Death: a special report on the inevitable

New Scientist, October 22 2012

Memento mori: it's time we reinvented death

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628872.900-memento-mori-its-time-we-reinvented-death.html

The knowledge that we will die profoundly shapes our lives – but the nature of death itself is elusive and changeable

IT'S said that when a general returned in glory to ancient Rome, he was accompanied in his procession through the streets by a slave whose job it was to remind him that his triumph would not last forever. "Memento mori," the slave whispered into the general's ear: "remember you will die". The story may be apocryphal, but the phrase is now applied to art intended to remind us of our mortality - from the Grim Reaper depicted on a medieval clock to Damien Hirst's bejewelled skull.

As if we needed any reminder. While few of us know exactly when death will come, we all know that eventually it will. It's usual to talk about death overshadowing life, and the passing of loved ones certainly casts a pall over the lives of those who remain behind. But contemplating our own deaths is one of the most powerful forces in our lives for both good and ill (see "Death: Why we should be grateful for it") - driving us to nurture relationships, become entrenched in our beliefs, and construct Ozymandian follies.

In this, we are probably unique. Most (not all, e.g. elephants are a notable exception) animals seem to have hardly any conception of mortality: to them, a dead body is just another object, and the transition between life and death unremarkable. We, on the other hand, tend to treat those who have passed away as "beyond human", rather than "non-human" or even "ex-human". We have developed social behaviours around the treatment of the dead whose complexity far exceeds even our closest living relatives' cursory interest in their fallen comrades. Physical separation of the living from the dead may have been one of the earliest manifestations of social culture (see "Death: The evolution of funerals"); today, the world's cultures commemorate and celebrate death in ways ranging from solemn funerals to raucous carnivals.

So you could say that humans invented death - not the fact of it, of course, but its meaning as a life event imbued with cultural and psychological significance. But even after many millennia of cultural development, we don't seem to be sure exactly what it is we've invented. The more we try to pin down the precise nature of death, the more elusive it becomes; and the more elusive it becomes, the more debatable our definitions of it (see "Death: The blurred line between dead and alive").

And those definitions matter, because they are the only way we have of rationalising our otherwise illogical fear of death - a fear that's probably the most widespread phobia on Earth (see "Death: Don't fear the reaper"). Most of us would wish for a peaceful death after a long and well-lived life. Of course, not all of us get our wish. For some, death comes sooner than we would like, and that's one reason to fear it. Only recently has it become commonplace for death to come later than we would like. Death can now be deferred by mechanical and medicinal means for days, weeks, months or years - and that brings with it fears of its own: of impotence, dependency and pain. Nothing in the way our societies are constructed is at all suited to this new situation.

So perhaps it is time for humanity to reinvent death, 3 million years or more after our first intimations of it. Indeed, the job is already underway: the proliferation of new types of death - industrial, vehicular and biochemical - has led to correspondingly complex legal codes. And there are those who seek to redefine death still further, by freezing their heads or replicating their minds outside their bodies - all to reify our long-held notions of passing beyond humanity.

Such projects may seem outlandish. But even for sceptics, the idea of greatly deferring or even defying death outright is worth deep and sincere reflection: in thinking about death, we are also thinking about life.