Author Archives: wijss

Death Anxiety, Culture, and the Public

Posted on by
Reply

My group’s action project had a lot less to do with political policy and action than other groups. Instead of supporting real campaigns with campaign goals, we were tasked to make a video for the Ernest Becker Foundation introducing Ernest Becker’s work, death anxiety, and what the Ernest Becker Foundation did.

Initially, I found the project to be frustrating because of how limiting it was; as we mentioned in class, we were discouraged from pursuing a more critical lens regarding death anxiety, but we managed to get some in there regardless by having our experts touch on the biases in the research. I also wanted to be able to draw more concretely on what we had learned in class, but incorporating complex ideas would require complex explanations, and there just isn’t time for that in a video that’s meant to be consumable by the public. So instead, our video acted as a sort of survey introduction to the topic of death and death anxiety which did, in fact, raise some issues and/or goals for research on death anxiety in the future.

The aim of our video, in essence, was to get people thinking about the ways they thought about death and how that might be related to other cultural outcomes. The questions we asked our student-interviewees reflected this in particular (How often do you think about death? What do you feel when you think about death? How do people’s feelings about death impact our culture and broader society?). We were really surprised with how reflective students seemed to be in response to this question, and it gave us a bit more hope for the future.

The student interviewees’ responses, though, are symbolic of some of the goals that a video like this has. While there is no guarantee that this video will reach more than a handful of people, our video might encourage them to reflect on their own experiences with death and death anxiety to recognize the detriment it causes in their own life. Hopefully, as a result, they would engage in more compassionate behavior and reject cultural frameworks that perpetuate harm, slowly building towards a more equitable, just, and safe future.

“I thought death would smell worse”: How Death has Crawled into Every Crevice of Society… and my Attic

Posted on by
Reply

One of the main takeaways I got from this course is that death lives everywhere in society; if we take Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker at face-value, everything we do, whether directly or indirectly, is to manage our own death anxiety. When I first heard that, it seemed a little convenient. Of course something that all humans experience was at the root of all our social, political, and environmental problems.

However, upon reflecting more upon the ways that death has influenced my own life—from trying to be remembered, to “doing good,” and more—I recognize that, in someways, it makes a lot of sense. Death has invaded pretty much every aspect of human life. And then, it invaded my attic.

I always thought I’d be able to tell if something had died in my house; if not by sight, then by smell. I never thought I’d spend more than three months living under death—and before you freak out and think there’s a dead body in the attic, there’s not—but, it seems like, similar to the way death operates in our society, it’s actually pretty easy to live under death if you have no idea it’s there. Until, of course, things start going wrong.

My roommate got severely ill almost a month ago, and it became clear that something in the house was causing it. She hired a mold inspector and, upon our exploring our attic, he found something that was admittedly much worse than mold. The wet spot on her ceiling wasn’t a water leak, and he didn’t think it was mold, either. No, he thought it was rodent urine. There were rat and squirrel nests in the attic. And carcasses. So. Many. Carcasses.

Immediately, he told us to be on the lookout for any kind of symptoms for illnesses we struggled to say and/or spell—oh, and ammonia poisoning. Leave the house if you get a headache. With one trip to the attic, it felt like our house had crumbled around us. We realized that this space that we had started to make a home could be killing us.

In the same ways that talking about death anxiety altered the way I view the world and those around me, the rat carcasses altered the way my roommates and I saw our home. We were no longer safe, and everywhere we looked we saw death.

Manhattan Wildlife Stock Illustration - Download Image Now - Rat, Cartoon, Death - iStock

Alternative Contemplation: How I Found my Expanse

Posted on by
Reply

Some of my most robust contemplative practices occur outside the fold of the ordinary, particularly through mediums of art.

After watching Journey of the Universe, I felt an idea crop up linking to a line in Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” (We saw to the edge of all there is—/so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back) that sat at the borders of my mind like a thread I couldn’t grab hold of. So I started painting. The painting I created features a disembodied person with stark outlines, with color fading beyond the shape of a person. The same is true for Earth, and both Earth and the person bleed into deep black, flecked with stars: the Universe. This painting is a reflection of my own feeling of expanse, which I was the emotion/feeling I named after watching Journey of the Universe.

To me, it blurs the lines of distinction between “us” and “the universe,” but I didn’t set out to portray that meaning when I picked up my paint brush. I had to excavate my own feelings about both the film and the poem through a different medium before I could interpret what this feeling of “expanse” meant.

