Mortals (Rachel and Ross Menzies)
OVERVIEW
Humans have an extraordinary capacity to look forward and plan for harmful potentialities. This is the power of our reflective consciousness. But it comes with a curse. If we are capable of seeing the paths ahead of us, perhaps better than any species that has ever lived on our planet, at some point we must realise where all paths are leading – to the grave.
Children begin to understand the irreversibility of death around age four. By age ten, they have a mature understanding – they comprehend that death only happens to living things and that all living things eventually die. The next short step is, of course, the understanding that you are a living thing and therefore that you will die. The existential terror this inspires is called death anxiety, and we have devised many ways to placate it. The character and consequences of these placations are the subject of “Mortals: How The Fear of Death Shaped Human Society” by father/daughter team Ross and Rachel Menzies.
While you may think that you don’t suffer from death anxiety (you do), or that death anxiety doesn’t influence your behaviour (it does), the truth is that our dread of death affects everything. Death anxiety impacts your relationships, the number of children you have, how fast you drive, how much you exercise, and the God you pray to. Remind people they’re going to die, and you can change everything from the amount of sunscreen they wear to their beliefs about immigrants and minorities.
The prospect of personal extinction lingering on the fringes of consciousness has the power to make or unmake our world. So, how do we manage death anxiety? Mostly denial, but you’d be surprised how many cakes you can bake with that one ingredient.
Religion – the most obvious way to buffer death anxiety is to be convinced that death isn’t real. Religion is the appeal to literal immortality. Four billion of us believe that we will live on after death, our religious texts and beliefs assuring us of our special place in the universe. But magical thinking has been costly. While the historical fallout of religious wars, prosecution, and subjugation needs no pointing out, our present-day religiosity continues to contribute to worldly suffering. Religious thinking restricts access to contraception and medical care, allows corruption and abuse to go unchecked, creates castes, martyrs, and division. All of this in a bid to escape existential anxiety.
Culture – but before the non-believers among us begin to feel too self-satisfied, society itself is one giant shield against death anxiety. Culture provides us the means to achieve symbolic immortality (as Rachel and Ross say, we are apes with symbols). “Our shared cultural worldviews give us a sense of meaning in a meaningless world. Clinging desperately to government, educational and religious systems and rituals offered by our culture distracts us from our insignificance and creates the illusion of eternity. When we buy into our culture, we become part of something greater than ourselves.” Hundreds of psychological experiments show the same thing: remind people of their mortality and they cling more tightly to their cultural worldviews. Remind people they are going to die and you can get them to buy more stuff, aggressively defend their political parties, or exact heavy fines/punishments on those breaking cultural norms. Death reminders also inflame in-group/out-group thinking, exacerbating xenophobia. Culture is the fortress we have built to keep out feelings of vulnerability and insignificance in the face of a fragile and finite life.
Legacy – diving a little deeper, how exactly does culture provide the infrastructure for symbolic immortality? Culture offers us the potential for legacy. We support the construction of new hospital wings, purchase park benches, name streets, buildings, and new discoveries after ourselves, paint pictures, plant trees, compose music, write novels, or seek to live on through our good deeds and children. Leaving our mark on the world, a lasting reminder that I was here, softens the pain of mortality – it lets us believe we won’t totally be erased in death. While most modern immortality projects may be benign (historical projects, like the pyramids built by thousands of slaves, necessarily excluded), they aren’t always. When the drive to live on contributes to overconsumption and exploitation of finite resources (as it might in our present-day desire to have children), legacy works as an antagonist to the survival of our species. And, if we’re honest, we don’t really live on. A placard in the Sports Hall of Fame is not real immortality, nor is a book, a painting, or a gene, and precious few are remembered even a hundred years after their death.
