Month: February 2014

Escape 13: “…men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation.”

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Escape 13:  “…men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation.”

 So, this is my 13th post looking at Ernest Becker’s last book Escape From Evil (EFE) published posthumously in 1975.  I’m taking a different tack from now on in these posts.  First of all, I’m changing the titles so that they always start with Escape, rather than Ernest Becker. I’ll start with a short quote from Becker’s EFE then put that quote into perspective and elaborate.  So far I’ve used sometimes long quotes from Becker so as to let Becker speak for himself.  As I said before, there’s no substitute for reading Becker himself, but this will hopefully tweak your interest in the subject of Becker’s work which can be summarized in this quote:

Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death. [EFE 125]

Of course that promise is empty, always unfulfilled except temporarily, and brings with it astonishing pain and suffering to millions of innocent people, because more often than not evil and death are seen to have a face and that face must be destroyed at all cost.  This is exactly how Hitler thought of the Jews.  To him, the Jewish people presented a threat to the Aryan race.  Every Jewish face was a reminder for the Nazis of disease and death.  In the end, Hitler’s promise was a monumental con and he himself became the personification of evil and death for millions of people who vowed to destroy him even at the cost of their own lives.

But back to the quote in the title: “…men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation.”  This quote is from the last paragraph of Chapter 3 in EFE called The Origins of Inequality.  In this chapter Becker tackles a basic fact of life in virtually all societies beyond the primitive.  Hunting and gathering societies had virtual equality, but even then there were people who stood out because of their prowess in certain things like hunting or healing.  Becker argues in this chapter that we are unequal in society because from the very beginning personal qualities gave rise to rank, power and privilege.  And those personal qualities were there for all to recognize.  Becker notes that a Sioux warrior announced by means of decorations on his moccasins how many horses he had captured, ‘enemies killed…etc.’  If a person is particularly good at hunting and consistently ‘brings home the bacon’ it’s hard not to see how all benefit from his skill.  He will always be rewarded and eventually the rewards become part of the structure of society.  This is the origins of the concept of hero.  As Becker notes “…he is the one who gambles with is very life and successfully defies death, and men follow him and eventually worship his memory because he embodies the triumph over what they fear most, extinction and death.” (p. 43)

So, we’ve always sorted ourselves out by personal characteristics, but Becker argues that the first real class distinction was between humans (mortals) and immortal beings which were not only gods, but ancestors and other fauna inhabiting the invisible world and played with human lives, or so the primitive thought.  What else was he supposed to think?  Without science, there was no recourse but to imagine or dream of what it might be that controls us.  So, class society began with the distinction between immortal and mortal.  It wasn’t much of a stretch then to see that heroes, because of their special skills might just have a special connection with the invisible forces that surrounded the primitives in their world.  Heroes were revered for their special gifts, but also feared because of their connection to the sometimes merciless and volatile forces that controlled life on this planet.

Once the ‘hero’ who was also the shaman and chief created the techniques of perpetuating his power even as he aged and became weaker the stage was set for society to have a structure of followship where the chief and shaman spoke for the gods and demanded subservience and tribute from the people.  “Who has the power to mystify?” (p.49)  Class distinctions have always been and still are sacred because they are all about the quest for immortality.  The leaders promise immortality or at least future prosperity and we sometimes gladly, sometimes reluctantly, surrender our own personal power.  We defer because we are promised immortality, we hold on to that promise with dear life and we bend to the wishes of the gods through their earthly intermediaries. We may complain now and again, but our first instinct is to submit.  Still, there are moments in history when our gods have abandoned us and that’s made it necessary to abandon their promises and adopt new, more powerful ones.

I haven’t been overtly critical of Becker yet in these posts but I must disagree with his analysis of Marxism in this chapter.  That won’t concern most of you.  Suffice it to say that his emphasis on the control of economic power by the elite is grounded in the humanism of a certain brand of Marxism and not of Marx himself whose analysis of class was purely historical and structural.

Ernest Becker 12: Guilty as charged!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Ernest Becker 12: Guilty as charged!

