Death

...Osier took a dour view of people who spoke of the pain and grief of death, except in the minds of family, friends, and onlookers_9 Thomas speculates on whether there may possibly be, as the result of evolutionary adaptation to the inexorability of death, "some protective physiological mechanism, switched on at the verge of death, carrying [the dying] through in a haze of tranquillity...

...sickness, yes...

...he need only act...

...Thomas cites the physician Osier to the effect that dying is "not such a bad thing to do after all...

...Ancient Rome gave the customary and legal base to this sense of marriage so far as Western society is concerned, but everywhere, through the greater part .of human history, this has been the significance of marriage...

...Above all, there must be a restoration of ritual, of the drama of birth, life, and death...

...it is rather that death was highly visible to everyone, and in as concrete a way as is possible...

...There seems to be an instinctual disposition to repudiate any thought of death being simply the final stage of the individual life cycle...

...The long habit of living," wrote Thomas Browne, "indisposeth us to dying.'.' But however indisposed Paleolithic man and all his successors down to the last century or two may have been, such indisposition could not have been as great where death was just as much a part of family life, of community life, as were birth and marriage...

...According to the wisdom of the past, death is, first and last, communal, not individual...

...This article is reprinted by permission of the publishers from his latest book, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, released this fall by Harvard University Press, Copyright _9 1982, by Robert Nisbet...

...The physical fact of birth was not nearly so important as the social fact of birth...

...But the inescapable fact, despite all of the national holiday devotions and everything that has been done for the welfare of children which exceeds all other ages put together, is that the true value of these roles has withered, for they have been extracted from the traditional community, which alone is the source and sustenance of birth, marriage, and death, and have been located in the individual...

...But nothing is likely to matter very much until death, along with birth and marriage, ceases to be regarded as something happening primarily to the individual instead of to the community...

...The social position of death in Western society ranges from a kind of obscenity, whose name is as improper in polite circles as sex was among the Victorians, all the way to a kind of celebrity, receiving immense attention in the form of books, articles, television documentaries, and lectures...

...You are obviously desolated by the loss," said one naif to the widow...

...is greater or that the incomprehensibility of death is increased...

...the child is idealized and romanticized in a way that would have been beyond belief before the nineteenth century...

...In our time an astounding number of people have never seen a dead human body...

...The community that nourished in life, nourishes also in death...

...The actor need not feel on any given day every last emotional drive inherent in his lines...

...the community did in its act of acceptance through some form of baptism...

...If death and mourning are contained within the community, seen as wound and remembrance within the community, individuals cannot help but be fortified in the "10ng habit of life" so far as its eventual and necessary termination is involved...

...A New England widow's ritual devotion to her late husband took the form of weeds and withdrawal from society lasting many months...

...My husband and I ceased even speaking to one another fifty years ago...

...This must be ritual alone, not any of the subjectivisms which the twentieth century has made so corrosive to the social fabric...

...Of the recurring crises of the human condition--birth, marriage, death--the last has drawn the vastly greater part of man's ritual propensity, most of it going to the welfare of the dead in the next world...

...Human beings knew death so directly, so recurrently, in the much shorter life cycle, that there was inevitably less of the abstract preoccupation with death known today...

...Rare indeed is the final struggle, the agony, the unwillingness to die that so many books and television documentaries favor...

...Death as part of the community, death as wound to the community, and death as departure from the community has been for at least fifty thousand years the stated or unstated philosophy of virtually the whole of the human race, the only species to bury its dead...

...These have never before had the same functional role and meaning they have today...

...But in spreading parts of the world, starting with the West and reaching its highest incidence in America, this philosophy is eroding...

...Our ancestors could, within the house, wash, dress, adorn, and otherwise minister themselves to the corpse in anticipation of burial and mourning...

...Nothing betokens life in community more than does mourning, with its rites, forbearances, weeds, and wailing...

...The entire emphasis is now put upon the conjugal couple...

...Death leaves a kind of moral suspense that is terminated psychologically only with greater and greater difficulty...

...Phlhppe Arms shows how over the past ten centuries dread, apprehension, and rejection of death have grown in almost precise relation to the growth of individualism and repudiation of community...

...One thinks of the linguistic abominations pass on, pass away, and ca/led for, which so fastidiously avoid the words die and death, words as noble as any to be found in the English language_9 But all the while people are queasily avoiding direct personal contact with death, in substance and in name, they are becoming increasingly obsessed by it in the abstract...

...But even more, it is a result of the decline in significance of the traditional means of ritual completion of the fact of death...

...The social meaning of death has changed with the social position of death...

...The idea is plausible and certainly agreeable...

