Ernest Becker

Escape 18: Our Bodies, Our Deaths.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Escape 18: Our Bodies our Deaths: What evil has history wrought?

Chapter 6 in EFE ends with a section called The Demonics of History.  How to summarize Becker’s arguments here?  Not without some difficulty: every sentence is jam packed with meaning.  In the last post we noted that money is the new immortality ideology but ‘new’ here means after the fall of primitive society and the rise of classes some 10 to 12 thousand years ago in some parts of the world, much later in others.  But, it’s complicated.  As Becker writes:

If we say that ‘money is God,’ this seems like a simple and cynical observation on the corruptibility of men.  But if we say that ‘money negotiates immortality and therefore is God,’ this is a scientific formula that is limpidly objective to any serious student of man…We see the changes from tribal modes of achieving power to money modes right before our eyes.

 In the early days of French ‘exploration’ in North America, once the Huron, Montagnais and other tribes understood the power of the invaders from Europe they didn’t need to be coerced to let go of their previous immortality ideologies.  They were confronted by a relentless and powerful new god, one that did not want to compromise with theirs, a god who showed that the only way to salvation and eternal life was in the worship of it and it alone.  The earliest ‘conversions’ had been gotten with bribes and coercion, but in time that was no longer necessary.

Think; if a race of men with advanced learning, health, and weapons were to land on our planet and tell us about the god who sustains them in Alpha Centauri, a new religion would sweep over large numbers of people overnight and discredit most of our institutions. 

 So, money represents real earthly power, but its power is sacred.  Money gives power now!  No need to wait on an earthly death for apotheosis.

Man has become dependent on social symbols of prestige that single him out as especially worthy of being remembered in the eyes of the gods and in the minds of men.  But for an animal who actually lives on the level of the visible and knows nothing of the invisible, it is easy for the eyes of men to take precedence over the eyes of the gods.  The symbols of immortality power that money buys exist on the level of the visible, and so crowd out their invisible competitor.  Man succumbs easily to created life, which is to exercise power mainly in the dimension in which he moves and acts as an organism.  The pull of the body is so strong, lived experience is so direct; the ‘supernatural’ is so remote and problematic, so abstract and intangible.

 Indeed the pull of the body is strong but it’s the body that is the source of sin.  The body dies and that’s not an acceptable outcome for such a narcissistic species as our own.  That’s why we divide ourselves into body and soul.  The body dies but the soul lives on.  The soul is an immortality project in the real sense of the term.  The body leads us into temptation.  It’s the source of all death and guilt.  As I get older, in my penultimate years, I feel that as the life drains out of me I am betraying our most cherished immortality symbols and I must feel guilt for the loss of life.  But the immortality ideologies that dominate the planet now are betraying me because their promises of immortality are empty ones.  It’s interesting to me how the symbol of the devil represents “physical, earthly, visible power and on this planet easily holds sway over his more ethereal competitor, spiritual power.” (p. 85)

As we noted earlier we need evidence that we are being heard by the gods in our search for immortality; that assurance does not come easily.  But if we can convince ourselves, as the Calvinists suggested after some initial stumbling, that how we conduct ourselves on this planet may be an indication of where we will end up after we die, that can give us some comfort but it also can bring on anxiety.  As Becker writes:

No wonder economic equality is beyond the endurance of modern democratic man: the house, the car, the bank balance are his immortality symbols.  Or to put it another way, if a black man moves next door, it is not merely that your house diminishes in real estate value, but that you diminish in fullness on the level of visible immortality – and so you die…the decline of traditional religion has eclipsed the god whose eyes judged merit according to the goods you piled up…In other words, modern man cannot endure economic equality because he has no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life.  No wonder that people segregate themselves with such consuming dedication, that special ness is so much a fight to the death: man lashes out all the harder when he is cornered, when he is a pathetically impoverished immortality seeker.  He dies when his little symbols of specialness die. 

