THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY: I finally read Joseph Bottum’s essay on death as the grounding of politics.

It’s–okay, look. It’s basically a commonplace book, not an essay. You should probably read it if you’re interested in how death and (especially) grief shape culture. It’ll tell you what to read next, and maybe what to look for and wrestle with in those other, better texts.

But it doesn’t work, fundamentally, as an essay. To the extent that there are statements, rather than suggestions, those statements are unsupported and sometimes wrong. For example, unsupported: The “modal logic” argument just plain don’t work. If you make the psychological claim that denying the importance of death leads to denying the importance of free will–because you want to say that nothing really important dies, and so you have to say that nothing really important changes–okay, I can walk along with you. But if you try to make that into a syllogism, you get caught up in precisely the confusion between “death” and “change” that Bottum notes and then ignores. He actually identifies the flaw in his own argument and then just says, “Yeah, but it sounds right, no?”

And, although this is not the most important thing about the essay: There’s only the most token gesture toward the ways in which rituals of sex and generation shape culture. It’s entirely possible to defend death’s claim on culture without denying the claims of these other facts.

As long as I’m throwing wild punches, I really would have liked more discussion of guilt, and its relationship to grief. Girard gets dismissed way too fast, too insouciantly. In general, in this piece, there’s way too much assumed common ground, common sensibility. If I don’t share Bottum’s sensibility on these issues, how can he expect non-Catholics to do so?

Really, “Death and Politics” reminded me of an earlier First Things essay, Leon Kass’s “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?“. There, too, I felt that suggestion was being confused with statement, that bases were being stolen, and that some aspects of death were being marshaled against other, equally true aspects. Kass’s essay led me to write my short science-fiction story, “Now and at the Hour,” which you can find on page 21 here (PDF); and I think Bottum’s piece, too, would really have benefited from more science fiction. Think harder about what a world without death, or without some kinds of death, or without some kinds of mourning, looks like! Be more specific.