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its members... The community in the traditional sense of the word no longer exists. It has been replaced by an enormous mass of atomized individuals.’
    Although Ariès acknowledged the benign influence of the hospice movement, and the work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and others, he did not believe that death would ever be ‘re-tamed’. Ariès wrote his book in the mid-1970s, when the hospice movement was in its infancy, and he predicted that hospices would take over what should rightfully be the duties of the family and community. Neither did he approve of the syringe-driver, which robbed the dying person of his moment of leave-taking: ‘...the patient’s passivity is maintained by sedatives, especially at the end...’
    Ariès was a romantic reactionary who looked back to an idealized, pre-industrial past where life was governed by community, family and religion. He lamented the individualism, egoism and atomization of modern Europe. He correctly argued for the importance of community and ritual. But I am not persuaded that death in Ariès’s Middle Ages was as painless and easy as he seems to suggest. The death of the 16th century French philosopher Montaigne (see Chapter 8) was, I suspect, typical of ‘tame death’: public, acknowledged and ritualized, certainly, but also full of pain, terror and horror.
GEOFFREY GORER:
THE PORNOGRAPHY OF DEATH
    The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (1905–85) was, like Philippe Ariès, a scholar who worked outside the academy. His inherited wealth gave him the freedom and luxury to indulge his passions. After a brilliant undergraduate career at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a double-first in classics and modern languages in 1927, he embarked on an abortive career as a playwright and novelist. He then wrote a well-received critical study, The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (1934), which, among other things, attempted to explain popular support for the Nazis in psychological, rather than political, terms.
    In 1934, with the insouciance typical of his class and social milieu, Gorer took his male lover, the Senegalese ballet dancer Ferál Benga, to the French colonies of West Africa. They travelled from Dakar through Senegal, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey and Nigeria. Africa Dances , his account of this journey, was a bestseller, and brought Gorer to the attention of the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead, along with her lover and colleague Ruth Benedict, instructed Gorer in social anthropology. He had found his calling: Gorer studied and wrote about not only ‘primitive’ peoples, such as the Himalayan Lepchas, but also about developed societies, such as Japan, the US and his native Britain.
    His writing style is limpid, authoritative, untainted by jargon. Gorer was also a literary critic, who numbered W. H. Auden and George Orwell among his friends. His closest friend, however, was Margaret Mead, with whom he maintained an intense correspondence and holidayed with annually. Many speculated that they might marry, but this was never likely since, although Mead was bisexual, Gorer was exclusively gay.
    Gorer wrote a famous essay, ‘The Pornography of Death’, published in Encounter in 1955, in which he argued that death had replaced sex as the great contemporary taboo: ‘The natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting, as disgusting as the natural processes of birth and copulation were a century ago.’ Gorer, anticipating Ariès, described a pre-industrial world where
    ...funerals were the occasion of the greatest display for working class, middle class, and aristocrat. The cemetery was the centre of every old-established village, and they were prominent in most towns... In the 20th century, however, there seems to have been an unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more ‘mentionable’, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more ‘unmentionable’ as a