Death is both horrifying and unavoidable. This is why we cannot truly face the reality of it or its implications; if we tried to do that, we'd be too paralyzed by fear to do anything with our lives. We therefore have various defense mechanisms in order to shield ourselves from the truth that is too terrible to grasp. We try to think about death as little as possible. We have in-built coping mechanisms that allow us to keep going after we've been struck by an unspeakably horrible event of losing someone close to us. We have religion that tries to console us by telling us that death isn't the end of our conscious life. We rationalize death by inventing philosophical arguments as to why it isn't really as bad as we think it is (it "gives meaning to our life," "makes us try harder to do something with our time" etc.)
Ultimately, all those defense mechanisms fail, and the knowledge that we are going to die is causing all of us considerable amounts of pain and despair. I suspect that even religious people, in their heart of hearts, do not really believe that their consciousness will survive the death of their bodies. (I only suspect that though; I do not claim to know what other people believe.) In one of Bertrand Russel's essays, there is a great anecdote that neatly illustrates religion's ultimate failure to soothe our fear of death. During a conversation with one of his religious friends, Russell kept asking him the question: "What do you think will happen to you after you die?" The friend kept dodging the question, but when he realized Russell wasn't about to drop it, finally gave his reply. "I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss," he said, "But why must we talk about such unpleasant matters?" Nor does it give us much consolation to insist that death gives meaning to our lives. Deep down we all know what was so greatly verbalized by Eliezer Yudkowski:
(...) if we were all hit on the head with a baseball bat once a week, philosophers would soon enough discover many amazing benefits of being hit over the head with a baseball bat: It toughens us, renders us less fearful of lesser pains, makes bat-free days all the sweeter. But if people are not currently being hit with baseball bats, they will not volunteer for it.Here is a song from the movie. The song is mediocre (sorry, not a Coldplay fan), but it doesn't matter. The audience weeps, partly in sympathy with the performer who has just lost his friend and who is hanging on to his own life by a thin thread, but also in self-pity, knowing that the same horrible thing is going to happen to them as well.
We just don't know.
ReplyDeletewhile it might increase our fitness to think about specific death threats, perhaps it wouldn't help us survive if we thought about death more frequently--maybe this is part of the reason that we religiously avoid thinking about it?
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's true.
ReplyDeleteMany people analogize death with pain though, I think, which isn't exactly correct. We do experience pain and know it as a signal of our fallibility. Death then becomes an extension of pain, necessarily higher or more intense. Thus, death is to be feared because it is pain unlike we've experienced before. While death may be preceded by pain, though, it doesn't mean pain. Instead, doesn't mean anything. It doesn't even mean nothing. It doesn't mean at all. In this sense, it is kind of odd to be scared of such a thing, because we cannot know it. The only thing we do know is that we have something now that death is not: awareness or consciousness, and we know we don't want to lose it because the thought of death or non-existence is scary. But it isn't scary. It isn't anything. We have no reason to be scared or preoccupied. We see people die and that is scary. We see mortality and that is scary, probably because we feel threats to our own security. So, what I'm trying to say is that rationalizations about death are a waste of time. Maybe, just maybe, thinking about death at all is sort of a waste of time--or maybe what is not a waste of time is thinking about the knowable corollary to death that we do know: people no longer available, and personal fallibility. What we're scared of, what we try to justify, is life.