The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 13: Replacement Theory

The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike Isaacson: Of course you’re gonna be replaced. No one lives forever.

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Mike: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Subscribe to our Patreon to join our book club. This should be an interesting episode. I’ve got Dr. Michael Cholbi with me. He’s chair in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and editor of the volume Immortality and the Philosophy of Death. He’s joining me to discuss Replacement theory. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Cholbi.

Michael Cholbi: Thanks very much, I really appreciate the invitation.

Mike: All right, so before we get too deep into the philosophy, talk a bit about what you study and how it contributes to the human experience.

Michael: Well, I'm a philosopher, and I specialize in particular in ethics. Within ethics, much of my research addresses philosophical issues, ethical issues, related to death and mortality. Some of the issues that I have written on include things like suicide and assisted dying, the desirability of immortality, the rationality of attitudes such as fear toward death, and most recently, working a significant bit on philosophical questions related to grief and bereavement.

In terms of what I think it contributes to the human experience--well, I hope it contributes something to the experience--I do think that it's probably the case that even if non-human creatures have some understanding of death, some inchoate understanding of death, we human beings learn at a pretty early age about death, and we learn at a pretty early age as well, that death is ultimately unavoidable. We learn that every creature that we have ever known, every creature that ever will exist including ourselves, does die eventually. And I think as a consequence of that, we have to live our lives in light of that fact. It seems to be pretty clear that our attitudes about death and mortality impact a lot of how we approach the world, what our attitudes are, what our aspirations are.

So I'd like to think that philosophy of death or dying is a subject that is relevant to people not because of, you know, their being a member of a profession, or because they come from a certain part of the world or whatever it might be, but simply because they're human and they are aware of the fact of their mortality. I think we all grapple with it, and I think that philosophy has some particular tools or methods that can help people grapple with it in a helpful way.

Mike: Now, the reason I wanted to have you on is because I think replacement theory sort of revolves around a fear of death or an inability to grapple with one's own mortality. So there's this idea of being replaced, it's obviously fundamental to the theory itself, and I think this relates to the idea of the first part of your book, “Is death bad for those that die?” I think that replacement theory would answer in the affirmative, and probably most people, though less frantically. So what do philosophers have to say on this question? Does anyone say no?

Michael: Well, I actually think there's a pretty significant contingent, right, of philosophers in different traditions who don't think that death is bad for the person who dies, or at least isn't bad necessarily. And I think that those who hold that view fall into several different categories.

One category are those philosophers who believed in the afterlife. A significant number of philosophers have worked in Christian and Islamic traditions and of course, according to those traditions, death is not really the end of us; it's more like a transition for us in that we change from being mortal embodied living creatures to being immortal creatures. Not all of the thinkers who believe in afterlife have believed in what we would think of as religions in the usual sense. Socrates famously argued that his death was not going to be bad for him because this was his opportunity to be released from his body and to become acquainted with the eternal and unchanging forms that he believed are the source of all knowledge.

Another school of thought that has denied that death is bad for us were the Epicureans and they have their contemporary defenders. Epicurean philosophers believe that death is neither good nor bad for us. Their famous slogan is "Death’s nothing to us," and their point of view is that death is the end of us. We don't survive it. There's no afterlife. And because we don't survive it, we don't experience anything bad, there's nothing to be bad about death, and we simply don't exist. So in their view, death is neither bad nor good.

Then there's a third school of thought that's a bit more contemporary. Most philosophers who adopt this school of thought would call themselves Deprivationists or Comparativists, and roughly the idea is something like this, that your death can be bad for you, and the way it can be bad for you is that if you die at a particular point in time, then had you not died at that time you would have lived longer, and had you lived longer, there's the possibility that you would have had a better life overall. So were I to die today then that means I would not survive longer, and perhaps had I survived longer, I would have had the opportunity to have a better life, a happier, more fulfilling life, to say.

So there’s certainly been many schools of philosophical thought, many philosophers, that have thought that death is not bad for us, or at least not necessarily bad for us, I should say. That said, I think it's been one of the sort of perennial questions in philosophy and there are a good number of people on the other side of the ledger who think that there's something deeply terrible about death just insofar as it represents the kind of destruction of our consciousness or of our subjectivity. It's bad simply insofar as it represents the cessation of the existence of the only thing that each of us can really say that we know or count on–ourselves. And maybe that's bad enough to make death bad.

