Why do we fear death?
DEATH! There is nothing quite like the mindless panic of looming personal annihilation. But aside from the very real biological reasons for clinging to life, why do death and dying inspire such deep, bone-chilling dread? Here are four buffet selections for your modern existential anxiety from Caitlin Doughty (mortician), Roy Baumeister (sociologist), Stephen Jenkinson (writer and activist), and Philippe Ariès (researcher). There’s a good chance you’ve sampled them all.
The fear of the unknown
In the West we’re told we suffer from “death denial,” but what exactly allows us to deny the existence of mortality? Caitlin Doughty argues it’s the modern invisibility of death. In a time not long past, humans took care of their dying and of their corpses. Today, we outsource our terminally ill to doctors and our dead to morticians. Few of us can describe the natural stages of dying, the physiological changes to breathing and circulation; even fewer can describe the stages of decomposition. Death has become the great unknown – hidden away, taboo, unnatural (as evidenced by our strange practice of pumping dead bodies full of poison and then entombing them). In both life and death, we seek to escape the reality that we are just food for worms. But by hiding death away we lose our familiarity with it, and what replaces that familiarity is an anxious uncertainty – a fear of the unknown that is amplified by its inevitability.
The fear of self-annihilation
The sociologist Roy Baumeister had a different hypothesis for why death was so frightening, that it was because death represented the annihilation of the self. One of our strongest defenses against existential anxiety is the feeling that our lives are meaningful, and Baumeister posited there were four needs for meaning in life: purpose, efficacy, self-worth, and value. The first three are easily satisfied by Western society, but “values” have disappeared. Western culture simply does not supply enough shared foundational values to legitimize our activities. In response to this modern “value gap,” we’ve turned the self into a value. Consider how we believe it’s an obligation to ‘find ourselves’ and to respect personal values (which amount to little more than individual opinion)… or how we treat the self as the highest moral authority, justifying our actions in terms of what feels right. In place of collective values, in place of the surety we get from group consensus on what matters, the self is now its own value and the most important pillar for meaning in life.
This presents an obvious mortality problem. The more you cling to the self – the more you derive meaning from your self-identity – the more death threatens meaninglessness. When life’s value and meaning are tied to the continuation of your inner experience (and less to your community or national or species-level belonging), the end of that experience (death) threatens to erase the meaning of life by erasing you… and it’s this meaninglessness that makes fertile ground for modern mortal terror to take root.
The fear of being forgotten
But why stop there? Western society has more to offer than just death denial and run-away individualism. Stephen Jenkinson says an important element of our contemporary terror is the threat of being forgotten. Most who live in the West do not belong to the land – it’s not where your ancestors lived and died. Jenkinson argues that only when there is a deep, unbroken sense of kinship with your home and your dead (buried around you, transformed into the landscape you love and the air you breathe), can you see yourself as part of an unbroken chain of life, can you see how you belong, even in death. Instead, to die is to disappear. There is no purpose to death in Western culture (except perhaps to poison the environment one last time). There is no enduring social or terrestrial fabric to hold our memory, and it’s why we often spend our dying time in a frenetic bid to be remembered – creating letters, videos, or other legacy projects. To die in Western society is to be obliterated, and for a species that craves belonging on a biological level – that needs to feel part of something – our ancestor-less-ness and our home-less-ness serve only to animate an ancient existential fear: eternal isolation.
The fear of non-existence, of being dead
We’ve saved the most dreadful for last… the fear of oblivion – death as a black void, a chasm, infinite nothingness. Seems terrifying, but travel back a few hundred years and the worry would be entirely foreign. According to Philippe Ariès, it wasn’t until the Romantic era that this language of eternity started creeping in and death became depicted as an “infinite abyss.” If that description unsettles you, you have the opposite reaction to the Romantics, for whom the sentiment inspired comfort! Whether it was the abyss of God, or just infinite bliss, we formerly loved the idea of death as eternity, as infinite, as unending.
So, what happened? It’s likely that when religion retreated, the concept of eternity remained but became an eternity of nothingness. We kicked God but kept the abyss. The eternal afterlife existed and was filled with our favourite people and things (our most modern conception of heaven), and so the absence of this positive after-party left the photographic negative: an eternity of darkness. Nothingness. Oblivion. This is, of course, fallacious thinking. In not being able to grasp the prospect of eternity with you as a subject, we tend to imagine an eternity of subjective oblivion, an eternal stream of consciousness with no object. We call this imagined insanity “nothingness.” But, of course, that’s not what nothingness really is. Nothingness is not our nightmares of anti-life. Not oblivion. Not darkness. Not a state at all, let alone one that you could experience. Regardless, this intellectual understanding can’t always be translated into a felt comfort. We hate the quote reminding us that the cradle rocks above the abyss, a crack of light between two eternities of darkness. As far as existential panic goes, the threat of oblivion is as good a provocation as any.
Modern* death anxiety
When we say “modern” death anxiety, we mean the anxiety of the present day, a time in which the dominant (domineering) cultures of Europe and most of North America (“the West”) are spreading globally. It doesn’t mean that modern is better, only that it is contemporary.
This modern death anxiety is very much a home brew. It combines our unfamiliarity with death and dying, our fear of disappearing, our over-valuing of the individual self, and the advancing presence of a secularism that hasn’t yet replaced religious comforts. Our contemporary living is sanitized and self-centered, our modern societies created by people colonizing or fleeing (often both). We have no connection to our homes, no secular rituals, no tradition, no collective memory or community-mindedness. What we do have is the fear of being forgotten, of being annihilated, of fading into an eternity of darkness. No wonder we’ll die trying to do anything but.