The Secular Satisfaction of Death (Bruce Ledewitz)

Submission by Bruce Ledewitz, Professor of Law at Duquense Kline Law School in Pittsburgh

One of the blessings of religion for former believers is the remnant radiation from the religious calendar. Every year, during the Jewish High Holy Days, my thoughts turn to the meaning of my life. But the result, as you can read below, can be unsettling.

Death is what unites all secularists.

Secularists disagree about atheism. I have been accused of being a theist because I reject materialism and embrace a teleology in the universe. God is a notoriously slippery subject.

Secularists even disagree about naturalism. Although secularists overwhelmingly reject any form of supernaturalism or miracle, so do many religious people, even within religions like Christianity, which maintain miracles as a core belief.

Anyway, in a universe as strange as ours, in which particles seem to interact simultaneously across distances, who can even say what a miracle is?

No, the big cleavage between secularists and religious people, especially the People of the Book, Christians, Muslims and Jews, is over what happens after death.

Every secularist I have ever met, no matter what they believe about anything else, assumes with complete confidence that when we die, we die. For each of us, death is the end.

Death in that way is like the time before we were conceived. We just do not exist.

I’m not certain that all religious believers differ from this understanding of death. Famously, Abraham in the Bible was never promised any personal continuation after death. His reward was that his descendants would be a blessing to the world.

Although a conception of an afterlife crept into the Bible—the shade of Samuel makes an appearance—it is clearly not the same person as in life.

Judaism did change in this regard over time and ultimately embraced something like heaven. Nevertheless, some Jewish thinkers, such as Martin Buber, continued to reject any form of personal afterlife.

In Eastern religion the concepts of what happens after death are more nuanced, with continuation in Hinduism and Buddhism of something that is not the self.

In contrast, concepts like personal continuation in heaven and resurrection are central to Islam and Christianity.

For me, the great satisfaction in secularism is learning to deal with my complete non-existence.

I am not thinking here of a tragedy, such as the untimely death of a child. Or even death from accident or war. I have in mind a long life that comes to its natural end.

The poet Dylan Thomas tells us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

But life actually teaches us gradually to let go and welcome death, as in the last Harry Potter book, greeting death “as an old friend” going with death “gladly, and equals” departing life.

(Of course Harry ends up after death at a train station “moving on”).

None of these thoughts are new, but they are a crucial part of living and bear repeating.

Retirement is one of the markers on the road to death, teaching us to give up a kind of importance. David Brooks, commenting positively about U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney’s retirement, wrote that “the hunger for continued relevance is the corroding lust that devours the very old.”

Retirement is the end of relevance.

We learn that life goes on without us. First in a job you thought you were central to and then later life itself.

Another marker of death is the more gradual physical breakdown. Physical life is not as much fun as it used to be. Leonard Cohen understated things when he sang, “I ache in the places where I used to play.”

Actually, the old ache all over. Even if you keep up with your yoga, you lose the easy grace and fluidity of the young.

At 71, I sometimes feel that rigor mortis is just the next step.

Even if you avoided the daily prescription routine your whole life, you are suddenly seeing doctors.

And boy are they young. The doctors you knew are all retiring.

The culture is no help. It’s afraid of growing old and dying. It celebrates the 100-year-old sprinter.

That’s just whistling through the graveyard.

All of this casts death in a different light—as a kind of release. A reward for a life well lived.

If you’re lucky in your life circumstances: you have enough money, the kids are doing well, you’re confident Trump will not be re-elected, age brings a calm equanimity. You become pretty invulnerable to slights. You stop trying to impress people. You better appreciate the good things in your life, especially the companionship of someone you love.

The world never did appreciate you enough, but that now matters less than it did.

It becomes easier, although this can still be a challenge to workaholics like me, to just be.

Age is the best teacher of things we should have known all along.

Ironically, on all these points, certain forms of religion can be a barrier to wisdom. As the theologian Thomas Berry put it, Western Christianity developed a rage against the limits that life puts on us. That is where Dylan Thomas got his idea. That is how capitalism works.

No, the secularist says, go gently into death. Stop consuming the planet. Give up your anxieties. They never mattered.

Our lives simply end so that there is room for new life.

That condition does not mock the lives we lived. Nor does it rob our strivings of their meaning.

We are part of the great current of the universe. We have expended our efforts, for good or ill. In some small ways, which seemed very large and important to us at the time, we have been a force for good or evil, or both.

Those efforts live on after us, physically in descendants, spiritually in the lives of those we touched and, maybe, historically, in the direction in which we moved and the vision of future life that we embodied.

Now all that is over or is ending. We have to accept that with grace and gratitude. We have regrets and undone work, but nobody’s perfect. The philosopher Martin Heidegger placed no small part of human evil on the unwillingness of human beings to get off the stage. Putin is like that—he is desperate to leave a lasting mark.

Far better to accept death as the natural culmination of life. Death is not a problem to be surmounted but is simply the anticipated end of a wonderful journey.