Covid has warped our collective attitude to death

So, having been promised that normal life would recommence on 21 June, we are once again frustrated by the Covid scientists. The trouble is, of course, that as far as we know the virus is never going away, so according to the logic of the scientists, there is no reason ever to allow us to return to our old way of life. And although it looks as if we are thereby being sensible and ‘following the science’, what it actually reveals is that we are fools to follow a few boffins in white coats, rather than following the received wisdom of the human race over the past 4,000 years: namely that death is an inevitability and even if we do not die of Covid-19, we are going todie of something else. Following the science means living in a fantasy world where death can be everlastingly postponed, or perhaps avoided altogether.

The strange era of Covid and lockdown seems to have brought to an end the pattern of life in which going to the theatre or the pub or having a holiday is regarded as normal rather than a piece of recklessness. By allowing ourselves to be bossed about by scientists, it feels as if the culture of the past has irrevocably come to an end. From the time of Homer’s Iliad, that long, painful, heroic meditation on death, until the second world war and beyond, humanity has stared at the reality of death, either with the hope of an afterlife or with the dogged conviction that there is no such thing. In either event, whether pagan or Christian, religious or non-believing, our forebears believed there was no greater duty confronting a serious person than to recognise the reality of death, and to prepare for a good one.

Everyone my age (I am 70) and older used to learn these lines from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome as children: