Commentary

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

~ Roger JG Albert

More Becker. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

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…

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Ernest Becker 5: Build Me A Sacrificial Altar

~ Roger JG Albert

As promised, more Becker. Every day, for the next month, more Becker.

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

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…

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Ernest Becker 4: Nah, we don’t REALLY die, do we?

~ Roger JG Albert

As promised, more Becker. This is the fourth instalment. Short. Easy to read, I think, but a defiance. Becker writes: Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death. “Society” here could mean any group of people from a family to a country to a group of countries to business enterprise and everything in between.

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

Ernest Becker 4: Nah, we don’t REALLY die, do we?

Alright, so Becker is keen on telling us that we are animals and our ‘animality’ must be considered in any analysis of what our place is on this planet.  More than that he states that like all animals we want to continue to live.  We crave life but know that it will end.  But that just can’t be!  We are such wonderful creatures, we’ve got these big brains and bodies that can give us such pleasure.  Why we must be the most intelligent things in the universe!  We can’t possibly die… Well, maybe, just maybe we don’t die.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Maybe our flesh and blood dies, but WE don’t.  Yes, disease and death are the twin evils that we face, but maybe, just maybe, that’s just a part of what we are.  Well…let’s let Becker speak now as…

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Ernest Becker 3: Not my tummy, no, not that!

~ Roger JG Albert

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

 

 

I’m going to start right off with this quotation from Becker’s EFE, pages 3 and 4.

 

And this brings me to the unique paradox of the human condition: that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive organism; he is driven by the same craving to consume…to enjoy continued experience.  But man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die. [Oh no, not my tummy!]

 

…As I argued in The Denial of Death, man erected cultural symbols which do not age or decay to quiet his fear of his ultimate end – and more immediate concern, to provide the promise of indefinite duration.  His culture gives man an alter-organism which is more durable and powerful than the one nature endowed him with…

 

What I am saying is…

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Ernest Becker 2: Oh, Our Lovely Tummies

~ Roger JG Albert

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

Ernest Becker 2: Oh, Our Lovely Tummies

So, following yesterdays post, Becker argues that we are animals.  Well, what else?  I know, I know, we think of ourselves as humans not animals, but that’s not a distinction that makes much sense.  Science has gone way beyond thinking of things on this planet as being exclusively plant, animal or mineral.  It’s not as simple as that.  However, for the moment, I hope you’ll accept my argument (and Becker’s) that we aren’t rocks or minerals or grapefruit.  No, we are animals.  We share genes with grapefruit and we need some minerals to survive, but we aren’t plants or minerals in any obvious sense.  That’s Becker’s opening argument:  we’re animals.  We behave very much in animal ways although we also very much deny it with all of our best efforts.  We have a lot in common with most animals, more with some than…

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Ernest Becker 1: Of mouths, digestive tracts and anuses…

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

From January 28, 2014. This is the first post in the series I wrote on Becker. From today on, I will reblog posts from my archives on Becker. Maybe some of you will be turned on to read Becker’s books: Escape From Evil and The Denial of Death.

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

So, for the next 30 days (probably more) at the rate of one quote per day, I’m going to go through Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil (EFE) drawing out quotes I feel are particularly powerful.  Becker’s widow and her publisher published EFE in 1975 a year after Becker’s death from cancer in a Vancouver hospital.  I consider EFE to be one of the 5 non-fiction books that has had the greatest impact on me.  I’ve read hundreds, if not thousands, of books and many have moved me, but not many to the extent that this book has.  Sometime, I’ll discuss the other four, but for now, it’s Becker I want to deal with.

My plan is to start on page 1 and go through the book until I get to page 170, the last page of text, pulling out quotes that strike me as particularly interesting and that will contribute…

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Why do we so often refer to sex as dirty?

~ Roger JG Albert

A post from 2016. Another post based on Becker’s work.

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

My next post was supposed to be about morality and that will be the subject of a number of future posts, but I was listening to the CBC this morning and the guest host of the morning program was interviewing a comedian and talking about his upcoming show. That tweaked my interest as I sipped my coffee. The host asked the comedian if his show was going to be clean. The comedian responded that for the most part it would be but that it would also be dirty at times. Well, I just had to weigh in. Morality will just have to wait a bit.

