The Political Impact of Death: A Reappraisal

The article I wrote twenty years ago, "Death and Democratic Theory: The Political Benefits of Vulnerability" has had a mixed durability (Killilea). I argued then that the burgeoning movement in the United States and elsewhere to take the subject of death out of the closet and to confront our mortality provided a catalyst for political change and for participatory democracy in particular. I saw death, along with the human vulnerability it manifests, as provoking a profound sense of equality and community. I portrayed the debate between revisionists of democracy who conclude that the mass of people are simply not interested in active political involvement and enthusiasts for worker participation in decisions in the workplace. I showed how even strong proponents of greater democracy like C.B. Macpherson were discouraged about finding a starter mechanism that would free people from absorption with consumerism and competition and I suggested that a wider acceptance of death and a sense of limits might provide that mechanism. I argued that death might then be seen "not as something to be denied but as a felix culpa in the human condition that prods people to discover the satisfaction of living in interdependence with nature and their fellow mortals" (Killilea, 283-4).

My thesis seems to me to have been largely valid in theory but misapplied in expected consequences. A highlighting in 1984 of the political significance of peoples' attitudes towards death seems prescient and well founded, given the fact that suicide bombers and other terrorists are now the most challenging new political force in the world today. My earlier concern to expand the possibilities of participatory democracy, on the other hand, now seems impractical, given the extent to which less demanding liberal democracy is reeling under attack from both global corporations and third world jihads (Barber). Hopes for participatory democracy have been overtaken in the west by the more basic need to protect individual freedoms in a war against terrorism. I will try to show in this article that a greater acceptance of our mortality may not achieve participatory democracy but it can be a crucial and saving response to terrorism on a global level and at home can undergird a commitment to the spread of stronger democracy.

Health care changes in the last two decades have forced upon our culture the need to be more candid about death. The vast expansion of the hospice movement and of palliative care units in major hospitals indicates an increasing ability to face the reality that one is dying and to seek comfort rather than cure in a terminal illness. Major funders like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Soros Foundation have supported ambitious projects to make Americans more aware that issues of death and dying need to be faced. An example of this effort is the superb Public Broadcasting System television series with Bill Moyers, “On Our Own Terms.” The preparation of living wills is now commonplace and advanced medical directives are now required with most hospital admissions. We shun death less in the culture, even if we do not yet know what to do with our awkward and usually unsolicited awareness of mortality.

Perhaps the strongest recent force for challenging the denial of death in American culture was, sadly, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center with its toll of 3,000 innocent lives. Amid our shock and plans for revenge, Americans could not help but feel their mutual vulnerability and mortality. These victims were so much like everyone else, with the same hopes and problems, the same varied successes and disappointments, and the same unmerited suffering. We could not hide from the fact that their awful fate could have so easily befallen anyone of us. We have sought to move on and return to our "normal" lives since 9/11. Indeed, within days of this staggering calamity, President Bush implored Americans to go shopping again or our economy would suffer a heavy blow. This reaction to catastrophe, both the popular and the official one, confirms key points in my article two decades ago about death and American commerce. When death was thrust upon us we recoiled from business as usual and sought consolation in the bonds of family and community. But our economy, which requires unceasing growth, could not cope with this respite from acquisition and we had to be urged back to the distraction of the malls and the stadiums. We have gone back to getting and spending, but there is no question that death is a closer companion than before 9/11. This unease is reflected in the consistently high level of apprehension about terrorism national polls have depicted since 9/11. Of course, Americans may be registering a fear of the ubiquitous enemy rather than awareness of mortality but it is likely the former is not distinct from the latter.

The new prominence of death as a political force could not be better portrayed than by the taunt of a terrorist message after the Madrid railway bombing of March 2004: "We will prevail because you fear death and we love death.” This violent romance of death is profoundly destructive and aimed, as all terror is, particularly at civilians. The concept of an assassin embracing death is not new. Machiavelli warned the Prince five hundred years ago against taking people's property because it would lead to hatred and hatred would lead people to put aside basic self interest, even survival, in an attempt to conspire against a Prince. A Prince can prevail against most conspiracies, Machiavelli said, but not against an assassin who does not care about plotting an escape. Against such fury that embraces death, Machiavelli warned that no leader could survive: “Princes cannot escape death if the attempt is made by a fanatic, because anyone who has no fear of death himself can succeed in inflicting it” (Machiavelli, 111). However, Machiavelli dealt with threats against leaders from people deranged by emotion to embrace death, not threats against civilian populations with a goal of undermining entire civilizations.

