Where are the Dead?

Exploring the idea of an embodied afterlife

Peter Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134763580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Where are the dead? What are they doing? What kind of a process is dying? What relationships exist among the dead themselves, and between the dead and those in the world they have left behind? Modern philosophers argue that the idea of disembodied survival - to which many believers pay lip service - is incoherent, and that there can be evidence neither for nor against something incoherent. By contrast, this book argues, the idea of an embodied survival (albeit a form of embodiment differing from our present embodiment) makes perfect sense in itself and fits much better with the alleged evidence for post-mortem survival. Exploring post-mortem survival, Where are the Dead? uses a variety of empirical data, alongside mythological, legendary and purely fictional material, to illustrate how the less familiar idea of embodied post-mortem survival might actually 'work' in some real afterlife environment. By asking questions about the nature and whereabouts of the afterlife, and about what it might be like to be dead, the book explores themes nowadays relatively neglected even in disciplines explicitly concerned with ideas about death, dying and life after death.

1 Clarifying the question

And after it there came so long a train

Of people, that I ne’er would have believed

That ever Death so many had undone.

Dante Alighieri¹

I

Most people are dead. Or as we might otherwise say – releasing them from the limbo of the present tense – most people have died. On one estimate, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world’s total population represented roughly 6 per cent of all the people who had ever lived.² This proportion is always changing, of course, and there could come a time when the number of the living exceeds the number of the dead. The real point, however, is the one famously made by the economist John Maynard Keynes – namely, ‘In the long run we are all dead’ (note again the present tense).³ And a further point is this: all but the tiniest proportion of those who have ever lived, not just individuals but entire communities, have been completely forgotten. Following Keynes, then, we can also say that ‘in the long run, we are all forgotten’. In the face of these inexorable facts of life and history, the following question may very well seem, if not facetious, then at least ridiculous: Where have they all gone, these almost entirely anonymous multitudes of the dead? And where will we, currently the living, go?

For many people nowadays, the simplest and most obvious answer is that the dead have gone nowhere and that we too shall go nowhere; the dead are indeed dead – dead without remainder. Our complete extinction is simply a fact of life, indeed is the price of life itself, and we have no option but to reconcile ourselves to it. Of course, this does not make the fact any less regrettable or saddening, and indeed the prospect of one’s own and others’ extinction may lead, beyond regret and sadness, to anxiety or depression. But while to some the finality of death is a saddening truth, to others it is a comforting one. This may be so for a number of reasons. Perhaps life itself is seen as, or has become, a burden, or perhaps the idea of continuing to exist after death is itself a cause of anxiety or dread. More positively, it may be felt that nothing could be added to the fulfilment of a life here and now by extending it into a future existence, or perhaps death is selflessly accepted as the condition within the natural order that allows new life to flourish. Whatever the attitude to the apparent finality of death, the answer to the questions posed here is still ‘nowhere’, and the only real questions are about how one is to live one’s present, finite life.

For those with some kind of religious belief, however, a different kind of answer might be expected, since most religious traditions embody a doctrine of life after death and usually offer some kind of picture of what might be expected hereafter. The doctrines and images of an afterlife which still inform the lives of religious believers undoubtedly give both purpose in the course of life and hope and comfort in the face of death. But it is not obvious that these doctrines and images encourage religious people to think any more critically about life after death than people who reject religion. Religious belief can be as lazy as religious unbelief. Beliefs of all kinds frequently function as contraceptives to further thinking. Adopting this or that particular and often ready-made answer to some difficult question can easily become a way of not having to think further about the question, just as giving money to some charity can be a way of not thinking any further about the issues that this charity represents. Believing in an afterlife can easily be a way of avoiding the challenge posed by the fact of death, or indeed the challenge posed by the difficulties of life. In this context, Marx’s well-known comments on religion as the ‘opium of the people’ come readily to mind.⁴ Those who refuse to pin their hopes on an afterlife will often seem more admirable than those who look forward to one. But taking the idea of an afterlife seriously means not resting satisfied with a particular answer, particularly an answer that one has ‘inherited’ and not thought through for oneself. Taking the idea seriously commits one to confronting further questions. Accepting that there might indeed be an afterlife, that the multitude of the dead might not have disappeared, can be at least as challenging as any ‘brave’ or ‘honest’ acceptance of the transience of human life.

