“We assume that our biotechnologies and nanotechnologies have given us the power we need to regulate our mental lives, but we have resisted roboticization. The freedom of the human will is rightly considered our most precious possession, setting us apart from even the cleverest AIs. We must recognize and accept that this freedom will occasionally be exercised in strange ways and should be prepared to defend the rights of the strangers in our midst. The decision to die young, even though one might live forever, is an exercise of freedom.”
The Thanaticists were by no means displeased by my adoption of this argument, and Hellward Nyxson took to describing me as his “first convert.” The more lavishly I embroidered my analogy, declaring that ordinary emortals were the feuilletonistes, epic poets, and three-decker novelists of modern life whereas Thanaticists were the prose-poets and short-story writers who liked to sign off with a neat punchline, the more the diehard Thanatics grew to like me. I receive many invitations to attend suicides, and my refusal to take them up only served to make my presence a prize to be sought after.
Perhaps I should emphasize that I was then, as I am now, entirely in agreement with the United Nations Charter of Human Rights, whose ninety-ninth amendment guarantees the citizens of every nation the right to take their own lives and to be assisted in making a dignified exit should they so desire. I continued to harbor strong reservations about the way in which the Thanaticists construed the amendment and to detest their solicitation of suicide, but I never sympathized with those extremists who argued for the amendment’s repeal while the Thanaticist Panic was at its height in the 2730s. The item’s original intention had been to facilitate self-administered euthanasia in an age when that was sometimes necessary, not to guarantee Thanatics the entitlement to recruit whatever help they required in staging whatever kinds of exit they desired, but a principle is a principle and must be upheld.
Some of the invitations I received during the latter phase of the Thanaticist craze were exhortations to participate in legalized murders, and these became more common as the exhaustion of ready models forced later “martyrs” to become more extreme in their bizarrerie. I refused to have anything to do with such acts, and often urged the would-be martyrs to reconsider their actions, but they continued regardless.
By 2740 the Thanaticist martyrs had progressed from conventional suicides to public executions, by rope, sword, ax, or guillotine. At first the executioners were volunteers—one or two were actually arrested and charged with murder, although none could be convicted—but as the Thanaticists became more desperate to reignite the waning glare of public attention they began campaigning for various nations to re-create the official position of Public Executioner, together with bureaucratic structures that would give all citizens the right to call upon the services of such officials. It was taken for granted at first that they stood no chance of success, but this proved to be a mistake.
Even I, who claimed to understand the cult better than its members, was astonished when the government of Colombia—presumably desirous of taking the lead in the nation’s ongoing competition with Venezuela for recognition as the home of the world’s aesthetic avant garde—actually accepted such an obligation, with the result that Thanaticists began to flock to Maracaibo and Cartagena in order to obtain an appropriate send-off. I was relieved when the UN, following the death of Shamiel Sihra in an electric chair in 2743, added a further rider to the ninety-ninth amendment, outlawing suicide by public execution.
By this time I had given up making media appearances that only seemed to cement my reputation as a Thanaticist sympathizer no matter how hard I tried to backpedal and distance myself from the movement. In 2744 I began refusing all invitations to appear on TV as well as all invitations to take part in Thanaticist ceremonies. It seemed to me that it was time to become a recluse once again.
I had a great deal of work to do on the fourth part of my history, and I had had my fill of distractions.
FORTY-SEVEN
The fourth part of The History of Death, entitled Fear and Fascination, was launched into the Labyrinth on 12 February 2767. Although the furor over Thanaticism had died down, my commentary was immediately subject to heavy access demand. The heyday of the movement was long past, but its atrocities were still fresh in the world’s memory, and it is possible that my title misled some would-be readers into thinking that my commentary would be directly concerned with the Thanaticist creed. Requisitions of material from the first three parts of the history had declined sharply in the 2760s in the wake of the Thanaticism-inspired boom, and I might have set a higher access fee had I realized that the new publication would generate such high demand.
Academic historians were universal in their condemnation of the new commentary, and those who complimented me on the thoroughness with which I had bound together the underlying data were annoyingly few in number. I understood that the enthusiasm with which the publication was greeted by laymen was hardly conducive to academic acclaim, but I felt that I had done the ritual spadework with exemplary efficiency. There were, however, a number of popular reviewers who praised my commentary highly even after discovering that it had nothing explicit to say about the “problem” of Thanaticism. My arguments were recklessly plundered by journalists and other broadcasting pundits in search of possible parallels that might be drawn with the modern world, especially those passages that seemed to carry moral lessons for the few remaining Thanaticists and the legions who feared and were fascinated by them.
The commentary attached to Fear and Fascinationextended, elaborated, and diversified the arguments contained in its immediate predecessor, particularly in respect of the Christian world of the Medieval period and the Renaissance. It had much to say about art and literature, and the images contained therein. It had substantial chapters on the personification of death as the Grim Reaper, on the iconography of the danse macabre, on the topics of memento moriand artes moriendi.It included comprehensive analyses of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and graveyard poetry. These were by no means exercises in conventional criticism; they were elements of a long and convoluted argument about the contributions made by the individual creative imagination to the war of ideas, which raged on the only battleground on which man could as yet constructively oppose the specter of death.
My text also dealt with the persecution of heretics and the subsequent elaboration of Christian Demonology, which had led to the witch craze of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. I gave considerable attention to various thriving folkloristic traditions that had confused the notion of death, especially to the popularity of fictions and fears regarding premature burial, ghosts, and various species of the “undead” who were said to rise from their graves as ghouls or vampires. To me, all these phenomena were symptomatic of a crisis in Western civilization’s imaginative dealings with the idea of death: a feverish heating up of a conflict that had been in danger of becoming desultory.
The cities of men had been under perpetual siege from death since the time of their first building, but in the Middle Ages—in one part of the world, at least—the perception of that siege had sharpened. A kind of spiritual starvation and panic had set in, and the progress that had been made in the war by virtue of the ideological imperialism of Christ’s Holy Cross had seemed imperiled by disintegration. That Empire of Faith had begun to break up under the stress of skepticism, and men were faced with the prospect of going into battle against their most ancient enemy with their armor in tatters.