Death the great Leveller

 

There are so many places in our cultures where the idea of 'equality in death' is used. You hear it in songs:

Landlords and gentry, for all your plenty,

You'll all go empty, where'er you're bound..

You hear it in Shakespeare:

Imperial Caesar, turned to clay,

Will stop a hole to keep the wind away

And you of course hear it in Christian religions (and in plenty of others, for all I know). The picture at the top is the Wenhaston Doom, a magnificent medieval painting in a Suffolk church, showing all the kings and princes going as naked to their judgement as the commoners (although they still have their crowns on so that we know who they are!)

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, if God doesn't take you, the devil must!

Now this consolation of 'equality in death' has always struck me as a bit of a fraud. If we're equal after death, does it balance out inequality in this life? Marx's 'Opium of the masses'? Does it mean we should accept inequality, cruelty, injustice here just because we'll all end up dead?

Any Catholic-raised child will have been encouraged at some point to 'offer it up' or be told that 'worse things happen at sea/ in Africa/in my grandparents' time'. And do sailors/poor African children/your grandparents really want to be used as a human shield for bad behaviour or bad luck? It feels a little bit as though other people's ill-fortune is being used to downgrade your own minor first-world or second-world ill-fortune.

Similarly with death. If you tell people that all the bad things that bad people do to others will be cancelled out by their equality with everyone else in death (and perhaps by the judgment of a Wrathful Lord) isn't that perhaps giving you an excuse for accepting their badness and not trying to establish justice in this world? Opium indeed. There are other ways of looking at the whole Great Leveller thing though, I must admit.

One potentially useful way of using the 'Great Leveller' approach is to encourage people not to get too far up their own arses in what they think of themselves. It's the 'however magnificent you are, you are still going to end up dead' approach, and perhaps some arrogance, self-aggrandisement and bluster could be reduced by pointing out mortality. I remember we were told that in a Roman Emperor's Triumph as they rode through Rome after some great victory, there was a slave behind them who held the laurel wreath over the Emperor's head but repeated the phrase to them, which ChatGPT tells me was “Respice post te! Hominem te memento!” (which apparently means: "Look behind you! Remember that you are [only] a man")

I think another indicator of how remembering our mortality can be a beneficial influence is to look at those in history who fought grimly against mortality. There are a number of tech bro billionaires who put large amounts of funding into 'longevity science', in the can-do belief that if they can master a trillion-dollar social media leviathan they might also have a pop at the man with the scythe, if they put enough money into it. Frankly, from what I see of how much they enjoy life, I don't know why they would bother to extend it, but they are in good company, historically. The first Emperor of a united China, Qin Shi Huang, was obsessed with overcoming death even 2200 years ago, and I see his alchemists, who tried to find the pill of immortality for him, as the direct ancestors of the 'longevity researchers' who think that cellular manipulation may remove that old burden from someone in Silicon Valley.

But as you may have gathered from other posts in this blog, I have no truck with immortality whether physical or spiritual. It seems a terrible distraction from this mortal coil, which has so much enjoyment and potential and reality and interest in it. Focusing on something (that time after death), of which I believe I will have absolutely zero knowledge, seems a big distraction from everything that is happening now, with every beat of my heart, every new connection in my neural networks, and every letter that appears now from my taps on this keyboard. 

Rather than focusing on that 'equality of the grave' I would rather encourage people to focus on the equality of us all being alive and having the pleasures and pains of life that we all share in our own distinctive ways. We all breathe and our hearts beat. Most of us can perceive this beautiful world around us and enjoy the thoughts and words and ideas of others (friends, family, writers, whoever). We do share the knowledge that we are mortal, but we also share the joy of being alive, that which we share with all other living things in our world. And rather than the cold equality of an equal grave, why not focus on the warm reality of all those hearts beating all around the world, waiting for something to make your pulse race?