assumed thanatophobia: a common modern-“Western”-anthropomorphization
groundwork. let’s start with working definitions.
- thanatophobia - the fear of death as a concept, on its own. Fear and pain are inbuilt death-avoidance mechanisms for many living things. Consider, common human phobias of snakes, heights … those things could be legitimately dangerous, especially in a context w/o healthcare. But the fear is of the snake regardless of the capacity of it to harm or kill … it is not direct-death-fear. Thanatophobia is direct, it is the existential terror of contemplating death, what may happen after, and by extension fearing/rejecting reminders of the inevitability of the individual-death.
- anthropomorphization - assuming that a non-human being operates like a human. For example, assuming that because living in isolation sucks for (most) humans, that it sucks for all beings … even though many animals prefer living alone and get more stressed by having constant companionship. You can see an inverse - the dehumanization of individuals & communities that do things differently than the “human norm” … as defined by the imperial states of the past & present, of course.
so, assumed thanatophobia: the dominant attitude of fear-of-death, denial-of-death, rejection-of-death-reminders, devastation from the death of loved ones … this dominant attitude is the assumed attitude of all beings.
Death = bad. All humans agree. All life agrees. that’s what I’m refuting for the rest of this post. let’s begin.
Death = bad.
Yes, the death of a loved one, human or otherwise, can be horrible. I know this. Witnessing death, even peaceful death, can be devastating, seeing the light leave their eyes. But death is not bad on a broader scale.
The world works in cycles. Life requires assimilating matter – eating, uptaking nutrients through the roots, etc – and death gives that matter back to other life. Death does not stand alone, it is simultaneously the beginning of life. Thousands of species of life-forms require dead material to live, sometimes specializing on different parts of the dead body (hair, bones, flesh…)1, sometimes specializing on different recency-of-death2.
Apart from direct nutrient-cycling, death re-provisions other things, such as space3. This is usually good. It can be a problem when a harmful invasive species takes that space, but that’s not death’s problem.
Death can come with the implication of pain and tragedy but that is not inherent. Cruel, needless death is not the only way to die. Death can be unexpected and painless and non-painful for the surviving left behind. Death can be accepted and welcomed when it comes.
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All humans agree.
Not so.
Modern death-rejection comes with ideas of rejecting reminders, rejecting the idea of the body decaying. Countless individuals and cultures stand in opposition.
As Dr Paul Koudonaris4 finds as humans around the world welcomed him to document their mourning practices:
People keep the mummies of their loved ones in their house, dressing them, sleeping alongside them in bed.
People keep the mummies of tragedy – of dead children with no known parents, for example – and provide them with care and affection.
“Western” cultures did not always flee from death, as evident in Catholic ossuaries and works like Ars Moriendi … death is not something that happens on the deathbed, but the culmination of a person ensuring that their work, their loved ones, etc, will have means to continue after their passing.
“Tame death” (as per Philippe Ariès) is an ancient practice, where death occurs surrounded by loved ones, and worldly issues pertaining to the dying-person are resolved in preparation.
Many, many cultures consider death as simply a different state of being as opposed to the antithesis of life, and have important posthumous rituals which keep the dead functionally-alive in their community.
The cultural rituals around death alleviate the terror and loss of it. A lot of suffering-from-death comes from the anticipation, from unjust death and death someone is not prepared for, and from the surviving from participating in post-death mourning processes. How these look, for an individual, for a culture, are vastly different, as above, and also with reference to compassionate cannibalism-as-mourning5.
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Dr Koudounaris finds that thanatophobia and the rejection of death is a more recent concept, that is is borne of Christian dislike of corporeality and of misguided ideas around death-causing-disease, and has been retroactively asserted as the default human state as death = no more capacity to pass on your genes4. Cultures that fall out of line are deemed monstrous.
So, in humans alone, the inherentness of thanatophobia is already falling apart.
in any case, we can move on to animals, to poke further holes in inherent-thanatophobia. time for part 3:
All life agrees.
Definitely not. Some animals appear to mourn, and there is also cross-species mourning (e.g. humans mourning dogs, but probably also non-humans mourning other species). At its most basic, many beings form intra- and inter-species connections, and death permanently severs those connections … death-grief is separation distress6, mourning can ease that distress.
