Delphic Maxim 140: Do not wrong the dead
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
140. Do not wrong the dead
It’s pretty obvious to me that so many of the maxims deal with spirituality, our attitude to the dead, and the afterlife because — even in pagan times — there was a strong belief that something of ourselves continues after we are gone. So a maxim asking us not to ‘wrong the dead’ makes sense within a worldview in which ‘the dead’ can be wronged — as though they might continue to feel some kind of temporal grievance in the afterlife. I don’t believe that, for a range of reasons, and so the challenge with this maxim (and a lot of the maxims) is looking for a way to square the circle of secularism.
Probably the simplest way to do that is to fall back on the idea of honour — another concept that’s invoked regularly throughout the maxims. Honour has a transcendent quality, or at least it does if you think about it as being something that exceeds one individual. It is produced in the web of social relations between us — a quality that comes from our social relations, our expectations and roles, and our sense of duty to community.
I think to properly ‘wrong’ the dead would have to involve doing something to dishonour them — particularly when in life they had earned it. And it’s important to recognise that the dead themselves don’t really care if they are wronged or dishonoured, it’s the living who survive them that do. That’s the whole point of honour as a social construct and a networked value: it requires a community to be sustained.
No, the dead are either completely finished, returning to stardust and ready to change into whatever arrangement next arrives in the circle of life’s never-ending kaleidoscope. Or, if there is an afterlife, they are happily wiling away their time in Elysium — maybe they are watching us schmucks back here on earth, boiling the planet away as though Hades couldn’t come fast enough. You get my point right? Whether totally dead or alive for eternity, those who have passed into the next life (as atoms or angels) don’t really care much for what happens here.
Wronging the dead is a proxy today for wronging each other. Sometimes it gets wielded with a little too much force — you only need to look at the myths and controversies around Anzac to see just how the honour and spirit of the dead can linger in the community of the living. They are reworked into nationalism, into movements, into the politics of life itself. All these individuals with their own flaws, their own obsessions, probably their own beliefs about the dead that came before them — each goes to grave alone, but as people they live on in this complex web of social life. And that’s where the idea comes along that they are wronged.
It’s a memory that is wronged, not a person who isn’t here anymore. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t cause harm. I think one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about academic research and writing about nationality and national myth-making is that arguing that something is artificial and constructed makes it somehow less ‘true’. Our lives are surrounded by artificial things — televisions, iPhones, the internet, blogs — they’re all constructed and contrived, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
The stories we tell ourselves are stories, but stories have a materiality to them — they give meaning and structure to our lives. Our memories of people are just the same: not shadows of a life, but a very concrete way — as concrete as thought and feeling can be — that people continue to live. To invoke a religious metaphor (one that has had a concrete impact for thousands of years now), consider the Holy Ghost in the Christian trinity. Essentially it is a way that God — whomever or whatever that might be — continues to exist within the community of believers. It’s that excessive thing that is produced in the space between people.
That’s the same space occupied by social relations like honour and collective memory. If we feel like we are ‘wronging the dead’, it’s in this space that it happens: not the actual person who is gone, but the trace of memory in us that remains.
