Yes, we need to talk about death.
But not in a morbid way. Ever since science made working towards not dying, as opposed to not dying prematurely, a prerequisite of medical progress; there has been a frantic scrabble for “wellness” which has culminated in the deserving and none deserving when it comes to who will have access to medicines and operations. It also needs to be stressed that these interventions may keep people alive for longer, or in some lucky cases cure, but are by no means certainties, even in this day and age.
I’m going to look at this from several angles, so hope it makes sense to those of you kind enough to read it. A bit of recent history first.
The Victorians and Edwardians were famous for being obsessed with death and in particular what, if anything came afterwards. It was completely understandable at the time as not only did we have various wars to contend with that resulted in a large loss of life; but infant mortality was rife and a large percentage of children never made it past their tenth birthday. Even the upper classes suffered as there were no antibiotics or the modern surgery techniques of today and childhood diseases as well as illness and injury that would be easily treated nowadays could often prove fatal in those times.
As for adults, well they were just as vulnerable to infection from accidents, or diseases such as cholera and tetanus etc. A long life was often the exception rather than the rule, no matter how good your genes were.
Death in this case, truly was the great leveller. As it is now, so it was then. In order to cope with the crushing effect of losing a friend, family member, the love of your life or even the loss of vast numbers of your village or town, it became a matter of great importance to know if death was the end, or if you continued on in some form afterwards. Because of this, religion was extremely important to the population as was living a “good life”, for people who truly believed they would go to hell if they sinned without repentance. Having something to look forward to after you died made people more accepting of their lot in life as well as their lifespan, as God would make all things right after death. It also allowed them to take more risks and try to do more with the life they had, because living was only one part of a bigger process, so no need to be too risk averse.
However, since even Harry Houdini never made it back to tell us about the other side as far as we know, people kept seeking reassurance through seances etc that “the other side” really existed and they would definitely be with those they had lost when it was their turn to join “the majority”.
Fast forward to today and the basic ideas have not really changed, but how we process them definitely has.
With the decline of religion from the twentieth century onwards, God has been replaced by science and whomever is running things on the temporal plain. A person no longer needs to wait until after death to be judged. Since the current zeitgeist is of the opinion that death is the end and that all religions are folk stories resulting over time in cultural habits to be accommodated but not actually believed; people are now judged by their gods on the earthly plain and it is considered extremely important that those designated as sinners, or of no intrinsic use by our rulers, are not seen to benefit in any way. This includes access to medicine or other things that might keep them alive or allow them to live in comfort.
This is also called not rewarding sin; which has itself been redefined to mean whatever the ruling class w,ants it too. We have very fickle gods unfortunately which means we no longer have a basic shared morality from which we construct our ideas on how to live. The current state sponsored morality has to be adopted if you want to be classed as good and if not, your hell on earth will be obligingly created for you.
However, a lot of people aren’t satisfied with this and there is still a great yearning to know one way or the other if this is really all there is. Such yearnings are problematic because if people came to believe there was an afterlife again, they might be less compliant in this one. It is therefore extremely important for science to prove religion is not true and that the soul does not exist as an entity. It is also problematic for science for the opposite reason. Immortality is impossible to achieve without something to become immortal. Since this cannot be the biological self, consciousness is currently fulfilling this role, as the twenty-first century version of the soul.
Medicine was developed to cure people who were ill, that’s all. It wasn’t created to decide who was worthy of its bounty and who wasn’t. Nor was it created to tell people that they had to live a certain way in order to be worthy of its benefits. No medical scientist ever created a breakthrough in treatment on the proviso that it only be given to “deserving people “, whatever that means.
However, since the means of production and distribution of the medicines and technology needed to deliver modern medical treatments is controlled through a small number of mega corporations, people tend to be evaluated by monetary means as the gold standard, according to things like productive life and quality of life expectancy. If they are living in a way that could reduce those things, then they are considered unworthy, or at best only worthy for reduced medical support.
Because of these monopolies, medicine and medical procedures are often more expensive than they need to be and so this type of evaluation is considered and sold to the public as a fair way of distribution.
Of course, like everything else sold to the general public, there are exceptions. The fracas about the boat people being given instant access to medical care as well as other public benefits they have never and probably will never contribute to is one example.
