On collective grief

I left for Burkina Faso on August 16^th, 2014, shortly after the death of a childhood icon of mine, Robin Williams.  A few days after the flood of appropriately theatrical grief for Williams, I departed with images of Aladdin hugging the genie and Patch Adams surrounded by children fresh in my mind.  Those images had what I presume was their intended effect on me.  Even the pictures of a zany fruit-bat were not easy to view without moist eyes.  Don’t get me started on that scene with Matt Damon. 

Yesterday, I logged into social media to find that the actor who breathed life into one of my all-time favorite characters had passed away.  Spock had an incredibly penetrating view of humanity.  His disposition was critical and hopeful.  Sounds like somebody you know?  I predictably spent some time yesterday looking at old clips of my most memorable Spock moments.  I nostalgically reread quotes that I had memorized many years ago. 

One thing I noticed after the deaths of Robin Williams and Leonard Nimoy, and the subsequent grief on social media, was the obvious fact that not everyone gets this treatment.  This seemingly innocuous observation allows us to ask who we grieve publicly and why we do it.

When I first learned about what occurred, it took time to react.  I found, to my own amazement that I truly felt the need to grieve somebody that I did not know.  It is unnerving to see an idol, who made you laugh/think/cheer/etc., revived because they are dead.  Even saying that last sentence in my head as I write this, is a little unsettling. 

Grief itself is just unsettling.  It reminds of our own eventual mortality.  Another’s passing affects us and try as we might sometimes, we cannot fight it.  It reminds us that we are never fully autonomous.  We can be undone by other humans who are not even alive.  And strangely, we wouldn’t give up this sort of ordeal for anything.  Imagine the inhumanity of not feeling grief when people die.

Thinking about grief, in terms of recent events, entails thinking about how we collectively grieve.  I have found myself wondering how often we think about our grieving process itself.  Do we realize how arbitrary our grief conventions are and how we take them for granted?  For example, we know that other cultures grieve differently than us.  Some give gifts to the bereaved.  Some cultures, such as Fiji Islanders, treat death casually in everyday conversation.  Some are very stoic and others extremely emotional.  We even see degrees of this kind of variation within our cultural paradigms.  Some cultures have incredible support for those who are grieving whereas many places the U.S. give you two days of leave from work.

It has struck me as odd that we do not seem to think of grief as being a constructed and prefabricated process when we exist in a culture that dictates prescribed stages of grief.  How many books are in print to help guide you through these stages? Put another way, we freely dispense and internalize the ideas of reaching certain contrived landmarks in a specific order so as to grieve normally.  Is that really the natural way to grieve?  Especially if entire cultures do it differently?  This sort of question is where you can see the construction of grief.  In some sense grief, as a process, is structured by culture.  Grief might appear to be a nearly universal experience but how we do grief varies considerably.

Keeping that in mind, think about what we do together when we grieve.  There are no laws that govern proper funeral/wake attire.  But I bet you wear black or dark clothing to funerals.  Probably a suit or dress, right?  Not everyone on the planet does this.  But it would be at least odd and probably disrespectful for you not to do so.  So you uphold the behaviors of grief that you know.  There is certainly nothing objectively more grief-like about black than, let’s say… grey.  Or, as morbid as this may seem, why not do red?  Black is just a convention.  It is merely a pattern of behavior which people tacitly accept.  Observations such as these tell us that our grieving process is institutionalized.

What sociologists mean by the word institution is something more abstract than the everyday meaning of the word.  We tend to think of institutions as formal entities such as hospitals, schools, prisons, the military, etc. that serve public needs within strictly defined parameters.  The sociological meaning is habitual action that serves a social function.  Since different cultures appear to handle grief differently, it is accurate to describe the public grieving process as “doing grief.”  We have learned behaviors that we display and we have conventions by which we appear to abide most of the time.  There are also private grieving mechanisms, but for this post, I am concerned with the ones we see.  The ones we observe others doing and willing follow suit.  I am interested in the public institutional grief.

This sense of the word institution implies patterns and expectations of behavior.  And though this seems mundane, it is extremely powerful.  We can reasonably expect certain behaviors of people we do not know.  We even grieve together with people that we do not know for people that we do not really know.

This framing of the institution of grief reminds me of an anthropological concept of the imagined community.  As I understand the term, it refers to the community building elements of social and cultural constructs.  That sounds a bit abstract so let me give a couple of examples. 

