Dying

Facing the Facts

Hannelore Wass, Robert A. Neimeyer, Hannelore Wass, Robert A. Neimeyer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781560322863
• eBook ISBN: 9781317763635
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This work provides an up-to-date examination of the ways people face dying and bereavement. In this third edition previous chapters are throrughly revised, and new contributors expand areas that have changed significantly.

Reflecting the field's complex interdisciplinary character, the chapters cover such diverse areas as psychology, nursing, medicine, AIDS, family studies, sociology, education, philosophy, law, religion, the humanities and political science, whilst highlighting thanatology's core psychological and therapeutic caregiving dimensions.

First, the text offers broad examinations of death systems from the vantage points of various cultural, historical and disciplinary perspectives.

The second section represents the core of the book, offering detailed surveys of the "data" of death, dying and bereavement as they relate to different phases of our encounter with death as an abstract possibility and concrete reality.

Next are chapters addressing a cluster of death-related issues and challenges that confront us at both a societal and individual level - such as AIDS - and finally the volume closes with a few reflections on the complexity of contemporary thanatology, framing some issues and recommendations that deserve greater attention by scholars, researchers, policy makers and practitioners. Also included is a comprehensive resource bibliography on the topic.

This text is intended to be of use as a resource for all those interested in reading about death studies, both professionals and students alike.

Part One

Contexts and Perspectives

Chapter 1

Death and Politics: A Psychosocial Perspective

Michael C. Kearl

Underlying the kaleidoscope of death perspectives presented in this book are hints of a multidisciplinary core. Indeed, into the family of deterministic theories in the social sciences—those paradigms that feature some central force underlying the human condition, such as sociobiology in biology, psychoanalytic theory in psychology, communications and transportation determinism in technology studies, and materialism in sociology and anthropology—has arrived thanatology, perhaps the most unifying of the lot.

For thanatologists, the roots of civilization are bound up with humans’ first awareness of their own mortality. With social evolution, we learned that death was the fate of not just individual life forms, but of entire species and genuses. We learned that the passage from existence to nonexistence was not the fate of just life, but also of mountains, planets, stars, galaxies, and, according to the Big Bang eschatology, eventually the entire universe. This appreciation of the prospect of meaningless nothingness was to motivate only the human animal. And the essence of this motivation was to be like no other: transcendence.

Each academic discipline has broken down death into various constituent parts. For instance, philosophers consider the distinctive fears of meaninglessness, self-extinction, extinction with insignificance, and incompleteness. Psychologists have broken down the dying process into the experiences of pain; fears of the unknown; regret; and, of course, the emotional stages of Kübler-Ross. They have broken down the bereavement experience into phases of grief work. Among disciplines focusing on death on a societal or cultural level, one research tradition has been to determine how social systems themselves break down death into distinctive dreads. For instance, one may investigate how religions mold death anxiety into fear of agonizing hell or undesirable reincarnation as a means of obtaining moral obedience or how secularization and the rise of contemporary medicine have shifted cultural death anxiety from fear of postmortem judgment to fear of the dying process. As will be developed, how these anxieties are focused determines, at the individual level, the nature of the rituals people use to manage them; at the social level, the distribution of power; and at the cultural level, the nature of the death ethos.

For thanatologists in these more macroscopically oriented disciplines, there were many lessons to be learned during the spring of 1993: the burning of the Waco, Texas, compound of the Branch Davidian cult; the dedication of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC; and heated Congressional debates over whether the United States should intervene in the civil war in former Yugoslavia, whether women should serve in military combat roles, and whether there should be a federal health care system. Although these events were apparently coincidental, what they were publicly dramatizing was the ascendency of civil religion over all matters of life and death. In Waco, the state reaffirmed its monopoly over legitimate violence. In Washington, DC, the state demonstrated its power to rescue from oblivion the memories of the millions politically selected to die. And in Congress, the state determined the degree that premature deaths would occur due to combat and disease.