Self-esteem – nevertheless, both religious and cultural worldviews are safety blankets that assure us of our importance and specialness. Our mortality makes us cling to them to reduce the feelings of vulnerability and meaninglessness we might otherwise feel. The prospect of death also makes us grab for self-esteem, the overall sense of our value and worth. “By convincing ourselves that we are people of tremendous worth, we escape our real insignificance in the face of mortality.” If you think tanned skin makes you attractive, you’ll tan more after a death reminder; if you think driving fast makes you look cool, you’ll drive faster and more recklessly; and if you think smoking makes you look sophisticated, you’ll smoke more too. The double-edged sword of self-esteem may both protect us from death anxiety while also making us more likely to die. Not only is the security of self-esteem illusory, it’s sometimes life-threatening.
Death drives a variety of other behaviours that are explored in “Mortals,” good and bad. After death reminders, people report a desire for more intimacy, which leads us to invest more deeply in our relationships. However, some studies show that this desire for more intimacy manifests regardless of how our partners treat us. Our need for belonging in the face of death can be a blessing or a curse. Our inability to deal with the dread of death also spurs us to try and cheat it. While grabbing a gym membership or eating healthy are often viewed favourably, wasting our money on useless vitamins or futile health interventions is not. Neither is the outrageous amount of money spent trying to preserve ourselves using cryonics, or pour funds into solving how we might upload our consciousness to the cloud.
“Mortals” also contains an illuminating chapter on how death anxiety underlies some of our biggest mental health issues. In a survey of 200 people who were seeking treatment for a mental illness, death anxiety significantly predicted every single marker of mental health that was measured. The more death anxiety, the more medications you were likely to be taking and the more times you had been hospitalized for mental illness. Death anxiety was also predictive of overall levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. How much death anxiety you had could tell the researchers how severe your addiction to alcohol was, how much you worried about social judgement, or how dissatisfied you felt with your body. “Out of the twelve disorders that we looked at, every single one showed this strong relationship between death anxiety and the severity of symptoms.” Knowing someone’s level of death anxiety gave the researchers more information about their mental health than any other variable. The worm at the core of mental illness may be our dread of death.
Live like a Stoic
Death anxiety may have kept our species alive, but our denial of it has also led to incalculable harm. It drives religious conflict, in-group/out-group thinking, mental illness, and even male bravado. It makes us cling to our abusers, engage in risky behaviour, and exploit others and the planet in a bid to build a legacy. But there is a healthier way to have a relationship with death, and that’s to put death in its rightful place, as something natural and normal. Rachel and Ross offer that we could all do with a little Stoicism, that ancient philosophical movement that understood death as something neither to be feared nor welcomed but simply accepted. Anxiety, stress, and discomfort manifest only when we desire to control things outside of our control, and the desire not to die has always fit this bill. The proposed solution in “Mortals” is neutral acceptance, a Stoic approach – understanding that while life is worth preserving, the futile attempt to escape death at any cost will always be costly.
Rachel and Ross know this solution may feel unsatisfying, a letdown unbefitting of our special status. They recognize that humans want more than “shit happens – embrace it.” But that’s the rub, friends. It may feel unfair, but our alternate option, death-defying delusion, has left us worse off.
The Menzies leave us with perhaps my favourite quote of all time:
You are a mortal ape and, soon enough, you will be dead. You will not be remembered.
Read that again. You will not be remembered. How does that make you feel? Do you feel sadness, disappointment, maybe fear? I think if you sit with this truth long enough, you’ll find it also feels like freedom.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Check your death anxiety
Death reminders are everywhere – on the news, in our movies and TV shows, even on our daily drives past the local cemetery. Knowing the ways these death reminders may influence our beliefs and behaviour can empower us to be on guard. Be sensitive to those times you find yourself trying to inflate your ego and impress others, or when you feel “us vs. them” resentment brewing. Do you really need those vitamins and that third yoga mat, or are you just feeling extra mortal today? Is your local politician using death reminders to push their anti-immigration agenda, or gain support for a war effort? Is your local gym or church trying to sell you a way to cheat death?
In the same way that learning how we’re all prone to the bystander effect can help save lives, understanding how mortal fear drives our beliefs and behaviours can better our own.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? How death anxiety drives behaviour and shapes society.
Who should read this book? Every mortal ape.