The Value of Literature in Handling Dying, Death, and Grief: Medieval Poetic Responses to the Loss of a Loved One and Warnings from the Past for Our AI-Controlled Future. Violence, Inhumanity, and Governmental Control Meet Medieval Comments
The Value of Literature in Handling Dying, Death, and Grief: Medieval Poetic Responses to the Loss of a Loved One and Warnings from the Past for Our AI-Controlled Future. Violence, Inhumanity, and Governmental Control Meet Medieval Comments

Summary/Abstract: One of the crucial elements in all human life is the capacity to develop and demonstrate empathy, to express one’s feelings, or even just to experience those in the first place. When people begin to resort to violence and kill each other randomly without any reasonable justification, such as in war or a crime scene protecting a potential victim, then the human element is in danger of getting lost. The current political situation in many different countries of the world indicates that this basic capacity to accept and respect other people as worthy and noble individuals is in danger of getting undermined. Robots might pick up where the violent governmental agents operate now, and then there won’t be any humanity left because all ethics and values will be lost. Beginning with political reflections about this imminent danger we all are facing, then turning to the disappearance of love, sympathy, compassion, and other feelings in our current world, this paper then looks at a selection of medieval texts where we can see already some precedents of this dangerous decline in humanity. However, the real purpose consists of exploring expressions of grief and mourning in a number of poems as signifiers of the cultural development of a specific society in the past. Most poignantly, the question pursued here consists of how individuals react to the loss of a loved one and what this tells us about our level of civilization. Tragically, the operations of the American agency ICE speak volumes about a horrible decline in humanity imposed on us as civilians by our own, US government. The messages from medieval literature thus sound loud and clear as to the central value of the ability and freedom to grieve and hence to be human.

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