To understand the primitive mind you must understand guilt. Understanding the nature of primitive economics demands that we know what guilt is.  Guilt is not a weakness as Nietzsche and Freud thought.  Brown seems to have picked up from them this same perspective on it.  Becker, however, argues that guilt is not a weakness and to understand it this way means that an understanding of primitive economics must remain elusive.  Guilt arises because there are so many binds in life. One of these binds is that of a child who inevitably loves the people who provide her with nourishment and life but who can also frustrate her in the things she wants or doesn’t want [as we witnessed shopping this morning].  Love can quickly turn to hatred and ‘destructive impulses’ and it can be hard on the ears too.  This is one kind of bind, but as humans we experience many, many binds.  Guilt

…is a feeling of being blocked, limited, transcended, without knowing why.  It is the peculiar experience of an organism which can apprehend a totality of things and not be able to move in relation to it.  Man experiences this uniquely as a feeling of the crushing awesomeness of things and his helplessness in the face of them. 

 Think about it:  How are you feeling right now about what the Harper government is doing?  Are you feeling angry and upset?  Have you signed petitions declaring the tar sands to be the work of the devil?  Are you feeling disempowered because you can’t really do anything about it?  That sense of disempowerment is guilt.  We also feel a certain sense of guilt because we know we might be benefitting from the wealth created by the tar sands, but we don’t want to stop driving our cars and using plastic products.

We feel guilt when we don’t feel ‘enough’ gratitude towards those who nourish us and that can include our society or culture (using Becker’s word).  We owe everything to our society, even our sense of self-worth so we naturally feel subordinate to it but at the same time we resent it for constraining our actions and imposing upon us ‘unreasonable’ obligations like having to pay taxes.

This real guilt partly explains man’s willing subordinacy to his culture; after all, the world of men is even more dazzling and miraculous in its richness than the awesomeness of nature…An attitude of humble gratitude is a logical one to assume toward the forces that sustain one’s life; we see this very plainly in the learning and development of children. 

 There are so many different binds in life.  Have you achieved in life all you could?  If not, how do you feel about that?  I can’t remember where I read this but it’s the story of a multi-billionaire who was unsatisfied with his accomplishments because there was someone yet richer than he was.  He actually felt guilty about not being the richest person alive.  I feel guilt when I don’t speak up when I think I should.  Do you?  How do you feel when you see someone being abused and do nothing?  That’s that old guilty feeling.  At trial we may be found guilty and that means only that we’ve not been good and properly subordinate to our society.  In this way we are an embodiment and personification of guilt. We can then be used as a scapegoat in the struggle to ensure the gods are happy. Guilt keeps us in line.

We feel guilt for being poor and guilt for being rich and more: As Becker writes,

One can be in a bind in relation to one’s own body, which is the guilt of anality; to feel bound and doomed by one’s physical appendages and orifices.  Man also experiences guilt because he takes up space and has unintended effects on others – for example, when we hurt others without intending to, just by being what we are or by following our natural desires and appetites, not to mention when we hurt others physically by accident or thoughtlessness.

If we stand out in a crowd, if we are too prominent we experience guilt.

Some individuals achieve an intensity of individuation in which they stick out so far as that almost each day is an unbearable exposure.  [think Hollywood here, Justin Bieber in particular.  His notoriety must be near unbearable for him at times]

Of course just being human with faces unique to ourselves makes us stand out in nature.  In that we’re way ahead of other animals.

Faces fascinate us precisely because they are unique, because they stick out of nature and evolution as the most fully developed expression of the pushing of the life force in the intensity of its self-realization.  We don’t understand why the life force is personalized in this way, what it is trying to achieve; but we flatly know that it is personalizing because we have our heads and faces as empirical testimony, and as a burden of guilt. 

 Headhunting was not just a particularly gruesome way of killing.  It was a way of destroying the most personal and individual aspect of us.  In primitive society and in France not so long ago, it was dangerous to have a head!  Taking a head was probably a way of sharing guilt and atoning for our own sin of sticking out.

Probably the most important dimension of guilt is its social nature.  What did Brown mean when he said that social organization was a structure of shared guilt, “a symbolic mutual confession of it?” (p. 35) What Brown concluded was this:

Mankind has so many things that put it into a bind that it simply cannot stand them unless it expiates them in some way.  Each person cannot stand his own emergence and the many ways in which his organism is dumbly baffled from within and transcended from without…This is why the main general characteristic of guilt is that it must be shared: man cannot stand alone.

 What you do when you give a gift is lose guilt, if only temporarily.  Giving is a way of re-establishing balance or even putting obligations on others.  In real terms, guilt motivates individuals to strive to achieve social standards of acceptability.  Shopping relieves guilt and raises spirits. In a society like ours where possessions and the market rule, having no possessions or money imposes a huge burden of guilt to the point that it drives people into physical and mental illness.  To be idle in a society founded on work is to be guilty whether idle by choice or not.

