If You Can’t Say Something Nice . . .

The taboo on speaking ill of the dead, practically universal across religions and cultures, is dissolving.

Ann Widdecombe in London on Sept. 27, 2019. Photo: vickie flores/Shutterstock

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All societies take a view on how one ought to speak of the dead. Along with conventions around funeral rites and the proper preparation of the body, we are also obliged to observe speech conventions best summarized by the Latin phrase de mortuis nil nisi bonum—say nothing of the dead unless it is good.

In the hadiths, reports of Muhammad’s sayings and actions, Muslims are instructed to refrain from mentioning the departed’s bad qualities. Jewish law warns against lashon hara, or harmful speech, directed against those who can no longer answer for themselves. Anthropologists consider a taboo on speaking ill of the dead to be a human universal, or close to it. Historians are of course permitted to make an honest assessment of the long-dead, but there is a mourning window that should be observed. To do otherwise is vulgar, insensitive, cruel—even, in some circumstances, belligerent.

This taboo is dissolving. When Sen. Lindsey Graham died on July 11, progressives took to social media eager not only to criticize his political record, but to celebrate his passing. “Good riddance,” wrote podcaster Ana Kasparian. Comedian Margaret Cho joked that another conservative politician—Donald Trump, perhaps?—might imminently die. Anonymous posters went further, openly fantasizing about acts of political violence.

President Trump himself has little respect for the conventions of mourning. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” the president wrote on social media when former special counsel Robert Mueller died in March. Less than a year after the death of Rep. John Dingell, Mr. Trump joked at a rally that he might be “looking up” from hell. Such outbursts have been met with outrage, and rightly so.

Meanwhile, attempts on Mr. Trump’s life are reliably met with expressions of regret that the bullet missed him yet again. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year, celebratory comments on Bluesky, the left-wing Twitter alternative, were accompanied by a hit list of other potential targets. J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk were popular options. Bluesky scrambled to remove such posts from its platform while the Trump administration promised retribution against those inciting further violence.

The latest political figure to die in violent circumstances is an icon of the British right. Ann Widdecombe, the official immigration and justice spokesperson for Reform U.K., was found dead at her rural home on July 9. At the time of writing, a 28-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of her murder. Counterterrorism police are leading the investigation and have said that the suspect was in possession of communist literature that could suggest a political motive.

Widdecombe was both a faithful Catholic and a steadfast social conservative. News of her death was greeted with pleasure by various figures on the left. Although there were some truly grotesque comments posted online, it was the calm and considered remarks of one guest on the BBC that I found most unsettling. Acknowledging that being murdered in her own home was “quite a sad way” for the 78-year-old to “go out,” Daze Aghaji, an environmental activist in her early 20s, nonetheless took the opportunity to list every one of her objections to Widdecombe’s politics live on TV. “There are a lot of people who won’t be grieving,” she concluded. It was a euphemistic way of saying “good riddance.”

This taboo violation made me deeply uncomfortable, as it did the other guests sitting next to Ms. Aghaji on the BBC sofa. It’s one thing when such comments are made under cover of online anonymity. That has a disinhibitory effect, encouraging impulsive expressions of emotion, including nastiness.

This became evident during the earliest days of the internet, when websites hosting obituaries found themselves overwhelmed with malicious comments from people who would never have uttered such words in front of other people. Dedicated memorial platforms emerged partly to solve this problem, employing moderators to remove the worst of the spite.

But many of the people breaking the taboo on mourning rituals are doing so quite openly and without shame. They don’t even pretend that the recently departed deserve a special social status. As the progressive commentator Jenna Price wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald after Charlie Kirk’s murder: “The idea that we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead is baffling. It comes from a time when we were far more committed to the woo-woo than we are now. As in, spooky woo-woo, some weird leftover from more spiritual times.”

Ms. Price frames the change as a positive one, a rejection of antiquated custom. I see it differently.

Periods of political conflict have often witnessed a collapse of ordinary conventions surrounding the dead. Although ancient Romans generally maintained a taboo on speaking ill of the recently deceased, exceptions were made during periods of instability, when a disgraced public figure might see his name removed from public monuments and his images destroyed.

Some political regimes go further. In times of revolution, the bodies of deposed leaders might be hidden or destroyed so that their graves don’t become shrines or sites of political protest. Desecration of the dead is also commonly used as a political tool, as during the French Revolution, when the bodies of royals buried at Saint-Denis were exhumed and defiled.

When revolutionaries do such things, it isn’t because they’ve forgotten the taboo on treatment of the dead. It’s because they are aware of the taboo that they violate it with such zeal.

While all societies recognize mourning practices of one kind or another, they apply them only to people seen as within the community. Those outside it aren’t subject to the usual taboos and can be insulted without restraint. The mourning window exists not only to protect the feelings of the living, but also to demarcate the boundaries of a social group. We honor our dead alone.

In stable societies, these boundaries are generous and expansive. Confident and happy groups of people can show respect to their political opponents, including by honoring mourning rituals. This isn’t just “spooky woo-woo” as Ms. Price insists. It is a kind of social glue. A politeness that both reveals and reinforces a state of civility. It isn’t prissy to care about such things.

But during periods of intense polarization, consensus over who is and isn’t a member of the political community breaks down. We are living through such a period. This is why so many of us find the collapse of the mourning taboo disturbing in a visceral way. It isn’t only a show of rudeness, although it is rude. Speaking ill of the dead is also an act of symbolic banishment, assigning the dead person the status of an outcast.

Note that violators of the taboo are rarely consistent in their disregard for convention. They speak ill only of their political enemies, while taking great offense if their allies suffer the same insult in return. Don’t mistake this for a general rejection of stuffy convention. Something much more aggressive is at play. Something that reflects poorly on us and on our times.

Ms. Perry is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.