 This is a long quotation but I feel no qualms in putting it down here for you to read. It sums up a great deal of Becker’s thought in this chapter.  Over time we came to distrust invisible symbols of immortality.  As Becker writes: “Immortality power, then, came to reside in accumulated wealth.” (p. 87)

So, in a world dominated by secular immortality symbols, where we judge people on their possessions how do we understand the concept of sin?  In a world where our immortality is gotten by bartering with the gods, sin meant distancing oneself from invisible power.  It might mean angering the gods by not performing a ritual properly or by ignoring prescribed behaviours.

Sin is the experience of uncertainty in one’s relation to the divine ground of his being; he no longer is sure of possessing the right connection, the right means of expiation. 

Sin, in a Christian sense, defines a situation, created by certain actions or thoughts, that distances the believer from his God.  It’s a denial of the symbolic side of humankind.  And, of course, it’s our symbolic side that is the seat of our immortality.  The body betrays us, drags us down.  No wonder we often speak of the body in terms that connect it to the earth and in doing so we can barely mask our loathing of it.  Sex is ‘dirty’ unless of course it’s sanctioned and made acceptable by the application of essential rituals to ‘cleanse’ it.  In this sense, it’s easy for men to think of women as the source of evil and death.  Men can think of themselves as purely symbolic creatures whereas women’s bodies are the source of temptation and descent into death.  Women bleed monthly, they bleed in labour, they give life, but in so doing create death.  They are the carriers of death by giving birth.  The idea is perverse but any simple and cursory study of the ethnographic record easily demonstrates how widely it was, and is still, accepted.  I will explore this further in subsequent posts, but for now I have to wrap up this already too long post.

So what does it mean to sin in a secular world?  Well, I don’t agree completely with Becker in his conclusion here.  He claims that we’ve avoided sin by “simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related.” (p. 89) But, in my mind to sin in a secular world that promises victory over death by the accumulation of wealth, sin must be the inability to accumulate wealth.  The poor, by definition, are sinners of the worse kind.  But how do we atone for this sin?  In a Christian world simply asking for forgiveness and promising to lead a better life can be enough.  In a secular world it’s not so easy.  Of course we make the poor pay for their ‘sin’ by treating them like shit.  “There, that will teach you for not being wealthy.”  Becker concludes:

History is the tragic record of heroism and expiation out of control and of man’s efforts to earn expiation in new, frantically driven and contrived ways.  The burden of guilt created by cumulative possessions, linear time, and secularization is assuredly greater than that experienced by primitive man; it has to come out some way…The point I am making is that most of the evil that man has visited on his world is the result precisely of the greater passion of his denials and his historical drivenness.  

Escape 17: Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

Escape 17: Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology

That’s the title of Chapter 6 of Escape from Evil.  We all take money for granted, it’s such a common feature of our lives.  It’s funny how we think about money.  Technically, money is a social relationship.  It doesn’t refer to the stuff we carry around in our wallets.  Coins are technically called specie and the folding plastic (used to be paper) things are banknotes.  They are actually the physical representation of money.  So they’re kind of like a metaphor.  Chapter 6 is Norman O. Brown’s chapter.  Otto Rank and Brown share a unifying principle in their work, the universal urge to immortality.  It underlies everything they write about.

In a pre-scientific world a person could get some kind of immortality by leaving behind children.  That’s not entirely satisfactory because for men it’s never certain that your children are really your own.  In this circumstance it’s not a bad idea to have a back-up plan.  How about leaving something else behind that reminds the living of how great a person you were?  How about things, physical things, things you know are yours.  Surround yourself with things and maybe you have a little insulation against insignificance.  Leave many wondrous things and maybe you gain a little immortality.  Yes, indeed, have your name placed on buildings…that will not thwart the grim reaper but it will be a lasting symbolic reminder of your life on this planet.  That’s about all we can expect.  It’s not much, but for an animal like ourselves we need to reach out and grab any bit of hope we can.

Money it seems is a great way to get yourself a little sense of immortality.  If you can, have a likeness of your face stamped into gold coins.  Yeah, that ought to work.  Money is a new magic object.  As Becker writes: “Money is the new ‘totemic’ possession.” (p. 75) Money soon became the new ritual focus.  The old rituals were just not doing it anymore.  Time to move on.  Money was the perfect replacement for the old rituals.  Becker quotes Mary Douglas from her book Purity and Danger:

Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sigh for what would be confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience.  Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evaluate them.  Money makes a link between the present and the future, so does ritual.  The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor.  Money is only an extreme and specialized type of ritual.