But not all life is connection-forming life. I don’t say this to say they’re inferior or cruel, just different. some species live in a way that connection-forming wouldn’t help, or may even cause problems.
broadly a few things:
r/K selection theory in ecology refers to different “strategies” of reproduction. Parental investment includes things like how much energy is spent on pregnancy, egg-creation, etc, as well as parental care like feeding, protecting, and teaching. The more investment, the better chance each child has of surviving, but the more effort it takes to raise each child. r/K therefore proposes r-strategy species, which have as many offspring as possible and don’t care much for them, and K-strategy species, which have very few offspring that they care a lot for. r-selection is thought to be useful in highly unstable environments, because the chance of each offspring surviving is low, so better to have a lot … “not put all eggs in one basket” or I guess, all effort in one egg. K-strategy facilitates teaching & learning, long life, larger size, and is thought to work well when the population of the species is usually already at-maximum and the ability to compete for available resources is super important. K-strategy aligns well with connection-forming and grief-on-death, but r-selection can involve dumping hundreds even thousands of offspring out into the world and never seeing them again. Both are valid strategies. caring about the safety & death of your loved ones isn’t as feasible across species here. r-strategy species would basically be constantly sick and suffering from death-grief.
death-grief as separation distress makes sense, and is congruent with mourning being observed in social animals like humans, like elephants7, herd-animals, pack-animals. But not all animals form connections, and have no connection to be severed by death; not all animals form connections as intensely, and/or as quickly, as many humans do. Red pandas eat their own babies if they’re not ready to raise them. Stylops is not alone amongst animals that eat their own parents. When a tree falls over, nearby-offspring flourish in the light from the newly-opened canopy.
Thanatophobia cannot be taken as default for life, even with the 20th-century justification that thanatophobia is necessary for survival and is the natural consequence of evolution4.
whether something fears death, whether something fears the dead, whether something suffers from the death of another (and if these are regardless of the death-circumstances) – these must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, perhaps most-workably at species level.
and there we conclude. Death-fear is not universal at all. It cannot be used as a basis for good action. as I have mentioned before, rejecting death-presence runs counter to the health of the biosphere. Rejecting acknowledging death may contribute to how terrible it is nowadays, with people failing to create a will and leaving their grieving relatives with a legal mess to clean up, & with people spending their last moments terrified out of their mind & with people unable to speak freely about grief, incurable diseases & disabilities, so on.
As per the Order of the Good Death:
“[The death-positive movement] does not ask that we simply “accept” death, but that we push back and engage with the systems and conditions that lead to “unacceptable” deaths resulting from violence, a lack of access to care, etc.”
We can extend this beyond the human context. Death is necessary and inevitable. Suffering is not.
If a living being must die (invasive species culls, disease-vector animals, for harvest,) , we should aim to it in a way that minimizes suffering for both that being & the beings that may grieve for it – not just the way that makes us think about death the least.
Removing dead beings should be done when deemed necessary by capacity to cause real issues – carcasses near water, carcasses carrying disease-agents and toxins like prions and lead, dead trees which could fall onto a house or a path, dead bodies implicated in eutrophication, so on. The dead being is not an issue in and of itself.
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The same moral pacifism critiqued by Andreas Malm8 can be applied more broadly in these cases. Refusing violence (as an active death-adjacent thing) & killing & the validity of death-presence “yield[s] a priori to the worst forms of evil” – here as ecosystem collapse, disease outbreaks, embalming chemicals & plastics in the soil; oppression and cleansing of cultures and communities who treat death differently, of cultures revolving around animal hunting and slaughter; of disabled & terminally ill people who are refused space to exist publicly.
Animals are alive, and eating them can be killing – and plants, fungi, and rot are alive, and eating them can be killing as well. Animals eat animals eat plants eat soil eats rot eats animals, plants eat animals, plants eat rot eat plants, plants eat plants.
We are alive because another being has died.
we are animals, we will die. And other life will then eat us. None of this is bad – but refusing it, and refusing the ability of others to acknowledge it, can be.
Was ihr seid, das waren wir; Was wir sind, das werdet ihr –
– Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos.
Memento mori.
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1 ) Beekers, B.; Meertens, H.; Reiniers, K.; Helmer, W.; Colijn, E.; Krawczynski, R.; and Meissner, R.; trans. Righart, A.; and Allen, D. Circle of life: A new way to support Europe’s scavengers. Rewilding Europe & ARK Nature, 2017.
2 ) Amendt, J.; Krettek, R.; and Zehner, R. Forensic entomology. Naturwissenschaften, 2004 91:51-65.
3 ) Franklin, J. F.; Shugart, H. H.; and Harmon, M. E. Tree Death as an Ecological Process. BioScience, 1987 37(8):550-556.
4 ) Koudounaris, P. Memento Mori: the Dead Among Us. Thames & Hudson, 2015.
5 ) Burley, M. Eating Human Beings: Varieties of Cannibalism and the Heterogeneity of Human Life. Philosophy, 2016 91(4):483-501.
6 ) Brooks Pribac, T. Animal grief. Animal Studies Journal, 2013 2(2):67-90.
7 ) Roothaan, A. Decolonizing Human-Animal Relations in an African Context: The Story of the Mourning Elephants. African Environmental Ethics, 2019 255-268.
8 ) Malm, A. How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. Verso, 2021.
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images:
Artwork, Wellcome Collection – Photograph of a skull, Arian Zwegers – Photograph of trees, Vyacheslav Argenberg & Photograph of a jackal, Yusuf Ijsseldijk – Artwork, Metropolitan Museum of Art
