Sergey Mokhov - about grief in the digital age, ritual practices and the hope for immortality

Can we achieve immortality? Why do social media users teach each other how to mourn correctly, why do we need to cry at funerals, and could the coronavirus change our attitude towards death?

Sergey Lebedenko and Vladimir Eremin, hosts of the Book Link podcast, talked about this and many other things with Sergey Mokhov, an anthropologist, editor-in-chief of the journal Archeology of Russian Death and author of the book The History of Death: How We Fight and Accept, which has just been published in publishing house Individual.

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WARS FOR SORRY: HOW TO GRIEF WITHOUT OFFENDING ANYONE

An excerpt from the "History of Death" by Sergei Mokhov

To the question "Why do we so easily get involved in arguments about how to grieve properly?" there is no direct answer. It is clear that most often the cause for such a conflict is grief associated with a tragic or mass death, and not the quiet death of the conditionally nasty grandfather Ivan Ilyich.

Any death raises two simple questions: why did this happen and what conclusions can be drawn from this? In fact, these are questions about justice, the patterns of what happened: why this person or these people? Could this have been avoided? Religion answers such questions simply: "We are all mortal, there is fate and God's will." Psychologists talk about the naturalness of death and the emotions associated with loss (hence the advice in the spirit of "cry") and the need to live on - "for the sake of something" or even for the dead themselves. Both paradigms celebrate the idea of ​​life, which is ultimately worth living for, the old Christian idea of ​​progress and faith in the future. Both interpretations aim to accept the loss as a natural fact and to stabilize the emotional consequences. But what about when faced with a death that doesn't seem natural? After all, when it comes to murders, terrorist attacks and child deaths, the answer to the question “Why did this happen?” much harder to find.

Tragic death in the modern world is not explained by spiritualistic-mythical religious constructions. It is impossible to say that children died in a burned-out movie theater because God wanted it that way or because "death is natural." Therefore, such cases provoke an aggressive reaction to uncertainty, to a system error.

Public and tragic deaths lead to a kind of hysteria, what researchers call mourning sickness. People in this state actively look for the guilty, build the most fantastic causal relationships and easily believe in conspiracy theories - after all, you need to at least somehow explain what happened. And where the functions of interpreters were performed by religious institutions, public groups and various opinion makers appear.

Social networks are becoming an ideal tool for clashing conflicting explanatory discourses.

In Moscow, on the Kursk direction of electric trains, you can see a large graffiti that is several years old. The author of huge letters, referring to the experience of a fire in the Kemerovo shopping center "Winter Cherry", claims: "All the billboards will not be enough to ask ... Kemerovo." The inscription refers to the American film "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri", which tells about the murder of a young woman and how her mother tries to get a fair investigation into the case. Just like the heroine of the film, ordinary Russians turn into the void, trying to understand who is to blame for the tragedy and why it happened. From these questions, new ones logically follow: is not the fire that claimed the lives of children an occasion to think about our safety? And even more globally: can we trust each other after what happened? Rallies dedicated to the Kemerovo tragedy were held in 23 cities of Russia. Some of these rallies were organized by the authorities, the rest by the opposition, which blamed corrupt officials for the tragedy.

Not only lack of grief can come under criticism, but also grief that seems excessively intense or inappropriately prolonged. This is confirmed by the scandal around the documentary film by Russian journalist and producer Yuri Dud, released in 2019, “Beslan. Remember." One of the most striking negative comments on the film was a video message from designer Artemy Lebedev, in which he asked why the relatives of those killed in the 2004 terrorist attack couldn't "just bury their children and move on with their lives." Victims of accidents should also not speak publicly about their pain and suffering when the public reputation of the authorities and the state is at stake. Thus, the first vice-governor of the Kemerovo region, Vladimir Chernov, called the rally that followed the fire in the Zimnyaya Vishnya shopping center “a clear, planned action aimed at discrediting the authorities,” and emphasized that many people took to the square, “ not at all understanding what are they doing there . In the course of such a policy, the mourners are isolated from society and left alone with their own interpretations of what happened.

The inability to publicly grieve for a loved one, if he is somehow stigmatized, has also been studied by a number of researchers. For example, Ken Doka, one of the main theorists of grief, even coined the term "disenfranchised grief" - literally "limited grief", "unacceptable" or "disenfranchised" grief. He notes that in this case "a person is experiencing a loss, but has no right to mourn for it, since no one around recognizes the cause of his grief as legitimate" .

Doka writes about a whole range of such phenomena: for example, grief can be regulated in the case of the non-traditional sexual orientation of the deceased or in the case of mourning for a pet, whose life is considered less valuable than a human one. In this focus, mourning becomes a tool for establishing the status of a “normal person”: it turns out that you can mourn only for those who deserve it.

The expression of grief becomes a form of self-objectification. Everyone must constantly experience pressure and threat. As the researcher of the cultural history of emotions Andrey Zorin notes, speaking of modern society: “ In the discourse of the new sensitivity, it is the experiences that are subject to legal protection, and not just one or another individual, but a group defined by a common identity. The center of a person's self-awareness is the ability and ability to correctly offend on behalf of a group. In the process of showing resentment, we construct our own identity. Therefore, we are persistently looking for an opportunity to be offended.

Despite the fact that Zorin speaks mainly about resentment, his observations apply to the situation of mourning: everyone can now be offended by an insufficient or incorrect expression of grief and even try to look for this situation. This idea is also confirmed by the American anthropologist Katherine Verdery: analyzing the rituals of reburial in the post-Soviet countries, she notes that grief and grief become extremely important components of social emotions, because they allow you to separate your own from others. In this regard, grief allows you to reconstruct your own and group identity, to show it more clearly, to unite through a collision with strangers. So, in the case of the fire in the Zimnyaya Cherry shopping center, some state channels used the tragedy to accuse Ukrainian social media users of mocking Russians and their grief. And on the Tsargrad TV channel, there was even a report “What sorrow for people is joy for non-humans: The reaction of Ukrainian social networks to the tragedy in Kemerovo” .

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Remembering my ten-year-old self, sobbing at my father’s wake so as not to feel out of place, I understand how accurately and quickly I captured the context of mourning in an elusive traditional culture in which crying was important in order to comply with all norms of decency. Platonov's old woman Ignatievna urged Mitrevna to "cry a little" because it was supposed to be so, and not because the emotion was caused by an inner desire. Obviously, in the modern world, grief takes on completely different functions. It becomes an important part of self- and public representation, a way to designate one's subjectivity, a powerful tool for social and political expression, which is aimed not at an ascetic inner experience, but at a general demonstration.