I unironically do hope that if further reflection reveals me unworthy of reverence that people piss on my grave, etc. It certainly doesn’t affect me, I’ll be gone by then; the only value of my bones will be in what the living find in it
“Worthy of reverence,” taken at face value, seems like an absurdly high bar. Most people aren’t that thing, and I don’t imagine that either of us endorses “pissing on graves” as the default. But I assume that’s just semantics.
“The only value of my bones will be in what the living find in them.”
Sure. What kind of value is that likely to be?
It’s really not “we think this guy was awesome, and we want to memorialize that awesomeness as a reflection of our present values.” There are people, right now, who think that memorial is that thing – way too many of them – but this doesn’t hold up if you look at it even for a moment. We “commemorate” events we barely remember and people about whom we know practically nothing. We preserve, and lovingly maintain, the art and artifacts of cultures who were frighteningly alien to us. We give everyone a grave marker (ahem), if we possibly can, without asking whether that person deserved it. None of our memorial praxis looks remotely like something rooted in straightforward moral approval.
So why?
Partly it’s the historian’s impulse, or the antiquarian’s impulse. We don’t want old things to disappear unnecessarily, not when our understanding of the past is already so fragile. The memory of civilization is a long slow war against entropy, and we actually have to fight it unless we want to forfeit.
But that’s only a small part of it, applying only to certain kinds of things. Beyond that…
It’s about having enough bits of the past around – actual bits of the past, not heavily filtered through the commentary of the present – to be able to maintain any kind of temporal perspective. It’s about remembering that, yes, there actually were ages gone by, and they had their own wars and glories and sorrows, and no one living then gave a shit about most of the things that matter to you. It’s about memento mori, and being able to think about the dead as people rather than as flat symbols, not for their sake but for yours. It’s about reading the story-of-existence that others have written rather than scribbling all over their text, in recognition of the fact that in the end there’s not going to be anything left of you save whatever story you were able to write.