Mike: This kind of gets us into the next topic I want to get into. One of the topics that comes up in your book is the idea of life as a narrative arc that concludes with your death. And it seems like that is roundly refuted but it still feels compelling. It forms the basis of most action, adventure, sci fi, fantasy, etc, stories.

And it kind of implies destiny, which is something crucial to replacement theory. Even the Comparative approach touched on in the first part of the book takes for granted one's destiny that we compare, you know, beyond one's ultimate death, or one's untimely death. Replacement theory kind of takes this narrative arc story of an individual life and puts it at the meta level with the grand narrative of the nation. So, how do philosophers take on this idea of life as a story, presumably that concludes with one's death?

Michael: Well, I certainly think that outside of philosophy and say psychology, we see an abundance of evidence that perhaps one of the defining features of human beings is that we're storytellers, right? We tell stories about ourselves, about other people, about our communities. And it's certainly possible to look at one's life as a narrative, as a kind of story.

There are philosophers who have denied that this is sort of essential to us. There's a living philosopher now named Galen Strawson who has essentially said that, or at least from his point of view, he lives his life as a series of disconnected episodes as if there's sort of no narrative, unity, or structure to them at all. And of course, there's also the possibility that we tell stories about our lives or craft narratives about our lives that turn out to be false or incoherent or really don't make any sense.

I don't think necessarily that the notion that we view our lives as narratives and our lives as narratives implies destiny. In fact, I think a lot of what people are attempting to do in the course of their lives is to try to craft a life that corresponds to a certain story. So, perhaps you have a life where a certain kind of adversity was present early on in life, but one of the central things that you tried to do was to overcome that adversity, and by the end of your life, it's clear that you had overcome that adversity. That's a pretty common trope in the stories that people aspire to create for their lives.

I think at the collective level-- and that seems to be really what sort of Nazi replacements theory is operating at a sort of meta level as you said-- you know, the notion that we aspire to tell stories about ourselves that connect us with others, and in particular connect us with others who will continue to exist after we are gone is a very powerful human equation. I think certainly, many people when they think about what they want out of their lives, they want in some ways their lives to transcend their own biographies, right, to have a legacy, to leave an impact in the world, to improve life for the next generation. In fact there's a philosopher recently, Samuel Scheffler, who has kind of coined this idea of the "collective afterlife" that much of what we do and care about, when we sit back and reflect upon it, seems to assume that there will be people who will exist after we're gone. So if you're a cancer researcher, and you were to learn that in the days after your death the entire earth and the whole human species were to be destroyed by an asteroid, Schaeffler says that would probably change your goals, right? You wouldn't think that curing cancer was so important a goal.

So I think it's pretty baked in. I think, to human nature to be able to view our lives as stories, to want our stories to interconnect with other people, other members of our family, our community our nation, our religion. It's actually a very commonplace feature of human life that we struggle with death, and one of the ways that we try to address that struggle, I think, is by crafting a narrative that transcends ourselves as individuals.

Mike: All right. So your book ends with a part on immortality, which I think is also important for Replacement theory. This idea that you will somehow live on through your nation or your race or your genes or whatever. It seems like a mystical way of achieving immortality. So, historically philosophically, how do people seek to attain immortality? How does it color the way we navigate the world?

Michael: Well, I mean in some ways I would say that the desire for a kind of immortality that is symbolic, as some people have said, a kind of immortality that doesn't involve literally surviving as an individual, but a kind of immortality that consists in having a legacy or leaving an impact on the world. That kind of immortality is, in some sense, less mystical than in certain other ways of thinking about immortality. I suppose the most mystical or most puzzling is one that I was referring to earlier in our conversation, you know, the notion of an afterlife. It does seem to be on its face puzzling how we can die and be entirely completely dead and yet somehow survive that and come out on the other side, so to speak.

But certainly, the various narratives of the afterlife are one of the ways that people have thought they could attain immortality. Another, of course, is what we've been calling legacy through family, culture, religion, nation, and so forth. And a third one-- and this is the one I suppose that sometimes people forget about-- is that you could conceivably attain immortality simply by not dying. [laughs] So you know, if you were to be able to find the proverbial fountain of youth, that would give you eternal life rather than some post mortem immortal life, that'd be a kind of immortality too.

