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Modern man is less and less in direct contact with death. However, with the pandemic it returned to our lives, writes Professor Ivaylo Dichev.
The pandemic has acquired existential dimensions. With him returned the death that modern societies tried to forget.
There is no one in our country who does not have an acquaintance who has suffered from a coronavirus. By the end of the year we will probably reach the dismal figure of one death for every 1,000 Bulgarians. In the United States, by contrast, as many people die every day as victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack, which unleashed mad wars and irreparable shock in the Middle East. Today, its former presidents are desperate to ask for masks and will set a personal example by getting vaccinated in front of a camera. The new adversary, still invisible, is more terrifying because he is eternal.
Death is alien and distant
It is that modern man is less and less in direct contact with death. Only 3-4 centuries ago, half of children did not reach puberty, and those who skipped childhood could live to be 30-40 years old. For the vast majority of people, the only health care was magic and prayers, people slept with pets to keep warm and threw their jars out at night.
Anthropologists have estimated that during the last three millennia, humanity has been at peace for only two and a half centuries, and in pre-state societies the situation is even worse: excavations show that in some tribes violent deaths reach 40 percent of all. By superimposing the historical facts listed, we realize that death was an inseparable companion of life, there was not a person who did not attend death, who did not have to say goodbye to the dying man, wash the corpse and prepare it for the last. travel. Hence the imagination of those times: the torments of hell represent the fear of dying, the hope of salvation, the idea of the final end of pain.
Today, the vast majority of people die in hospitals, some more modern, others more primitive as in our province. Paramedics touch them with rubber gloves, monitor them, breathe them with masks, feed them with systems. This is the norm, and if someone close to us dies before our eyes, it is an intolerable scandal. A grieving agency follows, where they again prepare the corpse with rubber gloves, then cremation, resulting in a compact urn that we can have.
Added to this is the fact that fewer and fewer people live in the same household: in Sweden those who live alone reach 50 percent due to the wealth of society, in our country they live alone again, but for exactly the reason Opposite: young people have gone abroad. abroad and often miss the death of their parents. Humanity is experiencing an astonishingly long period of peace, with a steady decline in murders due to better control, but also aging societies. We have believed in the promises of progress that science will one day finally deal with disease, as it did with smallpox. And, as Condorcet wrote in the illustrated 18th century, death will be like falling asleep when we are tired of living.
Death is mythologized and mediated
And suddenly COVID-19 appears. Cold mortuaries, crowded hospitals, people turning blue waiting for ambulances. Scandalous, unfair. I hope you don’t think that I want to avoid criticism of our healthcare system, which has been as fragmented as the roads, the universities, the parliament and everything else. I pay attention to cultural change: for the vast majority of us, death is not an immediate physical reality, it invades our lives as a media image. The new calamity actually acts like the images of demons in religious mythology – some images make us panic. This is how we react to terrorists that most of us will never see, but with whom the media constantly bombard us. We do not even see the specific faces of those who suffer for the protection of personal dignity: again and again installations, masks, statistics.
The effect of this mediatization of death is the separation of personal experience from an abstract fear that we have been living with for a year. Each of us individually imagines how he would cope if misfortune happened to him or his loved ones, how his body will fight, how he will find the strength to endure pain. In the media image, however, death takes on other dimensions: disaster has befallen humanity as a whole: the celestial army of science is fighting against the invincible forces of nature, which gives birth to us. and viruses. Faced with this mythical scene, we are small, defenseless.
Death is intolerable and unacceptable
The other important point is the incredibly high cost of living in the developed world. Just 75 years ago, humanity was ready to send more than 60 million to their deaths for ridiculous ideologies. Today, 1.5 million, most of them already ill, cause scandals and discontent. Why is that? Death has lost its meaning, both divine and political, and has become even more intolerable. Many people make these comparisons; You see, they die a lot from the flu every year and a lot from malaria. But there is no going back, there is no legitimate force to shut down the counter and say: there is no point in treating them. Well, there are variations: for example, we heard from China that they are still testing vaccines, but they have already immunized a million, and in Russia they seem to have missed some tests. But the global consensus of the media has gradually prevailed everywhere: no one should be sacrificed.
An interesting question is how modern man thinks about what happens after death. A third of Bulgarians still score paradise in polls. For others, the teaching of Epicurus is valid: “you will not be there when you are not”. And if death is simply non-existence, it is best if it comes imperceptibly, without thinking much and without terrifying images; somehow you fall asleep, you drink something intoxicating, you disappear before you understand what is happening.
The American philosopher Thomas Nigel seems more relevant to me. We fear death, he says, because it will deprive us of the things we can go through. That is why the death of the young man is more unjust than that of the old man: he did not earn a living, people say. To put it more modernly, it’s a kind of FOMO: the fear of missing out on the things that will happen after us. They taught us to think that something is owed to us, so many years of life, so much health, so much happiness, and if we don’t get it, we protest, we blame the doctors, the governments, the Chinese bats.
Here are the two sides of universalism. We must face disaster all together, as humanity. But if I, the individual, lose the part of life that I deserve, the suffering is unbearable.
Bulgaria
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