necessarily 'The End'.
The second is the logical end of hedonistic pursuit of novelty. In the richest country in the richest period of history, there are seemingly endless amusements, an infinite variety of shows to watch and items to buy, and a near complete lack of limits. Sex, drugs, gambling, gaming, social media, it's trivial to go down the rabbit hole of any addiction you choose today... But hedonistic adaptation always catches up. I think there's a sort of latent transgressive desire to find a boundary just so you have a boundary to transgress. Death is the ultimate boundary, the one thing not tried yet. To die becomes a luxury experience of sorts, limit one per person. It reminds me of another book I likewise highly recommend:
"Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!"
Fydor Dostoyevsky
Tags: notes-from-underground
This is riveting.
I’ve read the Silmarilian. You made it better for me. I was an easily distracted teen at the time. Wish I’d seen what you saw. Glad I see it now.
Thank you so much.