Death and Magical Thinking

The inevitability and finality of death are facts that no one accepts at first.  Fear of death is instinctual, a heritage of our animal roots.  We knew that fear long before we were advanced enough as a species to be conscious enough to imagine the triumvirate of time.  But now we are conscious and we do know the present, remember the past and can imagine the future, including our own death.

Accepting that image of our own death is another thing. Unlike the colorful scenes that easily form when we contemplate a day at the beach, death imagined is first a dark, formless bruise. Our first reaction is to reject the whole incomprehensible idea--at least for ourselves.  That first rotting corpse or grinning skeleton, is hard evidence indeed that others die, even though our conscious memories of the living person linger.

They also linger less comprehensibly in dreams, as hallucinations and coincidental likenesses glimpsed in a crowd.  From these mental hiccups we draw the comfort of an alternate hypothesis: their spirits live on.  Our spirit must live, too!  Maybe -- with no more flesh to liquefy and bones to turn to dust --  forever!  Maybe we all live on in the company of other souls, and even hobnob with the spirits of forests, seas, rivers, savannas, deserts, mountains, caverns, wind, rain, sun, moon and stars.

So thought our primitive ancestors. These were things to wonder about, perhaps around the fire at night, in a grove of trees dispensing fermented fruit, followed by joyful carryings on and leading to dull aches and dim memories of regrettable excess the morning after (Original gin begets original sin, in the words of Philip Wylie).

In every tribe some told better stories while others were adept at expounding the morals and lessons of right and wrong conduct, reward and punishment, found in the stories.  Beliefs grew from such crude beginnings to become belief systems,  then  full fleshed religions.  Armies of gods grinning behind every thing and event, bush and tree, became hierarchies of spirits on mountaintops that only occasionally walked among men to meddle disastrously in their affairs. 

Then one of the gods became the One God, and other deities his subordinate family, approachable only through prayer but alive to the wants and worship of every person, the fate of every sparrow, especially if properly approached through handy respectful rituals commanded by His priestly interpreters.

Next God stood alone, remote in time and space, architect of the machinery of life and engineer who put it into motion, but left the steering to his natural laws.  We were on our own to choose between good and evil -- until, perhaps, a day of judgement. 

Today, in some learned quarters the seed of life is a singularity and  the Big Bang that expands space/time into a universe fit for life fills in for God.  Scientists have superseded priests and "In the Beginning" is a hot topic of theory and experiment, of chalk board equations, particle accelerators and a full spectrum of telescopes on earth and in space.  (Only the old laws of right conduct, separated as Jefferson did, from the fables, remain eternally relevant and surprisingly uniform across the boundaries of major faiths.)

Like the evolving varieties of life itself, new more sophisticated ways of describing our origins coexist with all the old ones.  Old beliefs persist out of ignorance, but not only for that reason.  Evolution without purpose, a throw of the dice in the service of mere survival and leading to nothing but memories in the dwindling minds of the living, is as cold as the void of space and even less acceptable.

Where is the comfort in that? The stories we prefer to tell  have happy endings.    Better a tribal myth to ease the passage from being to nothingness.  My father, who died at 85, said it succinctly and by his lights did it best: "I have lived here long enough.  I want to join Bess."  My mother had died two years before.  He refused treatment, quit eating and drinking and died in days, happy to join her for all imagined eternity.

But tribal myths conflict and thus cannot all be true.  And when we are not slaughtering each other to settle which religion is the one true faith, we consider uneasily the possibility that none of them are.  As scientific thinking catches on, and the old magical feelings lose their hold, an increasing strata of humankind bows to the evidence and faces even death without superstitious denial -- if not without most of the old fear and a residue of incredulity (Me?  Die? Not me!  Well, maybe.). 

For the great mass of humankind  science, too, is magic, as incomprehensible as a lightening strike or a rainbow to our prehistoric predecessors.  For most folks today a quadratic equation is as much mumbo jumbo as a Latin mass, while a hydrogen bomb is uncomfortably akin to Armageddon and an astronaut of equal awe as an angel.  The more science dispels magic and mystery from its ancient places, the more it seems that our popular culture peoples our imagined world with voodoo and vampires.  The science fiction of imagined futures regresses into unscientific fantasies of seers and shamans, dragons and potions.  Evidence of scientific accomplishment is seen as proof of a wide ranging conspiracy ("Those moon landings were faked!  In Area 51!").

Okay, you're convinced.  The fact and fear of death is the root cause of magical thinking.  Alcohol numbs the fear, then causes the hangover that engenders guilt, which turns magic into religion and lets the priesthood twist fear and guilt to their power hungry advantage.  But why, why must we die?  What is the reason for death and how do we go about eliminating it?

Death is the inevitable result of sexual reproduction.  The only form of life that is even theoretically immortal is the single celled creature that replicates by division as the cells in our body do.  Life forms proliferate by  evolution.  Evolution in turn is fueled by accidental mutations of the genetic code winnowed by natural selection.  Only mutations that convey an advantage compete, win and survive.

Advantage for what?  For -- and only for -- reproduction.  Afflictions that lead to death by disadvantage in the struggle for life only after a species normal reproductive time span has passed will persist because they can.  Nothing gets rid of them.  Prostate cancer, for example, can kill you but usually only after you are a grandfather. 

Why then did sexual reproduction evolve? Why did nature equip us with a sex life?  If you suspect that it was not out of the goodness of nature's heart, you are right.  In essence it is because two sets of genes, one from each sexual partner, is better for the species than the one with which the amoeba must make do.  The doubled variety means that your offspring are more flexibly equipped to respond to and survive the contingencies of life, be they new predators, parasites or climate swings.

But once you can no longer conceive or carry a child nature is done with you.  Nature's insults to the body continue and accumulate.   Late blooming harmful mutations passed on from your parents express themselves in ways that weakens your immune and other systems and organs.  A cascade of bodily failures ultimately robs life from even the most hardy of us.

A gloomy picture, but not entirely so.  While far from eliminating death, we have lately found ways to postpone it, to lengthen life and improve the quality of the life we live.  Life expectancy has nearly doubled in the span of today's elderly, mostly because more children and mothers survive the trauma of birth and children born alive overwhelmingly make it to maturity.  The age at which the elderly die has improved also, but more importantly, more of us stay active and reasonably healthy much longer.

These advances did not not come from prayer or any other form of magical thinking, but from the application of logical thought and scientific method.  No amount of fantasizing will put rotting flesh back on bones that crumble into dust at a touch and breath life into the assembly.  But patient application of the scientific method has the potential to perpetuate our species and enhance our ever longer lives to a degree as limitless as the stars.

Who needs magical thinking?  Not me.  No now. Not ever. To hell with it. I'd rather die.