In the previous chapter I outlined some of the main contributions to the ‘denial of death’ thesis. This thesis is most commonly associated with Ariès, Gorer and Elias, but its themes appear in the work of figures as diverse as David Stannard, Milton Gatch and Ivan Illich, as well as in the thinking of more contemporary sociologists, philosophers like Martin Hägglund – though his complaint is as much with the religious denial of mortality as with the pathologies of reflexive individualism – and psychologists such as Darian Leader. Given the diversity of standpoints involved here, reducing this to a single argument or perspective would clearly be a misrepresentation. Critical commentators have thus rightly emphasized the need to differentiate the many different meanings that ‘denial’ may have, and which social groups it may plausibly apply to, and to look at these meanings in more nuanced and open-minded ways (Kellehear 1984; Walter 1991; Seale 1998).

Among the more persuasive arguments against the reductive nature of the theory of death's repression or denial, three stand out. The first is that it is premised on a romanticized view of nineteenth-century attitudes to death; the second is that its critique of twentieth-century modernity confuses the repression of death with its structural differentiation or ‘sequestration’; the third is that it fails to accurately describe attitudes to death in affluent urban societies over the last 50 years, which are far more expressive and accepting of the reality of human mortality than the theory claims. In what follows I will summarize these three arguments, before revisiting them with a more critical eye.

The early European discipline of sociology emerged against a backdrop of tumultuous social and economic change, and the efforts of its earliest protagonists are often understood as an attempt to theorize, measure and master the ‘crises’ of Westernized modernity arising from the capitalist-industrial revolution. Yet while poverty, inequality and the decline of social cohesion were the frequent targets of sociological investigation and analysis, reflections on the individual's search for meaning in the face of death do not figure prominently in the work of the disciplinary founders.

There are, however, two notable exceptions to this. In this final chapter I will begin by revisiting these exceptions – in the work of Durkheim and Weber – before exploring how the German social theorist Harmut Rosa has developed the insights of the classical tradition in a direction more attuned to the contradictions and challenges of twenty-first century modernity. Rosa's work is especially valuable for the way it puts the vulnerability and receptivity of the subject at the heart of our experience of both suffering and happiness. Combining this with Levinas's ethical philosophy should then allow us to think more clearly, and more hopefully, about the meaning of mortality in the context of the climate emergency.

Missing out

Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide was premised on an analysis of statistical data and was intended to demonstrate the positivist method of social science that the author so passionately advocated.

In the previous chapter I suggested that attitudes to death in affluent Western societies are not as healthy, open and inclusive as is sometimes claimed in contemporary sociological literature. The harsh treatment of the elderly, the fantasy of one's own autonomous demise, indifference to the mortal sufferings of other people and our alarming failure to address the accelerating destruction of life in the Anthropocene, are more indicative of a disavowal than a reckoning with death. Evidence of growing climate anxiety, on the other hand, suggests that what is repressed by modern systems of social reproduction and control cannot stay hidden forever. The tendency for researchers to theorize climate anxiety as ‘existential’, as an issue of ontological insecurity related to concerns about fate, guilt and human self-worth (Budziszewska and Jonsson 2021), also suggests that fears about the survival of life on Earth, while statistically more prevalent among younger people, articulate doubts about the purpose of human existence that bear some interesting similarities with the anxieties of ageing that we commonly refer to as the ‘mid-life crisis’. Understanding the latter, and contextualizing it socially and historically – which I will do in the final chapter – may allow us to see these similarities as more than coincidental, and in the process to think more decisively about both the need for and the possibility of intergenerational solidarity and meaning.

The mid-life crisis

When we are young we typically acquire aspirations that are important to us because the goals are, from our under-resourced starting position in life, remote enough to feel exotic. Once we have achieved success in their pursuit, however, it is not unusual for the things we valued to lose their lustre.

At first glance it may seem puzzling that something as natural and universal as death should ever be a cause of worry to human beings. If we were purely biological entities then death would only be a continuation of what we intrinsically are. If we lived wholly on the plane of the organic, then, aside from an instinctual aversion to pain or predation, which is common to all animals and a condition of their own self-preservation, the necessity of our life's eventual termination would not trouble us, for we would be sustained by the spontaneous exuberance of living matter until its very end. But we live in a symbolic as well as a natural universe, and in this symbolic world our lives do not obey the laws of biology. We have projects and plans, dreams and aspirations. We attach ourselves to values and ideals, and we challenge, revise and improve them. As social and communicative beings we perform roles that connect us to the performers of other roles, as well as to previous generations who performed those roles, and to coming generations who we imagine will perform them in the future. We make and find ourselves represented in language, in art, in technology, in fashion, film and music, and when these symbolic forms are unsatisfactory – when we discover ourselves to be more singular or more profound than our cultural inheritance can articulate – we subvert, recreate and renew them. Our linguistic tools invite us to express, reason and justify that which does not coincide with what, according to nature, is and has to be. We measure and manipulate reality, and we create and imagine new realities. We secure the future with projects and promises, and we repudiate the past in acts of fantasy, crimes of betrayal, feats of heroism.

