So, 100,000 years ago or so, our long-faced Neanderthal cousins took the trouble to bury their dead

with flowers, feathers, and shells. 30,000 years or so ago, our large-brained cromagnon ancestors dressed their dead

in jeweled garments and furnished them with ivory statues and stone tools.

Perhaps there were some practical-minded citizens among them who protested the waste of resources.

But the practical-minded citizens did not prevail, and to this day they do not prevail.

Now, the fossil record is tricky to interpret and controversial, but if you set it alongside the records of the historic civilizations,

the suggestion is hard to miss.

We human beings care for our dead, not counting the cost, because we are convinced

that our dead still live in some sense. Sigmund Freud thought he could explain this curious

fact. In February 1915, he gave a talk called Thoughts for the Times on War and Death to his

B'nai Bredt Lodge in Vienna. The world had been at war for eight months. Two of his own sons

were at the front. This war he had once regarded it as an ennobling exercise that would usher in a new age of enlightenment

was proving instead to be an object lesson

in human self-deception.

It was also exposing Freud thought

the hidden psychic mechanisms that compel human beings

to believe in life after death. Freud said that at bottom,

we don't believe in our own death. In the unconscious, in my infantile mind, I am immortal. Whenever

I try to think of my death, I imagine myself as a spectator.

On the other hand, Freud said, I have no trouble believing in the death of a stranger,

especially an enemy who is wholly other to me.

So I don't believe in my death. I do believe in the death of a stranger.

...