If death has no meaning, then how can life?

Are you looking to dispose of an awkward corpse in a hurry? Well, modernity has a solution for you. Yes folks, combining the efficiency of fast food with the soullessness of … fast food … it’s the drivethru funeral. Save precious seconds thinking of others that you could instead devote to yourself.

I am not making this up or seeking to play the ghastly spirit of Christmas yet to come. Instead I’m contrasting a Saturday National Post story out of Japan with the message of hope appropriate to the season.

The Post disposed of the subject with suitable briskness: “A Japanese company has launched what it claims is the world’s first funeral drive-thru service. In a country with a shrinking population, where the death rate far outstrips the birthrate … It enables the elderly and immobile to see off their friends and family from the comfort of their cars, streamlining what can be a lengthy service into a simple affair lasting just minutes.”

At last we can begin to die. I didn’t know even death could be new and improved. Well I guess I did. With euthanasia we shall “die with dignity” unlike the old days when the Grim Reaper’s work tended to be messy, painful and ill-timed. But surely the real spectre at the funeral feast is the actual corpse, a person-turned-thing whose risus sardonicus mocks our hopes and dreams.

Because of the jeering materialism of our mortal remains, a dignified farewell has been thought important since the stone age. Even brutal slaveowners who denied slaves almost any kind of dignified treatment including weddings, to say nothing of respecting their marriages, knew it was very dangerous to deny them funerals. And throughout history and around the world, to mutilate a corpse or leave it for the wolves and crows was regarded as spectacular humiliation.

Obviously the deceased could feel neither pain nor shame from the desecration. But it sought to drive a stake through any hope of meaning in life, saying no, you’re just a lump of meat and it’s all you ever were. (As cannibalism did even more grotesquely.)

So does a “streamlined” high-tech funeral. It might seem to offer up-to-date reverence. And the Post story mouthed respectful pieties about how “the new service economizes the sometimes lengthy but profoundly important ritual of easing the dead into the next world.” But if there’s no “next world” the ritual has no importance. You mumble clichés about “they’re not really gone as long as we remember them” which only postpones annihilation until we also die, dispose of the carcass then head off to some more pleasant diversion from the “until we also die” bit.

It streamlines, simplifies, dazzles … and empties of meaning. Indeed why have mourners at all if they’re just drumming their fingers in their comfy cars, maybe cranking up some tunes, and wishing it would end soon? Trends like writing our own eulogies, deciding when we die, and tailoring the ritual basically make the funeral a giant selfie. But selfies aren’t just self-absorbed because we’re focused on ourselves. So is everyone else.

I remember in the 1980s Japan was going to blast past us economically, having “modernized” far more smoothly and effectively than any non-Western society, apart from their psychotically ill-judged mid-20th-century lunge for world conquest. But there was something empty and frantic at its core now visible on the outside.

The Japanese have simply given up on life. With an aging populace projected to dwindle by two-thirds by 2110, something like a third of Japanese youth have never been on a date. Instead they have hobbies, sex robots and push-button funerals. And perhaps it is not modernity gone wrong. Perhaps it’s our future too. Their dwindling 126 million people may have the 3rd-largest economy in the world. But all their technology can’t manufacture hope.

It is in death that we confront most starkly the mystery of human existence, of how it can matter what we do in life even once we are dead. Hence the spectacle of confirmed atheists receiving religious funerals and elaborate burials including Lenin gruesomely embalmed in Red Square. I’d call it whistling past the graveyard except the Japanese increasingly eschew formal graves because there’s nothing to commemorate and no one to commemorate it.

In a way it’s puzzling that elderly Japanese should be in such a hurry to be done with funerals. Where are they rushing off to? But if funerals offer no hope beyond the grim reality of the grave they are simply awkward and should be rendered as quick and painless as euthanasia or ordering a burger.

Christmas is a time of hope, or so I hope. But if so it must be hope for victory over death. Otherwise hit the muzak button, ditch the stiff and get back to playing Candy Crush.