Good Life, Good Death

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Most people aren't so calm in the face of 'mortality salience' -- modern science-speak for the moments when we realize death awaits us. According to studies, pointed reminders of death are more likely to trigger unsavory behaviors, including a puritanical conformism that drives us to defend our worldview and to punish others who threaten it -- if only in our minds. Curiously, an awareness of death also drives us to seek out ways to bolster our self-esteem. Researchers say that even little ways of feeling better about ourselves (like flattery or shopping) are strangely effective in lulling us back into forgetting our ultimate fate.

Some say our efforts to manage the terror of death can be used to explain a range of human activity, from the rise of culture and religion to American patriotic fervor after the attacks on 9/11. As noted by Kate Douglas in New Scientist magazine (Aug 28, 2004), not all researchers buy what is known as 'terror management theory,' or TMT, 'but nobody doubts that we do react in interesting ways when confronted with death.'

Long before Western science got interested, mystics and sages have sought to live well with our mortality, tapping its potential to liberate our better traits while sidestepping its equally potent ability to turn us into rigid creeps. From death anxiety and its contradictions, 'the most sublime, creative, and spiritually uplifting aspects of our nature emerge,' says Daniel Liechty, a theology and peace studies scholar and a professor of social work at Illinois State University, quoted in Science & Spirit (March/April 2005). But that's also from where 'the most primitively reactive, paranoid, and violent aspects of our nature emerge.' The Zen master's equanimity with his fatal disease springs from a centuries-old discipline of clear-eyed gazing at the frightened self's response to its annihilation. And Zen is only one of many traditions, religious and secular, that have sought to teach us how to deal with death.

As the tragic cycle of violence that began with 9/11 enters its fifth year, that event has come to be seen as an entire era's near-death experience. Many would say the result is a world hardened into absolutism, where myopic foreign policy is de rigueur. Instead of encouraging creativity and enlightenment, the fear of death, amplified by the modern media, creates panic as well as political leaders who garner power by promising the kind of psychic safety that only rigid ideology can provide. In other words, we're watching the paradox of death awareness play out on a global scale.

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