Fear of death


Yesterday’s Financial Times contained an article about slowing demand for diesel, the “lifeblood of the industrial economy”. According to the FT, the “warning signs” and “investor fears” indicate a “looming recession” in the US. For all its professed sympathy for renewable energy and decarbonisation, the FT can’t help thinking that a healthy economy is one that burns a lot of oil.

We are living in the dark ages as long as a reduction in fossil fuel consumption is represented as a bad thing.

According to the Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan American think-tank based in Washington, in a study undertaken in September 2021, most people in the US, Canada, the UK and European countries say they are willing to make “a lot of or some” changes to the way they live and work in order to reduce the global impact of climate change. Great! The most obvious change is to use less oil. So if, as the FT suggests, American demand for diesel is lower, isn’t that a cause for celebration rather than concern?

Alas, it seems unlikely that we’re witnessing voluntary demand-side efforts to reduce carbon emissions on a large scale. When push comes to shove, most of us are very reluctant to address our fossil fuel addiction – our addiction, that is, to travelling lots of miles and buying lots of stuff. This is partly because we don’t like change or find it easy. But I wonder whether there’s a deeper cause than mere habit, or short-term necessity, to explain our insatiable appetite for energy and resources.

Fear of death?

In one of his travelogues, the presenter Simon Reeve follows the river Ganges to the Indian city of Varanasi, where people go to die. According to Hindu tradition, to die in Varanasi is to be released from the entrapment of reincarnation. Reeve opens up by saying that he frequently wakes in the middle of the night in cold sweats at the prospect of his own end.

Maybe I’m showing my ignorance, but I can bring to mind very few instances from books that I’ve read, or programmes that I’ve watched, where the fear of death is so explicitly acknowledged as a part of everyday life. It is likely to be mentioned when people are in mortal danger, due to frailty or illness, or a dangerous adventure, or conflict situation; but it is hardly ever admitted to in normal circumstances when people are fit and unthreatened. Apart from Reeve’s admission, I can only think of one other: in a book by Alain de Botton where he claims that we live in a constant state of mortal terror.

Especially, perhaps, because it goes unacknowledged, the fear of death fuels our restlessness, our urge to travel, and our acquisitiveness. Maybe if we could recognize it, talk about it, even bring it into our education system, we could learn to live with it more easily, and discover and foster a Zen-like capacity for stillness in ourselves.

Not that psychological stillness is synonymous with sitting still all the time. Some of us at least could do with being more physically active, not less … but in ways that don’t involve cars, planes, demolishing and rebuilding, or acquiring lots of stuff. Being alive doesn’t need to be confounded with excessive consumption of energy and resources.

Fear of death may also indirectly affect our attitudes to food and diet. To many of us, whilst we might not have articulated it as such, being strong and virile – robustly resilient to death – means eating plenty of meat. I was reminded of this a week ago when an elderly member of the family reported that the canteen at an old people’s home was largely meat-based: “man’s food”, she called it.

Our food and our energy. In each case, the unacknowledged fear of death warps our judgement – so we don’t notice the unbalanced (and unsustainable) relationship we have with them. So we devote ever more – now nearly half – of the planet’s entire land surface to livestock farming; and we continue to correlate diesel consumption with a “healthy” economy.


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