How do we celebrate the virtues of dead loved ones in a secular age? | Jeff Sparrow

The Enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico argued that culture began with funerary rites.

“Humanitas in Latin,” he said, “comes first and properly from humando, burying.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since my father passed away in September last year. His death, which came peacefully in his sleep, was unexpected – but then all deaths, even those we’re anticipating, arrive as a surprise, if only because of their shocking irrevocability.

“No, no, no life?” cries Lear, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life/
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more/
Never, never, never, never, never.”

My family arranged a secular service for my father: one that, I hope, did some justice to the memory of a loving and kind man. But throughout the whole awful process I found myself wondering at the scantiness of the cultural resources available at such a basic human moment.

Think, for instance, of the eulogy that forms the centrepiece of the traditional funeral. By custom, it follows a tripartite structure: first, you celebrate the dead person’s virtues; second, you lament their loss; third, you affirm your hope in their eternal life.

All the elements feel, today, oddly out of joint.

Most obviously, heaven – at least as once understood – no longer really exists, now that a kind of weak atheism prevails as the unspoken theological default. Even among the pious, the afterlife has faded and blurred, with the major faiths restructured along secular lines and experienced by most people as a cultural affiliation rather than an engagement with something fundamentally Other.

Compare Philippe Ariès’ classic description of death during the Middle Ages in Europe, a process, he says, governed by intricate rituals that implicated the whole community.

Ideally, the ailing person acknowledged the imminence of their passing, and then began farewelling family, friends and even enemies, settling old grievances and granting pardons in an elaborate ceremony of mutual forgiveness. A deathbed meant communal prayers but also eating, drinking, music and games. Nothing separated religion from daily routine; the porous boundaries between the ordinary and the miraculous enabled faith to shape how men and women laboured, how they loved and how they celebrated – and then guide them through their encounter with death.

The historian Brandy Schillace notes that, bizarre as it seems to us, “most people hoped to be spared a quick death, as it prevented them from preparing for the end financially, socially and spiritually.”

It’s not possible – and nor is it desirable – to return to a premodern era (in which, we should note, the life expectancy stood at about 30). Nevertheless, we can acknowledge that the victories won by science over superstition and disease involve a certain collateral damage, which becomes particularly apparent at the death of a loved one.

Whether we’re atheists or whether we’re believers, we trust now in doctors and hospitals rather than priests and rituals, with eternity, even for the faithful, a concept banished to the specific field known as “religion”, a ground marked off as fundamentally distinct from daily life.

“For many men,” says John Updike, “work is the effective religion, a ritual occupation and inflexible orientation which permits them to imagine that the problem of their personal death has been solved” – and one suspects that’s true even for churchgoers.

The corrosion, not merely of belief, but of the collective ceremonies that belief once animated deprives us of the vocabulary with which, in the second part of the traditional eulogy, we’re invited to express our sorrow.

How often, today, do we rehearse the cadence and rhetoric of public emotion? Many – if not most – people arrive at the most significant events of their lives (weddings as well as funerals) with no experience of ceremonial oratory, and, not surprisingly, find themselves, in a moment they want with all their heart to be special, scrabbling through dead phrases and snatches of poems half-remembered from movies and TV.

Like Flaubert, we long for music that will melt the stars but instead make do with the cracked kettle of cliché and hand-me-down sentiment, so that our joy and our grief sounds, even to ourselves, oddly distant and insincere.

That difficulty pertains also to the first aspect of the eulogy: the celebration of virtue.

For what, today, does virtue mean? What values do we collectively honour, when the governing philosophy begins and ends with “buy low and sell high”?

In the past, we took our concept of the good life from religion – or, perhaps, from the social movements that created a secular morality and thus gave their members the purpose and meaning that a dying God could no longer provide (think of Henry Lawson’s short story “The Union Buries Its Dead”). But, like the churches, the great causes of the 20th century exist only as faint shadows of themselves, stripped of the emotional power they once possessed.

One doesn’t have to be a radical to acknowledge – in this, the year of Donald Trump – the spiritual impoverishment of late capitalism. Back in 1970, the pioneer neoconservative Irving Kristol noted the market’s tendency to corrode all social virtues – a tendency that, over the past half century, has become infinitely more pronounced.

In 2017, everyone understands that, if you want to succeed in public life, an overly developed conscience counts as a liability rather than an asset (hence the almost universal contempt in which politicians are held throughout the industrialised world).

Obviously, we all know good people – I am confident my father was one – but we recognise them despite, and not because of, the social order in which we live. As a result, it’s strangely difficult to celebrate their goodness, other than by cataloging a string of prosaic qualities, rather as one might complete the profile for an online dating service.

Of course, the deceased do not care what we say about them or, indeed, how we mark their passing. But that doesn’t make our rituals less important.

“[T]he awareness of death,” writes Robert Pogue Harrison in his Dominion of the Dead, “that defines human nature is inseparable from – indeed it arises from – our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead.”

My father is gone, and no one can bring him back. But, precisely because we’re not self authored, our relationship with the dead reflects the relationships between the living: the way we order and govern our society.

And that, at least, we can change.