If guilt is the experience of fear and powerlessness, then immersing oneself in a group is one way of actively defeating it: groups alone can make big surplus, can generate extravagant power in the form of large harvests, the capture of dangerous animals and many of them, the manufacture of splendid and intricate items based on sophisticated techniques, etc.  From the beginning of time the group has represented big power, big victory, much life…[we feel giddy in victory, depressed in defeat]

 If we thus look at both sides of the picture of guilt, we can see that primitive man allocated to himself the two things that man needs most: the experience of prestige and power that constitutes man a hero, and the experience of expiation that relieves him of the guilt of being human…Man needs self-esteem more than anything; he wants to be a cosmic hero, contributing with his energies to nothing less than the greatness and pleasure of the gods themselves.  At the same time, this risks inflating him to proportions he cannot stand; he becomes too much like the gods themselves, and he must renounce this dangerous power.  Not to do so is to be unbalanced, to run the great sin of hubris as the Greeks understood it.  Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself. 

 So, the individualism that characterizes our world is based on the fantasy that we somehow control our own lives, that we are in charge.  To some extent we are, of course, but fundamentally we are not.  Again, I could point to others who have explained this much more clearly than I can or that Becker has.  I think here of Norbert Elias who argues that there is no such thing as a human individual.  We are a system of interdependencies and interweavings.  The real power in our lives lies in our social relations not in our individual initiative which is meaningless unless it is socially guided and sanctioned.

Guilt makes the world go round.  How and when we feel guilt is determined by social expectations.  Whenever we feel guilt, whenever we feel blocked, we need to expiate it by some form or another.  When we feel an especially strong attachment to our social group in times of awful stress, we may be in a position to relate to what a mother said upon hearing of the death of her son overseas in war.  She said in so many words: “If only I had another son to sacrifice too.  I feel that what I’ve done already is not enough.”  She could not have acknowledged in stronger terms her unconscious realization that she was completely dependent and beholden to her society while realizing at the same time that her sacrifice had not made any difference, had not made her society a better one.

Ernest Becker 11: Bartering with the gods: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Bartering with the gods: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

So, the forces of nature are pretty scary and can be downright devastating, mean and nasty killers.  What does a primitive to do in the face of such capriciousness?  Well, it’s always better to have something tangible to deal with so instead of thinking about the ‘forces of nature’ early humans created immortality projects that usually incorporated a god, or at least some kind of entity that served as a stand-in for those anonymous forces.  The forces of nature, gods, were obviously the source of life but they could just as easily be the source of death.  So a two pronged approach was required.  Gods had to be thanked for the bounty they provided, but they also had to be appeased in case they got pissed off at something humans were doing.  Humans were in debt to the gods all the time and paying off that debt was a constant preoccupation of primitives.  They were driven to accumulate a surplus so they could offer something to the gods and food was a logical choice.  Becker writes:

Food is a sacred element because it gives the power of life.  The original sacrifice is always food because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life.  “Give us our daily bread…”

And of course food is not just a physical thing.  After all, milk contains the essence of the cow, beef too.  Sharks fins are more than a delicacy for certain people, they embody the fierceness and boldness of the fish itself.  Maybe that fierceness and boldness gets transferred over in the process of eating the things.  So, giving food as a gift to the gods meant that you were also giving them mana power, “the strength of supernatural life.” (p. 39)

This is how we are to understand the potlatch giving and one-upmanship, the destruction of quantities of goods: the eternal flux of power in the broad stream of life was generated by the greatest possible expenditure; man wanted that stream to flow as bountifully as possible. It then became hard to distinguish who gave and who received, since all were bathed in the power of the movement: everyone participated in the powers that were opened up – the giver, the community, the gods.  “I give you power so that you may have power.” The more you give, the more everyone gets.

 Of course, we need things to flow, to move, to grow.  We get all bent out of shape when the stock market falls.  We need to keep the economy moving.  The magical free entreprise powers are working only so long as goods keep moving.  That’s why at every turn we are pressured to buy, buy, buy.  Buy anything.  Don’t have any more money?  Well then, borrow some, borrow lots.  If you don’t, prosperity will cease and the whole deck of cards will come toppling down.

Like the primitive, modern man feels that he can prosper only if he shows that he already has power.

