What the Romans called mos maiorum, the custom of the ancestors, was part of the living heartbeat of what it meant to be Roman. The dead still stood behind the living as a source of order, example, and obligation. In the home that was concrete. Families kept a lararium, made small offerings, and lived with the lares, the guardian spirits, and the di manes, the honored dead, as part of ordinary domestic life. Among the elite this could take the form of ancestor masks and lineage display, but it was not just an upper-class thing. Ordinary Romans kept the dead near too, in the house, in family rites, and in daily memory. A Roman did not experience himself as a free-floating individual. He belonged to a line stretching backward and forward in time.
Christian Europe changed the theology, but it kept the dead close. From the Middle Ages onward, graves sat right near the center of communal life. The churchyard, the parish, the village, and the family grave all belonged together. People worshiped near the dead, walked past them, tended them, and remembered themselves through them. That pattern held for a very long time, through medieval Europe, through the early modern world, into colonial America, and in many rural places well into the early 1900s. The dead were still part of the moral and social landscape. People understood themselves less as isolated selves and more as members of a people extended across generations.
Then that whole world started thinning out, but not all at once and not everywhere. In the 19th century, growing cities, overcrowded burial grounds, sanitation fears, and the rural cemetery movement began pushing graves away from the old center. But in many small towns, villages, and rural communities, the dead still remained close to ordinary life well into the early 20th century.
Then came the wider twentieth-century turn. Bernays mattered here because he helped supercharge hyper-individualism through a culture of desire, image, and managed wants. Mass advertising, consumer culture, suburban life, mobility, and the shrinking of life into the nuclear household all pulled in the same direction. People were taught to see themselves as free-floating individuals chasing present satisfaction and private wants instead of living as links in a generational chain with any duty to the dead. The grave moved outward, and the ancestor moved outward with it.
You can still see traces of the older world in places like Appalachia. Decoration Days, grave cleanings, dinner on the ground, homecomings, singing, and family returns to the cemetery kept alive the sense that the dead still belonged to the people and the living still owed them something. In a lot of white Western life, that world has plainly grown thin. Younger people move away. Fewer come back. Some old mountain cemeteries are mostly kept going by the older generations. What fades is more than a custom. It is a way of seeing oneself as part of a living chain of generations instead of just an atomized present-tense self with a private past.
It’s painfully obvious how easy it would be for one party to end the American Republic. Yeah we have a Constitution, but our system is still just as dependent on the mos maiorum as Rome’s was. And the mos maiorum is dying.