Explain to me the importance of corpses.

In My Humble Opinion
1

People almost universally seem to place high value on the treatment of corpses, and I don’t really understand it. In ancient religions that believe a copy of your corpse is made in the afterlife (or something to that effect), like in ancient Egypt where they’d bury you with useful things, then it makes sense to treat corpses as they did, even if it’s silly, it makes sense within that belief system. But the big religions now - at least the western ones I’m familiar with - seem to place no little importance on corpses.

Why, then, are people so obsessed with treating them as some sort of holy object?

We dedicate large plots of high quality land to graveyards all over the place. Space is often at a premium in the locations you find graveyards, and the land is often very nicely landscaped and quite pleasant - very often a place that would make a great park or something else suitable for public use. Instead it goes almost entirely unattended and unused because apparently some rotting sacks of meat need them more than the living.

There’s usually a strong cry to recover bodies from disasters even when it’s impractical. Now - wanting to confirm that your loved one as killed in the disaster makes a degree of sense - but even in cases where that’s not an issue, for example an airliner that crashed into the sea and is sitting under miles of water - people want to recover bodies from being buried in the sea to… bury them under some dirt.

Movies and other stories often portray military units as leaving no man behind, and this includes dead comrades - often putting their lives in great jeopardy to retrieve or carry these bodies. I don’t know if this reflects a real practice, but even if it doesn’t, the fact that it’s supposed to resonate with us as part of the story seems to indicate that people feel that this is important.

People buy elaborate caskets that are expensive armored hermetically sealed shells, as if their body needs to somehow be protected for a thousand years.

Some people refuse to donate organs, or to donate their body to science in general, because somehow they feel the need to keep their corpse intact, and deny using their corpses in ways that could help real, living people.

There are great taboos against doing anything that could be viewed as desecrating corpses. Robbing graves, for instance, is a strange thing to criminalize since it’s far more bizarre to me that anyone is burying valuable things with people, yet it’s generally regarded as quite a despicable crime. Eating a dead person may be one of the strongest taboos in our culture, even under extreme circumstances where it’s the only practical route to survival.

In general, people are completely squicked out by the idea of anything happening to their corpse when they’re dead that they wouldn’t want to happen to their live body.

And I have to wonder - why? Why do you care? Do you think you’ll inhabit your body after you die? Do you think the condition of your body affects you in the afterlife? Do you think your body is still meaningfully you in some way after you’re dead? Do you think that you’ll be able to somehow know or experience or suffer from improper handling of your corpse?

Christianity has no special status for corpses are far as I’m aware, so for the vast majority of Americans I don’t think there are religious motivations behind this.

What, then? Is it just misplaced anxiety over death? That somehow asserting control over other people’s corpses, in the hopes that others will do the same for you, some way to take control over your anxiety over death? That’s the only guess I have at all as a psychological motivator.

It’s so common that I suspect I look like a complete oddball for not understanding why a cold piece of meat is so important and requires so much respect, but I just don’t get it.

As for me - give my body to necrophiliacs who pass me to cannibals when they’re done. I won’t care, because I can’t. Might as well let someone alive be happy.

2

It’s because the living miss their loved ones, and think that everybody has someone that loves them after they’ve gone. The dead don’t care. And even though many of us can reconcile that their long passed grandma is no longer in that shell, it still looks like grandma, so we should respect it.

3

I suspect because at its root, the bodies are all that we have left. It’s hard to demonstrate love and respect for that spark of humanity but spending money on a body? Putting it somewhere culturally considered sacred or special? They’re ways of saying, “See how much we care!” That only after it doesn’t matter is this care given is rather telling, I must admit.

4

I don’t understand either, but I suspect it’s because I’m not a sentimental person, I’m not a follower of any religion, and I’ve never had a close loved one die before.

