Tom Flynn is the editor of Free Inquiry. Historical material for this article is drawn from his contribution to the entry “Ritual, Ceremonial, and Unbelief” in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Prometheus, 2007). No one named Edna was harmed in the writing of this essay.
"Funerals and memorials aren’t for the dead, they’re for the living.” That’s a maxim often heard from believers and humanists alike, including several writers in this section. Curmudgeon that I am, I’m unconvinced. I look at this whole business of secular memorial services and ask, “Why bother?”
First things first. Whom do funerary rites serve? Until relatively modern times, they were understood as magical exercises by which a community sought to facilitate, supplicate for, or (in some cultures) outright buy passage into a more desirable afterlife for a community member recently deceased. If the rites also consoled survivors, that was a trifling side effect of their loftier metaphysical purpose. Far from being for the living, then, through most of human history, funerary rites were quite precisely for the dead.
Yet, today, many assume that funerary rituals were always meant to benefit the grieving, a wildly ahistorical notion. How did so many smart people get this, pardon the expression, dead wrong? Here’s my guess. After the Enlightenment, educated Westerners who had lost faith in the rituals as “soul magic” unfortunately kept on practicing them (ah, cultural inertia). In time, people who’d never experienced the rites in their original matrix might easily rationalize that they existed to support the bereaved. Granted, I’m speculating. But if I’m right, we might expect to find the just-so story that rites exist to aid the grieving widely believed, whether or not it is true—essentially the situation we find today.
Secular humanists grasp three harsh truths: there exists (1) no deity to weight the dice in favor of, say, poor, dear Aunt Edna; (2) no afterlife; and (3) no soul capable of surviving death. In consequence, a ceremony whose original purpose was to (1) influence a supernatural being to (2) skew the afterlife in favor of (3) a particular soul is trebly baseless. If such an empty ritual achieves anything today, it is only to instill an unhealthy impression that each person’s life must have some “larger meaning” on a canvas grander than the individual’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. On such sticky hooks, imprecise thinkers can easily hang vague notions of transcendence or “spiritual” significance. And that’s only my first objection.
My second objection is that funerary rites may do more harm than good. Given that they cannot influence anyone’s quality of afterlife, about all they can do is to encourage survivors to indulge in a systematic denial of reality. Contrary to the hopes of most religionists, we’re not going to see Aunt Edna again. Contrary to the hopes of many humanists, Aunt Edna’s not going to live forever in the memories of future generations. To be blunt, Aunt Edna is gone—and, unless she led a life of extraordinary achievement, after a century or two, dear Edna’s name on a gravestone, urn, or mausoleum plaque will mean no more to anyone then living than most names on Civil War gravestones mean to us today. Critical thinkers should reject any denial of reality, even one as deeply rooted as this one is in kind intentions. We should gently insist that mourners might find it more healthful to acknowledge stark reality, as swiftly and frankly as they can. Yes, that entails pain. But it achieves something no sentimental exercise in denial ever can: it captures truth.
My third and final objection is that funerary rites are collective exercises, usually conducted on an authoritarian pattern (someone has to “lead” them, after all). Like any collective activity, they carry the risk of imposing conformity in thought and feeling, blunting authentic individual responses, and imposing groupthink. In pursuit of a salutary goal, this risk can be worth taking: when a lecture, play, or musical performance concludes and all those in attendance clap their hands, few worry about groupthink. But if I’m right that funerary rites have no purpose a naturalist can take seriously, then the collectivist downside associated with any public ritual, small as it may be, merits caution.
So here’s an extreme idea: if funerary rites can’t benefit the dead, were never meant to help the living, and their only real effects are negative … why not stop performing them?
Actually, that’s less extreme than it sounds.
Since the eighteenth century, a proud cohort of freethinkers and other radicals has disdained traditional funerary rites, replacing them with increasingly unorthodox alternatives, including the most radical one: doing nothing. Freethinking Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen contrived to be buried without religious ritual, a bold move at the time. Following his wife’s premature death, nineteenth-century freethought journalist Horace Seaver improvised a “social funeral” marked by informal exchanges of fond memories, setting a pattern for many of today’s alternative memorial gatherings. Free-love campaigner Ezra Heywood and novelist Sinclair Lewis forbade religious memorial ceremonies in their wills. Near the turn of the twentieth century, atheist anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre went further still. She wrote regarding the disposition of her body: “I want no ceremonies nor [sic] speeches over it. I die . . . owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.” Twentieth-century freethinkers increasingly followed de Cleyre’s example, directing that no observance of any sort follow their deaths. Examples include the flinty atheist editors Woolsey Teller and James Hervey Johnson, the philosopher/encyclopedist Paul Edwards, and the German-born U.S. rationalist activist Walter Hoops, whose Missouri admirers lovingly ignored his instructions and feted him after he died in 1999 at age ninety-seven (see Barbara Stocker’s essay in this section).
For myself, I stand with Voltairine de Cleyre. When I die, I wish no public ceremony of any kind. No funeral. No memorial. No kitschy celebration of my life. Not even a drunken party presided over by department store Santa Clauses, much as I suspect one of those may be planned. Let there be done to my corpse whatever the law demands, not in connection with any ritual but simply in the interest of prudently handling biological waste. I wish no grave, no urn, no marker, no hollow attempt to pretend that anything about my life has “eternal” significance.
Am I selfish—as some contributors to this section might suggest—because I seek to impose my will on my survivors? History says no; recall that it is the decedent, not the bereaved, whom funerary traditions arose to serve. Recall also (as Ronald A. Lindsay’s article points out) the growing number of U.S. states that explicitly empower decedents to dictate how and with what (if any) observances their remains shall be disposed of. In harmony with both history and law, what is done in connection with my death should reflect my views.
For the record, then, here are my views (well, the relevant ones) in a nutshell: life has no meaning as such. There are only the plural meanings we create for ourselves (see my “The Big M,” FI, June/July 2007)—real meanings, to be sure, but far more limited and ephemeral in character than the illusory cosmic meanings dispensed by the great religions. It is to these nonexistent “larger” meanings that funerary rites point with their blather about eternity—or in the case of humanist ceremonies, their fatuous promises of “living on in memory.” Like every human, I will die, and, soon enough, like Aunt Edna—like most humans—I will almost surely be forgotten. Therefore, much as I’d like to believe otherwise, my dying will be nothing particularly special. It would ring false for those who survive me to make more of it than it deserves.
Equally important, I do not wish that any who mourn me should feel compelled to force their authentic responses through the distorting sieve of some scripted collective ceremony. Rather, let those disposed to ponder their feelings, thoughts, and memories of me do so as individuals, each free to respond in the way most truly his or her own. That might include coming together in groups if that action feels spontaneous and genuine. Then again, it might not.
To my mind, the closest secular humanism comes to splendor is when it fortifies us with the existential courage to face life’s dark truths head-on—without denial, without evasion, without euphemism. Death is real and final and, therefore, supremely unlike those empty husks of rites whose only honest purpose was to petition nonexistent deities to grant nonexistent felicity to nonexistent souls.
When I die, let there be no denials, no evasions, and no euphemisms. Most of all, let there be no empty husks of rites. I am satisfied that this is the healthiest, most humane path, and it is my directive.
If, on the other hand, my directive is ignored, at least I will have the same consolation as Walter Hoops: having ceased to exist, I will not experience the indignity.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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