By dirty I know, and you know, that the host and the comedian were referring to the use of  swear words like fuck and shit and piss in his routine. He was not, however, going to make specific reference to the sex act and have…

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Death Denial

~ Roger JG Albert

I think this needs to be kept living and not just hidden in my archives. I will be posting more from my archives on Becker.

Roger JG Albert's avatarRoger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma

If there’s a constant in human history, it’s death denial.  Ernest Becker, in the last book he published just before his death in 1974, The Denial of Death, explores and explains the pervasiveness of death denial in all cultures all over the globe.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in trying to come to grips with their own death, but also with the death of cultures, ways of life and all cultural artifacts.  According to Becker, individual death is a given, at least in the physical sense, but as human beings, we can’t accept that inevitability, so we devise sometimes very elaborate systems of death denial.  For Becker, cultures themselves are immortality projects designed to deny death.  The Christian idea of the soul is a great immortality project.  The body dies, the soul lives on forever.  Take that, death!  Life 1, Death 0.  So, Christians…

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Why Average Incomes Tell Us Nothing About Real World Inequality

~ Roger JG Albert

When the experts tell us that average incomes have risen, what does that actually tell us? Not much that’s useful in understanding real world politics and the inequities of economic life. I know that most of us understand averages, now don’t we? What’s there to explain? Well, let’s have a look at average incomes.

Incomes can be looked at using three measures of central tendency: the mean (the average), the median and the mode. For a technical explanation of these terms see: https://statistics.laerd.com/statistical-guides/measures-central-tendency-mean-mode-median.php.

Each of these measures has its advantages and disadvantages.  If we take a population and want to figure out their average height, it’s simple: measure each individual in the population, add the heights of all of them together and divide by the number of individuals measured. It’s unlikely that all people in a population would be of the same stature, and it doesn’t tell us anything about the range of heights. It’s always good to know what the range is otherwise there’s no way of judging just how variable the heights are in a population. Same goes for incomes. Scenario A below is of a fictitious population of income earners that each earns $100 thousand dollars each per year. That makes the total incomes earned by the group $1 million dollars and the average is $100 thousand. If you know where such a world exists, please let me know.

Scenario A  
Income Earner Income $ % of total income
Income earner 1 100,000 10
Income earner 2 100,000 10
Income earner 3 100,000 10
Income earner 4 100,000 10
Income earner 5 100,000 10
Income earner 6 100,000 10
Income earner 7 100,000 10
Income earner 8 100,000 10
Income earner 9 100,000 10
Income earner 10 100,000 10
Total Income 1,000,000 100
Average Income 100,000  

Now, let’s consider Scenario B below. The total income of all ten earners is still $1 million and the average is still $100 thousand. What’s changed? The distribution. In this scenario, the highest income earner brought in $200 thousand while the lowest earner brought in $45 thousand. That’s a significant difference and means that there is substantial income inequality but if a government wanted to obfuscate rather than clarify the issue, it might want to argue that average incomes haven’t changed. What are you worried about?

Scenario B  
Income Earner Income $ % of total income
Income earner 1 200,000 20.00
Income earner 2 150,000 15.00
Income earner 3 130,000 13.00
Income earner 4 100,000 10.00
Income earner 5 95,000 9.50
Income earner 6 85,000 8.50
Income earner 7 75,000 7.50
Income earner 8 65,000 6.50
Income earner 9 55,000 5.50
Income earner 10 45,000 4.50
Total Income 1,000,000 100.00
Average Income 100,000  

Now, consider this third scenario. The total incomes are still $1 million, the average is still $100 thousand. However, in this scenario, the highest income earner is taking in 72.7 of the total income. This scenario pushes income inequality to a much greater degree.

