This is a re-post of an essay originally posted at speculist.com in 2004. The original comments from the old site are now part of the post. I’ve also reopened this entry for comments if anyone is interested in getting back into it.

Death Sucks

Reader Mary (Definitely on the Outer Ring) posed the following question in a recent comment:

Why are you so scared of dying?

(She wrote some other provocative questions as well, but I want to focus on this one for now.)

From the context, I’m going to assume that what Mary is asking is a philosophical question. She doesn’t want to know why I would get out of the way of a speeding truck. All mentally healthy human beings are “scared of dying” in that sense; it’s something we share with virtually every living being on the planet.

What Mary wants to know is this: why am I not resigned to my own mortality? Why would I want to engage in this unseemly practice of exploring alternatives to dying?

I’ll tell you why, Mare.

Death sucks.

Image by E L O via Flickr

Some say that dying is as natural as being born. I say, so what? Vomiting is as natural as eating, but I happen to like eating a lot more.

Some say that death is a part of life. I contend that, by definition, it is not.

Some say that death is the threshold to the next stage of existence. I say maybe so. But this stage seems to have a natural built-in aversion to the threshold to that stage, and I’m going to go with that.

Many believe that the fear of death is a primitive relic, a lingering superstition. Fear of death, they will tell us, is what originally led humanity to irrational thinking. We invented gods and spirits primarily to assuage this fear. Now we live in an age when rational thinking might once again hold sway, although irrationalism persists all around. To differentiate themselves from the irrational throng, rational thinkers proudly state that they are not afraid of dying.

I remember years ago, when I went to see Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ, there were two groups of sign-carrying protestors standing out front of the theatre. One group was Christian, the other was Atheist. The box office line was rather long, and those of us standing in it were stuck between these two groups: one warning us not to go see this shocking piece of blasphemy, the other encouraging our support of free speech. Needless to say, there was a good deal of verbal sparring between the two camps. Some comments were good natured and even a little funny, but it got heated from time to time. I remember one exchange ended with these very words:

Yeah? Well, I’m not afraid of dying.

Hey, good one. Sign-carrying atheists, one; sign-carrying fundamentalists, zero.

Unfortunately, that’s a load of crap. No, I don’t mean that I doubt that guy’s sincerity when he said that he was not afraid to die. I’m sure he meant it, and wasn’t just trying to score points against those polyester-clad, big-haired fundamentalists in front of his cool sign-carrying atheist friends. But the notion that the fear of dying is uniquely linked with irrational thinking is just about as wrong as it can be.

Let’s go back 50,000 years or so ago and take a look at our primitive ancestors. It’s true that somewhere along the line they developed burial rituals and a belief in an afterlife. Maybe this was just an irrational response to their fear of death and the grief of losing a loved one. But it was just a small part of what they were doing. What, then, were they spending most of their time doing?

Figuring out how the world worked.

These plants will make you sick. These are good for food. Spears with sharp stone heads are better than pointed sticks at bringing down game and warding off predators. This is a good place to stay; predators don’t usually come here. After the moon changes three more times, we’ll start heading south. We used to wait until it got cold, but this way works better and we lose fewer members of the tribe.

Our ancestors relentlessly pursued an empirical investigation into the nature of…everything. Science didn’t begin with Newton or Bacon or the ancient Greeks. It started way back when. All mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy — all rational human thought — has as its foundation the pioneering work of these our ancestors.

Now what do you suppose motivated them to do all this hard investigative work, to engage in all this rational thinking. Could it have been the fear of death?

Absolutely. They were besieged by threats on all sides. A rational, empirical approach to the world emerged as the soundest way of warding off those threats. If our fundamentalist-taunting friend could go back in time and somehow convey to a group of his ancestors his basic credo of intellectual superiority — “I’m not afraid of dying” — they’d think he was nuts. And not because they were so irrational.

But we’re only halfway there.

Paradoxically, the self-satisfied volley of “I’m not afraid of dying” might just as easily have come from the religious side of the ticket line as it did from the non-believing side. Religious and spiritually oriented people are often quick to tell you that they have no fear of death. And if you really got it, — whatever that means to the particular believer — you wouldn’t be afraid of death, either. If you only understood about Jesus‘ victory on the cross, or reincarnation, or nirvana, or even just the Natural Order of Things, you would be as resigned to your own eventual demise as the rest of us.

Yeah, well, that’s a load of crap, too.

I’m going to restate that so I’m not misunderstood. Any religion that teaches that you should be okay with the fact that you’re going to die is a load of crap. Christianity (to use the religion I’m most familiar with) most assuredly does not teach this. As C. S. Lewis famously put it:

But here is something quite different. Here is something telling me — well, what? Telling me that I must never, like the Stoics, say that death does not matter. Nothing is less Christian than that. Death which made Life Himself shed tears at the grave of Lazarus, and shed tears of blood in Gethsemane. This is an appalling horror; a stinking indignity. (You remember Thomas Browne‘s splendid remark: “I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed of it.)

I believe that all human beings, including people of faith, share the same natural revulsion for death. We can blot these feelings out and cover them up, but to do so is to become like those rabbits in Watership Down who sang melancholy songs while trading their lives for some lettuce and carrots.

Those who claim to have no fear of death, whether they be an Objectivist or the Dalai Lama or some Palestinian strapping dynamite to his chest, have lost touch with a primary truth of human existence: a truth which has lead us both to science and to faith. Those who seek to prolong human life — whether via antioxidants or cryonics or standard medical procedures — have tapped into that same fundamental truth:

Death sucks.