 Money, in fact, is religious.  It has become the new immortality ideology.  It provides life like no other ritual could.  The more of it you have, the more mobility you have, the more liberty you have, the more assurance you have of your value to others.  Life is mobility, death is immobility.  From this perspective the poor are the walking dead.  It’s not surprising that zombie movies are so popular these days and that zombie characters are often made up to look like ‘street’ people.  Money gives life, it is life.  There is no other way to put it.  I take exception to some extent to Becker’s analysis here.  If as Marx points out money is the average commodity then ‘commodity’ is the god here and not money.  Or to put it another way, the market is the thing.  Money is a representation of the relations of the market.  The market is the venue par excellence of exchange, gift giving and receiving.  It’s why we feel so good on a shopping spree and down when we are short of cash.  We are feeling a little connection to the gods. It sucks to be poor.  No connecting to the gods for you!

I’m not going to go into a lot of the content of chapter 6.  It’s a lot about how money came to have such power a long time ago, how it came to have supernatural power.

A little money goes a long way, but a lot of money goes a lot further:

And so we see how it was that money came to buy many things: if it was magic, people would give anything to have it.  As Géza Róheim put it in a very happy formulation, “originally people do not desire money because you can buy things for it, but you can buy things for money because people desire it.”

That’s a bit convoluted as a way to state it, but it’s clear that the evolution of money into want it is today was fairly slow.  Now, banks have replaced churches and cathedrals as the favoured display of immortality.  How many new cathedrals have you seen built lately?  How many bank towers?

Ah, money.  The best thing about it is that it can be accumulated and passed on.  In our time, we’ve made this into a sacred duty.  We sin if we don’t save.  We get chastised by the finance minister for not saving while out of the other side of his mouth he is urging us to spend otherwise we’ll find ourselves in a depression…which reminds us way too much of failure, immobility and death.  Spending means life and prosperity, even if we accumulate guilt as we borrow our way to communing with the gods.  When the bills come in after Christmas, then what?  But still, we believe in it.  We trust it.  It can be good to us, at least some of us.  Best of all,

…[money] radiates its power even after one’s death, giving one a semblance of immortality as he lives in the vicarious enjoyment of his heirs that his money continues to buy, or in the statues of himself and the majesty of his own mausoleum.  In short, money is the human mode, par excellence of cooly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature.

 Enough for now.  I’ll finish up dealing with Chapter 6 of EFE tomorrow as Becker addresses what he calls The Demonics of History.

Escape 15: If your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Escape 15: If your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die.

Half way through this exercise.  Becker is in my blood, it seems, not because of him as a person.  He is not my Christ.  What he does do for me is summarize and synthesize ideas that I slowly came to accept over 40 years of scholarship.  Actually by 1975 only a year after Becker’s death I was already ‘predisposed’ to accept his arguments having spent many hours reading the ethologists, Emile Durkheim, the Bible (2 versions), as many ethnographies as I could get my hands on, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Will Durant and scores of others.  The idea of an immortality-project that became the centre of people’s lives and embodied all of their hopes for eternal life, I had already intuited but not articulated as such.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I read Becker and his muses, Norman O. Brown and Otto Rank, I felt that I found my way home.  Of course, the irony hasn’t escaped me that this could very well be my own immortality-project, but I’m OK with that.  We as humans can’t exist alone, as individuals.  We need company, meaningful company and we gather life from it.  We get stronger with every association we make so it’s not surprising that we hunt down every ‘like’ we can get on Facebook.  We need others to share our project because there’s strength in numbers.  As Becker writes:

Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die.  Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life fallible.  History, then, can be seen as a succession of ideologies that console for death. 

