November 2024
The twentieth was the century of scientific materialism, when dying - or life itself - was not given any real thought, or meaning, despite the carnage and genocidal events of the wars and the degree of inter-national strife. God was “dead”, people died in institutions without consolation, and, for the most part, we simply didn’t talk about it. Death, as “the great unknown”, had also become the great unmentionable. The American cultural anthropologist, Ernst Becker, thought death was our greatest taboo. We came to deny it altogether.