Philosophy, again; death is regarded as part of life, and nothing, including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as giving shape to life.
While burial, cremation and other—to us—conventional forms of body disposal are not unknown in the Culture, the most common form of funeral involves the deceased—usually surrounded by friends—being visited by a Displacement Drone, which—using the technique of near-instantaneous transmission of a remotely induced singularity via hyperspace—removes the corpse from its last resting place and deposits it in the core of the relevant system’s sun, from where the component particles of the cadaver start a million-year migration to the star’s surface, to shine—possibly—long after the Culture itself is history.
None of this, of course, is compulsory (nothing in the Culture is compulsory). Some people choose biological immortality; others have their personality transcribed into AIs and die happy feeling they continue to exist elsewhere; others again go into Storage, to be woken in more (or less) interesting times, or only every decade, or century, or aeon, or over exponentially increasing intervals, or only when it looks like something really different is happening....
I’m on the fence as to whether or not this really constitutes full-blown deathism or just a belief that sentient beings should be permitted to cause their own death.
I suspect that any cultural norm inconsistent with treating the death of important life forms as an event to be eradicated from the world is at least an enabler to “deathism” as defined locally.
“A Few Notes on the Culture”:
I’m on the fence as to whether or not this really constitutes full-blown deathism or just a belief that sentient beings should be permitted to cause their own death.
I suspect that any cultural norm inconsistent with treating the death of important life forms as an event to be eradicated from the world is at least an enabler to “deathism” as defined locally.
There seems to be some appeal to nature floating around in it, at the very least.
Sure, death is natural. So is Ophiocordyceps, but that doesn’t mean I want parasitic mind-altering fungi in my life.