Well over half the federal budget is devoted to

• Refining the instruments of death (e.g., the military),

• Preventing death (e.g., environmental control and cleanup, and paying for nearly one third of the nation’s health care bill), and

• Assisting those most likely to die (between the 1960s and 1980s, the portion of the federal budget spent on those 65 or older increased from 15% to 28%, and 25–35% of Medicare expenditures go to the 5–6% of enrollees who die during the year [Callahan, 1987].

This ascendancy of the state as the most powerful social agency against death has a host of implications. For thanatological determinists, political structures of power are seen ultimately to be collective efforts to control death, either unleashing it against our enemies or harnessing it at home. With modernization, most premature death occurs because of man-made (hence avoidable) causes. Concurrently, and not unrelatedly, modern political regimes have become the social institution providing the cultural rituals related to death control and death transcendence. It is not so much Eisenhower’s military–industrial complex, but rather a medical–military–industrial complex, that has evolved as the skeletal structure of the social organism. During the 1980s, military and health care employment were the major sources of job growth in the United States, creating one in four new jobs (Greenhouse, 1993). As will be argued, political systems are replacing religions as the mechanism by which death beliefs and fears are shaped and used for social control.

A PARADIGM FOR A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH

People’s ideas and fears of death are not innate but rather are learned from their social and cultural environments. Thus to study such matters as the psychology of dying or grief separate from individuals’ social, cultural, and historical contexts is analogous to conducting an ethological study in a zoo. The resultant agenda for some of the more sociologically inclined social psychologists and historians has been to map the influences of separate institutions (e.g., religion, the mass media, families, and the military) on individuals’ death-related fears and motivations and to relate historical changes in their relative power to distinctive cultural orientations to death (e.g., Ariès 1974, 1981).

Extreme among these researchers are the thanatological determinists (i.e., Bauman, 1992; Becker, 1973; Harrington, 1977; Kearl, 1989) who argue that social power concentrates in the institution that is best able to harness death’s power ritually. Such harnessing occurs through giving meaning to death’s occurrence, reminding individuals of their mortality, helping them to outlive their contemporaries, and providing opportunities for transcendence over death.

Death and the Problem of Meaning

Arguably, the central accomplishment of any culture is its capacity to give symbolic order and meaning to human mortality. A culture’s death system (Kastenbaum & Aisenberg, 1972) or death ethos (Geertz, 1973) strongly conditions the behaviors of the living. It determines such widely ranging phenomena as a people’s militancy and suicide rate, their willingness to take risks, their fears of or hopes for reincarnation and resurrection, their willingness to receive organ transplants or to purchase life insurance, their preference for burial or cremation, their attitudes toward capital punishment and abortion, and their conceptualizations of good deaths. So great is the power of an ethos—the construction of meaning erected against the terror of death—that various social agencies seek to harness its energy as a method of social control.

Canetti asked, “How many people will find it worth while living once they don’t have to die?” (cited by Bauman, 1992, p. 6). The power of death derives, in part, from that fact that it is a catalyst that, when put into contact with any cultural order, precipitates out the central beliefs and concerns of a people. Experimental demonstrations of this cultural chemistry come from tests of Becker’s (1973) thesis that death anxiety intensifies allegiance to moral codes. Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Lyon (1989) found that when reminded of their mortality, people reacted more harshly toward moral transgressors and became more favorably disposed to those who upheld their values. In one experiment (Greenberg et al., 1990), for instance, 22 municipal judges were given a battery of psychological tests. In the experimental group, 11 judges were told to write about their own death, including what happens physically and what emotions are evoked when they think about it. When asked to set bond for a prostitute on the basis of a case brief, those who had thought about their death set an average bond of $455, whereas the average bond set by the control group, who had not been asked to write about their own death, was $50. The authors concluded that when awareness of death is increased, in-group solidarity intensifies, out-groups become more despised, and prejudice and religious extremism escalate. It is for this reason that regimes attempt to monopolize collective death awareness and to focus its energies toward political ends; examples are Hussein’s coverage of civilian casualties during the Persian Gulf War and the United States’s and former Soviet Union’s development of military–industrial complexes during the Cold War, when fear of nuclear annihilation was great (e.g., Boyer, 1985). Any breech in this monopoly, such as the martyrization of antiregime victims in Northern Ireland and South Africa, portends political change.

