Revolutions in Sorrow: The American Experience of Death in Global Perspective by Peter N. Stearns

Author:Peter N. Stearns [Stearns, Peter N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317252719
Google: XxYeCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28132512
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Impact of Culture

The new U.S. attitude toward dealing with death was a striking historical innovation. It also generated a wide variety of criticisms, not only from traditionalists but from other angles as well. Most basically, although it reflected the death revolution, it risked foundering on the fact that death still happens. If the dominant approach to death involves ignoring the subject, downplaying emotion whether one’s own or others’, and keeping children particularly ignorant, what happens when death happens anyway, as it always will—death of others or, perhaps even more ominously, contemplation of death of oneself? Is the emphasis on emotional control even consistent with widespread ignorance and inexperience? Is death not likely to provoke even wilder emotions from people who have been encouraged not to think about it and who, as children, are kept away from the death that does occur?

In fact, the U.S. majority never fully bought into the new culture. They accepted large elements, but they maintained several older emphases as well, which proved quite functional in several key death settings; they also registered on some of the criticisms of the new culture as these circulated from the 1960s onward, introducing some additional modifications. The result continued to be strongly shaped by the new culture, which meant that it did have some ongoing vulnerabilities; but the amalgam was more complex than the new culture suggested. Additionally, of course, a host of subcultures in the United States added their own variants.

The new culture did shine through, for the majority of Americans, in three crucial respects. First, most Americans absolutely agreed that, when death threatened, the first call should be to modern medicine; death should be fought as long and as hard as possible. Second, most Americans increasingly agreed that a proper society should be able to prevent death before later age, by eliminating risks, and that when death did occur prematurely, someone ought to be blamed. And third, most Americans progressively dropped most of the traditional rituals associated with death, agreeing that the death of others should not significantly interfere with normal life.

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