Derek discusses a forthcoming interview with Alex Ebert, which will be featured on Conspirituality 52. They discuss the dearth of death rituals in America. In this bonus episode, Derek meditates and, more to the point, our anxiety around aging, including a modern incarnation of that age-old fear: the quest for perpetual youth through wrinkle-free skin.
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
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I'm surrounded by death.
It's not an intentional design, at least not a conscious choice so far as I'm aware.
Being fascinated by religion and mythology, I find death entertained, discussed, and dissected in dozens of the books surrounding the desk at which I now sit.
Some argue that it is the only topic to really take seriously.
Besides, of course, how to fill the space between now and then.
One such book is The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker's 1973 classic that he was, without irony, posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Becker was a lapsed Freudian who, upon re-reading some of the psychologist's works, decided that there was enough value to explore the Austrian's thinking, especially as it relates to the death impulse.
Becker's book posits the idea that civilization is effectively an elaborate defense mechanism against mortality.
We construct society, and the ways in which we act within society, to emotionally protect ourselves against the inevitable.
Thanks to our penchant for dualism, we're able to separate our narrative voice, which Becker believes always ends up positioning the individual as the hero, from the physical world of objects.
This is how we're able to, for example, listen to podcasts on phones that we know, somewhere along the chain, involve child or slave labor or the mining of precious minerals, or both, or all three, and consider only the value we derive from them, not the cost to others to deliver them into our pockets.
Or maybe we read about the terrible labor practices, the enslavement, in an article we glimpsed once, somewhere, and forgot about it.
The object itself is a carrier of information that we've grown to demand, become addicted to even, in the forms of memes, selfies, music, or even voices that echo in our heads.
It's the information, not the physical demands.
Not the actual cost that we focus on.
For Becker, this is how all of civilization plays out.
Focus on what entertains and distracts us.
Ignore the painful truth of mortality.
Had he survived longer, he would recognize this impulse toward heroism as the driving force that allows us to destroy ecosystems with our shopping habits while sharing articles about the dangers of climate change and not recognizing the irony.
Speaking of irony, here's one of my favorite passages.
The irony of man's conditions is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation.
But it is life itself which awakens it.
And so we must shrink from fully being alive.
Why is that?
It's not a purely American phenomenon, though it is predominantly a Western mindset.
This inability to meditate on the reality of death.
To rage against the possibility of an end at every step.
Next week, you'll hear my interview with Alex Ebert, the man behind Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, on Conspiratuality 52.
I began our discussion talking about death because I noticed he'd been posting about the topic on Instagram recently.
Alex lives in New Orleans, so we started chatting about death rituals.
We wondered aloud whether American society would be better served by regularly discussing and even ritualizing death instead of denying it or believing something magical happens on the other side of it.
We both agreed that it would.
Indeed, Socrates himself made such a claim when he said, To fear death, gentlemen, is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not.
For it is to think one knows what one does not know.
No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest of blessings for a human being, and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that it is the greatest of evils.
There's the hero again.
New Orleans arguably boasts the most intense and important death ritual in American culture, the second line.
The first, or main line, in a funerary parade is designed for mourning.
Grieving is part of death, but it's not the only part.
When that procession is through, a celebration of life ensues.
