Death and Lament

Part 1, The Pornography of Death

In this series I want to make an observation about lament and the Psalms, and to make that point I want to set up some background in a few preliminary posts. 

The preliminary, background-setting point I want to make is one I've made before. Specifically, modernity has existentially altered our relationship with death. Where generations past had a more stoical and resigned relationship with death, today we are increasingly traumatized and fragilized. By no means do I want to minimize our personal griefs, losses and bereavements, not today and not in the past, but I do want to point out how the most predictable fact of human life, that we all will die as will everyone we love, is now experienced as something shocking and surprising. 

What has caused this change in our relationship to death?

According to Ernest Becker, American culture is characterized by a "denial of death." American culture specializes in helping us repress our awareness of death, causing us to live with illusions of perpetual youth, health, and immortality. Our working assumption is that we will live forever. Geoffery Gorer describes this as "the pornography of death." Death is, as I describe in Stranger God, our "dirty little secret." Public mention or recognition of death is deemed inappropriate and unseemly. Talking about death makes people uncomfortable. As Gorer observes, the modern world has experienced a seismic shift in prudery:

In the 20th century, however, there seems to have been an unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more “mentionable,” particularly in the AngloSaxon societies, death has become more and more “unmentionable” as a natural process.

Again, this denial of death, this pornographic unmentionableness of death, is a unique aspect of the modern world, American culture in particular. The theologian Arthur McGill describes this well in his book Death and Life: An American Theology, where he observes that “Americans like to appear as if they give death hardly any thought of all.” The American lifestyle is, thus, “for people to create a living world where death seems abnormal and accidental. [Americans] must create a living world where life is so full, so secure, and so rich with possibilities that it gives no hint of death and deprivation.” We accomplish this feat, according to McGill, through acts of death avoidance. Americans live with “the conviction that the lives we live are not essentially and intrinsically mortal.”

How is this illusion maintained? According to McGill, "Americans accomplish this illusion by devoting themselves to expunging from their lives every appearance, every intimation of death . . . All traces of weakness, debility, ugliness and helplessness must be kept away from every part of a person’s life. The task must be done every single day if such persons really are to convince us that they do not carry the smell of death within them." 

So that's the set piece for this series. In a culture characterized by death avoidance, death is increasingly experienced as abnormal and accidental, rather than as normal and expected. This change creates existential fragility. Death is now experienced as random and intrusive, and our response is surprise and confusion. Instead of experiencing death as the expected and predictable, we are blindsided and shocked.