Taboos, who needs 'em!

[liv]

I made a big post talking explicitly about class and finances and the sky doesn't seem to have fallen in, so why don't I talk about death while I'm at it?

My social circle have been celebrating a sort of pre-death wake for author Iain Banks who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He's very well liked both personally and as a writer, and he's shockingly young, and people are devastated. papersky wrote a magnificent elegy and rant against mortality in his honour. She mentioned in the comments that: There's not a whole lot of comfort in the face of death for people who aren't religious. That sparked off a whole pile of thoughts which I think are better here than dumped in the comment thread full of grieving people.

I am religious (by most definitions), but I find more comfort in broadly secular responses to death than stereotypical "religious" ones. At least, if somebody tells me the equivalent of: 'don't be sad, they're safe with Jesus now', that's completely unhelpful to me. And only partly because my religion doesn't share that Christian view of the afterlife; more importantly, there is no comfort for me in a religious position which doesn't acknowledge my grief as real. Neither does it help me if you tell me it's part of God's plan for people to suffer debilitating illnesses and die young; my conception of God's plan is that humans were created to repair what is broken in this world, and I can't fulfil that plan if I go around being piously resigned to things that are patently awful.

Religious rituals can be comforting, of course. Gathering together with a community I'm connected to, having practical actions to follow, having familiar, resonant words to recite, all of those things do help even if I don't always agree with the content of the words, not in that moment of raw misery when someone is lost; faith that there will be some kind of resurrection and continuity doesn't alter that. It seems to me like the SF fandom community are doing pretty well at creating a spontaneous ritual to mourn Banks, and using the internet, blogs and Twitter and so on, to connect to other mourners. I think that doesn't always happen when the bereaved are outside religious communities; sometimes the burden falls on the people closest to the deceased, who may or may not be in a fit state to organize anything, sometimes non-religious people have to rely on a sort of watered-down Christian without the theism type of ritual. But I don't think the underpinning beliefs are the reason why religion may be helpful in dealing with death. Even then it only may be helpful; if either the deceased or the mourners are non-believers, religious rituals are just as likely to be offensive and uncomfortable as comforting.

pw201 posted an atheist response to the death of another well-loved geek celebrity, Roger Ebert. Ebert's own words quoted at the beginning fit in with some religious and some secular theologies; I am surprised to learn that the devout can’t abide such sentiments, because for me, I could easily restate Ebert's point in overtly religious language. The references to Hume and via Hume to Lucretius (also quoted in Paul's post) are I think good examples of the best kind of secular response to the horror of death. The Skeptics scrabbling around to look for a rational justification why they feel bad about death (in spite of these noble sentiments about how oblivion is no worse than the state of non-existence before birth) I think are missing the point rather. As far as I can tell, some religious people are extremely philosophical in the face of death and some fear it ( or perhaps fear punishment in the afterlife or something), some atheists are entirely accepting of death and some fear it. I don't think one's beliefs or lack of beliefs about the afterlife actually address the emotional issue of how it hurts to lose someone you care about, nor the moral issue that so much suffering and so many lives cut short seem unfair.

I do agree with papersky that it's somewhat easier to accept my own eventual death than other people dying. People have built academic careers arguing whether Plato's Socrates was a theist or secular, but I have always been a bit fond of his discussion of death at the end of the Apology:

Let us consider in another way also how good reason there is to hope that it is a good thing. For the state of death is one of two things: either it is virtually nothingness, so that the dead has no consciousness of anything, or it is, as people say, a change and migration of the soul from this to another place. And if it is unconsciousness, like a sleep in which the sleeper does not even dream, death would be a wonderful gain. For I think if any one were to pick out that night in which he slept a dreamless sleep and, comparing with it the other nights and days of his life, were to say, after due consideration, how many days and nights in his life had passed more pleasantly than that night, – I believe that not only any private person, but even the great King of Persia himself would find that they were few in comparison with the other days and nights. So if such is the nature of death, I count it a gain; for in that case, all time seems to be no longer than one night. But on the other hand, if death is, as it were, a change of habitation from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be, judges?

Which I read to mean, either there is an afterlife, in which case death isn't really an annihilation, something of "me" will continue on in some form, or else there isn't, in which case I won't be around to experience my lack of existence. There's also this poem, which is theist in that it mentions God in the penultimate line, but it's not really tied to any particular theology. The general sentiment, that there's more to celebrate in having experienced life than to regret that life must come to an end, seems to agree with the passage Paul quoted from Ebert and I think could be of some comfort to religious and secular people alike.

That doesn't completely help me to accept the deaths of other people, people I care about, people who it seems to me morally deserve to continue living for many more years, or at least to die gently without first enduring months and years of illness, loss of capacity and misery. I don't think there's much in religion that can really properly answer that, and religion that tries to be glib or forbid adherents from questioning this part of reality is religion I find difficult to respect. What we have is the collective wisdom of all of human history of grappling with this question, some of it from people coming from within a religious frame and others explicitly secular, but what's beautiful and profound in facing the reality of suffering and death I think can be of value irrespective of whether it takes this reality as "God's creation" or "just the way things are".

And then, what about the case when unpleasant and hated people die? I find it abhorrent that anyone might be said to deserve prolonged illness or premature death, and if an evil person dies peacefully at the end of a long and full life, that seems unjust towards much more admired people who don't get that benefit. Which honestly isn't much of a benefit, it's still their life being cut short, and I am not willing to concede that this is a desirable state of affairs, for anyone, of any moral standing. I said a couple of years ago that I might have to avoid the internet when former PM Baroness Thatcher dies, and today she has. I suppose that since I wrote that post I've come to realize that if someone has been so badly hurt by recent UK politics that they feel inclined to celebrate and rejoice in the death of a sick, elderly woman, then it's not my place to criticize. But I'm not going to join in. Just no. No resignation. Tears and rage. And that goes for all of illness and death, not just of people I care about or my friends care about.

Tell me, is there anything that you find comforting when you have to confront death? Texts, art, music, philosophies? How do you live with knowing about mortality and the enormous unfairness of it all? Or are you reconciled to living in a world like this?

Comments

[siderea]

Do you think that's in any way similar to the attitude of people who are phlegmatic about suffering

Stop. Right there.

I don't know anybody who is phlegmatic about suffering. Whether because of their belief in god or gods or for any reason whatsoever.

Perhaps you do. Not saying you don't.

But I don't. So I could only hypothesize about such people's attitudes in the most speculative, hypothetical way.

Should such people exist, I would have to get to know what it is they actually think and feel to be able to answer your question about similarity.

It is also possible that there are people out there that you are projecting phlegmaticness about suffering onto, because of your forced-choice belief system, which I describe below, in which one must either get blameful, resentful and angry about tragedy or not feel anything at all.

[liv]

Fair call. It seems very likely indeed that people who seem phlegmatic to me are simply choosing not to let me see their emotional response. You're right that this isn't a useful line of speculation.

I was trying to avoid the dichotomy you pointed out to me, by thinking of feeling sad and grieved, yet also accepting, but I think I wasn't really imagining what shape of emotional state that would entail, so I probably am still in this either-or frame of mind even though I'm trying not to be.

[naath]

I mostly don't have any emotional response to things that are outside my monkey-sphere; and not very much emotional response to things inside it either.

It's not a philosophical position I've worked myself around to having. It's a defect in the way my brain is wired.