The community of a college or university is an imagined community.  I do not mean that it does not exist.  But I do mean that there exists a tacit connection between all current and former students of that college.  Even your graduating class is an imagined community.  You likely do not know every member of these communities.  But it is still a community.  It is certainly not a physical community, you are all scattered to the winds.  Whatever connection you have with all individuals of this community is, in a sense, imaginary.  You never actually connect with many of them.  Even with a concrete entity, such as a sufficiently populated school which has a physical location, there are elements of an imagined community. 

This concept can be understood elsewhere.  Consider sports team fanbases (other fandoms can apply, such as comic book fanbases).  Do you know every other fan of your favorite team?  The answer is almost certainly no.  However, would anyone ever doubt that you are a community?  You perform some of the same rituals and you certainly aspire to a common goal: victory for team.  You can connect with total strangers at bars and stadiums because of this one commonality, and share in each other’s delight and disappointment.  And this community, while made up of real people, exists in the collective imaginations and habits of its members and nonmembers.

Some sociological institutions, in this view, are certainly functions of imagined communities.  There is no way that you know everyone in the western world who wears black dresses to funerals.  But that doesn’t stop you for doing what you imagine that everyone else does.

Stay with me on this next one.  Societies and nation-states appear to be imagined communities, unless you know every member of your country.  Nations are certainly constructs with rules and enforced boundaries but they also exist in our collective imagination.  They are clearly demonstrated as imagined when you poll people about the values that define their nation.  No two people have the same vision of this entity called the nation-state. 

However, nations are bounded and defined by laws and other formal practices.  But what about societies?  Laws and somewhat tangible institutions such as governments and public services are not the crux of societies.  Plenty of societies on this Earth exist without these.  But all societies do have conventions.  For example, even commonplace biological functions, such as the treatment of human waste are very conventionalized.  Most of us don’t think about all the steps we must take to deal with biological processes and how these steps are constructed.  However, I presume that you are aware that urination/defecation do not actually look or even work the same everywhere in the world. 

Putting that all together, societies are necessarily imagined communities.  That is to say, they are not physical entities.  You can no more touch a society than you can touch your imagination.  They are epiphenomenal.

So, how do we get these abstractly imagined societies?  Put another way, what are the building blocks of a society?  I presume your first thought was people.  Yes, in some sense (although I think an argument can be made that animals have societies too), but the people have to do things, I presume.  Babies in a nursing wing of a hospital are not a society.  The people have to move toward common goals or do some of the same things.  This is where the sociological institution is useful.  Institutions (patterns of behavior that serves social needs) are the necessary attribute of societies.  What makes a “strong society?”  When everyone follows the same social conventions, right?  When everyone has the same sense of purpose and the same sense of how to bring about that purpose.  This is to say, societies are imagined communities that share collective corporate action.

When it comes to building/maintaining a society, I offer that public grief is a powerful tool for doing so.  It represents our collective corporate action that transcends political, ethnic, gender, class, etc. boundaries.  We feel and demonstrate our sadness together.  We can easily imagine the other members of our imagined community doing the same.  We are not generally (I presume) compelled to action by anything other than some social pressure and our own desire to participate.  We simply want show that we too are grieving.  In apparent solidarity.  Willingly. 

I think that collective grief serves cultural and social functions.  We (individuals) did not gain anything by posting pictures on social media.  The departed certainly gained nothing from the attention.  But many of us did this.  And we grieve(d) people we do not know, even if only for a short while.  Why?

I think the answer is that this is a form of cultural propaganda.  It helps the individual punctuate and define their cultural heritage.  We express precisely who we are allowed to be affected by.  It helps us remember and reinforce which stories influenced our young lives (the stories which helped us build our senses of morality, fairness, justice, etc.).  It helps us to define our collective values.  We proudly flaunt them and agree with each other.

It seems that collective grief is an exercise in culture building and cultural maintenance.  The human condition is indeed strange such that the deaths of others are used to define the values for the living.  However, if we are going to do anything at all about the passing of those who touched our lives, what better way to honor them than to prop them up as cultural icons?  Among these bittersweet displays over the next few days, take a moment to consider what it means and what message you are sending when/if you are honoring Nimoy.  And do keep in mind that “… the more we share, the more we have.”