What if…

we all became necrophobics—what would life be like?

The first instinct of necrcophobia is to avoid  encountering corpses at all cost.  Or upon encountering a corpse, to place the greatest distance possible between it and oneself.

Now most of your are probably right now envisioning human corpses.  Have you ever heard of the Body Farm dedicated to the forensic study of human decay?  O perhaps you’ve ventured curiously through the electronic tomes (tombs?) or www.rotten.com  dreading some day that you, too, might be so depicted?

So a technologically-astute civilization such as ours that pragmatically embraced necrophobia would first, no doubt, commence a program of launching human corpses into space.  “Expel *the Silence* from the planet,” would be the hardcore rationale.  There’d be no more funerals.  No more burials.  But simply a transport to a launchpad where a deceased body would become the payload for an unreturning launch toward the center of the galaxy. 

There would almost certainly exist a concomitant poetic justification for this discard.  Launching the corpse into space would be heralded as sending it to “Heaven” or “the heavens,” placing it “beyond the rot of maggots,”  sending it upon “an adventure into the Unknown.”  Yet the driving energy would be to make distance—to put away and get away, leaving only life to celebrate its inhabitation upon Earth.

Yet a truer form of necrophobia would not distinguish between the human coprse and that of another species but would find all death equally revolting.  And it is this ultra-necrophobia at the extreme range of reaction that I would like to briefly ponder a moment—for I think that it informs us importantly about the nature of life.

The ultra-necrophobic  societal constellation would require that all death be jettisoned as expediently as possible from the trust of the planet.  Not merely human corpses, but all corpses to include even dead plant material would be targeted for clearance.   Innumerable squads of the living would be constantly engaged in scouring the Earth for the identification and removal of the remnants of whatever was once previously alive.  From mummies in museums, to dead trees in forests,  the exhumation of all past buried and unburied remains would become the Grand Unifying Human Project comparable to the 14^th and 15^th century quest to discover the New World,  the 19^th century mania with constructing worldwide canals, or the 20^th century mission to reach the moon.

And, yes, there would arise a huge controversy about how to label things “living" or “dead.”  After all, we all need food to live and yet at some point the food we eat must die.  But not necessarily before eating it.  So the utra-necrophic constellation of humankind (yes, reflecting my own biases, I am avoiding calling it “society” or “civilization”) would need to embrace the culinary habit of limiting food consumption to “living food” , i.e, live fish, live meat (whatever that might be), live plants (Well, when does a plant die anyway?  Certainly not immediately after it is picked since many picked plants can revive if reincorporated into the ground.  Is an apple alive before it is picked and dead immediately thereafter? )  And regardless of how fuzzily "alive" appropriate food was labeled, clearly, resultant feces would need to be flushed at efficient escape velocities ever heavenwards.  The Earth eventually, at last, would become relatively corpse-free, manure-free, and vibrantly dominated by life and life alone.

Or would it?  Picture a planet that is constantly wasting its waste by shedding it upon the receding solar winds.  Like a wealthy man tossing stacks upon stacks of dollar bills out of a speeding convertible, such a planet would be a pure study of self-exhausting prodigality.  Soils would become impoverished.  Habitats would vanish.  Many key species would become extinct with human life itself becoming an entirely commercial endeavor.  And eventually the insanity of sanitized human life itself would shrivel upon its own cleansed inorganic altars of mere existence.

Face it.  On earth, we need death.  It feeds us.  It nurtures us.  Thus as long as we choose to remain uncleanly alive and non-necrophobic,  we must admit, if not proclaim, “Death becomes us.”

(by the way, feel free next time you're told to *rake the leaves* or *take out the garbage* to use this alibi )