...What has happened to death has 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 happened also to birth, childhood, marriage, and senescence in modern Western society...

...No, the beginning of the end of funerary and mourning rites in modern society is social, a part of that wider tidal movement of modern history that has destroyed so much which lies intermediate between individual and state...

...Therefore, until somehow the reality and sense of community have been restored to Western society in national, local, and kinship spheres, people will continue to live in the void--ego-gratifying, hedonistic, narcissistic, subjective and at the same time, timorous, trepidant, fearful of death...

...So long as death was concrete, personally experienced over and over in life, public rather than hidden or transferred to mortuary technicians, and above all, familiar ritually in the kinship community, it was comprehensible and acceptable, at least to a greater degree than it is now in American society...

...No doubt the current mania about " h e a l t h " - - e v i d e n c e d in health maintenance organizations, health clubs, health pursuits of every kind, with jogging the pi}ce de resistance--is but another manifestation of unease with death...

...and "senior citizens" are venerated once a year as mothers and fathers...

...There is nothing extraordinary in the fact that narcissism and egocentricity are the companions of the fear of death--or, for that matter, fear of birth, children, and even marriage--for the origins of all these lie basically in the individualism that Comte called "the disease of the Western world...

...More good may have been done the social bond by those weeds and that withdrawal from society than by all the muttered prayers since the beginning of time...

...The bafflement is in considerable part a result of the smaller size of the family, which gives greater emotional value to each of the members...

...There was a conjugal union, to be sure, but its meaning came from the larger community, starting with kindred...

...Don't be ridiculous," she replied...

...Today people leave that to the mortician and, on a constantly widening scale, avoid even sight of the dead person...

...Possibly the newly oriented medical profession, beginning to be taught how to minister to death as well as to life and disease, will help contemporary man come to grips with death in the way his forefathers did;' perhaps the hospice movement will provide surrogate families to give all the sustentive attention that family once did for the dying...

...The socially annihilating individualism--that is, the atomization of society, chiefly by the modern state--that has led to the dismemberment and fragmentation of the traditional forms of community, especially kinship, has removed more and more of the communal properties of death, just as it has of birth and marriage...

...No one was unacquainted with the physical.fact of death, directly and personally...

...He distinguishes "death tamed," which is what it was in traditional society for thousands of years, from "untamed d e a t h , " which is what it has become...

...No one knows what health is...

...and originally the treating of Sickness, not the maintenance of health, was the sworn responsibility of the physician...

...perhaps still other adaptations will make their way into currently apprehensive minds and will prove anodyne in the long run...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 9...

...In times past, individuals did not have children...

...In the ancient world no child was "born" until ten days or say after parturition, when it was duly and ritually received or, when necessary, rejected...

...As Burke noted, true society, namely community, is a partnership of the dead and unborn as well as of the living...

...Even the repugnant spectacle of the human body in process of decomposition has not prevented the almost universal belief that there is some human essence which is destined for survival in the hereafter...

...Nor can it be claimed that this behavior is mute recognition of the disappearance of available land for cemeteries, for peoples at other times thought nothing of using and reusing graves, and there were charnel houses for the bones...

...Of no account in death and mourning is one's actual state of mind and emotion on the occasion of ritual expression...

...Inevitably, cremation and instant dispatch of the ashes crowd out burial...

...The modern indulgence in individualism has ill prepared people for the very sober responsibilities of the family, of the community in all its manifestations, and indeed of the nation itself...

...It is not that their grief Robert Nisbet is Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Lewis Thomas reports that in his own experience with the dying, there is, at the very end of life, a detached acceptance of death, a serenity and release from care never known before...

...Whether one leaves food and clothing in the grave or merely utters prayers, the premise is the same...

...It is not entirely that death was earlier and more frequent in human society until recent times...

...The truly strong religions of the world are not those rich simply in the word but, far more important, in the act...

...But more important than the physical onset of death in the individual is the place of death in the community, or rather in what is left of community in the increasingly anonymous, impersonal Western society...

...In modern society people are increasingly baffled and psychologically unprepared for the incidence of death among loved ones...

...With one hand people push death under the carpet, but with the other they reach out almost obsessively for help...

...Marriage was not an affair of two individuals uniting and thus forming a new " f a m i l y " ; marriage was basically a rite of adoption whereby, in strict accord with the bans on incestuous union, the girl from one household was ritually cleansed of her former family identity, her name altered so that its new suffix would indicate that fundamentally she was a daughter in the new family, a possession of husband and house father...

...Death is bound to be a more acceptable, even desirable, fate if it has been known repeatedly in vicarious form through rites of mourning...