Progress and Death

 When people bemoan our modern world the usual retort is an instruction not to romanticise the past and to consider the lifesaving utility of medical science.  The merit of medical science, in the hands of pharmaceutical oligarchs, is itself questionable.  Modernity from the dissolution of the monasteries to the categorisation of the wise woman of the village with herbal knowledge as a witch cut us off from inherited collective knowledge.  This indicates that today large corporations simply have to rediscover ancient knowledge never analysed and then they patent it.  That aside, progress in large part justifies itself as a successful flight from death.

Through the technological advances of progress we are cossetted from the severity of our mortality.  Death is made hygienic in a place of face masks and medication.  Coffins are not open at funerals, people generally die in a sterile environment amongst medical experts.

The argument here is not that the advances of medical science should be rejected.  The human being was endowed by his Creator with the talent to solve the problems presented by a hostile fallen Nature, outside of Eden.  Nonetheless this ability is ambiguous, it also leads to a subtle Luciferianism.  This is most strongly demonstrated in the idea of Singularity from the dark technical minds of Silicon Valley, in the idea an imitation of our personality recorded on technology is a means of immortality.

Most  human beings with any consciousness of their soul understand that this method of denying death is by no means immortality.  Nonetheless, we all seek to avoid death and prolong at least a healthy existence if not an unhealthy one.  The other side of this idea latent in progress that the future will be hygienically healthy cannot really tolerate to look at the physical decline of illness and old age.  Even though the technology progress itself produced can prolong people in a sort of nether region of half-life. this is not considered hygienic and as much as the body of the deceased must be concealed, the infirm are considered to have no dignity and we take upon ourselves the right to choose when we live and die or even when others should die (as soon as their scientifically prolonged existence tarnishes the bright and clean future).

Without wishing back a time of pestilence, plague and violence, we must also recognise in the hygienic world of progress a spiritual aspect of human nature has been somewhat curtailed.  We have not and will not conquer death, but we have hidden it.  It is no longer really considered necessary to find a spiritual answer to our mortality, instead our mortality is hidden, because science will solve that question before our turn comes.

A spiritual answer to death does not require some morbid and macabre focus, as though we need to dig up our relatives' decomposing cadavers to take part in a grotesque theatre of afternoon tea.  Somehow that seems reminiscent of the frozen corpses of Americans committed only to life in this temporal world.

Pestilence, famine and war asked us serious questions about the meaning of life that a life of medical care and shopping malls somehow conceals.  We should therefore along with serious thinkers such as Martin Heidegger or Aleksandr Dugin, continue to think seriously about death and how it actually imparts meaning upon our lives.  Without death there is certainly no sense of eternity.  Only with limitation can life choices be meaningful.  Only when we think of our frailty in the face of time can we gain a sense of the eternal.

Modern man might mock the apparent "superstitions" of his ancestors who faced death day in day out, but is that not only because he hides from the question of his mortality? And in hiding from his mortality he is also hiding from the eternal.  Consumption is the answer to ignore the pressing and creeping sense of limitation.  Phrases such as "you only live once" as a justification for existential curiosity that Heidegger saw as inauthentic, are really ways to evade death not to acknowledge it.  In hiding from our mortality, in living for our passions, we are also denying the demands of eternity upon us. 

There is a political question here.  It is with GDP, more consumer choice and liberalisation of laws to "free" us to engage our passions that a global political class can keep us passive.  It means no really difficult questions are asked about what is happening and why it is happening.  Arguably a citizen of Russia or Iran is far less politically-naive than those living in Western democracies where we can sate ourselves and hide from our mortality.

There is also, more obviously a religious question.  For the Westerner death can be regarded as some sort of Malthusian solution that does not necessarily touch me.  Pestilence and famine keep the numbers down and resist the Malthusian bogeyman of overpopulation.  In reality, if we truly recognise each person as more than a mere avatar of their passions, more than a consumer whose identity is defined by his career, by what football team he supports or what genre of popular music he enjoys, more even than which political party he supports, - if we actually see the human person as the imago dei, then his annihilation through physical decomposition is an affront to all that holds real value.

If we finally look at what death really means - the seeming annihilation of the personality, we can see it as the reductive and unnatural force that it really is and therefore reject its right over us.  That though is not in terms of some artificial download onto a computer.  It is instead a theological question, a cosmological question.  How can death exist in contrast to the human person?  It is only then we can recognise that for all our technological and medical progress, the real question is spiritual.  It is only then we can see the real answer is that this fallen world, following the laws of Darwin, is not natural.  It must be the consequence of sin, of a fundamental primary distortion of reality.  That means it cannot be solved by all the cunning techne of human ingenuity.  It is instead solved not by technological or political solutions, but by personal repentance.  We should not let technological, medical or political progress distract us from this.