The Anxiety of Death: A Force in Historical Progress

In Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, a conversation between Geryon and Lazer beautifully captures human helplessness in the face of death and the anxiety that comes with this awareness (Carson, 2010, p. 95).

Lazer imagines himself climbing a hill, with his daughter beginning her climb behind him. He has spent about half his life reaching the top, and the other side slopes down. He knows that his daughter must make her own journey along the same path of life. But he cannot help her escape its inevitable end. What can he tell her? “Don’t climb so fast?”

The question exposes our helplessness before mortality. We know that death is coming, yet we continue to climb. We cannot stop the journey, even when we understand where it leads. This knowledge shapes us in ways we do not always recognise.

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski’s Terror Management Theory (TMT) suggests that the influence of mortality extends beyond our conscious thoughts. Their later dual-process model distinguishes between proximal defences, which respond to death-related thoughts in focal awareness, and distal defences, which operate when those thoughts recede from awareness. Defending one’s cultural worldview and maintaining self-esteem can serve as such distal defences (Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenberg, 1999, pp. 835–845).

If mortality anxiety shapes human behaviour even when death is outside our conscious awareness, its influence may extend beyond individual psychology. It may also help shape the collective pursuits through which human beings confront their finite existence.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker examines how people seek forms of immortality through cultural meaning and achievements that outlive them (Becker, 1997). This desire raises a question: does it help drive historical development?

Religion offers one of its most powerful expressions. The promise of heaven, an afterlife, resurrection or rebirth gives human beings the possibility of existence beyond death. These beliefs also helped shape powerful moral systems. Conduct acquired consequences beyond the immediate world: the righteous might be rewarded in another life, while wrongdoing might invite punishment. Such beliefs gave moral obligations a significance extending beyond an individual’s lifetime, helping religious traditions organise communities and sustain shared norms across generations. Religion has many historical origins and functions, but the promise of transcendence offers one way of understanding its enduring appeal.

Medieval and early modern history show how anxiety about death helped shape institutions and historical change. Elizabeth Barnardiston founded a chantry intended to secure perpetual prayers for the dead, supported by land worth seven marks annually that her husband had bequeathed for that purpose (Harris, 2018, p. 51). Such foundations reflected the belief that Masses could shorten a soul’s time in Purgatory. Their decline amid the English Reformation shows how changes in religious doctrine and government intervention could disrupt institutions built around hopes for the afterlife (Harris, 2018, pp. 51–52). Centuries earlier, Ragusa imposed isolation measures against plague in 1377, requiring arrivals by sea to remain isolated for thirty days and extending the period to forty days for arrivals by land (Gensini, Yacoub and Conti, 2004, pp. 257–261). The two cases reveal different responses to mortality: the hope of securing the soul’s future through religious institutions and the effort to protect the living body from disease. Both helped shape institutions and practices that extended beyond the immediate fear of death.

The question of mortality also reaches beyond religion and public health. Philosophy examines how human beings ought to live in the face of death; art and literature preserve experiences and achievements beyond the lives of their creators. Societies transmit laws, knowledge, traditions and institutions across generations, while science and medicine seek to understand life, prevent death and extend its duration. Each pursuit has its own motives, yet the desire to preserve what death threatens may contribute to them in different ways.

Mortality anxiety acquires historical significance when human responses to finitude become embedded in shared institutions, passed between generations and transformed by new knowledge. Later generations inherit these achievements and pursue further possibilities, including the extension of life itself. The struggle against death is one of the forces that helps carry society from one historical stage to another.

Hegel’s philosophy of history raises the question of whether history moves towards an endpoint through the development and resolution of its contradictions (Hegel, 1975). But what happens when one of the forces driving historical change approaches its own end?

If humanity eventually achieves genuine immortality, the struggle against death will lose the purpose that has sustained it for millennia. Its success would undermine the very condition that gave it direction. What, then, would drive history forward?

The answer lies partly in the other forces that have accompanied this struggle from the beginning. Belief systems, moral orders, institutions and forms of knowledge may emerge partly in response to mortality anxiety, yet acquire lives of their own. Once established, they develop new functions and generate conflicts, desires and possibilities beyond their original purposes. Power, inequality, freedom and the desire for recognition will continue to shape human affairs even if death ceases to be inevitable.

The end of one historical force need not mean the end of history. If humanity ever overcomes death, it will discover that the struggle that carried it so far was only one of the forces shaping its journey. The destination of one pursuit becomes the starting point of another.