McCleary 1
Sylvia McCleary
5/11/2017
Sociology 101 Death in Society
As Franz Kafka stated, the purpose of life is that it ends.
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In our modernized Western
societies the entertainment industry, the media, religious franchises, and governmental
regulations have done nothing to demonstrate the end of life but rather to manage it. The
consequences of these actions are that no one has a familiarity with death anymore as a process
of life, but rather something to be afraid of, something which will only happen if you drive drunk
or travel in terrorist based regions. The reality is that death happens to most of us in as very
predictable and obvious manners that is referred to as “old age.” The tendency of modern
Western society is to sterilize, commercialize, and vilify death rather than continue the age old
process of acceptance, creates a disassociated population that fears death, an environmentally
destructive process of preservation rather than allowing decay and a society that is ill equipped to
understand, let alone benefit from the experience of death.
The process of sterilizing death in Western Society has created a population that
disassociates itself from one of the life’s most intimate processes. Today, according to Caitlin
Doughty, “Not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world, and the
industrialized world has established systems to prevent unsavory encounters with the dead. At
this very moment, corpses motor down highways and interstates in unmarked white vans…bodies
crisscross the globe in the cargo holds of airplanes while vacationing passengers travel above.
We have put the dead beneath. Not just underground, but under the tops of fake hospital
stretchers, within the bellies of our aircraft, and in the recesses of our consciousness.”
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1
“A Quote By Franz Kafka”. 2017. Goodreads. www.goodreads.com
2
Doughty, Caitlin. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes And Other Lessons From The Crematorium. 1st ed.
McCleary 2
At the very core of humankind is the fear of death. We are the only animals that are conscious of
our inevitable mortality (or demise), and for many of us, our life’s purpose is to deny or repress
the fear of dying. We in western society take advice from the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard to
tranquilize with triviality, and numb ourselves with the banalities of life and forget the
insignificance of our existence. “Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a
certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually
occurs…. Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial.”
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The vehicles of our lives are our bodies, and the body allows for actions to be taken. It also
places material limitations upon what we can experience, and it ultimately dictates that our lives
must end. Death is the great certainty of life, but how the ‘West’ perceives the inevitability of
absolute decay creates an unhealthy terror in the collective minds of the people. In the book,
Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers, Mary Roach says, “We are biology. We are reminded
of this at the beginning and the end, of birth and death. In between, we do what we can to
forget.”
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A society manifests what it values and places emphasis upon. In our modern societies,
the tendency and desire to be beautiful have had tremendous impacts in all sorts of cultures.
Feminism, advertisement, and success are just a few examples. Death itself hasn’t escaped the
overwhelming desire to be beautiful as well. The funeral industry has gone to great lengths to
beautify the corpse. They often tell people that the natural dead body is not good enough as it is.
They will put it in makeup; they will put it in a suit or dress, they will inject dyes, so the body
looks a little more “alive.” Embalming is the cheat code for providing the illusion that dying and
then decay are not the natural end of all organic life on Earth. In short, the “most” beautiful
3
Becker, Ernest. 2011. The Denial Of Death. 1st ed. London: Souvenir Press.
4
Roach, Mary. 2004. Stiff. 1st ed. London: Penguin.
McCleary 3
death is one that still looks alive.
In modern society, if you are looking to avoid being doomed to decay, you will receive an
abundance of help from death professionals. Whether they voluntarily do it or not, the funeral
business promotes this idea of “human exceptionalism” or anthropocentrism.
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It doesn’t matter
how bad it is for the environment, how much it costs, or what it takes, we still do it because the
notion of “you” are “worth it.” This ignores the fact that death can be an elaborate affair and that
there is beauty in decay. There is great beauty in a true return to the earth from where we once
came.
It doesn’t just stop at the body; beauty is also in the ownership of things. Caskets,
flowers, grave markers, plots of land, gilded urns, music, powerpoints, CDs, memorial booklets,
announcements have become so commercialized they almost seem like the last great prom.
While indeed cynical, these new attempts to beautify the experience of death, no longer focused
on the dying person but on those that are living comes at a tremendous cost. Caskets are the new
car, for example at Baucke Funeral home, caskets range from the lowest being three-thousand to
