Why are we so scared these days to look death in the face?

We have sealed ourselves away from death in a way that is unique in all of recorded human history

Death is suddenly visible in our culture in a way it has not been for generations. Newspapers are printing pictures of corpses and it is now widely expected, given the 24-hour news coverage of the war, that al-Jazeera or one of the US networks will in the next few weeks bring us the first live televised killing. Don't worry: this isn't another war column. But wars are often turning points in the way a society sees death; and the current conflagration in the Gulf might be just that.

In her book Vigor Mortis, Kate Berridge explains that the First World War transformed the British understanding of death forever. The Victorians had such strict and universal mourning rituals that death was visible on every street corner. If your husband died, you would wear black for two years, and like Queen Victoria you would rarely leave your home for the duration. It wasn't just close relatives who had to be ritually mourned either – if you were a second wife and (deep breath) your husband's first wife's parents died, you had to wear black for three months. You saw death on the bodies of every person you met (and it would occur in your own house on average once every seven years) – so it became mundane. It was not an event, a shocking exception to the culture of life all around us, as it is today; it was part of the tapestry of normal life.

But after the mass butchery of the trenches, grief was so widespread and sudden – almost every family was hit – that the old Victorian ways had to be ditched or the whole country would be clad in black forever. Women had to do war-work so they couldn't hide themselves away. Mourning was shunted into the private sphere; it was no longer acknowledged as part of everyday life. A silence fell over the topic of death, and it joined with other trends to form the denial of death which has reached its apotheosis in our society today.

This is why the images of corpses we have seen in the past few days have been so shocking. We have sealed ourselves away from the reality of death in a way that is unique in all of recorded human history. I am 24 and I have only once seen a dead body. Most 50-year-olds have never seen a corpse. To anyone living in another culture or even in our own just a few generations ago, this would have seemed incomprehensible. We have swapped places with the Victorians: we are chilled about sex but freaked out by death. Our refusal to see or acknowledge death has had a dangerous, warping effect on the way we live. Ingmar Bergman wrote that "death is like the black backing of a mirror, without which we can see nothing". Today, we see nothing. We hide the most likely candidates for greeting the Reaper – the old – away in residential homes, lest they mar our tidy, sanitised houses with death. We inject poisons into our faces so that we do not look like we are nearing death. We only glance briefly (if at all) at the bodies of our dead relatives, and even then only after morticians have deoderized and rouged them into a semblance of life.

Why did this happen? It is significant, I think, that the Grim Reaper disappeared from our lives at the same time as God. The Victorians could acknowledge death – and especially a level of child mortality that seems horrifying to us today – in part because most of them were certain of a heavenly afterlife.

Like many people (the 39 per cent of Brits who are non-religious, for example) I believe that this view of death is comforting but false. I no more think that my grandfather still exists somewhere "up there" than I think my old pet hamster is running in some eternal, heavenly wheel. I think both of them were pieces of organic matter, the product of random historical accidents of evolution and chemistry. They lived, and then they rotted in a box, and one day I will too.

Even most atheists are uncomfortable admitting this: they still like to imagine that there is something comforting beyond this life. The result is that we have never developed a post-religious understanding of death. As more and more people in Europe (although not in the States or the developing world, it has to be said) have lost faith in God, they have preferred simply to not think about death. This is, I think, a terrible mistake; it makes us live in unhealthy ways. Death has an excellent knack of forcing us to analyse our priorities. I do not think, for example, that we would live in such an insanely work-obsessed, money-fixated culture if we were more aware of the fact that our lives are limited and soon it will all come to an end.

One of the few thinkers seriously to articulate a positive vision of godless death is the novelist Jim Crace, whose extraordinary 1999 work Being Dead outlines a positive but not supernatural understanding of death. He opens with the horrific murder of his two central characters, a middle-aged couple; they then proceed slowly to rot throughout the novel as their life story is told. Crace is not afraid to describe the fact that "they lived in tender bodies. They were vulnerable. They did not have the power not to die. They were, we are, all flesh, and then we are all meat." These are facts we all pretend are not true every day.

Yet Crace's vision is as far from being bleak as anything can be. It is only, he shows, when we confront the reality of death that we realise how important life is. When the murdered couple's daughter sees their rotten bodies, she realises that "she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world's small, breathing denizens ... were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends ... There is no remedy for death – or birth – except to hug the spaces in-between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall."

More of us would realise this if only we faced up to death. So let al-Jazeera show us the victims of this and other wars (including, crucially, President Saddam's war on the Iraqi people). Let the BBC show us the Congolese people teetering close to starvation while most of us do nothing. Let us contemplate once more our dead relatives and admit that we too will go that way. It is only when we admit that we all will rot, and nothing comes after, that we will truly value our lives.