While not facilitated during our class time, this contemplative practice helped identify some of the thematic content I was struggling to contend with. I believe the distinction between humans, non-humans, the Earth, and the universe, is overstated; if we are all made of stardust, the distinctions between “us” and an “other” (regardless of what form that might take) become irrelevant. The contention between the boundaries our societies impose and my understanding of internal exapnsiveness has caused a great deal of internal conflict for me, which I experience through anxiety or forms of grief.

However, accessing the expanse within myself has offered me inroads to coping with my own fears around worsening global conditions and finding generative perspectives; knowing that the opportunities for know knowledge are so vast that it is impossible to capture them all has redirected where I pour my energy. If our existing lines of inquiry have gotten us this far with various disastrous results, I believe it’s time to open up a new avenue of knowledge—to sacrifice some things we hold as fact—to explore ways of being and existing that were either lost, destroyed, or entirely undiscovered.

Humans, Hubris, and the Anthropocene

Posted on by
Reply

The Worm at the Core touched on how humans have developed systems of culture and domination that suppose to keep us placated in the face of death. One thing that escaped me, though, is how the fear of death inspired such rapid technological innovation (and subsequently spawned a myriad of climactic issues) and why our fear of death does not spawn action in the face of the deadly consequences of climate change.

In a separate course, I am reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. One of the points he makes, which I think applies neatly to this course, concerns the increasing rates of destruction and lack of infrastructure to adjust to climate events linked to climate change (Ghosh specifically talks of Mumbai’s lack of preparedness for cyclones). Ghosh also points out that, while much of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century concerned themselves with dominating nature, we have subsequently made ourselves more vulnerable to the volatility of the climate.

Western, industrialized societies view the Earth and, subsequently nature, as a resource to be mined, extracted, or dominated. The building of dams, destruction of mountains, and filling of lakes represent efforts to change the natural environment for the sake of human advancement at the expense of the natural environment. While we now understand the many scientific processes that cause hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc., we are still wholly unable to stop them or even effectively cope with them. The irony then is that, through the unfettered mining and exploitation of Earth’s resources, we have worsened the conditions we already struggle to cope with. In the quest to become the master of nature, nature has become even more untamable.

I think the emphasis on technology as the primary solution to climate change is hubristic. Already, our attempts to master nature have ended in disaster that harms the people least involved in the creation of the problem. Unchecked economic growth and technological advancement inherently fails to recognize and reflect on how we got to where we are in the first place, and not every society has sought to expel fear of death through the domination of the planet as the West has. We might look towards nations like Ecuador, who established the “rights of nature” in their constitution, recognizing Earth and nature as stakeholders in the conversation surrounding climate change. Substantial, effective change is not possible until this is recognized on a larger scale.

Societies of Fear

Posted on by
Reply

In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, the main character, strains against the cultural restraints of her community that prevent them from recognizing the imminent danger they face from a world ravaged by climate change, societal breakdown, and division. I’ll admit that I am nowhere near done with the book, but the tension between survival and cultural preservation in Parable of the Sower feel ever-relevant to the state of the current global order. Life, it seems, imitates art.

From Parable of the Sower:

All that you touch,

You Change.

 

All that you Change,

Changes you.

 

The only lasting truth

Is Change

 

God

Is Change.

Lauren Olamina struggles against the fact that, when faced with the terror, fear, and imminence of change (and death), her community turns away, refusing to make strides for safety, to prepare for what is inevitable, and to lessen the negative impact it might have. Octavia Butler, then, has taken hold of Terror Management theory and placed it into the future, in a not-at-all-unfeasible circumstance of climate disaster. Butler’s characters in Parable of the Sower are a very real reflection of people of the modern day, but when packaged into fiction, their actions become more outrageous and clearly ignorant.

Yet, we all know the people who turn a blind eye to global crises for fear of what it means to them. In some cases, this is framed in terms of mental health: it is absurdly painful to reconcile with what the future will really look like when it is nothing like what we imagined growing up. There are stories of growing old; of moving across the globe; of finding love, adventure and excitement. At our current state, it is unlikely that my generation will grow old. If we move across the globe, it will be as climate refugees searching for a livable environment. If we find love, adventure, and excitement, it will be in stolen moments where we can find a reprieve from struggling to survive, or it will be in ignorance of the struggles of others. That is not to say that there is no value to finding beauty in what exists in front of us, but it is unsurprising that, when the future looks so bleak, many use a preoccupation with the everyday to excuse inaction and create what is, in effect, a productive paralysis.