Ambiguity Of Death In Western Culture

Today, death is described as ambiguous due to the changes morality patterns, multiple meanings, and interpretations. Our cultural and individual orientations toward death are intimately interwoven. We are at once a product of our culture and a participant in its ongoing evolution. It is well recognized that denial, or perhaps more accurately, suppression are psychological defense mechanisms that mark the orientation of Western culture toward death. The culture tends to avoid serious consideration of death and avoidance behavior is readily documented.
Firstly, there has been changes in the morality patterns. We moved from a Pre-industrial society to more of a modern industrial society and thus, mortality has become controlled. During the Pre-industrial
society mortality was uncontrolled, which means mortality was big, fluctuated over a short period of time, and varied widely at any given time. Today, we live in a controlled mortality where the opposite happens; mortality is low and the rate is approximately the same as 1960, and mortality rates are not widely geographically. It is estimated that between the 13th and 17th century, life expectancy was short and mortality conditions fluctuated to as high as 1400 due to epidemics and large families. For instance, people would die from illnesses such as small pox, horrific events such as famine, genocide, and slavery which were all a big contributor to death and high mortality rates. Death was constant, present, and therefore, uncontrollable. Therefore, we had to incorporate death in our own thinking, but we have move passed that.
Today, life expectancy is seventy-five years old.
We have death rate at 10.9 for males and 8.1 for females out of every thousand to die per year. Thus, death rate hardly fluctuates for the past 15 years. About 2 million on average die in the U.S per year, so today mortality is controlled. Another effect was a change of who died. For example, in the past, it was infants before two years old whom had the highest death rate, predict death were those between ages 5-12 years old (they had the second highest death rate), and ages 12-25 years old and the elderly whom had the lowest mortality rate. The aristocracy had death rates as high as everyone else. If they could live until 12, they would die like other people. In the past, both parents were likely to die before their children reach adolescent because mothers died in childbirth, Pertussis (whooping cough), polio, and many more infectious diseases. In the past, death was also sudden caused by infectious diseases such as, syphilis, anemia, etc. As a result, microbiological diseases count for 44% of deaths, but today, they only count for 4% of all. Today, death is not fast, it is slow. Death is a progress that happens through diabetes, strokes, cancer, heart disease, etc. Today, most people have a notion that death only happens to the elderly. Therefore, you are not corporated on death, if you are not old and you are focused on prolonging
life.
In America, we believe in efficiency, progress, and innovation.
In America, we feel that we should be able to conquer all problems and we believe that this could happen if we could rationally understand manipulate these problems. We approach death in the life of these values and our major concerned with death is how did it happened? We have this illusion that we can conquer death and that most people do not die of diseases like tuberculosis, gastroenteritis (no longer the leading cause of death). We believe that if only we can find a cure for heart disease and cancer, death would go away. But id=f we find a cure, life expectancy would be an additional 5.8 years, but death would still be possible. The response to death is not that we really deny it, but it is the instrumental activism. We have values to fight death, we can be active, and there are certain things that we can do to help us out. We value prolong life and how we rationalize the system of death. That is, there are certain things that we can do to control death or deliberately impose death, this includes, physician assisted death, death penalty, and suicide. Death in America is an enemy to be conquered by our faith to solve problems and to deal with the unknown. Death is not rational, something you can understand, but America and the Western Hemisphere find it difficult to live with ambiguity. We Americans think that we should be happy because it is emphasized in our culture and youth. For example, The Declaration
of Independence.