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Catholic conservatives frequently say they defend a “culture of life” against a “culture of death” soaked in abortion and euthanasia. (It’s not only Catholics who use these terms, but they’re most popular in Catholic circles, not surprisingly since they originate with former Pope John Paul II.)
The intended rhetorical significance of this phrasing is pretty clear: life good, death bad. But I find myself taking it somewhat differently. The problem with contemporary worldviews, in my books, isn’t that we have a culture of death. The problem is that we don’t have a culture of death, and we should.
All life ends in death. This isn’t news. How, then, could we imagine a culture of life that isn’t a culture of death? We need a culture that enables us to face the inevitable reality of our own deaths and the deaths of our loved ones, and that’s exactly what we don’t have. In our everyday lives we allow ourselves to think that death won’t really happen to us. I think of the generally forgettable movie Practical Magic, which rests on the premise that its leading women suffer from a curse: a man who falls in love with them “will die.” Not die young, not die prematurely; just “he will die,” and this is seen as something horrible. But we all suffer from this curse. We just don’t want to admit it – because we don’t have a culture of death.
Plato said the love of wisdom – philosophy – is the practice of death. We should listen.
Cory Hodge said:
I feel that, in the United States, we have not a “Culture of Death”, but a “Culture of Death-dealing”. We watch the news, we play the games, we watch the movies. Like you said, we don’t believe in our own moralities. We see this Immortality complex in many ways; from the blaring amount of our 18-24 year olds who are uninsured because “they don’t need it” to, even simply, many states requiring people to wear seat belts in cars and helmets on motorcycles because nether is being done.
I could go on more about this and Hollywood’s role in our “culture of Death-dealing” but that would be another entire thing onto itself.
-Cory
Amod said:
I think that’s right, although there are some distinctions to be made. A typical 18-year-old boy’s lack of attention to his mortality, it seems to me, comes from a very different place than a typical 50-year-old’s. The boy thinks he’ll never die and therefore doesn’t have to be cautious; the 50-year-old thinks she’ll never die because she is cautious. But neither has a good grasp of the fact of their mortality.
A few years ago I got a physical that revealed my “good cholesterol” was too low; the prescribed solution was primarily exercise, with modest changes in diet. When I started doing that, the nurse told me “hopefully if you keep this up, you’ll be healthy forever!” I had to laugh. Obviously that’s not true if taken literally; but if she didn’t mean that literally, what could the non-literal meaning of such a claim be? “I’ll love you forever” can mean “I’ll love you until I die”; but if “you’ll be healthy forever” means “you’ll be healthy until you die,” then the surest way to be healthy forever is to die young.
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