The Politics of Being Mortal by Killilea Alfred G.;

Author:Killilea, Alfred G.; [Killilea, Alfred G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6. Death and Politics

The Road to Narcissism and Back

She thought she would live forever, but forever always ends.

—Linda Thompson

The analysis of Michael Novak’s defense of the spirit of democratic capitalism shows that the crisis of spirit and public values that bedevils contemporary culture and that provides the context for a change in attitudes toward death has no arbitrary or accidental origin. His inability to isolate the economic and cultural realms in our society or to mitigate capitalist appeals to competition and greed with images of cooperativeness only underlines the extent to which contemporary hedonism is but a full flowering of the denial of limits in capitalist thinkers from Locke on. The treatment of capitalism and contemporary values by Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch further supports this description of the cultural setting. Lasch more clearly connects the increasing isolation and self-absorption in our society to an inability to deal with death and aging, but this linkage is also consistent with key parts of Bell’s examination of the problems and needs of our culture.

Michael Novak acknowledges that his division of society into three separate realms is inspired by Daniel Bell’s thought. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and other works, Bell does try to make the case for the disjunction of economic and cultural developments. But this disjunction in Bell is not as firm as it becomes in Novak, and in several key places Bell allows that the disjunction is fuzzy. Moreover, Bell’s arguments that appear to support Novak’s defense of capitalism against the charge that it is responsible for contemporary hedonism are among his weakest. Most important, the changes Bell sees as necessary if our society is not to become totally demoralized cut deeply into Novak’s confidence that capitalism is a solution rather than a problem. Bell’s changes definitely require transcending the moral flaws of capitalism and, indeed, constitute a ringing endorsement of the changes that could be produced by a new acceptance of human mortality.

Bell underlines the relevance of our effort when he observes in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism that culture is centrally concerned with “how one meets death.”1 Bell’s description of the interplay of economics and culture is learned, fascinating, and merits extensive summation and analysis. Basically, he disagrees with Hegelians and Marxists, who have a holistic view of society, and argues that society is not integral but disjunctive. He divides society into three distinct realms, the techno-economic structure, the polity, and the culture. Bell sees the economic order as organizing the production and the allocation of goods and services and framing the occupations and stratification systems of the society. By culture, he means expressive symbolism: those efforts in painting, poetry, and fiction, or in the religious forms of litany, liturgy, and ritual that seek to explore and express the meanings of human existence in some imaginative form. These realms have different rhythms of change; they follow different norms, which legitimate different, sometimes contrasting, types of behavior. The discordances among these realms are responsible for the contradictions within society.

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