ARTICLE - Averting One's Face From The Images of Death

Medieval church walls were covered in very graphic paintings. Frequently depicting unsparingly Death and all the various things that might happen to you. Should you not face up to this image of death one day becoming a reality, then literally all Hell would break loose. So, be a good Christian, sort out your life and moral behaviour, be exemplary and The Jaws of Hell will recede and Heavens Gate will open up and God will intercede to save you. A medieval lifespan was thirty years on average. If you made it that far unscathed then there was a good chance you could make it to sixty even seventy, but this was exceptional. Disease, child birth and warfare were the primary causes of early death, happening with great frequency and in close proximity to everyone. Memento Mori simply just rubbed it in even deeper.

Its a world and a mindset that is hard to comprehend  today, because Death, Our Death is barely spoken of. Its almost a taboo subject. And yet, it is still inescapably everywhere, on the news, in wars, in genocides, in hospitals, on our roads and streets. We are all living a wishful thinking life, where death feels like its marginal. Until it isn't. Because death, is not really something we feel we can do much about. Death is outside our control. So why dwell on it at all?

But, then, if this were really so, why do some of us play let's pretend? Spend huge amounts of time and money having god knows what done to their faces, devote hours a day to working out in a gym, all simply to keep us looking fit and younger. To not look like we are aging at all. To not gaze in the mirror and be reminded we are nearer to death today than we were yesterday. Maybe we hold out a hope that science will find a cure for death before then, and arrange to freeze our dead body just on the off chance. Desperate evasion follows desperate evasion. We keep on averting our face from the images of death - because we believe we can.

However, it does not end there. Our denial of death informs anything else that appears to be a mortal threat to our life. I am coming to believe that our attitude towards the Climate Crisis is informed by our reluctance to face our death. It has the same evasions, the same denials, the same turning of our faces away from its apparent inevitability. It has also developed its own secularised version of the Apocalypse, that we are all doomed. Our concerns around the climate have become so emotionally loaded and heightened, it has the same feeling of helplessness, of lack of control, the inability to do anything concrete to avert it, so why bother doing anything? If it happens, it happens, if we die, we die. Almost as though it was predicted in The Bible, just bring on the rapture.

A self-fulfilling death wish has started to hang over the world, where some governments and political parties, are beginning to adopt environmental strategies that they know will only make the climate worse. There appears to be one risky approach being suggested, that maybe human civilisation as it currently exists should be allowed to collapse, and those elites who survive will reap the benefits from whatever is left. So for some there maybe method in their madness. But even if you put these sort of conspiracy like theories aside, there is still worryingly an awful lot of short term thinking around. The sort of considerations that have hampered effective action in the many decades before now. Delay has never made the costs to the climate go away nor get cheaper to resolve, quite the opposite. Averting our face from this particular vision of climate extinction, because we don't want to face the possibility of our death, will paradoxically only hasten its arrival.

Contemplation of our death has been a practice in many religious traditions. Because a deep understanding that we will die, curiously enhances the importance of grasping life whilst we have it. Until we fully face the possibility of human extinction from man made climate change, then we will never value life enough to want to preserve humanity's future existence. If we are apathetic about death, then we will be apathetic about life too.