It is perfectly understandable that one might want to avoid thinking about some of the questions one sees coming once the idea of an afterlife is taken seriously. To think of the ‘dead’ as not extinct, but as in some sense still existing, is to many people tolerable only if the idea is kept rather vague or made somewhat selective, focused perhaps on our own family, friends or immediate cultural group. But such parochial views of immortality, perhaps excusable in earlier ages, are no longer tenable in the modern age, once we acknowledge what William James calls ‘the incredible and intolerable number of beings which, with our modern imagination, we must believe to be immortal, if immortality be true.’⁵ The evolutionary origins and long history of mankind commits us to an almost unbearably egalitarian view of immortality, one that might even embrace members of other species:

An immortality from which these inconceivable billions of fellow-strivers should be excluded becomes an irrational idea for us. That our superiority in personal refinement or in religious creed should constitute a difference between ourselves and our messmates at life’s banquet, fit to entail such a consequential difference of destiny as eternal life for us, and for them torment hereafter, or death with the beasts that perish, is a notion too absurd to be considered serious. Nay, more, the very beasts themselves – the wild ones at any rate – are leading the heroic life at all times. And a modern mind, expanded as some minds are by cosmic emotion, by the great evolutionist vision of universal continuity, hesitates to draw the line even at man. If any creature lives forever, why not all? – why not the patient brutes? So that a faith in immortality, if we are to indulge it, demands of us nowadays a scale of representation so stupendous that our imagination faints before it, and our personal feelings refuse to rise up and face the task. The supposition we are swept along to is too vast, and, rather than face the conclusion, we abandon the premise from which it starts.⁶

Thus the thought of the surviving dead in terms not of a select group defined by our own loyalties and interests but of an uncountable population stretching back through the millennia is an almost inconceivable and perhaps also an emotionally disturbing one. No wonder that for many people, the easiest and most comfortable answer as to the whereabouts of the dead is that the dead are not only dead to this world but dead to any world. How can we possibly think of the entire and ever-growing multitude of the dead as having a future when it is difficult enough to place them even in the terrestrial past? Where could we place them, in any case, and how could we begin to imagine a society of the dead?

We can deal with such a multitude only by placing it in some kind of landscape. Dante’s long procession of the dead is a procession of the damned confined within the boundaries of hell, while in The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot translates this scene into an earthly setting, in an image that both universalizes and limits the multitude: it is not specifically the damned but rather the generic dead who are seen as a crowd flowing over London Bridge.⁷ In both cases, the multitude is not so overwhelming that individuals cannot be picked out for comment. Another strategy is to subordinate the individual characteristics of the dead to their common fate. Thus William Cullen Bryant, in his poem ‘Thanatopsis’ (1817), finds strength and comfort in the solidarity of the dead with nature. Observing that ‘All that tread / The globe are but a handful to the tribes / That slumber in its bosom’, he encourages us to see the entire earth, in all its natural beauty, as a vast communal sepulchre to which we should, in due course, retire without regret:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.⁸

On the other hand, that the idea of a continuing multitude of the dead can be both emotionally and conceptually unsettling may hark back to the older and widespread fear of death as polluting and the dead as potentially threatening. Against Bryant’s nature mysticism and Eliot’s urban desolation, therefore, can be set the more ancient and ambivalent ideas represented in Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘Merlin’,⁹ in which the ‘outnumbering dead’ are described as the ‘husks’ of what was once ‘rich seed’.

Now, should they come together to be fed,

They would outstrip the locusts’ covering tide.

The allusion here is to the ritual feeding of the hungry dead – a widespread practice motivated as much by the desire to keep the dead at bay, within their own domain, as to honour and preserve them within the domestic circle. The multitude of the dead is of course made up of individuals, the more famous of whom can be named. But all are now gone, among ‘the raftered galleries of bone’. The multitude of the dead becomes a largely anonymous mass fading away into the past. Now, in their long barrows, the dead are ‘made one’.¹⁰

These poetic images of a post-mortem multitude usefully dramatize the kind of questions we need to ask regarding post-mortem survival, once we are prepared to take the idea seriously. The choice is between two fundamental alternatives – the extinction of all human beings or their continued existence in some other world. Moreover, the imagery of the dead assembling in, or moving through, some particular landscape or cityscape underlines the fact that the surviving dead would not exist in a vacuum. Nor can we imagine the dead located somewhere without also imagining them doing something. Moreover, since individuals only exist in and through relationships with others, the dead must in some sense constitute a society, or a series of societies, as do the living on earth.

The abstract and unimaginative way in which life after death is commonly discussed is comparable to those older discussions of biology which examined animals or plants without reference to their actual environments. ‘Is there life after death?’ This question, focused on the bare possibility of survival, is only the beginning. The root question about survival logically implies further and more specific questions – questions about where, in what form, and in what company and environment the dead survive. The particular question that forms the title of this book should therefore be read as emblematic of this whole series of possible further questions.

