Our culture is routinely diagnosed with an excessive fear of mortality. A calm look at the evidence tells a different story
It is often said that contemporary Western societies are in the grip of an excessive and irrational fear of death, a thanatophobia. For instance, this is the diagnosis given by the grief counsellor and author Stephen Jenkinson who observes that:
[P]eople in any culture inherit their understandings of dying much more than they create them. In our case, that inheritance takes the form of an extraordinary degree of aversion to and dread of dying. My phrase for it was that the culture is incontrovertibly and, for the most part, unconsciously death-phobic.
Jenkinson’s diagnosis aligns with that of the French historian Philippe Ariès, the author of a seminal study of the history of Western attitudes to death. Ariès argues that whereas our premodern ancestors maintained an equanimous relation to death, we moderns suffer a ‘horror of death’, which he describes as a ‘violent attachment to the things of life … a passion for being, an anxiety at not sufficiently being.’
Evidence for this view is not hard to come by. We are surrounded by advertisements for various supplements and ointments that promise to restore our youth or hide every sign that it is fleeting (and that we are going to die). Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and corporations such as Google are spending billions on anti-ageing research. Popular science books such as Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009) by Raymond Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To (2019) by David Sinclair, and Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (2020) by Andrew Steele have become bestsellers. The spirituality genre similarly assures us that we can keep on living, albeit in a different realm. The much-publicised multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, who spends $2 million per year on a personal anti-ageing regimen (the Blueprint), is building a community under the banner ‘Don’t Die’. Our collective fear of death is also evidenced by how we die: outside society’s view, in a hospital bed, drugged and connected to machines via intravenous tubes, fighting death until our last breath. Those around us ensure that everything is done to keep us alive.
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I disagree with his thesis that we are not death phobic, but death complacent. His argument revolves around our lack of action in trying to extend life. But I believe that the lack of action is a combination of a taboo around death caused by the fear of it and ignorance about how to extend life.
Once people see the continued health and long life of those of us who purposefully try to extend it, public opinion will shift in favor of extending life.
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