We're dumb about death. Or so Simon Stow argues in this elegant meditation. Dumb as in stupid, and the stupidity is politically incapacitating, even lethal—or, better, politically energizing, but for a nasty politics, not anything a humane democrat could embrace. And dumb as in speechless, or in any way inarticulate. We don't know what to say and we say the wrong things. And, again, our stammering stupidity has bad political consequences. Stow’s aspiration, which strikes me as unconditionally great, is to nimbly step around death as a timeless fact of life, or the biology of the human condition, and think about the ways in which it is culturally, historically, politically inflected. American Mourning does not aim at developing a sustained argument or chopping logic—fine by me—but at illuminating his dark subject from different vantage points.
Stow is a savvy ethnographer, and the best moments of this book take up famous and recent episodes in American history: the Gettysburg Address, Coretta Scott King’s funeral, Black Lives Matter, our treatment of military veterans, and more. He's commendably impious. If he wants to trouble placid complacency, it's because he thinks we should be troubled. If he sometimes overplays the importance of speech—I doubt that the Gettysburg Address made racial equality “all but unchallengeable” (p. 46; but contrast his closing thought at p. 227), and I would have doubted it even before the recent eruption of old-fashioned in-your-face vitriolic racism—he has an eye for telling detail, in both speeches about death and their reception.
The right-wing outrage machine would happily seize on one deliberately provocative formulation here: I mean Stow’s “no-doubt-distasteful suggestion . . . that Americans should mourn the death of Osama bin Laden,” a suggestion “offered with a straight face” (p. 18, and notice the wry piling on at p. 108 with the suggestion that Islamic mourning might be a model). Cringing, I pictured poor Stow pilloried on Fox News, enjoying (or not) his 15 minutes of Internet infamy, with the presiding impresarios of William and Mary, where he teaches, facing shrill demands for his ouster.
Stow notices the issue, drily suggests that the outrage machine is not likely to get its hands on a book of political theory—and offers a crucial distinction between what he's up to and the essay that got Ward Churchill fired. Churchill’s work, Stow observes, was an attack on the dead. But his own work is all about the living: on how we make political sense of death, how we talk about it, how we mourn. What matters about the dead here is not their past, not the past at all: It's how we carry on, in the usual stumbling improvisational way, to create a better future—or not. We should mourn bin Laden not because we owe it to him, a question which I don’t think interests Stow (though it sure does interest me), but because we will be better for doing it. Put differently, Stow’s politics of mourning are forward looking, not backward looking, even before he says incisively caustic things about nostalgia.
There is a Rousseauean worry here: If we were capable of doing such things, we would not need to; and the fact that we need to is precisely why we never will. Whatever you make of such worries, Stow is right to launch his meditation with this provocation. It's not just attention grabbing; it also orients the reader to the sorts of political possibilities he wants to explore. He wants a democratic politics more open to self-criticism, less inclined to demonize opponents; more tragically conscious of its own failures and limitations, less inclined to unthinkingly bellicose condemnations of even radical critics—in a word, if a crudely oversimplifying and oddly controversial word, more humane. Stow argues that “mortalist humanism” (p. 107) is not anti- or pre-political, but the crucial grounding of a decent politics. Though it's not on his radar, I promptly thought of how Achilles draws up short in the Iliad when he realizes that unlike heroism, death is brutally egalitarian, and how he suddenly finds the business of bashing the Trojans pointless.
It's mildly surprising, though no big deal, that Stow doesn't explore Achilles’ paralysis, though he does touch on his grimly enthusiastic return to the battlefield after Patroklos’s death (p. 6). For the Ancient Greeks are very much on Stow’s agenda, constantly furnishing templates that he uses to appraise key episodes in American history. I yield to just about nobody in my deep affection for the Greeks, but—here's the only material objection I have to Stow’s book—there's something unhappily abstract or ahistorical in his use of them.
Plato, Stow tells us, is worried about “the generalizations of nationalism” (p. 31). And the Pericles of Thucydides’ funeral oration is “nationalistic,” given to “jingoistic militarism” (p. 39). He conscripts the Greeks’ thoughts on nationalism over and over. But is nationalism, on anything like our understanding, conceptually available to the Greeks? Is the polis more or less like a nation, or even like a nation in the relevant ways? I doubt it. Start here: a million writers have thought that there is something important about language groups in the unfolding of nationalism. The Greeks understood the importance of sharing a language: so the contempt for barbarians, those whose speech strikes Greek ears as a babbled bar-bar-bar; and so their teaming up to defeat the Persians. Even then, I doubt that we have a nation: surely not a nation-state, and then not even the aspiration to a nation-state, crucial to modern nationalism. It doesn't seem apt to describe the Peloponnesian War as a civil war. I suppose jingoism has specific contours, too, as a kind of bloodthirsty foreign policy underwritten by nationalism. If in the Mytilenian debate, Cleon instructs the Athenians that they must do what it takes to hold their empire, Diodotus responds that this is bad advice that will not serve the interests of Athens, and of course he carries the day. Yes, the citizens first adopt Cleon’s brutally stern advice. But even that advice doesn't strike me as jingoistic.
More important, the modern state is just one social institution in a highly differentiated landscape (think: church, market, science, university; unpack “civil society” and discover dozens more institutions; and so on). It doesn't sprawl over the social landscape as the polis does, with so little outside it. I don't want to overplay the point. After all, Aristophanes gives us Dikaiopolis, “Just City,” negotiating a private peace with the Spartans and enjoying the fruits of private life—by the end of The Acharnians, he is rollicking, drunk, with a prostitute on either arm. This is a wicked inversion of Pericles's insistence that Athenians put the city first and foremost, even more politically fruitful, I think, than Thucydides’ choice to subvert the pompous majesties of the funeral oration by showing how ignobly the Athenians behaved when the plague hit.
Still, there is a salient difference between what the Greeks had on their hands and nationalism, just because there's a difference between the polis and modern society. Dying for the polis is not the same as dying for the nation—and then mourning the former isn't quite the same as mourning the latter. Soldiers today leave behind not just the state but all those other institutions, and the way we come to terms with their death could and should involve thinking of the other roles they occupied. We can agree that there's lots to learn from the ancient Greeks and still be sensitive to how our context differs from theirs. If Socrates worries about the “all-consuming nature of the nationalism” caused by a certain kind of funeral oration (p. 52), the point might lie more precisely in just what is more or less all-consuming about the polis, but not the modern nation-state. I've got nothing against exploring more abstract similarities, but the problems and possibilities of American mourning would come into sharper focus if Stow were attentive to these contrasts, too.
I briefly note a worry about style or exposition. Stow’s text is cluttered with invocations and quotations of other political theorists. One paragraph gives us Nicole Loraux, Charles Segal, Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière (p. 132). Another gives us Loraux, Christopher Pelling, Thomas Harrison, Simon Goldhill, Paul Woodruff, Edith Hall, and Sara Monoson (pp. 119–20). Trust me, there are plenty more examples. Isn't scholarship a collective enterprise? Isn't it worth building on the work of others and noticing where you disagree with them? You bet. But unless you need a sustained treatment of their work, all that is best left to footnotes.
Still, the book is an advertisement for thinking politically about death. Not just politically obvious cases—death in battle, assassination, cruelly unjust racism at the hands of an ostensibly liberal state—but also garden-variety peaceful death. It has real stakes for democracy, and Stow is a good guide to them.