 Giving gifts to the gods or the gods of your kinsmen Hocart sees as the origins of trade.  Of course the exchange was always a contest.  Who could give the most.  Who  had the power.  Who was obviously already favoured by the gods.  The more you could give, the more heroic you were.  The one who gave the most away was a ‘big power’ man.  Why, because everyone benefited if the gods were appeased and life flowed out of soil and there was plenty to eat.

And so, all this seemingly useless surplus, dangerously and painstakingly wrought, yields the highest usage of all in terms of power. Man the animal who knows he is not safe here, who needs continued affirmation of his powers, is the one animal who is implacably driven to work beyond animal needs precisely because he is not a secure animal.  The origin of human drivenness is religious because man experiences creatureliness. The amassing of a surplus, then, goes to the very heart of human motivation, the urge to stand out as a hero, to transcend the limitations of the human condition and achieve victory over impotence and finitude. 

 In fact, in primitive society, the greatest prestige went to the ‘big man’ who gave everything away and kept nothing for himself.  The ‘smooth flow of life’ had to be ensured.

This reveals a central fact about social life; primitive man immersed himself in a network of social obligations for psychological reasons.  Just as Rank said, man has to have a core psychological motive for being in a group in the first place, otherwise he would not be a group-living animal.  Or as Brown, who likes to call a spade a spade, put it, “man entered social organization in order to share guilt.  Social organization…is a structure of shared guilt…a symbolic mutual confession of guilt.” 

 What the hell!  What does guilt have to do with anything?  Well, stay tuned for the next post when we discuss the nature of guilt.  It’s a good one.

Ernest Becker 10: In debt to the gods, now and then.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Ernest Becker 10: In debt to the gods, now and then.

So, the title of chapter 2 of EFE is: Economics as Expiation and Power. I’m going to have some difficulty summarizing Becker’s thought now because as we go along in this book it seems that Becker is feeling a sort of urgency to get his ideas out and on paper.  He’s less inclined in this chapter and in subsequent ones to elaborate or beat around the bush.  He still uses examples a lot but I tend to leave those out here because they are not necessary to the story; but do they ever help in understanding Becker.  More important, almost every sentence is quotable. So, I say again, there is no substitute for reading Becker himself.  His two most important works in my mind are Denial of Death and Escape from Evil.  His earlier works are fine too, but his later ones summarize or fine-tune his earlier ones, so you might as well stick with DOD or EFE.  EFE cuts to the chase.

OK, back to chapter 2 of EFE.  Following from the first chapter, Becker builds on the idea that primitives bartered with the ‘gods’, the forces that controlled the natural world so as to gain more life and to ensure ‘prosperity’ or continued life in comfort for the future.  What did they have to barter with?  Well, simply, life is the answer.  They bartered life, life in the form of other humans or animal species.  They also offered food to the gods, life-sustaining food (which they often ended up eating themselves, of course).  Sacrifice is a key technic of manufacture in the primitive ritual world. In this chapter Becker introduces Norman O. Brown whose book Life Against Death (1959) was a huge inspiration for Becker.  Brown was a psychoanalyst but not a Freudian at least not the ‘dogmatic Freudian kind.’ (p.26)  Becker writes:

The whole burden of Brown’s argument is to show that economic activity itself, from the dawn of human society to the present time is sacred to the core.  It is not a rational, secular activity designed simply to meet human survival needs.  Or better, it is not only that, never was, never will be.

 Why would primitives drive to create a surplus…as Brown argues they had from the very beginning of society, a practice we carry on with a vengeance to this very day?  Why would primitives strive to make goods that were superfluous to their everyday needs?  Why work harder than is necessary to have enough to eat?  Of course we can argue that primitives put food by for the same reason we do…to preserve it for times when food is scarce.  But that’s not the only reason.