Historians began to take a specific interest in changes in the European practices and meanings of mortality following the publication of The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, a book which, in its attempt to capture and re-articulate the human spirit or ‘soul’ of an epoch, broke dramatically with the positivist approach that dominated the profession. In France the formation of the École des Annales in 1929 marked the beginning of an academic programme for the study of the cultural history of medieval and early modern Europe, including attitudes – or mentalités as the French scholars, following Huizinga, called them – to death. Probably the most ambitious historical survey of Western understandings of death, and certainly, thanks to the success of its English translations, the most well-known among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, did not come from the Annales school, however, but was conducted by the French Catholic historian Philippe Ariès. As an independent scholar (he called himself a ‘Sunday historian’) whose conservative outlook did not endear him to the left-leaning members of the Annales, Ariès was a more marginal figure in French academia than, say, his critical interlocuter Michel Vovelle, and certainly more marginal than his popularity in the English-speaking world might suggest. Yet 15 years of research by Ariès and his art historian wife, Primerose, into literary, archaeological, documentary, epigraphic and iconographic material, mostly but not exclusively from French sources, bore a rather splendid fruit: the impressive and often-cited magnum opus L’Homme devant la mort (1977), or, in the English translation, The Hour of Our Death (Ariès 1982).

About the series

Studying death can tell us an incredible amount about life. More specifically, it can illuminate a seemingly endless evolving relationship between humans and mortality. From sense-making and rituals around dying to how deceased persons are disposed of and even interwoven within human/non-human grief as ecologies shift, studying deaths not only deepens our understandings about loss and endings, but also of societies and culture. By attending to these matters, this book series seeks to shine a light on the cultural and social dimensions of death, exploring the wider contexts in which it is experienced, (re)presented and understood.

At a time when recognizing the differences inherent in these broader socio-cultural contexts has never been more important, the series adopts a broad use of the term ‘culture’ to enable us to bring together a rich multi-disciplinary set of monographs and edited collections. We appreciate that the concept of culture has long been debated in several disciplines, most notably within anthropology, as well as contested in terms of how to optimally study ‘culture’. While this series will acknowledge this, we do not seek to replicate some of these wider theoretical and epistemological debates. Rather, we want to open out ‘culture’ to include anthropological, sociological, historical and philosophical perspectives as well as drawing on media and culture studies, art and literature.

For all its obvious cultural and historical importance, the cult of the dead, as depicted in the Greek customs and myths discussed in the previous chapter, was not in any way an organized, self-conscious doctrine of life after death, and to it cannot therefore be traced the origins of later religious conceptions of immortality. Greek religious culture was, moreover, much more centred on ritual practices (some arising from casual superstitions) than it was on elaborating, judging or policing people's beliefs, this reflecting in part the Greeks’ view that what is transcendental is also mysterious and so ‘human knowledge about the divine and about the right way of behaving towards it is limited and circumscribed’ (Sourvinou-Inwood 1997: 162). It is therefore unsurprising that the Greeks had no equivalent word for ‘religion’, coming closest only with ‘piety’ and ‘holiness’ (Feibleman 2013: 71– 2), both of which described this-worldly qualities of action and character rather than devotion to specific theological doctrines. It is perhaps consistent with this that the cult of souls was focused more on the deceased's relation to, and approval of, the living, and on the precautionary duty of families to care for the spirits of their dead, than it was on the existential experience of the individual in the face of death. Though the soul's independence from the body undoubtedly played a role in the Greeks’ acceptance of cremation, the survival of the psychē after death was not guaranteed for eternity, since the piety of descendants might falter and their venerating thoughtfulness cease, thus depriving the departing spirit of its necessary sustenance.

In one of the many memorable scenes of battlefield desolation in the Iliad, the magnificent horses of Achilles, given by the gods to his father, stand weeping following the death of their chariot driver, Patroclus. Despite Automedon's efforts to drive them either into or away from the battle, the horses refuse to disturb their mourning: ‘as a grave-stone stands unmoving, set on the mound of a man or a woman who has died, so they stood there holding the beautiful chariot motionless, hanging their heads to the ground’. Looking on, Zeus feels pity for the animals: ‘Poor wretches, why did we give you to lord Peleus, a mortal man, when you are ageless and immortal? Was it for you to share the pain of unhappy mankind? Since there is nothing more miserable than man among all the creatures that breathe and move on earth’ (Iliad: 17.426– 66).

All creatures that inhabit the earth are perishable, but none are ‘more miserable’ than human beings because it is they who possess full consciousness of their mortality. Here we find, in an epic poem composed nearly 3,000 years ago, one of the first indications of humans’ troubled apprehension of death. In this chapter, and the one that follows, I am going to explore how misery in the face of mortality was given cultural meaning and creative form in the arts, rituals and beliefs of classical Greece.

Most of the time we do not think about our mortality at length or in depth. At particular moments or periods in life we are likely to find it difficult not to think about it, however, and for some people, in some places and times, death is a more persistent puzzle if not a fearful preoccupation. This book asks what it means to think about death, and considers how we should be thinking about death in an age where the destruction of life, both human and non-human, is occurring on a scale that tests both our courage and our imagination. Its aim is to elucidate why death challenges and troubles us, but also to ‘trouble’ conventional understandings of death, especially the tendency to reduce the condition of mortality to the possession of a finite lifetime.

Outside of periods of personal crisis, mortality for the average citizen of an affluent Western society is a remote absence rather than a close presence – at best it is consciousness of the fact that eventually one's life will come to an end with an event we call ‘death’. I argue in this book, however, that we also need to think of mortality as a condition of permanent and inescapable vulnerability. As it is the vulnerability, rather than the finite length of, our lives which exposes us to and makes us dependent on the world, emphasizing our vulnerability allows us to make better sense of people's fear about the future of this world, as well as their care for lives other than their own.