My earlier article anticipated somewhat the phenomenon of the culture of terrorism in describing the lure of fascism and the boast of Mussolini that fascism was more powerful then liberalism because it eclipsed the individual’s fear of death. "There was much discussion but--what was more important and more sacred--men died. They knew how to die” (Mussolini, 440). I argued that fascists were effective in “identifying as a critical weakness in Lookean liberalism the avoidance of the subject of death and the leaving of the individual to confront death in isolation.” However, I demeaned the ability of fascism to confront death:

If the flaw of liberal social contact theory lies in its exacerbating the individual’s anxiety about death and its inability to expect citizens to risk death for the public good, the fascists’ antidote for this weakness is not to confront death but to obliterate the individual. The theoretical contradictions and racist nonsense of fascism are devoted to lessening one’s fear of death and the sacrifice of life not by looking death in the face but by taking the individual off his lonely and vulnerable pedestal and creating the mythology of perpetual life through the race (287).

Many of these points about fascism and death apply now to terrorists, but the terrorists have added a level of fanaticism unimagined by Mussolini. Terrorism builds on the same dedication, alienation and resentment that fascism does, but its distinctive power today lies in the religious assurances of a hedonistic afterlife for its legions of suicide bombers. My point twenty years ago that fascism’s dependence upon war manifests an effort to “create an illusion of immortality and power over death by delivering death to other people” also applies to the terrorists. But the terrorists go further and belittle death as the final obstacle to glorious rewards for those who die heroically.

Terrorism confirms the central relevance of death to politics. It does not do so by an acceptance of death but really by a new denial of death. Terrorists do not take death seriously, as evidenced by the fact that Osama bin Laden and others could not give a rational explanation for killing civilians and other Muslims except to say unconvincingly that civilians are part of the war effort against the third world. Terrorists portray not only life as cheap and inconsequential but also death as cheap and inconsequential. The response to terror, therefore, must be to reassert the value and reality of both life and death. For both those who believe in an afterlife and those who do not, death must not be seen as irrelevant but as a closure that prompts an appreciation of one’s life and of the bonds between a person and the community that has sustained that person. As much as anything, the denial of death, whether in American or terrorist culture, is a denial of a unique identity and of community bonds.

The discussion in my earlier article of how an acknowledgement of death leads to a deeper appreciation of equality and community seems as appropriate and valid today as it was twenty years ago. I said then that no reminder is as powerful as death of the struggles all people must go through of self-doubt, self-deception, and self-acceptance. Facing death not only forces a person to seek the purpose of life, but to realize that everyone else has to make that same search in coming to grips with mortality. I argued that “such an urgent need of collective insight, criticism, and support in dealing with questions common to all people belies the elitist supposition that people are inevitably most interested in competing for wealth and fame” (Killilea, 290). I agreed with Corlis Lamont that death “dramatically accents the ultimate equality” in our common fate and its universality “reminds us of the essential brotherhood of man that lies beneath all the bitter dissensions and conflicts registered in history and contemporary affairs” (Lamont, 271-2). I concluded that “it is a striking paradox that the awareness of death, which is avoided by so many lest it rob life of meaning, in fact can provide an escape from the banality of compulsive acquisitiveness and can help one to discover the satisfaction and richness of one’s social existence” (Killilea, 291-2).

I believe these central arguments in my article are as true today as they were then and our need to utilize them as a fulcrum for social change is even greater. If America and the west are not only to defend ourselves against terrorism but to attack the root causes that create terrorists we have to countenance vast political changes that depend upon much stronger convictions about equality and community. It has become conventional wisdom to say that we have to substantially diminish our abject dependence on Middle East oil and avoid the propping up of unpopular authoritarian regimes that guarantee that oil. Such a change would require, among other things, an unprecedented seriousness about conserving energy and new attitudes about waste and extravagance. To achieve such a change in lifestyle, we would need to promote cooperative behavior over an enthrallment with competitive acquisition. We would have to accentuate our common needs and goals and thirst for shared achievement rather than individual glory. Even with the deadly challenge posed by terrorists, it is difficult to imagine such a change in consciousness in American culture without a profound appreciation of our mutual mortality and vulnerability.