We know that primitives amassed huge piles of food and other goods often only to ceremoniously destroy them, just as we continue to do…And finally we know that historically this creation of useless goods got out of hand and led to the present plight of men – immersed in a horizon of polluting junk, besieged by social injustice and class and race oppression, haves and have-nots, all grasping, fighting, shoving, not knowing how they got into their abysmal condition or what it all means.  Let us now turn to what is probably one of the most vital chapters in man’s self-understanding. [my emphasis]

What was the “economic” activity most characteristic of primitive society?  Gift-giving.  I know, it seems simplistic to suggest such a thing.  Why should gift giving be so important?  We give gifts to each other all the time and we don’t make a big deal out of it…or do we?  We do, actually, sometimes in spectacular ways and sometimes in more subtle ways, but it’s always a big deal.  In fact, as Becker goes on to explain, gift-giving could very well be the basis of modern trade and provided the impetus for the division of society into classes.  ‘Economic’ activity was always and still is a function of expiation.  This is a bit of a long quote and I’ll use it to end this post, but I must let Becker speak his own words here:

How could traders, missionaries, and administrators understand something that often eluded anthropologists themselves: that primitive man did not act out of economic principles, that the process of freely giving and receiving was embedded in a much larger, much more important cosmology, that since the white man had destroyed the old gods and replaced them, he had to give freely just as the gods had done.  Primitive life was openly immersed in debt, in obligation to the invisible powers, the ancestors, the dead souls; the group lived partly by drawing its powers from the non-living.  Unlike us, primitives knew the truth of man’s relation to nature: nature gives freely of its bounty to man – this was the miracle for which to be grateful and beholden and give to the gods of nature in return.  Whatever one received was already a gift, and so to keep things in balance one had to give in return – to one another and, by offerings, to the spirits.  The gods existed in order to receive gifts…primitive man created an economic surplus so that he would have something to give to the gods…

Ernest Becker 9: Morality is Fundamentally a Matter of Power

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Ernest Becker 9: Morality is Fundamentally a Matter of Power

I know that I’m dealing with Becker in these posts but there was a sociologist, the first bone fide European sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1857-1917), who considered sociology the science of morality.  Morality is not what most people think it is.  It’s not some abstract universal condition that has no relationship to reality.  No, morality is fundamentally rooted in political power.  This is not the place for it (I don’t think) but sometime it would be nice for you to challenge me to prove this by announcing what you think are moral precepts and defying me to show how they are connected to the material, real world.  It would be especially fun if you think that morality lies exclusively in the realm of ideas.

In any case, I digress.  Morality underlies all of his work, but now back to Becker and his closing remarks to Chapter 1.  So far he has established clearly that we are animals and that our animality must be considered if we wish to construct a model of humanity’s time on this planet.  We must eat and procreate, both activities that require certain types of organization for a species that is as social as ours.  In fact these activities are so important to us that we elevate them to lofty heights creating elaborate symbol systems around them including what we call morality.  We seek to control life and death although we can’t in any fundamental sense but we try just as primitive man did.  We do it with science, engineering and technology.   The primitives did it with ritual altars. They weren’t happy with just creating life, of course, they wanted it to last for an eternity.  So, they invented immortality ideologies or projects with the requisite ritual organization so as to convince themselves that immortality is possible.  This wasn’t easy.  Becker writes:

…man quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify for immortality.  In this way the simple food quest was transmuted into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity.  All of man’s higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power.  Nietzsche was one of the first to state this blatantly, and he shocked the world with it:  that all morality is fundamentally a matter of power, of the power of organisms to continue existing by reaching for a superhuman purity. 

 I haven’t mentioned in previous posts Becker’s thoughts on what he calls macrocosmitization and microcosmitization.  These unwieldy terms refer to the primitive’s tendency to ‘humanize the cosmos’ with the zodiac or think that reading entrails or engaging in any number of other similar rituals could bring us in touch with the heavens.

By opposing culture to nature in these ways, man allotted to himself a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled him to transcend his animal condition and assume a special status in nature.  No longer was he an animal who died and vanished from the earth; he was a creator of life who could also give eternal life to himself by means of communal rituals of cosmic regeneration.

 Obviously to primitives, nature was being controlled by forces beyond their capacity to understand sensually so they had to imagine what these forces might look like and not surprisingly, they came to look surprisingly like humans, special humans, of course, but human in look and with superheated capacities.  These forces were the ones who created life and took it away, often, it seemed on a whim.  How to control such capricious forces?  By giving them what they trucked in, life.  Sacrificing life to the invisible forces so that they would give up life and not take it away so casually.  Hence, Becker’s comment:

Man has always casually sacrificed life for more life.

 And of course we’re still into that.   The Rwandan massacre of 1994 was just this kind of sacrificial ritualistic search for purity with a concomitant cleansing of unpure, evil ‘others’.  Historical examples abound of our attempts to control life by sacrificing life.

