The mixed response toward the Queen’s death amongst some of my fellow U.S. citizens unsettled me. Not because the questions they raise are not valid ones, but because they were raised so soon after her death. It is a symptom of an attitude the West has increasingly come to hold toward our ancestors: because we are bearing the consequences of their moral failings, we owe them neither respect nor dignity. 

I think this attitude is a mistake. Not only does it disregard all that the now-dead have done for us in advancing the human good (including the development of that morality by which we regard their mistakes to be mistakes), but it cultivates a dangerous deafness towards and rebellion against the dead in those who come after us. If we have anything worthwhile to say or do, how can we, having taught our children to ignore the dead, expect them to listen to us when we have joined the dead ourselves?

We must not culture deafness to our ancestors in our descendants

Tradition has gained the reputation of being oppressive toward individuals and minority groups. But tradition, as G.K. Chesterton says in Orthodoxy, “is only democracy extended through time”. If the idea of democracy proposes that we give all human voices equal weight, tradition asserts that the same principle extends to the voices of those now dead. The “democracy of the dead” as Chesterton calls it, gives us the broadest possible idea of the human polity. All human beings — those living, those dead, those yet to be born — are part of the same community. As such, they ought to listen to one another. 

The human polity includes, in addition to the dead, the generations that are to follow ours. This makes the trend of disregarding the dead — in addition to being undemocratic — dangerous. In ignoring the dead we are teaching our children to ignore them. By ignoring the dead, we teach them to think only of themselves — neither of us, when we have joined our ancestors in death; nor (and this is the frightening idea) of their descendants who come after them. If we are seeking the well-being of the entirety of our human polity, we cannot culture deafness to our ancestors in our descendants. 

To culture complete rebellion is, in the end, the same thing as culturing selfishness toward the future. Wendell Berry’s poem “The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front” (as well as many of his other writings) speaks some good advice to this point:

Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

His argument is that, to live for the future, one must work in that which will bear fruit only in the future. “Invest[ing] in the millennium” also has to work backward. In order to think in terms of the millennium going forward, one must listen to the voices of the millennium going back, just as one can only know what planting sequoias means if they look at the grown sequoias standing over them.

In addition to the consequences of not listening to the dead, there is a dignity that death itself confers on the dead. T.S. Eliot recognizes this dignifying of the dead in “Little Gidding”:

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Even out of the poem’s larger context, these lines are striking. Eliot makes the case that the dead say different things when they are dead than they did when they were living, and that their voices are now stronger than they were when they lived. A possible explanation for this is that the dead’s lives are complete. Their actions and words come from lives that are, in our terms, finished. We listen whilst still incomplete. 

To mock the dead is to mock the mystery of our own death

What’s more, when we think on the words or actions or traditions of those dead, those things are for us bound up with grief: with the fear of our own death, and with the mystery of death itself and what comes after it. Aside from the communal dangers that accompany a deafness toward the dead, it violates the consecration bestowed on the dead by death itself. To mock the dead is to mock the mystery of our own death, the fear that mystery inspires in nearly every human person, the dignity of grief, and the idea that there is meaning in the completion of a life. 

There are very few among the dead who made themselves absolute monsters — who, truly, do not deserve dignity. We should not give it to them. But they are few, and are roundly condemned by the democracy of the dead already. Far more common are those who did some harm, but said and did and lived in ways that are still worth listening to. We ought to dignify and listen to them. We owe the dead our honour and our respect.