Scenario C  
Income Earner Income $ % of total income
Income earner 1 726,990 72.70
Income earner 2 85,000 8.50
Income earner 3 45,000 4.50
Income earner 4 20,430 2.04
Income earner 5 20,430 2.04
Income earner 6 20,430 2.04
Income earner 7 20,430 2.04
Income earner 8 20,430 2.04
Income earner 9 20,430 2.04
Income earner 10 20,430 2.04
Total Income 1,000,000 100.00
Average Income 100,000  

Now, think of a situation where aggregate incomes rise, but the lowest earners retain their share of earnings at 2.04 percent. Now the government can say: What are you worried about? Your income hasn’t changed at all and the country is getting richer. Silly you. Maybe you should just work a little harder.

Calculating median income isn’t much more helpful. The median income is the point where half the incomes are above and half below. That will tell us if a population distribution is changing in broad terms, but the median income in scenario C is $20,430.00. What does that tell you about the distribution of incomes in this population.

Calculating the modal income is interesting. The modal income is the one that appears most often in a distribution. In scenario C, the modal income is clearly $20,430.00. That’s the income most people make. It still doesn’t shed much light on the inequality in a distribution.

So, we always need more than a measure of central tendency to tell us what’s really going on in the world in terms of income inequality. If the government, or the head of the Bank of Canada for example, tells you that average incomes are rising, know that you’re not being told the whole story.

If you’re not concerned about these things, never mind.

Note: this post was inspired by a section of Robert Sapolsky’s book: Why Zebras don’t get ulcers.

 

Growing grapes on the Beaufort Range.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I live on one of the main roads that lead out of Cumberland, BC. Cumberland is on the eastern slopes of the Beaufort Range at about a 500 foot altitude. Over the past few weeks we have witnessed at least a dozen logging trucks headed out of town every week day down the Trent River Main headed who knows where. That’s been going on for years but it seems logging activity is picking up around here. Certainly, the clearcuts are getting bigger and bigger just up the slopes from our little community and they’re getting more numerous.

I don’t know much about what sustains a forest. I’m a sociologist, not a biologist nor an ecologist. What the ecologists tell me, however, is frightening. Logging and development are wreaking havoc with ecosystems and changing the landscape in very visible ways. I’m of two minds about that. Should we care?

But let me step back for a moment and ask a few questions some of you may have answers to.

  1. Given climate change and the report yesterday that increasing temperatures are accelerating, has anyone given thought to how a changing global climate will impact our forest and marshland ecosystems on Vancouver Island?
  2. Is there a tipping point where the amount of logging in any specific area will permanently change the local climate so that certain species of trees cannot grow here any longer?
  3. In the foreseeable future are we looking at the conditions ideal for growing grapes on the hillsides above Cumberland? Are we looking at a potential wine growing situation here?

I know that logging in the Comox Valley and in most areas on the eastern slopes of Vancouver Island mountain ranges is proceeding apace. I’m not at all against logging per se. After all, I’m a woodworker and sculptor in wood. We also still burn wood on occasion in our wood stove. I do, however, question the logic of the kind of clearcut logging we’re witnessing here. There are many ways that forests can serve the economic interests of communities and I’m not at all sure that what’s happening here at the moment is in our best interests. There are alternatives, but I doubt that they are given serious consideration.

Given that the mountain sides above us are all privately owned by logging companies who are themselves largely owned by pension funds, the current model is unlikely to change. Making pots of money is the name of the game and quarterly profits must increase or shareholders may look to invest their money elsewhere. I’m not sure pension managers know anything about logging or forestry, but they do know how to push for increased revenues. So, forestry managers must deliver the goods or risk losing their stake in the venture.

In some ways I grieve the loss of the wonderful forests that surround us, but I also realize that the land hereabouts was pretty much clearcut a hundred years ago to resemble a barren landscape. We live in second and third growth tree plantations, not forests. I’m quite shocked at the size of much of the timber I see leaving on the trucks by my home. I can’t image many of the logs on those trucks would be of much use except to make pulp or chips for strandboard, nor can I image you’d get as much as a 2X4 out of some of them.

That said, maybe I need to chill out and accept what’s happening. After all, I enjoy a nice Chardonnay. Maybe, soon enough, we’ll be a world class wine growing area with a balmy climate while California becomes a desert once again. Maybe we’ll have vineyards as far as the eye can see. Cheers! Maybe we can grow hops too!