[MD] The MOQ and Death part 3

[Steven Peterson]

Hi All

Since no one offered any objections to Becker's theory, I'll offer
some of my own.

Does all of social and intellectual patterns reall have their root in
the fear of death as Becker asserted? There is something very
unpragmatic and reductionist about "everything is really this one
thing" sort of theories such as Becker's. For example, when William
James explored "The Varieties of Religious Experience" his emphasis
was on the plurality of human motivations and needs corresponding to
different temperaments such as the "healthy minded approach" to
spirituality of Emerson and Whitman perhaps best exemplified today by
wellness gurus like Deepack Chopra and the Dalai Lama and the
"morbidly minded" or "sick souled" temperament of Martin Luther and
Jonathan Edwards typified today by the notion that a good person is a
God-fearing one and by Pat Robertson who sees our worst natural
disasters as supernatural punishment for our impurity. Becker cited
James frequently in The Denial of Death and was well aware of James's
pluralism. It is doubtful that James would have approved of
characterizing all of humanity as having a single driving need. Since
those closer to the "once born" or "healthy minded" end of the
spectrum seemed to him to be far less driven by the fear of death than
the "twice born" or "morbidly minded" sort, I think James would have
agreed with me that some of Becker's rhetoric went too far in
emphasizing the importance of death denial as an explanation for all
of human behavior when he said things like, "Culture is in its most
intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness."


Sometimes we erect a building only because we don't want to be cold
and wet rather than due to an unconscious motivation to create an
enduring monument to ourselves (though Becker is right that many of us
are motivated to create such monuments). Everything need not function
as a symbol for something else that we have repressed. Even for Freud,
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. When we buy a Big Mac, sometimes it
is just because we are hungry rather than an attempt to achieve
immortality through participation in a system of symbols.

Becker was aware of objections to his position and described the sides
of the argument using James's categories for religious temperment. One
sort of pposition to Becker's view comes from the healthy-minded camp.
Such objectors wonder, in Becker's words, why "the living of life in
love and joy cannot...be regarded as real and basic." He says the
healthy-minded objection is a nuture over nature argument since it can
be asserted that no real notion of anihilation exists in the mind of a
young child, so it must get put there by society. Becker charitably
admits that "the child has no knowledge of death until about the age
of three to five," and this gradual realization doesn't come to
fruition in understanding that death is inevitable for all of us
"until the ninth or tenth year." Though the young child has no
concrete concept of death, the fear of abandonment by one's parents
while one's psyche is not yet a differentiated ego from his parents is
a sort of fear of anhilation since to be abandoned would be to lose
onesself. The healthy-minded claim is that if loving parents do a good
enough job helping their children feel secure, the child will not
develop such anxiety, so repression of death terror need not be
regarded as fundamental and universal.


Becker doubts that such healthy-mindedness is possible through good
parenting and sides with what he calls the morbidly-minded camp with
regard to the universality of this anxiety. He quotes James to
describe his perspective, "Let the sanguine healthy-mindedness do its
best in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil
background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin
in at the banquet."  Becker also quoted another of James's colorful
trurns of phrase in calling the fear of death "The 'worm at the core'
of man's pretentions to happiness...whether they admit it or not."
(James is not lending his weighty support for either camp here, he is
"only describing their variety.") In addition to some distinguished
authority siding with him on the issue, Becker refers to some
scientific research confirming his belief in the reality of the
psychological phenomenon of repression. However, he admits that such
research cannot confirm that fear of death is fundamental and
universal and present below all appearances of healthy-mindedness,
even though his entire argument rests on this claim.

Becker said that both camps can claim distinguished authority and that
the argument "can pobably never be cleanly decided." I am not so much
concerned that we can never know the truth of the matter as I am
concerned that his theory may be something like Intelligent Design in
that whatever is observed about us no matter what can be made to fit
his theory. Becker recognized this trouble when he wrote,

"if you claim that a concept is not present because it is repressed,
you can't lose; it is not a fair game, intellectually, because you
always hold the trump card. This type of argument makes psychoanalysis
seem unscientific to many people, the fact that its proponents can
claim that someone denies one of their concepts because he represses
his consciousness of its truth."