Each organism preens itself on the specialness of the life that throbs within it, and is ready to subordinate all others to its own continuation.  Man was always conceited; he only began to show his destructive side to the rest of nature when the ritual technology of the spiritual production of animals was superseded by other technologies.  The unfolding of history is precisely the saga of the succession of new and different ideologies of organismic self-perpetuation – and the new injustices and heightened destructiveness of historical man.  Let us now turn to this.

Ernest Becker 8: The Logic of Sacrifice

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Ernest Becker 8: The Logic of Sacrifice

 How many times have we heard our government tell us that we have to make sacrifices now so that we can have prosperity in the future.  Sacrifice usually means putting off gratification now for pleasure and prosperity later.  Becker, along with his special ‘informants’ like Hocart, understood the nature of sacrifice.  In EFE Becker dedicates part of Chapter 1 to sacrifice.  It’s critical to his whole argument.  He writes:

 At the centre of the primitive technics of nature stands the act of sacrifice, which reveals the essence of the whole science of ritual.  In a way, we might see it as the atomic physics of the primitive world view…If he does things [performs the ritual ceremony] exactly as prescribed, as the gods did them in the beginning of time, then he gets control over the earth and creation.  He can put vigor into animals, milk into females…

In the Hindu ritual and in coronation rituals, this is the point at which the contest came in.  In order to control nature, man must drive away demons and hostile forces.  If he makes a slip in the ritual, it gives power to the demons.  The ritual triumph is thus winning of a contest with evil…dice and chess probably had their origin as the way of deciding whether the king really could outwit and defeat the forces of darkness.

 Of course we sophisticates in the modern world don’t believe in this kind of thing or do we?  Oh, I think we do. 

 Hocart warns us that if we think this is so foreign to our own traditional ways of thinking we should look closely at the Christian communion.  By performing the prescribed rites the communicant unites himself with Christ – the sacrifice – who is God, and in this way the worshiper accrues to himself a mystical body or soul which has immortal life.   Everything depends on the prescribed ritual, which puts one in possession of the power of eternity by union with the sacrifice. 

 We don’t have to dig too deep into our personal lives to see how much ritual and especially rituals of sacrifice play a role.  Think of the hockey player who must lace his skates in exactly the same, precise order before every game or risk losing the game.  If his or her team loses, the loss can be blamed on the ‘fact’ that the ritual wasn’t performed properly.  Think of people putting small (or large) amounts of money into savings accounts so that they will ultimately be ‘saved.’  But I don’t want to rush Becker into the modern world just yet.  He has yet to finish his look at primitive society, how it was organized and why.  But in the Conclusion to this chapter, Becker tells us that:

 Man has always casually sacrificed life for more life.

 I find this particularly touching as we are spectators to our government’s treatment of veterans.  Of course they are expected to sacrifice everything, even their own lives, for our future prosperity and ‘freedom.’  Problem is the sacrificial fodder doesn’t want to just lie down and accept that its role is completed on the battlefield.  Sacrificial objects aren’t supposed to ask to be recognized for their sacrifice.  Witness Fantino’s casual dismissal of them. Harper wants to sacrifice lives for future prosperity alright, just not their future prosperity.  It’s for him and his buddies, not for the vets who have already played out their role and should now just slink off into obscurity and not cost the government one more cent.  What an asshole Harper is, but he’s no different than the Aztec priest who cut open the chests of thousands of captives in massive sacrificial ceremonies so that the kingdom would continue with the gods looking down in favour on him.  

Yeah, Broncos are diminished, give life to the Seahawks!

~ Roger JG Albert

Ernest Becker 7: Broncos are Diminished: Give Life to the Seahawks!

This is my seventh post in this series and I’m only on page 12 of Becker’s Escape from Evil.  Better pick up the pace or I’ll still be at this in October!

So, poor Broncos.  Diminished.  Humiliated.  Oh well, there’s always next season.  That’s the beauty of organized sport in our day.  It’s never finished.  There is only symbolic death…but, boy, do people take these things seriously.  Because we are symbol-creating beings we tend to take our symbols seriously.  We attach ourselves to a particular cause, team, political ideology or habit and we hang on for dear life.  And then, we fight.  We need others because we can’t impart life to ourselves.  We need others to compete against to prove how worthy we are of immortality.  But competition isn’t always and only about defeating our opponents and our opponents would not benefit from our complete annihilation.   No, we have mechanisms to hold up, to protect our enemies from complete deflation.  We need them and they need us.  We help each other. But we do this daily too in countless ways and not against any perceived enemy. We help each other save face.