I think in terms of the place that thinking about mortality has in human life, you know, there's a school of psychologists led by Sheldon Solomon who put forward something called terror management theory. And as the name suggests, what terror management theory is about is the idea that we human beings are aware of our deaths, and we either find this completely incomprehensible that we could die, or we find it completely terrifying, and either way, we adopt certain strategies, perhaps subconscious or unconscious strategies, to try to manage or address that anxiety. In this respect, the terror management theorists are following upon the work of an anthropologist's writing in the 1970s named Ernest Becker, he wrote a famous book called The Denial of Death.

But the terror management theorists in effect say to us, "Well, many of us work very hard to either deny that we die. I suppose that could be one way of looking at belief in the afterlife as kind of the assertion that we simply don't die really. Or we try to live our lives in such a way that we're kind of reassured by the prospect that even if we do die, things that we care about continue, right? Our institutions that we're allied with, the community that we live in, our families, sports clubs that we root for, all of those kinds of things may continue to exist. And that gives us a kind of immortality that's not sort of metaphysical, right? It's not where you actually continue to exist, but I suppose you could call it a symbolic or ethical immortality."

But again, I think that I agree with the terror management theorists that somewhere deep in most of our consciousness is the awareness of the fact of our death, and it probably has a huge influence on how we behave individually. It's probably responsible for many of the principal features of human culture. Anthropologists have observed that pretty much every culture that has ever been studied has beliefs and rituals surrounding death, right? [laughs] That's like the starting point for anthropologist's study of the world. So yes, definitely immortality, or striving for immortality, is a way to wrestle or grapple with a mortality that I think we all come to appreciate early on in life.

Mike: So, replacement theory has been around for a while although it didn't really have a formal name as a theory until the Christchurch shooter wrote his manifesto, The Great Replacement. One thing I found interesting about the manifesto was the statistic he chooses to focus on. So fascists, racists, xenophobes, they generally appeal to a variety of statistics—racial crime statistics, racial population demographics, not very often racial immigration rates. But the Christchurch shooter chose to focus on racial birth rates.

For him, death is the birth of the Other. There's this fear of being bred out. For fascists, there's a sort of philosophical underpinning to this. It has to do with how they view the life and the nation. They consider the nation or identity or whatever, to be literally a living organism or super organism. This implies all the normal things about life–the power of decision making, a lifecycle, etc.

For fascists, the nation is a living thing with the state as its power of cognition. This is very similar to one thing we discussed on a previous episode, The Great Chain of Being, this idea that a kingdom is a living organism with the king is the head, and various classes of society as various body parts. So whereas The Great Chain of Being is held together by divine right, fascism is held together by kinship, yielding culture, civilization, politics, economics, etc.

This kinship is a unifying force that fuses individuals into an organic nation. And like all living beings, a nation is born; it has a youth, it has a maturation, a frail old age, and an eventual death. Now, fundamentally this comes from a fascist obsession with the organic and applying pseudo-biological models to everything. Anyway, here's my question. How does death shape the way we view non-living phenomena?

Michael: Hm. That's the toughest question you've asked me. When we're thinking about non-living phenomenon, are we thinking about just sort of matter? [laughs]

Mike: One example you can think of may be like the way that we think of when a computer breaks down, it dies. You know? But also like the idea that a nation in decline is dying or things like that.

Michael: Okay, I see. So death as a sort of metaphor for nonliving things, things that can't in some literal sense die. Good. Okay. Again, I think in some ways this goes back to storytelling. There is this well observed psychological tendency we have to attribute agency, personhood, to things that our better selves know aren't agents and don't have personhood. You know, your cell phone breaks down, your cell phone dies on you-- noticed how I used that word dies-- we tend to personify it, right? We sort of think of it as something like an organism.

Now, part of that, of course, is simply that thinking of things as having agency, as being person-like, is one of the ways that we try to conceptualize the world around us. And of course, this has some limitations. Sometimes I think you could say that perhaps certain advances in science have been impeded because we have some difficulty in understanding the prospect that events can happen without there being a storyteller or something sort of behind these events that instigates them or chooses them. This is kind of the basis for the infamous argument for God's existence, the argument from design that the world seems so orderly and harmonious in certain sorts of ways. And so this argument tries to infer that that order, that harmoniousness had to have been willed into existence by a god, right? By some sort of divinity.

It's certainly, I think, an instinct we have to personify other beings even when they're not persons, to treat them as agents even when they're not agents. I suppose that there's a kind of distortion there as at root in thinking about collective entities as if they are organisms. They're not organisms. And you're certainly right that there's something perhaps misguided about the Nazi replacement theory insofar as it thinks of society as a kind of organism that has these parts that can be healthy or diseased. And I suppose that part of the Nazi ideology has been to try to extirpate the diseased parts in order to preserve and maintain the healthy parts.

