Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Nigel Warburton

14th February 2008

In Leo Tolstoy's short story 'How Much Land Does A Man Need?' a peasant acquires more and more land until his greed finally kills him. The answer to the question 'How much land does a man need?' is obvious by the end. All we need, Tolstoy tells us, is about six foot by two: enough land to be buried in.

But do humanists even need a grave? Aren't graves a hangover from religion? Couldn't we get by with no land whatsoever? Wouldn't that be greener? More rational? After all land is a scarce resource. Better leave it to the living...

My father doesn't have a grave, or any other kind of memorial. Does that matter?

Actually he didn't even have a funeral. That was his wish, and it was a misguided one. It might have been a reaction to the ranting (and slightly drunk) preacher the crematorium wheeled in for his father's service. But not having a funeral is a mistake for anyone. It denies the living emotional closure.

A supreme achievement of the humanist movement is to provide sincere funerals that help people accept the deaths of friends and family without betraying the life and beliefs they had.

But I'm not sure about the grave question. Isn't there a kind of purity about making a complete exit, without leaving anything behind? No grave, no memorial...?

If you are a physicalist, in the sense that you believe that all that we value about human beings - consciousness, art, science, love, imagination, friendship, beauty - ultimately arise from neurons firing ...then what special value should we give to the body and its final resting place? The point is that the body's value to humanity is as a functioning living human being. After that it is a trace, a husk... a resource for other people.

Yet in many areas of life we do value relics and traces, a memento of a friend, relative or lover, perhaps a pen they used or a piece of jewelery they wore. An indiscernible substitute wouldn't have the same significance. Similarly, I can understand the desire to be in the presence of the last remains of someone we loved or knew or even of someone we would like to have known. There is no magic here. The dead person doesn't hear what we say to them at the graveside. We can't really interact with them. But like the memento, the grave is a way of focusing our mourning and our thoughts about the dead. The presence of the person's remains changes the nature of this experience. Land where ashes have been scattered can take on this role too.

This is a very human desire: the desire to set aside a place in which to remember our dead and in which what is physically left of the dead plays a part in that remembrance.

A grave can act as a prophylactic against the tempting illusion that the dead are not really dead, but continue to live somewhere else, somewhere better perhaps.

A physical space for our dead has real value for the living.

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