The Heart of the Cultural Death

Since the mid-20th century, Western societies have experienced a radical transformation in

their relationship to death. French historian Philippe Ariès described this shift as a true moral revolution. By identifying four major cultural regimes, tamed death, one's own death, the death of the other, and forbidden death, Ariès illuminated how Western societies gradually moved death out of the public and ritualized sphere into a medicalized, hidden, and individualized reality. In this context, the recent legalization of medically assisted death in several Western countries, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada, can be understood not as a complete rupture, but rather as a continuation of the regime of “forbidden death.”

Philippe Ariès

At the heart of this cultural regime, death becomes silent, sanitized, confined to the hospital, and experienced as an anomaly in a world that celebrates performance, youth, and the appearance of happiness. The sick, vulnerable, dying person, once surrounded by loved ones, is now often alone, stripped of control over their final moments, caught in a series of medical protocols. In the face of this dispossession, medically assisted death reintroduces a form of individual control over the timing and conditions of dying. In this sense, it represents an attempt to reclaim the act of dying.

This transformation can be reread through Ariès’s lens. It reflects the ongoing process of privatizing death, in which society seeks to avoid vulnerability and erase the visible traces of human finitude. Resorting to a medicalized death may appear as a way to "die well" in a society that no longer knows how to accompany death in other ways. Paradoxically, in the effort to make death more dignified, we may render it even more invisible—stripped of symbolic and collective meaning.

Thus, the legalization of medically assisted death represents both a reaction against the anonymous, institutional death of modern hospitals and a deepening of the trend toward the individualization of the end of life. It reflects profound tensions between the desire for control, the rejection of suffering, and the need to reinvent forms of ritual and meaning around death.

In this way, it stands as a powerful indicator of our time: a time in which death, though medically assisted, is still searching for its place in a culture that struggles to think about it collectively.