I'm not sure it's the metaphor that's the problem, but perhaps the particular construal ofit that the Nazi ideology gives, that societies are collectivities or organisms that have these parts that thrive or can be unhealthy on their own.

Mike: Okay so there was one article in the volume that at least one review I read took exception to. So the article in question is titled “Constructing Death as a Form of Failure: Addressing Mortality in a Neoliberal Age.” Now I won’t make you rehash someone else’s article. But I do want to talk about kind of the underriding theme of this article which is the idea that social values shape the way we conceptualize death. So how do social values shape the way we conceptualize death?

Michael: I think that particular article was emphasizing a certain way in which contemporary societies sometimes seem to understand death. That death is a sort of failure and that we should attempt to extirpate it, eliminate it if we can, or delay it as long as possible. I mean, certainly many people as they face death, as they become ill and their days become short, some people--not all--do seem to think that their deaths would amount to a kind of failure. Even some physicians have difficulty letting go of the idea that a patient who dies is a patient that they have failed.

But I think that's an indication of a sort of broader phenomenon and a broader reality where societies certainly do have values that invite certain interpretations or understandings of the significance of death. Just to give a sort of stark contrast, societies like ours that suppose often that the best sort of life is one that is very productive, where you have a lot of accomplishments, where you enjoy the various kinds of successes and various kinds of material goods. Well, death then looks like the end of all that, and that looks to be a misfortune.

Conversely, if one looks at societies or cultures that have a much more communitarian or perhaps cyclical picture of the human condition, they don't necessarily seem to view death as the end of something good or a kind of failure. They view it as a fact that we need to reconcile ourselves to, because again we do eventually die.

So I certainly think that our attitudes toward death have very rich logical and evidential interconnections with other things that we care about. And it certainly seems to be that with respect to the theme of your podcast, the Nazi belief system views deaths of white people or white culture or white civilizations as a profound loss, because of course the background ideology is one where those groups or those individuals are supposed to sort of be eternal to reign supreme. And so it's unsurprising then that they would view death as such a detrimental blow to them.

Mike: All right. Now obviously, you didn't compile this book as a metaphor for replacement theory. So what do you hope that people get out of your book?

Michael: Well, there's of course a collection of articles by a number of scholars--only one of the articles is by me--but I think that what this book can offer people is a richer understanding of two distinct questions that nevertheless interlock or overlap, if you will.

So the first question that the book addresses is really the first question you asked about today; is death bad for us? Should we think that it's a bad thing? I think there's a diversity of opinions about this as I mentioned. There are certainly philosophical traditions that have thought that death is bad for us, others that have thought that it isn't bad in fact it's neither good nor bad. Others sort of thought that it may be bad depending upon sort of the circumstances of your death and the circumstances of your life. So I'm hoping that people will garner a more robust understanding of why that's an interesting question and the different ways that philosophers might answer it, and the kinds of arguments they give for their positions.

Now, the other question that I think people will gain some insight about is the question of whether immortality would be good for us. It's natural to think that if death is bad for us then it would have to follow that the absence of death, which is to say immortality, would be good for us.

But many philosophers have been skeptical about that too. [laughs] They've sort of argued that we're simply not built to be immortal, we would ultimately find the life of an immortal boring and tedious. We would end up like the immortal gods of Greek and Roman mythology where all they seemed to do with their days is sort of meddle in the lives of mortals and create mischief.

Others have thought that this would amount to such a distortion of our values, you know, certain kinds of things that we care about in our mortal lives. They wouldn't be sustainable if we were immortal, right? I mean, what would it mean to marry someone, you know, to use that language "till death do us part" if death never comes? [laughs] Would we still value our romantic relationships in the same way? That's just one example where people have wondered whether immortality would in fact alter our values beyond recognition.

But I guess what I'm hoping people will see in the book is that those two questions about the value of death and particularly whether it's bad, and on the other hand whether immortality would be good, are both independently interesting, but also, I think, interesting jointly. Because the question of the value of immortality arises very naturally if you believe that in fact death is bad for us.

Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Cholbi, thanks so much for coming on to The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about death and replacement theory. The book again is Immortality and the Philosophy of Death out from Rowman and Littlefield. Thanks again.

Michael: Thank you. It was really a pleasure to talk to you.

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