[MD] The MOQ and Death 2: The Quest for Immortality

[Steven Peterson]

Hi All,

The title to this thread could have been "Becker's Theory of Evil: Why
DMB is such a dick, why Bo is a megalomanic obsessed with the SOL, and
why the rest of us are pretty much a bunch of assholes, too."

I'm going to continue my book report on Ernest Becker;s The Denial if
Death. Like Joseph Campbell, Becker achieved his widest recognition
very soon after his death. e product of his own quest for immortality,
The Denial of Death, was published in 1973 and was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1974, two months after he died of
cancer at the age of 49. It continues to resonate with many readers
today and was listed among Bill Clinton's 21 favorite books in his
recent autobiography. Becker was an anthropologist who wrote about
psychology within the tradition of existentialism.

While Becker was not himself religious, he, like theistic
existentialist philsophers as Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, was not
so critical of religion as were many other existentialist philosophers
such as Nietzche and Sartre who pointed to religion as an example of a
particularly inauthentic response to our existence and eventual
annihilation.  In their view, religion had desensitized us to life and
thus cheapened life through repression of our essential fear--a terror
that we ought to be felt in its fullness and faced head on if we want
to live authentically.

Religion is indeed at least in part a response to man's anxiety about
death and is one of the most successful coping mechanisms that man has
invented to deal with the fact of our mortality, but it is certainly
not the only one. Becker pointed out that religion is only one
manifestation of the "vital lie." Our personalities themselves, what
Becker calls our characters--the social roles we play--are built up
gradually as shields in response to the stimulus of knowledge of our
deaths. Our pursuits of "success," art, patriotism, genetic offspring,
and virtually every aspect of culture get called out as elaborate
defense mechanisms for repressing knowledge of our own mortality. We
embark on such "hero projects" whenever we try to create something or
become a part of something greater than ourselves--something eternal.
Such projects give us the sense that our lives have meaning and are
significant and justified in a larger order.

Becker thought that the products of such hero projects include
individual personality formation, artistic expression, our social
roles, and our progression from tribe to nation. Our response to death
constitutes the whole of what we know as culture. He believed that it
is not our "animal natures but rather our hero projects aimed at
transcending our creaturliness which explain most of the misery that
humans perpetrate upon one another. Most of this misery is the fallout
from the conflict that inevitaly follows from the fact that some of
our hero projects will be at cross-purposes with the hero projects of
others. Becker wrote, "It is the desguise of panic that makes us live
in ugliness, not the natural animal wallowing." Becker offered a
simple answer for why we make such a mess of the world and why we are
so unhappy. Unfortunately, the problem is one that anti-aging creams,
lotions, cosmetic procedures, and pills offering to beautify us and
make us look younger, and the shelf-fulls of self-help advice books
won't solve. Once we've lost all those unwanted pounds, cleared up our
acne, gotten ahead in our careers, bought that mini-mansion, dealt
with our daddy issues, finished writing the great American novel, and
started a foundation with your name attached to it, one problem will
remain that explains why we were so messed up in the first place. The
problem is simply that human beings are all freaked out about dying.
No therapy can take our fear of death away, because that fear is real
and entirely justified. The most these projects can do is provide a
needed repression of that fear.

Our responses to that problem, our hero projects, are adding to our
misery because while none of them can really solve the problem of
death, our hero projects conflict with one another. Our personal and
private hero projects may be at cross purposes with one another and
cause us resulting in neuroses, and our public hero projects are
likely to clash with the hero projects of other individuals and groups
rusulting in suffering. Racism and nationalism are explained as the
dark side of hero projects of groups of people trying to become
something cosmically significant--to be something other than "the
others" who are merely mortal, or worse, no better than animals.
Likewise, the dog-eat-dog world of some economic practice--the pursuit
of "success" often at the expense of others--is participation in such
a hero project.

These projects are not all evil on the surface. Many of our projects
are in fact targeted at defeating evil or are intended as in the
service of "the greater good," but as Sam Keen explains in his
foreword to the 1997 edition, many of "our heroic projects that are
aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more
evil into the word." This is so because our human conflicts are not
mere pursuit of our animal interests. They are symbolic struggles
between hero projects which must bear the burden of transcendent
significance. Therefore, Keen writes, "Human conflicts are life or
death struggles--my gods against your gods, my immortality project
against your imortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is
not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression or innate
selfishness, but our need to deny our mortality, gain self-esteem, and
achieve a heroic self-image."