I think Becker is correct that "repression is not [just] a magical
word for winning arguments," though unfortunately it could be used to
do so. I think repression of death is a real psychological phenomenon
that can reveal many of our hidden motivations. It seems likely to me
that scientific studies such as those described on the Ernest Becker
Foundation website can be helpful in demonstrating that we really do
develop mechanisms for repressing the knowledge of our deaths;
however, I am not sure how to get around the problem that if an
experiment fails to demonstrate repression, a researcher may simply
say that the repression must be even deeper than was previously
thought. Perhaps a researcher could never imagine an outcome that
would be inconsistent with the universality of repression of death. A
reseacrhcer wielding the "repression trump card" can function like a
Creationist who can shrug off the discovery of ancient fossils that
"appear" to be tens of thousands of years old by simply saying that
they must have been created to appear precisely that way (after all,
the Garden of Eden was not like a barren new housing development with
tiny sapplings planted here and there. It had vegetation that
appreared mature even when it had first been created).

However, it is not only science that can help us to understand what
truth there may be to repression of knowledge of death. We can also
look to our own experience of repressed fears. As Becker said,
"...there is nothing like shocks in the real world to jar loose
repressions." Perhaps we ourselves have had our repressed fear of
death made clear to us when we were taken by surprise by our own
responses to events like the death of a former classmate with whom we
were not even very close. Such a death could constitute not so much
the unexpected a loss of an important relationship but the destruction
of the illusion that death is something that could only happen to
other people. There is that feeling you may get just before comforting
yourself with probabilities when informed that someone you don't even
know was diagnosed with cancer or had a heart attack and just happens
to be your exact same age.

You may have noticed others reacting to events in unexpected ways
suggesting the need for some additional explanation beyond the usual
motivations we atribute to others. In such cases, Becker's theory may
be helpful in predicating behavior that was previously not so
well-understood. For example, perhaps, like me, you had not
anticipated the shock in the world and wide-spread grieving upon the
too-soon death of Princess Diana or the fascination with the notion of
Superman paralyzed in a wheel chair. Perhaps we can come to better
understand and anticipate such reactions in light of Becker's analysis
of psychoanalytical "transference"--our use of external objects and
other people for our own eternal self-perpetuation.

Also consider that psychologists note that the death of a sibling can
be much harder on one than the death of a parent even when the
relationship with that sibling was not all that close. Our siblings
are our peers. When a sibling dies, Becker's theory suggests, we
cannot help but wonder "am I next?" Such a death causes us to confront
the reality of our own future anihiliation in a way that we may never
have done before and in ways for which we were unprepared.

As a last example, there was no bigger public "shock in the real
world" in my memory than the events of 9/11/2001. I was amazed by the
instant-nationalism that emerged in the wake of tragedy. Many
Americans noted that it simply never occurred to them that they could
wake up and go to work and never come home again. I wish I could find
actual quotes to back up my memory, but I recall many "word on the
street" television and radio interviews where Americans expressed
indignation that they now had to live with the fear that they could
actually die. This is indeed a scary notion, and of course the fact is
that not only can we die but we actually will all die. Such
interviewees seemed to feel entitled to have this fear properly
repressed for them by their society. For Becker, such is indeed the
duty of society. Is its raison d'etre.

