The Slavery of Death: Part 11, The Pornography of Death

In the first ten parts of this series we've been focusing mainly upon theology and the biblical narrative. For the most part we've been working through a Christus Victor understanding of salvation, one deeply informed by the Greek Orthodox tradition.

The key idea has been this: The root of the human predicament is our slavery to death. Being mortal "flesh" (sarx) death keeps humanity enslaved to sinful practices. And in the biblical imagination the power of death is held by Satan. Consequently, in this understanding salvation comes to us when Christ sets us free from the power of death and the devil.

1 John 3.8
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Romans 7:24
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?

1 Corinthians 15.24-25
Then the end will come, when [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Liberated, freed, rescued and delivered from these powers humans are able to step out of the sinful practices of mortal flesh and begin to live a life according to the Spirit. Biological life (bios) becomes infused with the resurrection life (zoe). The key sign of zoe--living by the Spirit free from the fear of death--is love.

1 John 3.10, 14 (Good News Translation)
Here is the clear difference between God's children and the Devil's children: those who do not do what is right or do not love others are not God's children.

We know that we have left death and come over into life; we know it because we love others. Those who do not love are still under the power of death.

With this theological and biblical foundation underneath our feet we can now move on to "Part Two" of this series. From here on we'll start trying to connect the Christus Victor themes of Scripture to psychology and sociology. My goal in all this is to connect the ancient biblical theology of Christus Victor with empirical psychological research.

So let's start to make that turn.

Up to this point in our discussions we've been mainly thinking of the fear of death in fairly concrete ways. Yes, when we face starvation or illness or physical assault we will experience fear and anxiety. And yes, this fear makes us "self-absorbed." A survival instinct kicks in that can cause us to put self over others. Think of the behavior of people in conditions of starvation or war or those on a sinking ship like the Titanic. In these situations we see a fear of death leading to self-before-others behavior. However, we also see in these situations the rare examples of self-sacrificing love, where people accept death so that others might live.

However, while these situations do provide a window into some of the dynamics we're interested in the examples are extreme and don't occur in day to day life. More, while we observe the fear of death overcoming love in these situations this fear doesn't seem particularly pathological or insidious. The fear is sad, but understandable. This fear of death doesn't look like the "enslavement" described in Hebrews 1.14-15 and in the book of Romans.

This is largely due to the fact that the fear of death in the cases mentioned above (survival situations) are examples of what Freud called basic anxiety, the fear related to our fight or flight response in the face of environmental threat. Those of us in comfortable, industrialized nations don't face a lot of basic death anxiety. We don't fear starvation or physical assault. Consequently, we don't feel particularly "enslaved" to a fear of death. Sure, if we ever had to face a life or death situation we hope we would act nobly and lovingly and sacrificially. But until we face that moment it's hard for Americans to see how their day to day existence is a life enslaved to the fear of death. Who gives death any thought at all in American society? And if that's the case, how does a Christus Victor theology speak to the day to day existence of well-to-do Americans?

If we aren't facing on a regular basis guns or starvation or other life-or-death situations how can we be "enslaved to the fear of death all our lives" as it says in Hebrews 1.15?

The answer, to stay a bit longer with Freud, is that we aren't just looking for examples of basic anxiety--the fight or flight response in the face of an environmental threat. We are also looking for examples of neurotic anxiety. If you're chasing me with a knife and I run from fear my fear is a form of basic anxiety, a fight-or-flight response. But if I'm worried about you liking me or disliking me that's an example of neurotic anxiety.

In short, our slavery to death isn't just about basic survival fears. The fear of death is neurotic as well.

What I'm going to argue in the coming posts is that our slavery to the fear of death is largely neurotic in nature. More, I'm going to argue that this neurotic anxiety about death completely saturates our daily existence. Every aspect of life, even our very sense of self, is soaked with death. Death permeates everything. Death is the air we breathe. Death affects every aspect of our psychology, every aspect of our lived experience. Death, and the Devil who controls it, is the god of this world.

Of course, you don't notice any of this. That's the point. You don't see how death affects your gym membership, your hair cut, your clothing, your shopping, your entertainment, your love of sports, your patriotism, your vote, your boob job, your greed, your vanity, your worries, your rivalries, your accomplishments, your pride in your kids, your church attendance, your very sense of self.

You don't notice a thing.

We're enslaved to Death because we can't see what is going on.

We can't see how we are serving Death every second of every day.

Of course, to many of you these assertions will seem overblown. If you haven't read, say, Ernest Becker, Arthur McGill, James Alison or William Stringfellow, it's going to take a few posts to get all of us on the same page.

So to get a start on this, let's conclude this post with some cultural observations about how Americans (and those of you in other modern, technological societies) currently relate to death, and how this compares with how our ancestors interacted with death.

