November 15, 2022.

It is the morning of a Tuesday, 10:30 am. I am heading to our class and everything feels so normal. When I entered the classroom, I heard some of my classmates talking about something, some with excitement and some with concern. “We hit 8 billion people tonight”, “That is a new record”….

Fast forward to this week, Most of our readings for last were about how birthrates decline. USA, Spain, Japan, China, Portugal and more, are countries that expect to have a declining population, some even going to half, by the end of the century. According to the Washington Post article, “More Americans say they’re not planning to have a child, new poll says, as U.S. birthrate declines”, Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 were asked how likely it is for them to have kids at some point of their lives. The data made clear that less people wanted to have kids, but that is not what had my attention from the article. In 2018, the most popular answer of why adults without kids do not want to have kids, said that they just don’t have any desire to become parents. In the next research though, that took place on 2021, the most popular answers were medical issues, financial insecurity and lack of partner. That was so surprising to me. Eight billion people on planet earth, and people are still struggling to find a match. How is that possible?

I cannot answer that without referring to the pandemic. All of us felt isolated, feared for the our lives and the lives of our beloved ones. But the pandemic also brought to the surface. We all got a better understanding of climate change, of how vulnerable economies are, the impacts we have to the environment etc. I find a huge correlation to the changes in the responds and the “moments” of clarity that this pandemic gave us. If countries and governments want to find solutions to the birthrate that keeps declining, then they should probably start finding solutions to the actual problems that cause the uncertainty. Some days ago I saw a video about the creation of a “baby factory”, where lab babies will be created and developed in technological advanced wombs. Scientists will be able to interfere with every step of the development and potentially “fix” any anomalies that occur in the dna. With that technology, 30,000 babies will be born every year. That just left me wondering, is that another distraction so we don’t face the real problems?

November 30 – When we were assigned to read an opinion piece today from Crisis Magazine (Human Composting: The Ultimate Denial of the Soul), I was stunned. I thought, “How could our professor ask us to read an article, however thought-provoking, from such a bigoted source?” I know our professor vehemently condemns the queerphobia, misogyny, and racism spouted by the opinion writers for this website, which is why I have such a tough time understanding her purpose for assigning the article.

Perhaps, though, it should be me who is at fault for avoiding far-right viewpoints, and this was an attempt to encourage us to leave our comfort zones and echo chambers. After all, this article wasn’t necessarily spreading bigoted views about marginalized groups, it just happened to be featured on a website that did. Of course, that is an incredibly low bar to clear, and the article does spread harmful (and objectively false) statements about how the Church is the cure for depression, how America is a socialist state, and how abortion providers treat human life as disposable. Still, this begs the question: Is it right to completely devalue all the other valid criticisms of human composting that this article makes?

I imagine this article was placed on our reading list to provide a religious perspective on the “radical” practice of recomposition, and I do appreciate having that. I just cannot help but wonder if there might have been another article we could have been assigned instead, without the conservative nonsense. Yet asking that brings me back to whether it is wrong to avoid these viewpoints, since it is our unfortunate reality that they are held by a vast number of people in our country.

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December 2 – As I wrote the above, unfinished post a few days ago, I found no resolution to my feelings about reading the human composting article. However, when I happened to check the Crisis Magazine website today, I saw that a new article was uploaded: Dysconnected: An Excarnational Reckoning Is Coming.

Briefly reviewing this piece has given me some clarity about the quandaries I have been struggling with. While I admit that the human composting article had some value, I believe that it is completely lost when an article about “the insanity of the transgender movement” is one click away.

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Support Resources for LGBTQ Individuals: https://www.ncfr.org/resources/resource-collections/support-resources-lgbtq-individuals-and-families

Grappling with the thought of death has shown to cause fear, and in Worm at the Core, it is argued that this fear we encounter greatly influences how people live their lives. When reminded of their mortality, Worm at the Core shows how people tend to make pronounced differences in their decisions and behaviors. With the threat of if the world can even sustain the next generation as a result of climate change, death anxiety may be more at the forefront of people’s minds than ever. 

Terror management theory cites culture and society as distractions from an inevitable end noting how religion provides a comfort of what awaits in life after death. But regardless of whether people worship a god or healthy lifestyles, one thing remains true: if we can’t save the planet from ourselves, there will be no more fear because humans won’t exist as a species anymore. I can’t help but wonder, how does the mass extinction of species around us due to climate change affect death anxiety as we are headed towards the same fate?

Three recently extinct species: blue macaw, dodo bird, and western black rhino.

This brings us to an article written by the New York Times, The 8 Million Species We Don’t Know, that details the rapid rate of extinction of so many species at the hands of humans despite not knowing 80% of those species that exist on our planet. The piece details a plan created by conservation scientists called the Half-Earth Project that aims to protect large areas of land and water on the planet, keeping them in their most natural state to protect species and the biodiversity they bring as foundational elements.