The point of terrorism as a tactic is of course to get us to feel this
mortal fear and to get us to panic presumably by giving concessions.
This has been attempted throughout the world by various terrorist
groups typically by committing indiscriminate murders and attacks on
religious as well as secular symbols. Since we have come to understand
attacks on our symbols as attacks upon our immortality projects we can
now see how such attacks as much as indiscriminate murders can awaken
knowledge of our own mortality provoking nationalism and holy war.
9/11 was not just an attack on thousands of human beings, this was an
attack on America itself as a symbol for our ideals and our way of
life, our symbolic system of heroism, our very means of striving for
transcendence and immortality. Becker would not have been surprised as
I was by the way Americans became fiercely nationalistic in response
to the attacks. My feeling at the time was that we all needed to come
together to mourn, to formulate a reasoned response, and to solve a
problem that we had not realized that we had already been facing for
some time. The popular sense, however, was that, as we heard so many
times in those sad days, that the world itself had changed, and it had
for many of us. The world had just become a place where people had
become temporarily too aware of their deaths. As Becker would have
predicted, in the wake of the attacks people needed to become a part
of something bigger, something that is eternal, something that can't
die. That something was America. Becker's theory is a paradigm for
understanding popular reaction to such tragedy through which I would
have had a much better understanding of what was going on in our
culture at the time if I had been aware of his work.

Like Becker himself, I see no way that we could every demonstrate the
truth of Becker's broad assertion beyond doubt. But as with our
consideration of materialism, we don't need to buy into it as the only
true description of human culture. With regard to materialism, we said
that just because everything can be given a material description
doesn't mean it should only be given a material explanation. Likewise,
even if Becker's theory of repression can explain all of culture
doesn't mean it is the only explanation we should ever look to, and
even if it turns out to only explain some of culture rather than all
of it, as pragmatists we can use Becker's theory for whatever purposes
we find it useful. I am convinced that repression of the fear of death
is real. It may be useful as a way of thinking about our lives and our
personal motivations and also as a "theory of evil" that may help to
explain how our symbolic selves and our repression mechanisms rather
than our "animal nature" could be responsible for much of the misery
that humans perpetrate on one another. Whether or not death denying
mechanisms are adequate to explaining all of culture, we would still
do well to look at the possibly dangerous side-effects of such
mechanisms that do reveal our motivations.

My personal reading of Becker doesn't take too seriously his claim for
fundamental universality. Instead I see his theory as just one
paradigm that can be applied to do what Socrates told us to do:
examine our lives. Ask ourselves why we do all the things we do. Since
reading Becker, I have found it easy to find examples in my personal
experience of people making one another miserable in pursuit of their
hero projects. I have also found it useful to question my own
motivations in regard to death transcending heroism. It is more
difficult to analyze my own motivations in response to death anxiety
than it is to guess at the motivations of others, but I think the
attempt is more important. Since our symbolic selves are susceptible
to conscious deconstruction and self-creation, we can become
consciously aware our own previously unconsious responces to death
anxiety or other anxieties we may have to to try to keep them from
having ill effects on others.

I think that Becker is right that repression mechanisms are varied and
substantial (if not universal and fundamental) ranging from
comsumerism, nationalism, and religion to romance and artistic
expression. Religious practices are no more a response to our fear of
death than many of our other practices. While the "smug atheists"
alluded to earlier may claim that the believer just can't face death,
perhaps he hasn't really faced death either. Perhaps he just has some
different ways of repressing knowledge of death which are not
explicitly religious. The "smug atheist"  may have abandoned or never
had an explicitly religious immortality project, but that does not
mean that he has not been working on all sorts of other immortality
projects to deny his own fear of death. Whether or not we view
Becker's claim in the universality of repression of knowledge of death
as "unscientific," the smug atheist who dismisses religion as a
particularly cowardly response to human mortality is no more
scientific about his assertion.

What is left to be done is an analysis of Becker's theory of evil and
repression of fear of death in terms of the MOQ hierarchy of value
patterns. Perhaps Becker would have done well to distinguish between
the biological, social, and intellectual aspects to this fear which
perhaps may be regarded as, like all suffering, a negative face a
quality that drives evolution. I'd appreciate hearing any thoughts you
may have on that analysis as I try to get my own thought together on
the matter.

Best,
Steve