To be sure, the way in which death and dying are viewed, either philo-
sophically or culturally, tells us something about the society that we live in.
Geoffrey Gorer, for instance, has drawn attention to what he calls the “pornog-
raphy of death” – the curios of a morbid fascination with decay, horror, and
violence theorized as symptoms of cultural repression (Gorer 1995). According
to Gorer, death is a taboo subject much like sex in Victorian times. He argues
that when death is denied or normatively prohibited from public conversa-
tion, it nevertheless seeps into our everyday discourses in a more dramatic
and seductive form, sometimes as humor and sometimes as horror, but always
disassociated from reality and lived experience. An excellent example of this
can be found in Bram Stoker ’s Dracula, when Mina Harker requests (and her
request is granted) that she be read the Burial Service prior to her death
(Stoker 2003). Not only is death portrayed as unreal in this gothic horror
novel, it sheds light on the confusion between sex, death, and identity. Likewise,
when Herbert Marcuse wrote about the “ideology of death” he argued that
the ultimate compliance with death, sometimes haphazardly theorized as an
attitude of acceptance in thanatology, may serve as a justification for a will-
ingness or perhaps even an urge to die, further noting that when death and
sacrifice are extolled as cultural values then ‘working to death’ becomes the
norm: “earning a living rather than living becomes an end in itself” (Marcuse
1959). Similarly, Ernest Becker theorized that the repression of the fear of
death leads to sacrificial heroism, a willingness to throw oneself into action
uncritically and unthinkingly (Becker 1973). Thus, a society in which death
is experienced as unreal may be more prone to sustain and create a culture
of death in the form of militarism or colonialism. Philippe Ariès has also
charted in some detail the way in which modern death has been rendered
invisible and forbidden, perpetually creating an anxiety about death and
dying and an avoidance of its reality (Ariès 1981). In light of the ideological
significance of death, how dying and death are understood is of vital impor-
tance for the kind of society that we wish to live in, especially if the social
taboos regarding death are prevalent and potentially harmful in the sense of
either encouraging resignation towards suffering and dying, or glorifying
death as heroic or sacrificial. Taken together, it is possible to see that how
death is viewed ties into our predominant attitudes toward war, the econ-
omy, labor, and public policy.
Although western culture is often thought to be in denial about death,
death being a social fact persistently rendered socially invisible because of
its traumatic reality, Walter comments on the narrowness of this thesis,
Intersubjectivity and Religious Language • 187