 In this sense all cultures are sacred.  Becker does not subscribe to the common idea that cultures contain sacred and profane elements.  For him, all culture is sacred because it promises victory over death and disease.  So, now we get to the critical point:  it’s the group and the group alone that confers immortality.  There is no immortality outside of the group’s promise of it.  Furthermore, the power of the group can only be released with the proper ritual executed to perfection.  The group can demand from us countless practices, ideas, behaviours, scarifications, tattoos, lip plugs, genuflections, tips-of-the-hat, and what have you because in the end these things will get us immortality.  Not doing them or not doing them properly voids the contract and we die.

Unlike Freud, Rand argued that all taboos, morals, customs, and laws represent a self-limitation of man so that he could transcend his condition, get more life by denying life.  As he paradoxically put it, men seek to preserve their immortality rather than their lives.

 That’s all for today.  This is a short one but I’ve been at this keyboard for many hours today and I’ve had enough.  Tomorrow is a new day and a new post.

Escape 14: Promise me immortality and I’ll kiss your boots.

~ Roger JG Albert

Escape 14: Promise me immortality and I’ll kiss your boots.

 So how did we go from creating inequality just on the basis of personal qualities to what we have now?  In present times, in lots of ways it isn’t even people who we bow down to it’s capital.  That’s how abstracted from the original basis of inequality it’s become.  Chapter 4 of EFE is called The Evolution of Inequality and that’s what it delivers.  The next chapter brings us closer to the present, but for the moment we must stay with primitives for a while longer.

Once men consented to live by the redistribution of life’s goods through a god figure who represented life, they had sealed their fate.  There was no stopping the process of the monopolization of life in the king’s hands.

 Actually, this quote, although representative of part of the thesis of this chapter only reflects the trajectory in broad terms of the creation of ‘organized’ inequality and the development of classes.  In early primitive societies there was a basic equality.  Yes, some individuals were superior hunters and received prestige because of it but there was a mutual support system built into this arrangement.  The gods provided life and the society provided prestige for the gods or their intermediaries, the priest-rulers who fancied themselves capable of harnessing the power of the sun to benefit the society in question.  Early on there were people who commandeered the ritual techniques of manufacture and demanded that people followed them precisely or else death and destruction would follow.  Most Indiana Jones movies are based on this kind of scenario.  People weren’t necessarily happy about giving up some of their own power to the king or ruler, but they were willing to put up with a certain amount of tyranny if the harvests were good.  If not, one consequence was often the violent deposition of the ruler.  ‘You deliver, or else.’  Still things are never simple or straightforward everything considered: people like to be cajoled and seduced into following.  They don’t want it to be simply a question of force.

…men will not give in to power unless it is accompanied by mystification, as in the service of something that has a grander aura of legitimacy, of symbolic compellingness. (p. 58)

 So, eventually, after a period of thousands of years through the power of mystification and a good measure of coercion humankind moved from a simple system of sharing to one of redistribution by the ruler.  Slowly, without noticing it, people bartered away social equality and some individual freedom for prosperity and order.

Once you went from an economy of simple sharing to one of redistribution, goods ceased to be your natural right.  (p. 58)

Here Becker uses the potlatch as an example of a situation whereby economic activity and social morality began to be disconnected from each other.  He calls the classic potlatch as practiced by the ‘Kwakiutl’ a redistribution ceremony pure and simple.  Huge surpluses were gathered and concentrated in the hands of the chief without creating severe hardship for the people then redistributed.  It created a situation where heroism and expiation could be exercised concurrently.  The more goods one could give away or destroy the more heroic he would be and the more power could be accrued.  Expiation came too because in giving away loads of goods, the chief atoned for the sin of accumulating the surplus in the first place.  Now the invisible powers started to take a back seat to the more visible chief.  Now we were witness to what Hocart calls the ‘growing conceit’ of man.  Communal ritual now replaces the ritual importance of the family.  The thing about the classic potlatch though was that it didn’t transcend the group.  The modern ‘potlatch’ whereby Ted Turner gives the  UN billions of dollars or public buildings are donated by the likes of Carnegie, Rockefeller or more tellingly, Telus, GM and Molson’s is good publicity but it’s giving but a tiny fraction of what was gotten by exploitation.

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 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.  

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?