Indeed, the job is already underway: the proliferation of new types of death – industrial, vehicular and biochemical – has led to correspondingly complex legal codes. So perhaps it is time for humanity to reinvent death, 3 million years or more after our first intimations of it. Most of us would wish for a peaceful death after a long and well-lived life. Nothing in the way our societies are constructed is at all suited to this new situation. Death can now be deferred by mechanical and medicinal means for days, weeks, months or years – and that brings with it fears of its own: of impotence, dependency and pain. Only recently has it become commonplace for death to come later than we would like. For some, death comes sooner than we would like, and that’s one reason to fear it. Most of us would wish for a peaceful death after a long and well-lived life. The more we try to pin down the precise nature of death, the more elusive it becomes and the more elusive it becomes, the more debatable our definitions of it (see “ Death: The blurred line between dead and alive“).Īnd those definitions matter, because they are the only way we have of rationalising our otherwise illogical fear of death – a fear that’s probably the most widespread phobia on Earth (see “ Death: Don’t fear the reaper“). But even after many millennia of cultural development, we don’t seem to be sure exactly what it is we’ve invented. So you could say that humans invented death – not the fact of it, of course, but its meaning as a life event imbued with cultural and psychological significance. Physical separation of the living from the dead may have been one of the earliest manifestations of social culture (see “ Death: The evolution of funerals“) today, the world’s cultures commemorate and celebrate death in ways ranging from solemn funerals to raucous carnivals. We have developed social behaviours around the treatment of the dead whose complexity far exceeds even our closest living relatives’ cursory interest in their fallen comrades. We, on the other hand, tend to treat those who have passed away as “beyond human”, rather than “non-human” or even “ex-human”. Most animals seem to have hardly any conception of mortality: to them, a dead body is just another object, and the transition between life and death unremarkable. But contemplating our own deaths is one of the most powerful forces in our lives for both good and ill (see “ Death: Why we should be grateful for it“) – driving us to nurture relationships, become entrenched in our beliefs, and construct Ozymandian follies. It’s usual to talk about death overshadowing life, and the passing of loved ones certainly casts a pall over the lives of those who remain behind. While few of us know exactly when death will come, we all know that eventually it will. The story may be apocryphal, but the phrase is now applied to art intended to remind us of our mortality – from the Grim Reaper depicted on a medieval clock to Damien Hirst’s bejewelled skull.Īs if we needed any reminder. “Memento mori,” the slave whispered into the general’s ear: “remember you will die”. IT’S said that when a general returned in glory to ancient Rome, he was accompanied in his procession through the streets by a slave whose job it was to remind him that his triumph would not last forever. Read more: “ Death: A special report on the inevitable“
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