According to many thanatologists we are living in an era best described by what Geoffrey Gorer calls "the pornography of death." In pre-technological societies there was a frequent and overt cultural recognition and engagement with death. This was largely due to the fact that death was such a huge part of daily human existence. Mortality rates were very high before the age of modern medicine, technology and scientific agriculture. As Thomas Hobbes famously observed, the life of primitive man was poor, nasty, brutish and short. Consequently, when we study our ancestors it's not surprising to find that death was a frequent location of cultural and personal reflection. Death was a daily affair. You couldn't avoid it. Consequently, death anxiety wasn't repressed. Rather, death anxiety was processed publicly and communally.

But as technology advanced cultures began to work harder and harder to repress their awareness of death. In technological cultures death has become disruptive, illicit, and unseemly. Death has become "pornographic" in our era, not fit for polite discussion or contemplation. You don't want to bring up death at a cocktail party with co-workers. It's uncouth and vulgar.

So how did this pornography of death come about? And how is our culture collectively repressing our awareness of death?

A few things caused this to happen.

First, changes occurred in our relationship to our food. In agrarian and herding cultures there was a close association between death and food. You literally killed your food. Killed it, bled it, skinned it, prepared it, cooked it, and ate it. Often with only a few minutes separating each step. The association between death and food couldn't have been any closer. More, the food you ate was full of reminders that you were eating a once living thing. Bones, for example.

Compare that life and that bony food with eating a Chicken McNugget.

In our age, death has become radically disassociated with our food consumption. We don't personally kill the animals we eat. Death occurs somewhere else. Out of sight, out of awareness. Food just magically appears, disassociated from life and death. More, when we do eat meat, like with the Chicken McNugget, we have few signs that this was once a chicken.

A Chicken McNugget looks nothing like a chicken.

In short, our relationship with our food has been radically emptied of all death-reminders.

Second, changes have also occurred in how and where we die. In the past we died in our homes. More, family members cared for the sick and doctors made house visits (though they couldn't do much to help). The sick, injured, and elderly died at home. As did mothers and babies in childbirth. Death, in short, was a routine part of family life.

More, after death families prepared the body and buried their loved ones in family or church plots. Consequently, by the time you reached your own death you had cared for, handled and buried many dead bodies. Every home was a hospital and funeral home. Every person acquired experience as a hospice nurse. Every kid had helped to dig a grave.

All this changed with the rise of the modern hospital. With the advent of modern, technological medicine death was taken out of the home. More and more people began to pass away in hospitals. In the face of that change the funeral industry began to create "funeral homes" where the dead could be taken after they had passed away in the hospital. This effectively removed death from the daily lives of families. Sickness, hospice care and death were now handled by "specialists."

And with funeral services no longer being held in the parlor of the home magazines of this era began to suggest that the parlor be taken back from the dead and returned to the living. It was suggested that we should call our parlors something else, something to erase the memory of death--let's call the parlor a "living room."

And we did. It signaled the final banishment of death from the consciousness of home and family life. Though parlors still exist...but only in funeral homes.

Third, a final cultural shift, one also associated with the rise of the funeral industry, involved the relocation of cemeteries. In times past the dead were buried on family land or in cemeteries next to churches (which often functioned as schools). You still see this in some places, old cemeteries next to churches. In many medieval towns the cemetery was located in the center of the town and functioned as the public square and meeting place. In short, people lived next door to cemeteries. The home, the church, the school and the public square were all a stone's throw from the dead. Again, death was a constant companion.

But with the rise of the modern funeral industry cemeteries were gradually relocated, moved away from homes, schools, churches, and public gathering spaces. Moved from the center of life to the periphery. Physically, culturally and psychologically.

Death had been effectively banished from our field of view.

(A quick personal example of the difference between then and now. This last summer the family and I were visiting friends in Boston and one of the things we did was walk through a couple of the oldest cemeteries in the US with tombstones from the 1600s. I took lots of pictures because almost all of the tombstones had an image of the Angel of Death on them. A couple of looks:



Can you imagine modern Americans putting the Angel of Death, along with crossbones (!), on their tombstones? Too morbid, right? See? The pornography of death. Even in cemeteries we try to hide from death.)

All told, looking over all these historical changes (and many others) death has been effectively removed from public consciousness. Day in and day out we rarely confront, face, or think about death.

But what does any of this have to do with being "enslaved by the fear of death"? Isn't the removal of death from our consciousness a sign that we aren't thinking about or afraid of death?

The answer is this: Though we don't give death much thought, death hasn't gone anywhere. So what has happened in cultures like America is that we are living in a sort of unreality. With nothing to remind us to the contrary, Americans don't give death much thought at all. And this tempts us into thinking that death doesn't really exist. That we might, in fact, live forever. Thus, any reminders to the contrary are experienced as disruptive, morbid, and pornographic. They are rude affronts to the fantasy world we are creating. Americans, thus, are living in an illusion, living as if they were immortal and immune to death. Consequently, there is massive cultural and psychic pressure to deny the existence and power of death. And anxiety that was once overt has become covert. What was once a conscious engagement with death has been pushed into the unconscious. Basic anxiety about death has been traded for neurotic anxiety. We live in a culture, according to Ernest Becker, where the "denial of death" is our ruling reality.

Hebrews 2.15 is right. Our lives are enslaved by the fear of death.

We just don't know it.