Whether I see it on the 5 o'clock news, or the first page of the newspaper, or at the movies, it often seems as if it is mostly about death, and violent death in particular. In the most recent Sunday NY Times, for example, the front section has any number of articles related to death and violence, ranging from stories on Iran's potential capacity to make nuclear weapons, to killings in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Guatemala, to violence in Israel, Russia's nuclear missiles, and the discovery of the murdered body of a pregnant woman the day before her wedding.
Why this fascination with death? Nothing grabs our attention more than the threat of our own demise, or the demise of others. Editors know this, of course. As the old media saw goes, “if it bleeds, it leads”. And if it is death by violence, so much the better for evoking our rapt attention. But to ask what may seem an obvious question, why do we find it so compelling?
To give an obvious answer, we are all animals, for one. The life instinct and its concomitant fear of death (and the related capacity for violence) are buried deep and hardwired comprehensively in us. If they weren't, many of us probably wouldn't be here now. As a result, our fascination with death and dying is a natural outcome of our instinctual desire for life and fear of death.
But I think we underestimate death's importance to us if this is all we see. Avoiding death is more than just an instinctual individual impulse. Death has an important role in the social order at large. For instance, in the end, the threat of lethal violence is the only thing that compels some people to obey the law. It is the only thing that keeps some countries from destroying their neighbors. Imagine trying to run a country if an opponent, domestic or foreign, was willing to use violence, even kill, and you were not. Imagine being an unarmed, pacifist police officer surrounded by criminals with guns and a willingness to use them. Thus, one definition of the State, in social science, is as the holder of a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. Mahatma Gandhi aside, almost every social structure is in some ultimate way held together at least in part by violence, from the threat of death or death itself. Ironically, the threat or actual imposition of death is one of the most important way that human society has developed to ensure the survival of the totality. Thus, our interest in death in this regard is in many cases a matter of our interest in and curiosity about the power relations in our society and others, not a matter of our personal fears of it. Who is getting killed and why is a revealing barometer of these power relations.
But, again, is there anything other than instinct or the social order that causes us to be fascinated with death? Clearly, our beliefs about death also play a significant role in this regard. For instance, we may believe that we disappear altogether upon death. Or we may believe that, while we are likely to go to Heaven and be reunited with our loved ones after we die, there is also a chance that we may end up in Hell. This is probably often true even of people who say they don't believe in Hell, as it is often at least an unconscious part of the mental furniture the majority of us were given in childhood. Indeed, the concept of a Hell, in particular one in which we may be consigned to for eternity in endless horrific suffering imposed by demons who take pleasure in our pain, is likely a potent source of our fear of death. It is doubtless one of the most violent ideas in human history – and one that many people even today have difficulty digesting. By virtue of this violence, it is likely a potent form of social control as well.
In this regard, it's telling that many people who have had near death experiences say that they no longer fear death and don't want to come back. If they do come back, they typically do so for others. So, our beliefs about death obviously affect our reactions to it, even if the life instinct doesn't disappear (and even if we don't believe that NDEs accurately represent what happens when we die).
In the end, we walk around, many of us, morbidly fascinated with death, especially violent death, perhaps deeply afraid of our fate or the fate of those we love, and perhaps violent ourselves, at least inwardly. And all our unconscious faculties are on permanent low-level overdrive, seeking to avoid the most horrible ending to our lives possible.