II

Anyone demonstrating a sustained interest in the question of post-mortem existence is likely to come up against a variety of objections and criticisms – religious, ethical, psychological and conceptual. Thus the question may be deemed impervious to empirical investigation, liable to encourage unhealthy interests and emotions, inimical to the proper living of one’s present life, or overstepping the boundaries of established religious teaching. Each of these objections begs questions to which I shall return in the course of this book. There are, however, two specifically conceptual objections to the idea of exploring the possibility of post-mortem survival that demand immediate attention.

The first of these assumes that a post-mortem state, if it existed, would by definition be radically different from anything within our current experience. How in our present state of existence can we properly understand, even if we could find evidence for, a state of existence that by definition requires the absence of our present state of existence? Perhaps the difficulty here is analogous to the difficulty a young child experiences in trying to understand, while still a child, what it is like being an adult.

The weakness of this objection lies in its assumption (encouraged by certain religious texts or interpretations of texts) that life after death must be located in a world totally discontinuous with, and radically unlike, our present world. And yet this assumption is precisely what some of the empirical data seems to call into question. There is, moreover, the obvious point that if it is indeed we who survive our deaths, then our post-mortem existence could never be totally unlike our present existence. A post-mortem world would still be a human world, and there would have to be significant psychological continuity between this world and the next for any talk about survival, identity, progress or judgment to make any kind of sense. A further weakness of this objection lies in the assumption that being in one world necessarily excludes the possibility of communicating with (or even visiting) another, and once again there is empirical data suggesting precisely this possibility. What is of course true is that there can be poor communication as well as good communication. The analogy given earlier of the child trying to imagine what it is like being an adult is instructive here, since there is no absolute distinction between a child and an adult, nor any point at which the one definitively becomes the other, trying to imagine what it is like being an adult, not least when there are plenty of adults around to help, is by no means a hopeless project. We might even say that ‘imagining what it is like to be an adult’ is an essential element in the process of a child’s actually becoming one.

The second and potentially far more devastating conceptual objection to undertaking an inquiry into the possibility of post-mortem survival is that the very idea of a post-mortem existence is an incoherent one. For the eighteenth-century philosopher Joseph Butler, the question of ‘whether we are to live in a future state is both the most important and the most intelligible question we can ask.’¹¹ Clearly the question can only be important if it is first of all intelligible, and yet it is precisely its intelligibility that so many modern philosophers have called into question. Finding the question unintelligible rather than intelligible but false, or intelligible but unprovable, is the key point. If the hypothesis of post-mortem survival were challenged as being intelligible but false, the matter could in principle be settled by an assessment of evidence for and against the hypothesis, while in the absence of any definitive evidence, the hypothesis would at least not be an irrational one to propose or a meaningless one about which to speculate. But if the very idea of a post-mortem existence is incoherent, not only can there be no evidence for it, but no conceivable evidence. Similarly, there could be no evidence for a square circle because the idea itself is a self-contradictory one – in fact, ‘square circle’ is not even an idea, but rather an expression with no conceivable referent. (One might of course use this expression out of ignorance, or frustration, or as a figurative term for something else. For example, a child might talk about a square circle before learning the word ‘hexagon’.) What strikes many modern philosophers as incoherent about the idea of post-mortem survival is that it seems to posit the continuing conscious existence and identity of persons after death in the absence of the bodies and brains which were the basis of their identities as conscious individuals before their deaths. The living can no more survive death than circles can have corners.

If it be proposed that the surviving post-mortem subject is not dependent on one and the same brain or body, but on the contrary exists in the form of an immaterial soul or disembodied mind, the original objection returns with yet greater force. For how, in the absence of any identifying spatiotemporal criteria, could we discriminate one such disembodied mind or soul from any other so that it would make sense to say that this or that surviving mind or soul was now located somewhere rather than nowhere or anywhere? Notice that the difficulty here is not simply that of finding sufficient relevant evidence to establish the survival or location of discarnate souls or minds in general, or to discriminate successfully between this soul or mind and that soul or mind. The difficulty is the more fundamental one of being unable to make sense of what kind of evidence there could possibly be for the ‘square circle’ of a disembodied existence. And this is really just a polite philosophical way of saying that the whole idea is incoherent nonsense. You cannot seek or cite evidence for something that does not make sense in the first place, nor can you talk rationally about it even as a theoretical possibility.

One rhetorical ploy used by philosophers and others to bring out the alleged incoherence of the primary question about the possibilit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Clarifying the question
• 2 What could it be like to die?
• 3 What might it be like to be dead?
• 4 Locating the afterlife
• 5 What would the dead be doing?
• 6 Between the living and the dead
• 7 Post-mortem identity and continuity
• 8 Eschatology and the future of the afterlife
• Select bibliography
• Index