The Worm at the Core showcases that fear is a common sentiment when people are reminded of their mortality through terror management theory, but how are people affected when people are reminded that we are a species that can go extinct just like those in the NYT article? If people change their actions for fear of their own death, shouldn’t they change their actions to help save the disappearing species around us so that we may avoid that being our fate?

To quote the last line of Worm at the Core, “By asking and answering these questions, we can perhaps enhance our own enjoyment of life, enrich the lives of those around us, and have a beneficial impact beyond it” (Solomon et al., 225).

I agree with James Rowe’s article connecting terror management to capitalism’s endless consumption. When reminded of our temporariness, we double-down on our worldviews for some sort of safe purchase. If the pursuit of self-esteem defined by a Western capitalist worldview is conspicuous-consumption and power necessitated by the disenfranchisement and theft of resources from as many as possible, then the pursuit of symbolic immortality through the mythologization of endless wealth is clearly a reaction to the terror of mortality. 

But I don’t think that capitalistic greed and attempts to prove our own supremacy to ourselves— whether through cultural/racial supremacy or the supremacy of the human race— is the only possibility. It’s a far more human response (it’s much more appealing to our collective humanity) to recognize the sacredness of life and embrace radical empathy as a reaction to the terror of death. My disagreement with Solomon et. al’s statement that “we cling to our culture’s […]rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal” is summed up by Rowe— “but what if ritual [is] instead vital technology that has historically allowed some cultures to befriend death and impermanence?” Attaining symbolic immortality by gaining “imagined control” over death isn’t a universal pattern of thinking. 

Concerning Peck and Pachirat’s discussion of the ethics of animal consumption, I think the problem lies in the mass overconsumption of meat, and the wasteful ways Western societies package/discard meat and pathologize ways of meat-eating that use the whole animal, including the ‘undesirable’ bits. Peck completely misses a fundamental critique of Thoreau’s words—“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized”. It’s the perfect ideological predecessor of evangelical white veganism, those who have colonized the moral high ground and have no problem ignoring the conditions of labor exploitation and Indigenous land dispossession needed for their “ethical” consumption. Thoreau lived an individualistic fantasy, completely removing himself from the genocide, land theft, and stolen labor producing his ‘secluded’ comforts. The sequestration of violence is needed to produce Thoreau’s Walden— that legacy continues in the modern-day slaughterhouse, where the “mechanisms of distance, concealment, and surveillance” neutralize and routinize violence.

The Worm at the Core has a chapter about the interplay between sex and death, largely pointing to shame around sex and how it is fuelled by our desire to differentiate ourselves from animals. Although, the chapter took a largely heteronormative and patriarchal stance on this concept by only talking about heterosexual sex and implying that men’s sexual urges lead to violence towards women – I do still feel there is substance to this theory.

Within Western culture, shame and degradation have often been associated with sexual practices – particularly ones that do not conform to Christian sexual morality. Sex has often been associated with impurity, the spread of diseases, animalistic desire and youthful hedonism. So why is one of the practices entirely orientated around human life so heavily associated with death? In The Worm at the Core, it is largely argued that sex is associated with the human body at its most vulnerable, this reminds one of their mortality and therefore as the process of TMT explains leads individuals to associate sex with the fear of death.

However, where sex and death are most heavily related is in the heteronormative cultural worldview. Sex that threatens one’s cultural worldview is considered perverse and punishable as it threatens one’s beliefs of a practice that is already shaped by fear of death. Views of sex and heterosexual morality are both shaped by the fear of death, therefore when these are both threatened this fear is exacerbated. In the US, this has usually been portrayed through the fear of homosexual sex. When AIDS came to the forefront of public consciousness in the 1980s many Christian preachers and evangelists saw the disease as God’s revenge for sexual misconduct (Newtown, 1989). Moreover, fear of how AIDS could be passed on swept the cultural consensus and as it was revealed it was often passed through homosexual sex, this fear of death became a fear of queerness. Moreover, many gay people were villainised for ‘risking their own lives for sex’. Yet, there was a turning point when action groups such as ACT UP released projects such as “Silence = Death”, subverting the narrative by moving the thought away from equating sex with death to equating misinformation and lack of sexual education with death.

References:

The Worm at the Core

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4612043.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A51106171d2b01cab1f529d2e89a8c2ac&ab_segments=&origin=&acceptTC=1

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-confusing-and-at-times-counterproductive-1980s-response-to-the-aids-epidemic-180948611/

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/d2mxjdkb?wellcomeImagesUrl=/indexplus/image/L0052822.html

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