Daily Times

“It seems more likely that far more people in our time experience neither the presence of God, nor the presence of his absence, but the absence of his presence… The tremendous social realities of our time are ghosts, spectres of murdered gods and our own humanity has returned to haunt and destroy us. We are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die” (Laing). This is what necrophilia is all about. In 1936, during the Spanish civil war, General Millan Astray – “a cripple, a war invalid” – had overtly advanced his favourite motto: “Viva la muerle” (long live death). In Pakistan, one gets accustomed to this grisly and abhorrent phenomenon, which happens on an irregularly regular basis. Had Eric Fromm been alive he might have been thinking about changing the name of this psychological calamity. Death remains the only living thing in a society where necrophilia wreaks its havoc.

Drugs are preferred to cake and cheese. The generations of antibiotics overtake the generations of human beings. Subtle gadgets are used where their utility is most unnecessary. The rationality of endoscopic technology, a leap in scientific progress, is invariably used as scientific irrationality. In the name of diagnosis people are subjected to this ‘torture’ in their naivety. Medical language has acquired a hypnotic character, sentences have lost their meanings; they only serve a purpose. This is not the cunning of reason; it is an outright deception, an eclipse of reason, “whose denunciation would be the greatest service” to humankind.

This was probably the situation when Schopenheur dejectedly wrote: “No one desires to help another. Instead people wish only to dominate and increase their own power” and that too through death, “the impossibility of all possibilities”. Irvin D Yalom, a leading psychiatrist and writer, analysed the death situation in these words: “How terrible to face death without ever having claimed freedom even in all its dangers. If a healing lowers the healer, can it possibly raise the patient?”

“A sense of fulfilment at consuming one’s life diminishes death anxiety” but do people really consume their life in fulfilment or is it the trauma of life that consumes them? On this the verdict of Marcuse has the last laugh. He says, and what he says is so beautiful that it would be a sacrilege to alter his words: “Under conditions of a truly human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of 10, 30, 50 or 70, and dying a ‘natural’ death after a fulfilled life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain are the great indictment against civilisation. They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It takes all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of this guilt. Once again, the deep connection between the death instinct and the sense of guilt becomes apparent. The silent “professional agreement” with the fact of death and disease is perhaps one of the most widespread expressions of the death instinct or, rather, of its social usefulness. In a repressive civilisation, death itself becomes an instrument of repression. Whether death is feared as a constant threat, or glorified as a supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces an element of surrender to life from the beginning: surrender and submission. It stifles ‘utopian’ efforts. The powers that be have a deep affinity to death; death is a token of unfreedom, of defeat. Theology and philosophy today compete with each other in celebrating death as an existential category. Perverting a biological fact into an ontological essence, they bestow transcendental blessings on the guilt of mankind, which they help to perpetuate. They betray the promise of utopia. In contrast, a philosophy that does not work as the handmaiden of repression responds to the fact of death with great refusal — the refusal of Orpheus, the liberator. Death can become a token of freedom. The necessity of death does not refuse the possibility of final liberation. Like other necessities it can be made rational and painless. Men can die without anxiety if they know what they love is protected from misery and oblivion. After a successful life, they may take it upon themselves to die at the moment of their own choosing. But the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who died in pain. It is the remembrance of them and the accumulated guilt of mankind against its victims that darkens the prospect of civilisation without repression.”

Nietzsche, in his own words, endorses this statement. In Twilight of Idols, he says: “To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses, then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there. Also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life, all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that ‘religion’ has made of the hour of death. One should never forget that ‘religion’ has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience and the manner of death itself, for value judgments about man and the past.”

Death held no horrors for Socrates; it was a sleep or travel to a world better than that in which the human being was forced to live. But these were the men who fulfilled the purpose of their lives; at least this is what we think. What about those who are condemned to live in a society suffering from necrophilia? Will they ever be redeemed and by whom? Of course, not by the existing society and its messiahs. “There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of great tragedies can share in the feelings suitable to tragic mood, no error more fatal than expecting it from them” (Oscar Wilde). The institutions that upheld the struggle for existence can never provide its alternative, the pacification of existence. Life as a means cannot be qualitatively equal to the life that in itself is an end and ultimate purpose of all human achievements. The task is grim and the hope is slight, yet in these moments of hopelessness, dialectical theory is likely to find its opportunity of realisation.

(Concluded)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com