Being Forced To Think Unwanted Thoughts and the Power of Disgust

It was a result of having been routinely forced to contemplate their own mortality that our ancestors were, indeed, a more moralistic lot than we. Death’s omnipresence forced them to come to terms with their inevitable limits. Theirs were generations of character, the products of pain and tragedy. But as death, at least death due to natural causes, began to recede from everyday life (Ariès, 1974), there arose during the 20th century the coinciding processes of heightened individualism, featuring excessive narcissism (Lasch, 1979); the self-esteem and selffulfillment movements; sexual licentiousness; pornographic death (Gorer, 1955/1965); and moral relativism (Rigney & Kearl, 1994). Although the causal role of death’s changing character in these cultural phenomena remains a matter of debate, their cognitive correlations within Americans’ minds is an empirical fact (Kearl & Harris, 1981–82).

Wegner (1989) experimentally demonstrated that telling people not to think certain thoughts resulted in their becoming obsessed with these thoughts. Undoubtedly, death’s contemporary status as a taboo topic for everyday discourse relates to Americans’ appetite for violence and pornographic death. But what about forcing individuals to think unwanted thoughts—the thoughts that they are not the center of the universe, but rather powerless and insignificant beings; that their contributions are basically meaningless in the total scheme of things; and that their fate is only death? What power accrues to those individuals or institutions that bring up these unwanted thoughts?

In describing the nature of the sacred that “communifies” or attracts individuals into groups, Bataille (1938/1988) argued that the essence of the force is that which disgusts:

The social nucleus is, in fact, taboo … untouchable and unspeakable; from the outset it partakes of the nature of corpses, menstrual blood, pariahs…. Early human beings were brought together by disgust and by common terror, by an insurmountable horror focused precisely on what originally was the central attraction to their union, (p. 106)

These repulsive aspects of the sacred, responsible for the very origin of culture, Bataille argued, are denied by contemporary society. On this point, Bataille is partially wrong, as evidenced by the dedication of the Holocaust Museum in the United States, the collective memories triggered by newsreel footage of the concentration camp liberations and of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the evening news coverage of starvation in Somalia and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. The lesson given is that disgusting death now typically occurs because of political, not natural, reasons.

The Bonding Power of Death

It is for the reasons above that death has the ritual power that it does and funerals and ritual sacrifices are nearly universal practices. Of all phenomena, death most demands attention, ripping individuals out of their everyday, automatic routines. As Blauner (1966) noted, death’s sword is double-edged: “The very sharpness of its disintegrating potential demands adaptations that can bring higher levels of cohesion and continuity” (p. 394).

Nowhere is death’s power to invigorate life greater than during war. Reflecting on his experiences as a journalist at the front in World War II, Andy Rooney observed that people normally live at 50% and only in war does that experience total 100% (ABC News, 1987). As described by Captain John Early, a former Rhodesian mercenary who served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam,

This is really going to sound strange, but there’s a love relationship that is nurtured in combat because the man next to you—you’re depending on him for the most important thing you have, your life, and if he lets you down you’re either maimed or killed. If you make a mistake the same thing happens to him, so the bond of trust has to be extremely close, and I’d say this bond is stronger than almost anything, with the exception of parent and child. It’s a hell of a lot stronger than man and wife—your life is in his hands, you trust that person with the most valuable thing you have. (Dyer, 1985, p. 104)

Capitalizing on the Desire To Survive Contemporaries

Beyond death’s challenge to the meaning of life and its ability to bring together individuals, an additional social psychological assumption entails the morbid satisfactions derived when death comes to others. As Canetti (1960/1973) noted, “The moment of survival is the moment of power” (p. 227). Others’ deaths give meaning to our own success, evidence of our progress in our quest for immortality, and feelings of superiority. “The desire for a long life which plays such a large part in most cultures really means that most people want to survive their contemporaries” (Canetti,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• PART I Contexts and Perspectives
• Part II Data: The Facts of Death and Dying
• Part III Issues and Challenges
• Index