The meaning of death

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In the Western world death has – with the progress of medicine and the improvement of healthcare – retreated from the private sphere. Death isn’t something most of us have to deal with as much as we would have done 100 or 200 years ago. Death in childbirth; from the common cold; from tuberculosis; from complications arising from minor injuries; from surgery without anesthetic or antiseptic – have all, with the occasional exception, disappeared from our everyday lives.

As death continues to retreat from our personal lives it has erupted into the public sphere – death is in every newspaper and every news broadcast – celebrity death (now as important for magazines as celebrity marriage and divorce); war death (civilian and military); disaster death; disease death; social death (drugs, knife crime, child neglect); economic death (Woolworths).

Death is all around us – and so the feeling grows – the feeling, the fear of death. Despite an average life expectancy of 79.4 (according to a 2006 report from the UN) – putting the UK at number 22 out of 191 countries – death is never far from our minds. In November 2008 Alan Johnson, then health secretary, announced the introduction of ‘top up care’ into the NHS – meaning that patients can now pay for extra treatment not approved by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) without losing their entitlement to standard NHS treatment. Leaving aside the debate over what this means for the future of the NHS – we can say that this is an example of the belief in the right of life at any cost – bypassing the complex cost-benefit analysis employed by the experts at NICE.

A similar argument is being played out on the subject of euthanasia, where there is a significant lobby from either side – the essentials of which are the sacrosanctity of life versus the possibility of dignity in death and an acknowledgement of the bond between life and death. This is not something to discuss in great detail here but represents an example of two fundamental positions on the nature of death in society.

If it’s not bureaucratic NHS fascists who are threatening our right to life, there are other more sinister monsters lurking – asylum seekers, young people, swine flu, serial killers, cigarettes, gangsters, illegal music downloaders and terrorists. The recent sentencing of a white supremacist has been followed by reports that the potential pool of terrorists is widening. Soon we’re going to have worry about Daily Mail reading terrorists bombing energy-saving light bulb factories, or Guardianistas attacking customers as they leave Iceland laden with bags of battery-farmed chicken nuggets.

Life is tough, and death (or at least the thought of it) is ever-present in modern Britain. But perhaps our prurient, fearful, obsession with death results in a negation – a perversion of life. To experience death as existing outside of life – as Other – leads to an inability to accept and to live life in its totality. It results in alienation and fear of fellow human beings and a breakdown in social cohesion. The Hobbesian notion of the war of all against all –the state of nature – asserts itself – a bitter self-fulfilling prophecy that affirms only one thing – the need of a loose collection of terrified, atomised individuals to be held together by the conciliatory hand of a benevolent state.