Upward mobility and career migrations over the past two generations carried the hidden costs of broken ties to place and heritage and loss of the rootedness and attachments which shaped and sustained earlier generations. The selfhood that in the past was vouchsafed by continuity of time and place, today is dependent upon the fragile threads of jobs and immediate relationships. Because we've all bought into the mobile nuclear family over the rooted extended family of agrarian times, we set ourselves up for great difficulty dealing with death within our shrunken family unit. And when one of our members dies, the loss is disproportionately devastating and we hurt a lot. The second of the deeper cultural factors which ratchets up our grief over the death of our Scotties is modern myths about science and technology.
American myth revolves around technology.
The whole globe envies the virtuosity of our science. We are believers in this myth of technology, too, and that is as true for the fundamentalist preacher whose ministry is dependent on high-tech telecommunications, as for the child learning to surf the internet. We make technology, and technology then shapes our lives. The trouble is today's glitzy special effects are so realistic and advances in science so amazing we foster the unexamined myth that our science is omnipotent and our technology invincible. We are in control, affirms the myth, if not in our jobs and careers, then at least in the larger more important sense of the supremacy of our technology over disease and death.