Societal Incoherence About Death

Here I go writing about death again. I guess I have written about taxes, but that's not on the docket for today. However inevitable taxes may be, they really aren't quite as profound an issue.

I'll start with capital punishment. I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I don't have the sort of emotional revulsion against it that characterizes a lot of death penalty opponents. The government decides someone has done something so horrible that they deserve to die, and the government sees to it that they do. Why the strong reaction?

I think it is because whatever they might believe intellectually if pressed, emotionally the opponents feel life goes on indefinitely (emotional reading: forever) so the government has cut short an emotionally infinite life by ending it. (Quite likely death penalty proponents have the same view but feel good about that aspect instead of bad about it.) As far as I can tell, questions about whether the execution method meant a person died in pain are basically a manufactured concern. If there is any truth to the idea that an execution victim died in pain, it is only because the medical establishment refuses to cooperate -- there are ample ways that medicine can help someone die without pain if that is their goal. I don't mind their decision, but it would seem more honest if they said so plainly.

The time before an apparently unnecessary death can also count as pain and suffering. Notably, if someone is in an airplane that stops flying at a high altittude and descends in a free fall and crashes, the passengers might have a minute or more before they actually hit the ground and die. This entitles the survivors to more money in a financial settlement. When the space shuttles exploded, there was great interest in whether they died instantly or were conscious long enough to know they were dying.

The incoherence comes from the contrast with deaths that are unavoidable - an aged person has a terminal illness. In that case, the person dying is doing the right thing if they are peaceful and accepting. A death notice might say that someone died peacefully, surrounded by friends and family. The notice never says they died in great pain, or that up until the end they were angry and frantic that they were about to die, or that they were bitterly disappointed that their loved ones were not there. Why the difference? I submit that at that point people have discarded this emotional illusion that people might live forever if no one kills them.

I also have this hunch that great concern about a person's last days or hours or minutes rely on the notion of an afterlife -- even among those who would deny that they believe in an afterlife. If consciousness is forever extinguished at death, there is no special significance to the last bit. But in contrast, suppose we are dealing with a case where you are about to leave your homeland forever and go to a foreign land, in an era when there would be no further communication. In that case, you might care a lot what your last experiences of your homeland were. How the story in one land ended matters a lot if you are going to a new land where you can contemplate the old. If your best friend says they really hated you or your wife reveals that the children you thought were yours were fathered by somebody else, then those revelations will stick with you for the rest of your life in the new land -- and those who are left behind will know it. On the positive side, reconciliation with people you were on bad terms with will make your future life more peaceful. The people you left behind will be much happier if you leave seemingly content rather than perhaps totally distraught, as they will think (perhaps correctly) that that will influence your life in the new land -- that you did not leave gracefully.

Returning to the case of death rather than emigration, those who go on living who retain emotionally the idea of an afterlife (even if they don't believe it intellectually) will be happier if the person dies peaceful and accepting.

The alternative that the death penalty opponents want for the perpetrator of a heinous crime is a life sentence in a harsh prison environment. The quality of their life there is not of great concern -- at least they were not killed. Their distress, day to day, is finite, while if they were executed, the distress would be infinite.

If I remember correctly (I'm not going to look it up again), the guillotine did not get its name from the inventor, but from a French legislator of the time who argued for its use because a death sentence's purpose was to deprive someone of life, not to torture them. Apparently standard methods of execution before then included a variety of torture implicit in "breaking on the wheel". Burning at the stake also qualifies as torture. Apparently beheading with an axe wielded by hand is an iffy proposition, and if botched can amount to torture, while a guillotine was reliable in beheading without botching. So that was an issue being debated in the late 1700s, while at some point in the 1900s the terms of the debate shifted to no execution at all as opposed to no torture. I fully support an end to torture, whether at the end of life or any other time.

I don't know if death penalty opponents care greatly whether the victim was frantic and distraught just before the execution or peaceful and accepting, but they do care a great deal about this with regard to an unavoidable death. Sometimes I get the sense that joyous celebration of someone's life starts with the idea that they died peacefully and accepting. Survivors seem to be celebrating the death itself, since as we all really know, death is inevitable. I'm aware of this reaction in myself, though not proud of it. If some very old celebrity dies, I am often not aware of even one moment of grief, but with a sort of relief. They were bound to die, so now it's happened, and I can check off my list another of life's expected events that happened. If we actually actively mourned each death (say, if you read the obits regularly) you would rapidly be swamped by compassion fatigue.

But if you have a uniform sense that there is no afterlife -- no way, no how -- then someone dying early at someone else's hand isn't inherently a cause of more horror than the inevitability that they will die within a matter of decades in any event. If you're aware for a minute in a falling airplane that you're about to die, well, bummer! If they execute the wrong person, then... Oops! They still didn't end a life that was emotionally infinite -- they cut it short by at most a few decades.