Well, I guess I should admit to myself that I DO care a little, because I am adamant about being cremated. If I didn’t at all care about my dead body, then it wouldn’t care about this. And yet I do. I HATE the idea of someone dressing me up in clothes I would never choose to wear, in hair and make-up that I would absolutely hate. Even the idea of someone shaping the eyebrows on my dead body pisses me off. Why? I don’t know. I don’t even think many people would attend my funeral. But apart from cosmetic stuff, I really don’t care.

5

It probably arises from hygienic reasons. If you don’t do something with dead bodies, the gods curse you with diseases. If you bury them, cremate them, or expose them way out on the plains, the gods smile on you.

We took the lesson entirely to heart and built it into our core societal values. Now, we try too hard to collect bodies and body-parts, in a kind of fetishized way.

6

Everyone - do yourself a favor right now and say “importance of corpses” out loud ten times.

7

We want to symbolically show respect and love for someone whose recently passed. Their body is a pretty natural thing to focus these efforts on, since it both looks like the person who recently left and is arguably the deceased persons most valuable and intimate physical possession. Even in cases of cremation, there’s usually a lot of importance and ritual associated with how the ashes are treated.

There isn’t any strictly rational basis for it, but that’s true of a lot of things.

This is a somewhat recent development. Most Christians formally believe in a “bodily resurrection”, and as such, put a lot of stress on the condition of the corpse during the funeral. Until a generation or so ago, for example, the Catholic Church restricted the use of cremation.

8

I think also that the ritual and taboos associated with corpses are a way for us to organize and deal with our grief over the death of a loved one. Having rules and an expectation of how to behave makes it easier to cope.

That dead body over there may mean nothing to us, but we treat it with respect out of the hope that others will treat the dead bodies of those we love (or perhaps our own dead body) with the same respect.

9

Closure, America’s number-one growth industry. The central focus of the criminal justice system.

10

This just shows the extraordinary success of the funeral industry in persuading people of this. It’s comparable to the success of the jewelry industry which has been very successful in pushing the view that if you love someone you need to spends thousands of dollars purchasing diamonds.

11

Eh, a focus on the treatment of a persons corpse is older then the human race.

Spending lavishly on funerary monuments and gravegoods is at least as old as history.

I don’t think you can really blame this on any nefarious corporations.

12

One of the people commenting on that linked article said one of the things I was going to say:

[ul]
[li]Not eating dead community members probably developed as people figured out that whatever killed grampa also killed cousin Mrrgk after Mrrgk had grampa for dinner last night. A superstitious proscription against cannibalism would arise…[/li][li]Burial of dead community members probably started as a way to get the smell of meat away from the community so predators wouldn’t come around chewing up someone who was asleep. [“Hey! It smells like that one over there, only fresher!”][/li][li]Cave burial, deep burial, and later ‘packaging’ of corpses probably developed to further conceal the odor of a corpse in order to block olfactory invitations from going out on the wind. [“Where’s dinner?” sniff “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind!”][/li][li]These sanitary and defensive habits, transmitted from generation to generation (perhaps through an oral tradition maintained by group leaders and/or shamen?) would evolve into increasingly elaborate methods, technologies, and systems – probably varying with the status and wealth of the deceased person and it’s closely related survivors. Eventually they would be encoded into religious rituals, recommendations, and proscriptions.[/li][/ul]
By the way, in recent years (last couple decades, perhaps?) there has been a growing movement toward ‘organic’ burials (cardboard box, just a few feet deep, with a tree planted on top, that kind of thing) and whole-body donations for research (q.v. MedCure and other organizations). So you’re not the first to think along these lines. I think the backlash is a good one.
–G!
[…older thAn…it’s a comparative, not a sequential – oh, never mind…]

13

For about 40 years of my life I figured the dead were dead - gone, empty envelopes, devoid of being, mere husks, etc and etc.

Then my father died in complicated hospital circumstances, in another country not the US. This was the first significant death-loss of my life and I was not there when he died but was at the hospital within an hour of his death.

