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{"id":1721,"date":"2007-06-05T23:56:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T23:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/06\/1721\/"},"modified":"2007-06-05T23:56:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-05T23:56:00","slug":"1721","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/06\/1721.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY<\/strong>: I finally read Joseph Bottum\u2019s essay on death as the grounding of politics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u2013okay, look. It\u2019s basically a commonplace book, not an essay. You should probably read it if you\u2019re interested in how death and (especially) grief shape culture. It\u2019ll tell you what to read next, and maybe what to look for and wrestle with in those other, better texts.<\/p>\n

But it doesn\u2019t work<\/em>, 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 \u201cmodal logic\u201d argument just plain don\u2019t work. If you make the psychological claim that denying the importance of death leads to denying the importance of free will\u2013because you want to say that nothing really important dies, and so you have to say that nothing really important changes\u2013okay, I can walk along with you. But if you try to make that into a syllogism, you get caught up in precisely<\/em> the confusion between \u201cdeath\u201d and \u201cchange\u201d that Bottum notes and then ignores. He actually identifies the flaw in his own argument and then just says, \u201cYeah, but it sounds right, no?\u201d<\/p>\n

And, although this is not the most important thing about the essay: There\u2019s only the most token gesture toward the ways in which rituals of sex and generation shape culture. It\u2019s entirely possible to defend death\u2019s claim on culture without denying the claims of these other facts.<\/p>\n

As long as I\u2019m throwing wild punches, I really would have liked more discussion of guilt, and its relationship to grief. Girard gets dismissed way<\/em> too fast, too insouciantly. In general, in this piece, there\u2019s way too much assumed common ground, common sensibility. If I<\/em> don\u2019t share Bottum\u2019s sensibility on these issues, how can he expect non-Catholics to do so?<\/p>\n

Really, \u201cDeath and Politics\u201d reminded me of an earlier First Things<\/em> essay, Leon Kass\u2019s \u201cL\u2019Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?<\/a>\u201c. 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\u2019s essay led me to write my short science-fiction story, \u201cNow and at the Hour,\u201d which you can find on page 21 here<\/a> (PDF); and I think Bottum\u2019s piece, too, would really<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"