Life, reflected in the dead
Churchyard burial, tombstones, cremation, open caskets, epitaphs. Whatever the custom or religion, human beings expend vast amounts of energy and attention caring for the dead. Why? That was the simple yet profound question audience members were asked to grapple with Tuesday afternoon at a lecture hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The answer depends less on religious or metaphysical viewpoints, said Thomas W. Laqueur, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, than on a primordial set of ethical obligations played out over thousands of years across countless cultures. The story of why Westerners care for the dead in many ways begins with Diogenes the Cynic, who lived in the fourth century B.C. He said the dead should not be cared for at all, and wanted his own body tossed over the walls and “ostentatiously returned to nature.” In nature, the human body is nothing, and it makes no difference what...