I think here of the work of Erving Goffman, in which he showed with such consummate art how people impart to one another the daily sense of importance that each needs, not with rivalry and boasting, but rather with elaborate rules for protecting their insides against social damage and deflation.  People do this in their own interpersonal encounters by using verbal formulas that express proper curtesies, permit gentle handling, save the other’s ‘face’ with the proper subtleties when self-esteem is in danger, and so on.

…It is only in modern society that the mutual imparting of self-importance has trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work; there is hardly any way to get a sense of value except from the boss, the company dinner, or the random social encounters in the elevator on the way to the executive toilet.  It is pretty demeaning – but that’s not Goffman’s fault – it is the playing out of the historical decadence of ritual.  Primitive society was a formal organization for the apotheosis [the ascent of man to god like status] of man.  Our own everyday rituals seem shallow precisely because they lack the cosmic connection.

 The moieties stood for these opposing yet complementary principles.  The world was divided not only into sky and earth but also into right and wrong, light and darkness, power and weakness – and even life and death.

 …Modern man has long since abandoned the ritual renewal theory of nature, and reality for us is simply refusing to acknowledge that evil and death are constantly with us.  With medical science we want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our consciousness.  We are shocked by the vulgarity of symbols of death and the devil and sexual intercourse in primitive ruins.

 We don’t want to be reminded of death and if we are, we deny it any real significance via an immorality project.

The Egyptians hoped that when they died they would ascend to heaven and become stars and thus enjoy eternal significance in the scheme of things. This is already a comedown from what primitive social groupings enjoyed: the daily living of divine significance, the constant meddling into the realm of cosmic power.  I said that primitive society was organized for contests and games…but these were not games as we now think of them.  They were games as children play them:  they were actually aimed to control nature, to make things come out as they wanted them.  Ritual contests between moieties were a play of life against death, forces of light against forces of darkness…If death and disease were overtaking a people, then a ritual enacted reversal of death by triumph of the life faction would hopefully set things straight.

Not sure if this has anything to do with the Super Bowl.  But enough for today.

Ernest Becker 6: Today, will the Broncos hang their heads in shame?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Ernest Becker 6: Today, will the Broncos hang their heads in shame?

Following from yesterday’s post, primitive ritual is a tool used for the production of life.  [We get to the Seahawks and Broncos at the end of this post!] The Mayans and especially the Aztec were quite capable of ritually sacrificing scores of human beings to ensure future prosperity.  In this post I explore with Becker the consequences of our search for immortality and the means by which we pursue that search.  They vary in time and space, of course, but their aim is always the same: ensure prosperity and the good life.  Defeat anything or anyone that threatens it.

We have a great deal of faith in our way of controlling life, via science and especially engineering and technology.  So when our technology fails us, our faith is shaken.  When a plane crashes or a pipeline ruptures or a train crashes into a town killing dozens of people we wring our hands in worry.  We are wracked with doubt.  Maybe we aren’t infallible after all.  Maybe our way of life won’t lead us to immortality.  Look how easily it kills.  Anxiety fills our hearts.

When imperialists and colonizers came across primitives and their crude attempts to ritually control life, they smashed and burned everything and created a critical breach in the faith primitives had had in their immortality projects.  They were shown to be useless in the face of Western weapons and ideas.

One thing primitives did that was a complete puzzle to Western observers for a long time was the way they organized their societies.

The Australian aborigines – who were living in the Stone Age – seemed to most paradoxical of all, with their luxuriant system of kinship classification and their complex divisions of their tribe into half and half and then half again…One of the main things that took place between halves was something homo sapiens seems to thrive on: contests of skill and excellence…In fact it is possible that all team games arose out of the dual organization…

Technically we call it ‘moity’ organization – a dry and forbidding anthropological term that makes the study of primitives so dull…

But Hocart did not get carried away into abstractions as many did.  His explanation for this profound dualism lies in the real world of human ambitions and hopes:

 Perhaps it is a law of nature, but that is not sufficient to explain the dual organization…Nor does it explain the curious interaction of the moieties; in fact it is this interaction which must explain the dual division; for men divide themselves into groups in order that they may impart life to one another, that they may intermarry, compete with one another, make offerings to one another, and do to one another whatever is required by their theory of prosperity. [this paragraph is Becker quoting Hocart]

 There you have it.  Leave it to Hocart to cut through to the heart of the matter…The fundamental imperative of all ritual is that one cannot do it alone; man cannot impart life to himself but must get it from his fellow man.  If ritual is a technique for generating life, then ritual organization is a necessary cooperation in order to make that technique work. 

