To Let the Dead

I not so recently returned from an expedition on a terrestrial planet. We have technology for such journeys already and have had for some time, although most people most of the time seem unaware.

This place was inhabited by beings not unlike ourselves. They had very similar institutions and a set of cultures they themselves presumed to be very different because of what appeared to me and my party, as outsiders, to be superficial distinctions they themselves imposed and emphasized.

Overall the dominant belief can best be described as a kind of ancestor worship. Although there were some living members of their communities who were revered, the dead were given preeminence, and not just in monuments and other tributes.

The languages used were, like ours, gifted from the dead. But in their practice of speech and writing, recalling the words and quoting the dead gave what they said in every day life more meaning. This was not only true in conversation but even more so in art and argument and even law.

There were all sorts of rules and even laws about the proper way to do this, whether to quote verbatim or merely allude in an almost secret way to something someone dead had written or spoken.

These practices with words of the dead were not only for those who had been esteemed in their lifetimes. Often those who had been obscure and even despised, badly treated, or killed ignominiously were held in the highest regard.

Indeed, the words of several individuals who in their lives had been egregiously reviled were taken to be something supernatural. Those individuals themselves were given a mythic and divine status only sometimes long after their death.

On the other hand, the living generally were as a regular practice treated very badly, criminally so, even when they had apparently done nothing wrong.

They were not merely allowed to live in precarious or even obviously cruelly undesirable conditions, but were in fact effectively forced to do so because of the outcomes of games and rituals for the distribution of food, shelter and other necessities.

These games were largely dependent on chance, the accidents of birth and other matters not based on rational planning, but also had added layers, again based on the ancestor worship, which seemed to be there mostly to obscure and confuse the obvious impracticality of the systems perversely maintained against the common good.

Those institutional layers and rituals seem to have been implemented mostly to keep descendants of some members with more and others perpetually at risk of if not actually existing in squalor.

This was almost universally true across all of what they considered different cultures because the games and rituals of one group had effectively spread to dominate everywhere, and only vestiges of other previous social arrangements remained, permitted as ineffectual ceremonies, almost like ghosts of something better for everyone but not taken seriously in daily behavior.

As I said from the start in this place, whether advantaged or disadvantaged, one had to die to be allowed genuine dignity and authentic respect. Naturally, we watched them go extinct in the short time of our visit on the planet.

Then at last in death they achieved what often the words of the living and the dead claimed to be both their highest ideal and their mythic origin: Universal equality.

“To Let the Dead”