Mortality has become a culture war

The furious arguing about the legacy of the deceased says everything about politics now

Illustration by Jesse Zhang / Ikon Images

It’s been a strange summer of death. I don’t mean – although it’s more of a concern, invoking a larger spectre of mortality – the apparent trajectory towards heat-death. I mean the way mortality has become a culture war. It’s been that way for a while, because of, obviously, social media. It really is astonishing that you still see pundits discussing with furrowed brow this or that new rip in the cultural fabric, carefully avoiding the job-ending conclusion that the answer is always, “Yeah, it’s social media” – but it’s been ratcheted up these past few weeks with the deaths of a number of public figures.

I’m not going to discuss specifics, as, respectfully, what interests me is not what’s happened to any one person, but what’s happened to death. It’s instructive that I wrote “respectfully” there, because that’s what has been pushed back against: the assumption of reverence. Reverence involves silence, which social media abhors, and so death has become yet another site of rowdy public argument. At one end there’ll be extreme, performative mourning, and at the other, a neo-punk shitting on the dead, or similarly performative celebration of the fact of their death.

This shouldn’t bother me. I’ve written a book and performed a stage show about my late mother’s affair and my late dad’s dementia, precisely because I believe that telling the unvarnished truth about the dearly departed can itself be an act of love. Idealisation, like death itself, is a form of erasure; the dead, despite what we might like to think, are not angels. That impulse isn’t political. It comes from a belief that the only thing that matters is truth, which, I would contend, is the main casualty of our present hyper-politicisation. The furious arguing about the legacy of the deceased says everything about politics now – specifically, how much of it has been reduced to accumulating tiny wins on X and Bluesky – but nothing about life or death.

Not exactly writer’s block

I went to Cornwall earlier this month, to be on my own. I’m writing a book about what, I’m foolishly arguing, could today be considered the love that dare not speak its name: heterosexual male desire. The issue – again, would you believe it, the same stupid technology – with writing in these times is that one has to contend with seeing every sentence cropped and shouted back at you as you type, and that’s not helped when you’ve chosen a subject closely associated with shoutiness.

While going somewhere isolated to write seems like a good idea, it takes me about two days to get over the panic at being isolated. I spent most of the week finding excuses to go to the shops or calling someone. I did get over this existential dread, but by then it was nearly time to drive seven hours – on my own – back home.

Too hot to handle

My actual trip away this year will be Scandinavia. I grew up never going on holiday abroad, spending every August with my dad’s parents in Swansea, where, inevitably, in the 1970s, it rained most of the time. Thus, as an adult, I’ve always yearned for the stereotype of summer: sun, pool, sea. However, it’s become clear in the past few years that most places offering sun and pool and sea are now simply too hot. There’s no relaxation to be had on a lounger keeping one eye out for wildfires.

And the point of a holiday is difference, time away, a change, but with heatwaves now a regular feature of British summers, the hankering for a two-week oasis from grey skies feels increasingly like a hangover from the past. I know that thinking, “Well, that’s the south burnt to a crisp: I guess I’ll have to head north for hols,” isn’t an answer to our environmental malaise. But there’s a bleak poetry in spending 40 years chasing warmth only to discover that what we’re craving now is the cold.

A worthwhile test

I’m listening to Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus – I am of an age at which eyesight issues have forced me away from the written word towards the spoken one. It’s not an easy book: Geoff Dyer, who voted for it in the Guardian’s recent list of the 100 best novels of all time, says it’s a “test of the reader’s ability”. Indeed it is: dated, self-consciously literary, kind of snobbish, and yet extraordinary. The economy of language is so intense it’s as if Hazzard was chiselling words out of marble.

I keep pausing it to write sentences down on my Notes app. Most of them come from a narrative voice in a high, interposing George Eliot style, sinning against the show-don’t-tell rule of modern storytelling. But they tumble from her pen, these lyrical, packed observations, and are so on point, from the microscopic – “slow motion makes any human action beautiful, by an appearance of control” – to the huge and sweeping: “Even those who have truly lived will die.”

And you realise, listening to it, that one novel contains more truth about life and death than a million people online fighting to have the last word on both.

[Further reading: How did British singers get so posh?]