 …We saw in the Introduction that one of the main motives of organismic life was the urge to self-feeling, to the heightened sense of self that comes with success in overcoming obstacles and incorporating other organisms…Man can expand his self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or demonstration of his own excellence.  He expands his organization in complexity by games, puzzles, riddles, mental tricks of all types; by boasting about his achievements, taunting and humiliating his adversaries, or torturing and killing them.   Anything that reduces the other organisms and adds to one’s own size and importance is a direct way  to gain self-feeling; it is a natural development out of the simple incorporation and fighting behaviour of lower organisms.

 I leave you today with this most important insight in EFE:

By the time we get to man we find that he is in an almost constant struggle not to be diminished in his organismic importance.  But as his is also and especially a symbolic organism, this struggle against being diminished is carried on on the most minute levels of symbolic complexity.  To be outshone by another is to be attacked at some basic level of organismic durability. 

 As I type this, the Seahawks are ahead of the Broncos 29 to 0 in the Super Bowl.  Seahawk fans are cautiously optimistic.  Broncos fans are in despair.  Will they be diminished along with their team?  Will their heads hang low in shame?  Everything is at stake!  Will the Broncos give life to the Seahawks?  Or will the Broncos overcome all adversity and kick ass?

Ernest Becker 5: Build Me A Sacrificial Altar

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Ernest Becker 5: The Power of Ritual or Build Me A Sacrificial Altar

 

Becker was a master synthesizer.  He didn’t really do any empirical research himself.  His arguments are based on a careful distillation, combination, and re-combination of the work of many other writers, among them A. M. Hocart, Otto Rank, Johan Huizinga and Norman O. Brown.  In Chapter 1 of EFE, entitled The Primitive World:  Ritual as Practical Technics, Becker introduces the work of the anthropologist A. M. Hocart (1883-1939).  Hocart was a major influence on Becker and provided him with a number of basic insights upon which Becker built his elegant and provocative analysis of the thing that drives humankind to distraction…the striving for immortality.

Ritual.  As well as being creatures of habit, we are also creatures of ritual.  Human beings love ritual.  Our lives are frequently punctuated by ritual.  Becker writes:

Hocart…saw the universal human ambition as the achievement of prosperity – the good life.  To satisfy this craving, only man could create that most powerful concept which has both made him heroic and brought him utter tragedy – the invention and practice of ritual, which s first and foremost a technique for promoting the good life and averting evil.  Let us not rush over these words:  ritual is a technique for giving life.  This thing is momentous: throughout vast ages of prehistory mankind imagined that it could control life! 

Through spells, incantations, charms and magic primitive peoples believed they could control life.  In fact, ritual was required to make just about everything happen, from making sure the crops were good from year to year, that there was plenty of game to kill and eat and that no harm would come to people and their families.  Harm would come to people only if the ritual was not properly conducted or some malevolent being interfered with it.

The point I want to make is very simple and direct: that by means of the techniques of ritual men imagined that they took firm control of the material world, and at the same time transcended that world by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them supernatural, raised them over and above material decay and death.  In the world of ritual there aren’t any accidents, and accidents, as we know, are the things that make life most precarious and meaningless. 

 Let’s be clear.  Primitives believed they could control the material world with ritual.  We think we can control it with science and the modern secular worldview.  Primitives, of course, lacked the science-based engineering capacity of us moderns.  They didn’t have the factory system and mass production.  For primitives,

…ritual is actually a preindustrial technique of manufacture; it doesn’t exactly create new things, Hocart says, but it transfers the power of life and it renovates nature.  But how can we have a technique of manufacture without machinery?  Precisely by building a ritual altar and making that the locus of the transfer and renewal of life power…Man controls nature by whatever he can invent, and primitive man invented the ritual altar and the magical paraphanalia to make it work.  And as the modern mechanic carries around his tools, so did the primitive scrupulously transport his charms and rebuild his altars. 

 We call it magic because we don’t believe it worked, and we call our technology scientific because we believe it works.  I am not pretending that primitive magic is as efficacious for the control of nature as our science, but in out time we are beginning to live with some strange and uncomfortable realizations.  Primitive ritual manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the universe, but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it.  We control it up to a point – the point at which we seem to be destroying it.