Thomas Freedman and Benjamin Barber have argued that democracies don’t go to war with other democracies and that peace in flash points like the Middle East requires a commitment by the world’s non-authoritarian powers to promote democracy there and elsewhere in the world. In an Internet interview Barber argues that true democracies are incapable of breeding international terrorism, for terrorism is an

…expression of powerlessness, frustration, desperation, zealousness and extremism of a kind that simply doesn’t evolve inside democratic societies, where people are able to participate in civil society and the economy in legitimate ways (Nauffts).

Barber argues that democracy is the prophylactic that prevents terrorism because it empowers people and therefore “preventive democracy” is much more important than preventive war. Promoting democracy in the third world would have to build upon and dwarf the domestic changes required in America. Barber has extensively described how the independent thought required and fostered by democracy is not necessarily favored by the global corporate culture or capitalism in general. For America and the west truly to propagate democracy among previously deprived and desperate people would demand a sense of mission and commitment that could only build on a brotherhood and sisterhood of mortals. These are almost otherworldly concepts, but at other times so were the concepts of the equality of women or the end to slavery or the end of the cold war. Vast changes are possible when they are supported by ideas, instincts, and economics. It also helps if they are dictated by survival. Unprecedented dangers allow and require unprecedented changes.

My earlier article was written hardly in an age of innocence. At the height of the cold war, the very existence of civilization was vulnerable to nuclear miscalculations or psychoses of the leaders of the two superpowers. Writers like Jonathon Schell worried then that the law of fear could not constrain destructiveness in the absence of human solidarity. That worry still applies to the danger we face today from terrorism. While we arm ourselves against the world-wide threats we face, we must look for ways to establish human solidarity and the equality and community that reinforce solidarity. A greater capacity to confront our common mortality is not the only avenue to this solidarity but it presents a powerful inducement to the scale of personal and societal change that is demanded today. This attitudinal change is now creeping along beneath the radar of government and most commentators. It cannot compete in chiliastic fervor with visions of an afterlife that defy and dismiss death. But right now these visions are dividing the world into the saved and the infidels and are often contradicting their origins by spreading hatred and suffering. Taking death seriously is never easy. Emily Dickinson’s perception remains dominant in our culture:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—(2511)

While it takes remarkable courage to stop for death before it stops for us, it is a choice that issues in freedom and strong connection with other mortals.

Terrorists are seeing to it that death is in the air. Our challenge is not to just try to stomp out the terrorists to make death go away. If we can acknowledge that life is indeed fragile and is sustained by the contributions of countless other people, we will have the motivation and resources to attack the causes of the desperation behind terrorism and to endure the burdens that allow the spread of democracy. My earlier article did not grasp that the next frontier for democracy would not be deepening democratic participation in America, as fondly as we might hope for such a development. A prior and greater need is the spreading of a weaker but still freeing level of representative government to people who do not need to make the acquaintance of death for it has been their constant companion. My previous article was correct in linking the acceptance of our mortality and vulnerability and the theme of democracy. Its final sentence remains a fitting conclusion to this commentary at a point twenty years later when democracy is more imperiled and stopping for death is more prevalent:

If our society were to develop the customs, symbols and other cultural reinforcements to support increasingly larger numbers of people in acknowledging the fragility of their individual existence and the importance and satisfaction in finding community with their fellow mortals, it may not be presumptuous or naïve to anticipate a vastly changed political consciousness and vastly raised hopes for…democracy (Killilea, 297).

Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.
Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. The Norton Introduction to
Literature. Eds. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1998. 2511.
Killilea, Alfred G. “Death and Democratic Theory: The Political Benefit of
Vulnerability”. The Midwest Quarterly, 25:3 (Spring, 1984), 283-297.
Corliss, Lamont. The Illusion of Immortality. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc. 1959
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. London: Penguin Books, 1961.
Mussolini, Benito. “The Doctrine of Fascism”. Social and Political Philosophy.
Eds. John Somerville and Ronald E. Santoni. New York: Anchor Books, 1963. 424-440
Nauffts, Mitch. (20 March 2003) Interview with Benjamin Barber. Philanthropy News
Digest. Retrieved: 26 May 2004 from http://fdncenter.org/pnd/newsmakers/nwsmkr_print.jhtml?id=29100017.