Your Brain On Climate Fear of Death, with Molly Conisbee
I'm afraid that you are going to die. Sorry. You can imagine afterlives and amass great hordes of wealth, but you're still made of human stuff, and thus will die. Humanity's inability to get its head around this most inconvenient of truths is probably behind most of the silly pointless stuff we do, from rampant consumption to wars to spaceships to conjuring up Gods.
Joining me on this episode of Your Brain on Climate is Molly Conisbee - author of No Ordinary Deaths, a social history of how we've lived and died through the generations. Molly says we can learn a huge amount about how societies choose to live by how they deal with death - and why coming to terms with the fact that we will all (probably) cark it might lead us to do better by the climate in the here and now.
We learn how our relationship with death, the afterlife, and messy mortality, has changed hugely over the years. When we're ever more botoxed and scared of aging, and billionaire-backed scientists are actively trying to cure death, are we running ever more away from the most human - and beautiful - thing of all?
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Owl noises = references:
- 28:07. God on the rise with young people.
- 29.09. Yougov tracked people's belief in ghosts etc.
- 30.07. Roger Clark's Natural History of Ghosts.
- 34.51. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday.
- 39.12. A wiki on Ernest Becker's Denial (not Fear!) of Death.
- 56:40. Make a death / memory box,
The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack.
YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me. Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/.