Trump and Biden shouldn’t fear death Mortality is the key to solidarity

If this isn’t quite the way Trump thinks, it is partly because sickness and death are even more un-American than Marxism. They mark the limits of human existence in a nation for which the will is boundless. “I can be anything I want” is the kind of mindless cant one hears rather more of in California than in  Cambodia. Peter Thiel, another American coffin-dodger, has compared what he calls “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” to “confiscatory taxes” and “totalitarian collectives”, suggesting that death is as much an affront to individual freedom as a Stalinist state. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a wealth tax or public ownership.

Likewise, Madonna said recently that she doesn’t think about her age. She may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or so years’ time. Capital is accumulated for a whole range of reasons, but one of them is as a defence against the absolute loss which death signifies. Because there is no end to amassing the stuff, it is a secular version of eternity. Freedom is infinite and indomitable, whereas death shows us up as fragile and finite. Trying to cheat it may soon become as familiar among the superrich as trying to cheat the tax collector.

One Silicon Valley mogul has spent a colossal slice of his $125 billion fortune on various technological stratagems for defeating death. It’s a logical enough project, given that death threatens to strike meaningless a lifetime of piling up wealth. The wealthy are like unlucky gamblers who stack up a fabulous fortune and then lose it in a split second. The members of Joe Biden’s church wear ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday as a sardonic comment on those who unconsciously believe that they are immortal, and who thus pose a Trump-like threat to the rest of us. “Ignorance of death is destroying us,” complains a character in Saul Bellow’s novel Humbolt’s Gift. Those in hell are those who are unable to die.

From Oedipus to Lear, tragedy is the art form in which those who overreach themselves have to be broken in order to experience their mortal limits. Only by confronting the nothingness of death and destitution, in however symbolic a form, can they turn from fantasies of omnipotence to the constraints of reality, which includes their fleshly bonds with others. If there is a guardedly affirmative quality about the tragic, it’s because being broken can lead to a rebirth and remaking, though without any guarantees up one’s sleeve.

Some of the survivors of the attack on the World Trade Center seem to have undergone such a transformation. Having passed through death as through a flame and emerged somewhere on the other side, they found that their sense of the brevity and fragility of life was enhanced, and along with it the need to explore it in all its depth and richness. Trump’s life, by contrast, is neither rich nor deep; he just hopes that it will never end, insofar as he considers the matter at all. Everything else — capitalism, cheeseburgers, trophy wives — must remain exactly the same, while he himself lives on to infinity. Since the religious idea of eternity no longer has as many takers as it once had, infinity can plug the gap.

People like Trump find it almost impossible to die because death demands that you give up absolutely everything, and those who are too deeply invested in the status quo can’t extricate themselves from it in order to do this. This is why the Christian Gospel sees the rich as having a problem in getting to heaven. We are accustomed to giving up this or that — steak, smoking, sex six times a day — but to yield the very self which gives these things up seems inconceivable.

Paradoxically, that self is present in the very act of thinking of abandoning it. It’s easier to face oblivion if you have known love, which also requires a certain self-surrender in the name of an enhanced existence. Those who can love can die. Trump seems to find difficulty with the former, which may well prove a problem when he comes to confront the latter.

Love is one of the ultimate forms of realism, recognising that the other who seems part of one’s very being is actually autonomous, and acknowledging that one will die is the other major form that realism assumes. It means living ironically, in the sense of being bound up with human affairs while keeping one eye on the fact that in the long run none of this will really matter. This isn’t quite the same attitude as that of the schoolboy in the Woody Allen film who refuses to do his homework on the grounds that the universe will eventually collapse. The ironic shouldn’t be confused with the nihilistic.

There is, however, a nucleus of truth to be rescued even from nihilism. “Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear warns Cordelia, but as usual he is mistaken. On the contrary, the lesson of tragedy is that something will only come of nothing — that only by being stripped of one’s grandiose illusions and being hauled through hell will you be able to live with any degree of authenticity. To add an extra touch of gloom, there is no assurance that one will survive this radical deconstruction of the self. Lear doesn’t, and nor do most tragic protagonists.

It is a viewpoint which most liberals and conservatives find too bleak to be believable. Surely things aren’t so dire that they need to be remade from the ground up? In the end, what distinguishes radicals from their political opponents is exactly this claim. The human situation is a great deal worse than the bright-eyed liberal will concede, but at the same time more open to improvement than the sceptical conservative will acknowledge. Is radicalism more optimistic than liberalism and conservatism? The answer is an emphatic yes and no.

Both Trump and Biden should read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, despite the fact that the only books Trump is said to possess are ones he is colouring in. Swift’s novel contains an account of a race of creatures known as Struldbruggs, whose hell is the fact that they have been granted the gift of eternal life but not of eternal youth. Their first three decades are cheerful enough, but around the age of 30 they fall into a depression that lasts until they reach the age of 80. At this point, they are afflicted not only with the usual follies and infirmities of the elderly, but with an extra dose of vices which arise from the appalling prospect of living forever. They are peevish, opinionated, covetous, envious, morose, vain, garrulous, incapable of friendship and dead to all natural affection. At the age of 90, they lose their teeth, hair, ability to taste and most of their memory. Reading becomes impossible because, by the time they have arrived at the end of a line of print, they have forgotten how it began. These wretched creatures linger on for all eternity, deformed, diseased and demented.

There is, in short, one thing worse than death, and that is not dying. It’s a lesson which not only Biden and Trump, but the nation to which they belong, need urgently to learn.