They did not want me to see him because he was not yet sanitized. Whatever the fuck that meant. But I didn’t care. I had an immediate, visceral and emotional need to see him right then and right now. I can’t even explain precisely why, but it was what it was. I bordered on violence, or hysteria, or some-such and they let me in to see him and it was good and what I needed at that time. None of this was logical or calm but sometimes logical and calm don’t apply.

I had his ashes shipped to me and went to Istanbul to scatter them in the Bosphorus, which was entirely fitting.

14

For those of you who think you’ve done your part to buck this irrational attachment by being cremated, will you please also specify what you are to be cremated in.

My mother’s request was to be cremated when she died. My family has no religious or spiritual beliefs that would dictate otherwise. When the time came, I complied, only to be confronted with the unexpected options of whether she would be cremated in a cardboard box or a wooden box. The staff did not pressure me one way or another, but there were samples of the boxes there, and picking the cardboard one would have made me feel like I was at the UPS store or something, so I chose wood, despite knowing that my mother wouldn’t have cared, and knowing that neither I nor anyone else intended to witness the cremation itself. It was totally wasteful and irrational and I certainly knew that at the time even though I was grieving.

My aunt has requested that her sendoff be in the cardboard box. I won’t have trouble following her wishes, since she’s made them clear.

15

Strip me for spare parts then dispose of me in the cheapest way possible. Don’t venerate this corpse.

16

So there are two cases:

  1. Believers in the supernatural (religions, etc.)

Your Aunt Betsie has died. Her soul is probably levitating in the room above you right now, even though you can’t see her. Or she’s watching from Heaven, etc. You know that the important part is her soul, but you’ve always known her by her appearance (and so did she).

The doctors ask what should be done with her body. Can you really say, while Betsie is listening, that you want it to be thrown in the dumpster behind the hospital?
2. People who don’t believe in the supernatural

The corpse is the person. The body is, quite literally, all that there is. Souls don’t exist. A corpse is a person whose organs, including the brain, have stopped working.

So Aunt Betsie has stopped living, and you want to throw all of her into the dumpster? Why didn’t you suggest it earlier, when only half of her organs had failed?

17

Traditional Jewish view is that our bodies are ‘on loan’ from God - that’s why you’re not supposed to get tattoos and piercings and whatnot (or else you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery).

So there are some (contemporary) religions that have a reason for treating the dead a certain way.

Don’t ask me what it means that the Big Guy doesn’t seem to care about collecting his property when we’re done with it…

18

Yoo hoo: mind. Personality. Life. Brain activity. The mind is at least as much “the person” as the body is. You are leaving out a really, really important component of personhood.

Once the system halts – when the mind is gone and metabolism has ceased – then, yeah, the body is all that’s left. It doesn’t work any more. Obtain what benefits you can from the material carcase – corneas, etc. – and then toss it. It’s no more than yesterday’s newspaper to me.

19

Being agnostic, I don’t have a particular idea about souls and afterlife, but I think death is a mystery to the living. Maybe if there are souls, they stay with the body for a certain time after death before moving on, and maybe they feel pain even though the body may not show any form of reaction to pain. Maybe even if there’s no soul, the mind and/or body feel pain for a certain amount of time after death even if there’s no visible signs of reaction to pain. I guess what I’m saying is that maybe when we cremate or bury beings after death, they can feel the pain even though they have no way of showing this. Only the dead know for sure.

By the way, what is the percentage of land committed to graveyards?

20

Isn’t the mind/body separation an arbitrary concept?

Aunt Betsie’s mind is what her particular brain does when it’s working. It’s not even proper software since it relies on the physical connections in the brain. If we somehow revive her in the first few minutes after death, most of her personality will still be there. On the other hand, if we could transplant her brain into a different head, her mind probably wouldn’t be quite the same because it would be getting inputs from a different set of nerves.

So if we throw away her corpse, including her brain, then we’re throwing away what’s left of her mind, too.

(I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.)