I'm still staunchly opposed to the death penalty, but it doesn't make my top hundred list of things to be passionately concerned about. I suppose for me its importance derives from how important it is to other people. I also don't think that the mindset that leads to celebrating the execution of a hated person is a good thing, but exploring that would be another topic.

The warp in time from the year 2000

 The numbers of the years we live in are just numbers. The religiously neutral way to refer to the year is "C.E." or "common era". Although the hypothetical "year 1" came from a Christian calculation, that was long ago, and (likely because of cultural dominance) that's what has stuck. People realize there is no other, more logical place to start. Older cultures that reset the year each time a new emporer ascended to the throne were surely nightmares if you cared about history.

As the millenium approached, there were arguments about whether the true millenium might be a year earlier or later based on whether the first year was "year one". One quote that dismissed that whole issue that I thought was exactly right was, "It's all arbitrary, and I'm in it for the zeros".

But I've noticed a certain warping in my notion of time, a sort of distortion in time caused by that number 2000 and its properties. In 1980 it was just 20 years to the millenium. In 1990 it was just 10 years away. In 1997 it was just 3 years away. All those numbers about a significant future event were small. 1997 was notably later than 1994 because it was only 3 years to the millenium instead of 6.

And then -- it happened. Y2K. Nothing major broke. But starting on January 1, 2000, how do we think of years? Well, the next millenium will be the year 3000, and that's a fair amount of time away. Maybe a reasonable milestone on the way will be 10% of the way, which will happen in 2100. It's 100 years from now... Wait! 100 years from now is a LONG time from now! Even though all those zeros showed up at once, to live on a human scale we have to ignore a couple of them. A century is a long time, and that happens in 2100. Decades happen in the meantime. Stunningly, 22% of that first post-millenial century has gone by already. "Turn of the century" when I was growing up referred to 1900 and nothing else. If someone used it to refer to 2000 in the first few years after 2000, I certainly would have thought it odd. Now, 22 years later, we have to ask which turn over the century? Perhaps some disambiguate by calling it the turn of the millenium, but that risks expanding our time horizons to a much bigger scale than intended or desired.

Frozen history in our own lifetimes

 

When we first become aware of the existence of history in a meaningful way, we learn that our life has been very short and history has been very long. I remember that the idea of years passing somehow got through to me at a certain level in 1963. For a while I thought 1962 was long ago and anything in 1963 or later was recent. I remember looking up in the local college bookstore at things you could buy related to the class of 1971 or 1972 -- perhaps this was 1968 or so. Those years seemed impossibly far in the future. A "7"in the tens place? Hard to imagine! Initial correct observation when young: Our individual life is very short and history is very long.

Perhaps this is a partial explanation of a phenomenon I've observed in myself. Everything that has happened since I was a teen is recent history, but before that point history is to be measured out in the real decades that make it up and stretch into the distant past.

As one example, I was pretty firmly plugged in to current events starting in 1968, when I was 13 years old. That is 54 years ago. If I think of the history involved in the previous 54 years, it covers enormous ground -- 1914 to 1968. Two world wars and a depression. The availability of nuclear weapons to both sides in the Cold War gave rise to a "nuclear peace". Everything that has happened since then is to me recent history because it was part of my awareness as it happened. But 1914 seems a year from the far distant past, and 1968 seems recent. Emotionally considered, perhaps 80% of the time from 1914 to now happened before 1968, and the other 20% since then! As the decades of my life have gone by, that original idea that "I've lived a very short while and history is very long" persists even as it becomes less true all the time. I'm curious if others experience this.

You could argue that in fact less has happened in these latest 54 years compared to the 54 that came before. That would be true in terms of wholesale destruction, perhaps, but is not true in a great many other areas. The internet looms large. Even cell phones do. An enormous reduction in poverty happened along with dramatically better medical care. Technological miracles are cheap and abundant.

In my home town of Durham, New Hampshire, my oldest brother went to his first year of high school arranged in split shifts, because there simply was not enough space to fit all the high school students in the building at one time. In 1965 a new high school opened that relieved that problem. I went to this brand new high school, graduating in 1972. It was several years ago that someone remarked that the Durham high school was definitely old and needed replacing. Wait, it's brand new! But not actually, when I do the math. If I heard this in 2016, it was 51 years old, which I guess is getting on for a high school.

Within the course of my life, time also speeds up. The attacks of 9/11/2001 that seem liked recent history were more than 20 years ago. Twenty years before that was when Ronald Reagan was elected. That seems far more than twice as long ago as 9/11. This, however feels like a more common observation.