The evil brought about by our animal urges is small potatoes when
compared to the evil wrought by our symbolic battles against the many
scapegoats for our feelings of inferiority in the face of the infinite
cosmos--an inferiority that we project onto our enemies: the infidels,
the godless Commies, the Jews, the niggers, the homos, the others,
"them." Such enemies must be opposed because they are "dirty." We have
projected all our own insecurities about our creatureliness upon them,
and they must be made to suffer for their unworthiness. Bigoty can not
be explained by our animal selfishness, lust, or territorialism.
People don't engage in genocide by because they have succumbed to
their primal desires. Such evil can only be wrought in a symbolic
struggle. These are holy wars of purification, Keen said, "in which we
sacrifice our brave boys to destroy the cowardly enemies of
righteousness. And the more blood the better, because the bigger the
body-count, the greater the sacrifice for the sacred cause, the side
of destiny, the divine plan."

The notion of survival of the fittest applied to cultures suggests
that successful cultures needed to provide intricate symbolic systems
for their members for coping with death. Such systems are at least
covertly if not explicitly religious. The ideological conflicts
between cultures are battles between immortality projects which always
have the character of holy wars. Keen said,

"One of Becker's lasting contributions to social psychology has been
to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by
unconscious motives that have little to so with their stated goals.
Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less
to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for
assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting
worth...Becker's radical conclusion is that it is our altruistic
motives that turn the world into a charnel house--our desire to merge
with a larger whole, to dedicate our lives to a higher cause, to serve
cosmic powers--poses a disturbing and revolutionary question to every
individual and nation. At what cost do we purchase assurance that we
are heroic?"

Once we begin asking ourselves this question and begin to recognize
our personal hero projects for the immortality seeking crusades they
are and expose the unconscious motives by which individuals and
nations operate, we are on our way to avoiding participation in such
evil in the future. The silver lining in this bleak look at our fear
of death is, according to Becker, that "this means that evil itself is
amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the saw of reason."
We may not be able to do without such hero projects if Becker is
correct in saying that truly facing our own mortality is a horror that
no human can suffer and continue to abide, but not all hero projects
are destructive. We can maintain our benign practices though they may
still qualify as immortality projects.

Is Becker correct?

Becker's claim is a bold one.  I see no way that we could every verify
or falsify his claim that all of culture is a response to repressed
fear of death. It may still be useful however as a way of thinking
about our lives and as a "theory of evil" that may help to explain how
our symbolic selves rather than our "animal nature" is responsible for
the misery that humans perpetrate on one another. Since our symbolic
selves our own unconsious responces to repressed fear that are
susceptible to conscious deconstruction and self-creation, we can try
to avoid destructive hero projects.

Becker may not be right about his assertion that all of human behavior
has its root in fear of death, but I suspect that he is right that our
religious practices are no more a response to our fear of death as
many of our other practices. The "smug atheist" alluded to in my last
post may have abandoned or never had a religious immortality project,
but that does not mean that he has not been working on all sorts of
other immortality projects to deny her own fear of death.

Like the MOQ's theory of evil, I see Becker's theory as a paradigm
that can be applied to do what Socrates asked us to do: inquire about
why we ourselves do the things we do.

After reading Becker I started questioning my own motivations. Is what
I am doing part of an immortality project that is bound to fail and
make others suffer along the way? It also helps to explains the
possible hidden motivations of others. For example, perhaps it
explains why every disagreement, no matter how small it seems to us,
is blown up into a life or death holy war by DMB. And perhaps it
explains why Bo could not ever, NEVER, give up on the SOL no matter
how strong the arguments against it may be.

What do you think? Do you see Becker's theory of evil as useful? Can
it be harmonized with Pirsig's theory of evil as the conflict between
types of value patterns? Why is DMB such a dick?

Best,
Steve

(DMB, though I think you are a big dick, if you are ever in the Philly
area I would really love to get together for a brewski.)


woody allen
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to
achieve it through not dying."