Another wheeze is giving medical treatment for things like cancer using the cheaper out of patent drugs first and only if they don’t work, using a more expensive drug that would definitely have stood a high chance of effecting a cure if given at the time. By the time a patient is allowed access to them, the expensive drugs may not work either.
In order to prolong life to the maximum and avoid death, people are required to prove themselves worthy, unless they are part of a favoured group. A lot of people are willing to accept this, because fear of oblivion and as a consequence, extreme fear of death, is uppermost in people’s minds when they become ill.
Years ago, people who could not access care would go to their deaths firm in the belief that God was waiting to receive them. Now, with the denigration and almost destruction of western religion even that comfort is denied to them.
However, you must remember that we are talking about your average person here. In the meantime, what are the elites doing about their fear of death and lack of faith?
Well, not very much of it has to do with medicine as we know it now. Even though religion has been effectively binned by most of the elites, the idea of immortality definitely hasn’t. It always amuses me that although it is considered hopelessly primitive to believe in a soul that continues after death, the idea of projecting individual consciousness past the life of the physical body certainly hasn’t.
I need to state at this point that anyone who tells you that they know what consciousness is, is at best trying to get you to subscribe to their latest theory and at worst feeding you a line as the scientific truth in order to get you to experience your life in a particular way.
However, for the purposes of looking at this aspect of death avoidance, I am assuming that consciousness is like the soul, treated as a separate substance from the rest of the physical body.
Most people with a serious amount of money desperately don’t want to die. They want to live on and enjoy their riches and whatever level of omnipotence they have acquired as a result of it. More than any other group they believe that their continuation is not only good for themselves, but completely necessary for the development and continuation of the species and that it is their duty to live forever if they can manage it.
It’s a bit like the rank order of places in a nuclear bomb shelter. All the world leaders had to be saved first, so they could restart civilisation and restore order. Even as a child, I couldn’t understand why your priority would be to save the very people who caused the problem in the first place.
Because of the discovery of telomeres highlighting the genetic limitations of the physical body, it meant that serious seekers after immortality, or at least a vastly extended life, decided to shift their focus away from biology to more technical approaches.
Research into how to separate consciousness from the physical body and place it into repairable receptacles is already underway. Also, merging consciousness with supercomputers to create a sort of “singularity “, where man and machine become one, leading to an entity that results in post human life beyond consciousness that nobody can yet describe; but will have a personality and be capable of self-development without the need for human programming.
However, the one thing that all these research projects assume is that the consciousness that is being ported from one place to another remains as the essence of the person as they were in their physical form, because that is what they want.
In the sixties, the idea of being kept in suspended animation, either the whole body, or in some cases just the head, (it was assumed that the soul resided in the brain); were the first tentative steps in this direction.
Nowadays, physics and engineering are replacing biology when researching a means of staying alive forever.
Of course the question that really needs to be asked is if becoming immortal really is such a good idea, if it ever becomes possible.
People develop their world view biologically between the ages of about five and thirty. Although flex and change are possible to a degree after that; usually the older you get the less you are able to effortlessly adapt to all the changes in the world.
Can you imagine the stress and confusion in a consciousness of say five hundred years old that had wired itself in, four hundred and seventy years previously. All this, just to avoid the possibility of oblivion.
Our physical bodies are roughly designed to live between eighty and one hundred years old for the majority of us; all being well.
It was very exciting in the late nineteenth early twentieth century to be able to work towards more of us getting the benefits of a full life span. Of course there will always be outliers at either end of the spectrum, due to unforeseen circumstances and of course the length of individual telomeres. Death in that sense was not so much conquered but tamed to be not so greedy and allow people a reasonable time to be alive.
As a longer life span became the norm, it rapidly became not long enough to make your mark before oblivion. With the death of a belief in the afterlife, people no longer looked forward to death after a good long life, which would take you into another phase of existence, because science told them that phase did not exist.
Death has become a threat rather than a possible adventure, to be avoided at all costs and because of this, is often seen as horrific no matter how it occurs. As a result, we rarely talk about it unless it has happened to people who cannot be connected to ourselves. Like murder, there is a fascination about how people die and what control over death is possible, especially our own.
It seems that having got rid of God, we now have no choice but to try and live forever.