..Social Efficiency, Human Dignity … Glitz and Hubris be Damned.
(c) 2020, Davd
It is only logical the Virus Emergencies should remind me of my own mortality. Men have higher death rates than women, earth-wide. The old have much higher death rates than the young. In Canada especially, “care-facilities” have had far higher death rates1. Thankfully, I am not in a care-facility; but I am old, and male. I would be fooling myself if I did not think of death.
We have lately seen many pictures of funerals. Funerals tend to be elaborate, expensive, and in their commercial form, deceitful. The corpse is “embalmed” not with herbs and spices as in ancient times, but with poisonous chemicals intended to retard decay. A description of the process would be gruesome. The purpose is not to restore nor even preserve life, but to preserve a dead body for display.
Once my body has died, why show it off? Why not bury it, perhaps with some good Christian ceremony, in a simple rather than fancy manner? I have not lived in fancy style; the Virus Emergencies portend lower rather than higher material wealth in the coming years; let my funeral be one of simple dignity.
I resumed thinking of funerals last summer, when I was “going to church” at a monastery chapel. I had sojourned in another monastery in 2005. My image of a monk’s funeral has as its centre and theme, a plain pine coffin symbolic of human dignity without excess display or luxury. The Plain Pine Coffin was once quite normal in North-America; it persists with monks, who vow poverty and are buried accordingly. Their funerals have ample dignity and no hubris at all… as do their lives, with the occasional “falling short of the glory” [Romans 3:23]
Let my funeral be plain, simple, but at least a little dignified: A plain pine2 coffin, closed; a white or tan cloth covering the coffin, (a pall, signifying the equality of humankind), a Christian service. Do not spend [tens of?] thousands of dollars embalming the dead body i left behind, nor putting it on display; do not encase it in a fancy “casket”. If someone wants to cut some flowers from his (or her) garden for the occasion, fine; but no fancy purchased bouquets, please. If i die in winter, some evergreen boughs or a wreath on top of the pall should do.
As Flatt and Scruggs sang, decades ago,
“Give me my flowers while I’m livin’, and let me enjoy them while I can—
don’t wait ’til I’m ready to be buried, and then shove some lilies in my hand.
I cannot immediately name a symbol of living frugally, that is as familiar as the plain pine coffin is as a symbol and expression of frugal dignity in death. Because it is widely familiar and widely respected, it makes a good symbol of frugality combined with respect for human dignity—and as the final self-expression of many, many good men and women (especially monks and nuns) it probably has a greater visibility than the many similarly frugal, dignified, and humane acts that the monastic life contains.
You needn’t be a monk nor a nun to live the standard… nor need you be dead, not even dying—you can live the standard of which that plain pine coffin is the final expression.
The three traditional categories of life’s necessities are food, clothing, and shelter. As one who means to send his dead body out of sight in a plain pine coffin, i eat fairly plain, substantial food (much as pine is plain, substantial lumber) but as my cooking blogs will show, i season it with some vigor. I grow, forage, or occasionally receive as gifts local apples, berries, carrots, culinary herbs, fish, green-beans, kale, lettuce, [wild] mushrooms, potatoes, rabbit3, and rowan fruit.
I buy “local” food when i notice an opportunity. I buy food “from away” when the price is near its low point: [dry] beans, olive oil, coffee, flour, margarine, meat, oat and rye flakes for porridge, sugar.
I buy new clothing, but not much and not as often as the Tax Collectors and proponents of economic growth would wish. (Three of my best T-shirts were made up by a printer for Osoyoos, BC, and didn’t sell; i bought them for less than the price of ‘plain’ ones.) I buy some used clothing at “thrift stores”… but shoes, socks, work pants, and underwear don’t get to such places in good condition very often.
Much of what i wear, i was actually given, usually because the purchaser out-grew it. One pair of boots i wore for light work, until they finally failed, was left behind by my youngest son when he left our home for either college or military service. He had outgrown them: He is now some 10-15 cm taller than i am, with foot size in proportion. Various men closer to my age, have “handed down” shirts and less often pants because they had outgrown them at the waist.
I built two houses i lived in [with help from sons and friends]; a third, came with the land. (Logically, houses should more often be group than individual property.) What i added to “house #3” were two porches:
A sun porch where i started vegetable plants in the spring and which heated the kitchen-study on sunny afternoons from October to May;
… and a storm porch which held two cords of firewood; it broke the cold wind and i did not need to go to the woodshed when the weather was miserable.
What is the transportation expression of the Plain Pine Coffin Standard? Definitely not two cars in every garage—in fact, with fossil fuels becoming Politically Incorrect and electric cars remaining expensive, not even a car in every driveway. Perhaps not a driveway by every house. Perhaps the bicycle is the most general symbol of transportation frugality; but there are transportation needs it cannot meet.
I needed before the Emergencies, not a vehicle, but 10%-15% of a vehicle—say, about 10% of an efficient car and 3% of a pickup truck… so maybe the transportation expression is car-sharing co-operatives and second class rail coaches. Car-sharing co-operatives are still new to North America, and the bureaucracies, governmental and insurance, tend to delay their development. If governments are preparing for a more frugal “New Normal”, facilitating co-operative vehicle sharing should be part of their planning.
So should passenger trains… which as of 2019, were in use for urban commuting, but rarely used by working- and middle-class people travelling. In the mid-1980s, i travelled all over southern Finland, and from London to Helsinki, by second class train. I also went from Thunder Bay to Calgary and back again by second class train, more than once, to attend an annual year-end conference. The people i met on those trains were decent, contributing workers for the most part, with a few students and retired folks. The rich and the disreputable were notable by their rarity… as they also have rarely been buried in decent plain pine coffins.
This is not meant to be a specific, much less a detailed plan; rather a guiding example, of modest, dignified frugality. Frugality is never proud; it considers and does not condescend. I do contend that a Plain Pine Coffin basis for standards guiding economic and political policy would give most citizens more life satisfaction and less onerous work, than today’s (or should i say 2019 and before’s?) “policy frameworks”.
“All men are mortal” … and a “novel coronavirus” has demanded we take notice that we are. The plain pine coffin happens to be a symbol of frugality with dignity, that I honour among monks, recommend to all … and suggest we refer back to when concepts are needed for a Next Normal. Not fancy caskets but plain pine coffins. Not cars to go 5-10 km to work, but bicycles. Not airliners to travel 500-1000 km, but passenger trains. Not fancy restaurants, nor burgers and fries, but nutritious home cooking. Housing, methinks should have a post of its own; I did make some mention of socially efficient housing several years ago.
This is a time to make us think of our mortality … and recognize that a virus not even known to science last year, is “killing” many social customs and pretensions. We have some choice, what to let die, what to change, what to adopt to replace customs that perish. We never needed cruise ships, nor cars to go a few miles to work, any more than our bodies will need to be put on display in fancy funerals.
Notes:
1. Care-facilities house many more women than men, which is one major reason more women than men have died of “COVID-19” in Canada, than men. Many more women have been infected, and especially in care-facilities, because care-facilities house many more women. The death rates for men have been higher than for women, even though the women averaged older.
2. Pine is the traditional coffin wood, at least in the temperate zones where it grows, for good reasons: It is commonly available and while not the cheapest wood, is far from the most expensive; it is easily worked (while Thuja, for instance, splits readily when nailed without pilot holes); it is stronger than Thuja or balsam-fir ..and it has a pleasant smell which might cover the odor of death.
3. To be proper, “varying hare”; common name, “snowshoe rabbit”. It’s good meat, free of antibiotics and pesticides apart from perhaps sprays by industrial forestry.
