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Throughout history and across the world, regardless of race, class or creed, every human life shares the certainty of death. Improved diets and fitness, healthy life choices, protection by the law, and modern medicine delay it, but no one can indefinitely dodge it. Joseph Bottum, arts and culture editor at First Things in New York City addressed mankind's great equalizer in his lecture "What Death Is For: Mortality in Philosophy, Art, Political Theory, and Religion" Monday.
Although he admitted that the subject of his lecture, sponsored by the Religion and the Arts Journal, was morbid and melancholy, he said that death is a crucial issue to explore because of its influence over how people live their lives. Pointing to its central role in human experience, Bottum proposed, "In the midst of life, we are in death."
Bottum said he founded his premise in three core ideas.
"Political society derives from the fact that people die. The second is the deepest roots of culture are in its memorials and funerals. The third thesis that I would like to try out with you is that the fundamental human experience of death is in grief at death of others rather than anxiety at death of ourselves," said Bottum.
Bottum, who received a doctorate in philosophy from the Boston College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, drew from a variety of historical leaders, scholars, philosophers, politicians, playwrights, and authors in his lecture such as William Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, C.S. Lewis, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Marcus Aurelius, and Abraham Lincoln.
During his lecture, Bottum explored the psychological and social benefits of death as a unifying force and death's effect on contemporary and historical society. Bottum highlighted death's power in the realm of government, as he said that death plays a very apparent role in shaping the law.
"We look to government to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense, and we do so because through injustice, riot, and invasion, we can die. We look to government to secure our blessings to our posterity because you and I will die," he said.
Much of Bottum's discussion focused on the process of grieving for the dead. He examined the Renaissance rediscovery of minor fields of Pagan thought such as cynicism, Epicureanism, skepticism and, in particular, stoicism in works such as Shakespeare's Hamlet. Pagan and common contemporary thought often underline the universality of death - the idea that all things will pass - in an attempt to console grief and shorten the grieving process.
Bottum said that the stoic way of consoling grief can be destructive as it denies the reality of the beloved person who has passed away.
"We forget the life that was. We kill the corpse a second time when we abandon grief's struggle to maintain the always-present absence of the beloved dead person who we mourn …We can hasten the loss of grief's sharp edge but time will eventually wear it away anyway. But that does not make it morally right that we forget and still less does it make it right that we hasten the day of forgetting," said Bottum.
Further, Bottum said that true consolation after such loss is altogether impossible.
"Unless the dead stand again before us as themselves, unless death is in fact unreal, there is no such thing as consolation," he said.
Bottum approached the concept of mortality through two distinct lenses - how an individual views their own death and how an individual views the death of other people. From this concept, he proposed a question: Is society more concerned with the fear of one's own death or the grief over another's death?
Bottum emphasized that archeological evidence provides overwhelming support for an argument for grief, as the vast majority of surviving remnants of early settlements are structures and items such as tombs, graves, crypts, and cenotaphs.
Bottum said that the disappearance of such public modes of grieving for the dead eliminates important means of siphoning intense misery and could lead people to lash out in anguish in ways that are destructive to society.
"A culture that closes off public forums for expressions of mourning's irrationality, a society that eliminates rituals and ceremonies, has forgotten the hazards that those rituals and forums once controlled. When grief can find no public outlet, it will make its own in infection of social hysteria and the return of the blood feud. Grieving people are dangerous people."
He said that the failure of the funeral and other public forms of expressing grief are also in part responsible for weakening ties to the family in contemporary society. He warned that increased instances of burying dead in unmarked graves, the growing popularity of cremation and the spreading of ashes over large areas, and urban planners' distaste for graveyards are making impossible the time-old tradition of caring for the family grave. This trend could hold critical consequences for the role of family in society, he said.
"Family tradition is failing in our culture at the same time as the funeral tradition is failing in our culture … The failure to maintain the family grave increasingly leaves the family name without meaning and the meaninglessness of the family name increasingly becomes the reason not to have graves," said Bottum.
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