Commentary

Escape 26: It’s all about you and me. Yes, it’s personal, but the personal is the social.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

Escape 26: It’s all about you and me.  Yes, it’s personal, but the personal is the social.

So, I’ve managed to stay on schedule and write a blog post every day for the last 25 days.  It’s been an exercise in discipline as much as anything.  Why have I done this?  Why have I done anything in my life?  Why have you?  I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and reading all the relevant material I could get my hands on.  A lot of my attention has been and still is on the concept of morality and what it means to me as an individual and to the various groups I ‘belong’ to.  In thinking about this, I like to use the metaphor of the dance.

Life for each of us is a dance, a dance between self-aggrandizement and self-effacement, between ego and group, between me and you and all of us.  As an individual animal I need to eat, drink water, sleep, breathe air, shit and piss.  I could say that I also need to have sex, but that’s really quite optional.  Obviously for societies to survive some people need to have sex for the purpose of making babies, but not every member of a group needs to participate, as long as a ‘sufficient’ number do.  So, I have my needs and you have your needs.  Like sex, we have needs that involve other people.  Sex is a basic social act.  We need to cooperate to do it.  Most of us have a sex drive (Freud called it the libido), but it varies in intensity from person to person.  One thing is certain and that’s that we need the company of others.  We are a social species.  Of course, in a sense, all species are social, but we don’t all equally enjoy the company of others of our species.  In some species life is pretty much a solitary experience, individuals coming together for sex and for not much of anything else.  We humans are quite gregarious, by and large.  We like and need contact with others.  We know how devastating it can be when we don’t have meaningful human contact with others; we languish and die.  We also know that the most devilish of all punishments is solitary confinement.  We literally feed off of each other, as Kirby Farrell wrote so eloquently about in his blog post I reposted here today.  Yet, there’s a problem we have to deal with as individuals in our social relations.  In fact, as Norbert Elias argues, there is no such thing as a human individual, we are really interweavings and interdependencies.  We know nothing, are nothing outside of our groups.  Maybe after long years of effort we can learn to live by ‘our own devices’ but only because we take a whole lot of cultural baggage with us including material artifacts, things to do things with, tools for instance.

A hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen teased classical economists for their view of us as “homogenous globules of desire” bouncing off of each other in the market as if we and society were two separate things.  We are not.  We are society.  That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t exist without us.  No.  The existence of societies is not dependent on any number of discreet individuals, but only on the existence of a ‘sufficient’ number of individuals.  ‘My’ society doesn’t stop functioning because I die.  It’s not dependent on me.  I, however, am dependent on it.  To use an analogy, on the one hand, if I were a drop of water in a river, I could easily be ‘extracted’ from it and the river would still flow.  If the river dries up, on the other hand, there can be no individual drops.  Becker struggled with precisely these issues.

As individuals we need to feel that we have value.  We need to feel that the space we take up on this planet is justified.  We need to feel important, to know that our lives have meaning.  We do not get this meaning from our bodies, by eating, shitting and pissing.  So we do things as individuals to convince ourselves of our importance.

Enter the dark side of social life:  Becker says that we now have a general theory of human evil.  It’s the result of “man’s hunger for righteous self-expansion and perpetuation.” (p. 135) Often we exercise our hunger for self-expansion at the expense of others.  We do this as siblings vying for our parent’s attention, by cutting another driver off in traffic, by shouting at a clerk, but we also do it in large groups through warfare, ‘ethnic cleansing, scapegoating and discrimination.  The more power we have the more we can incorporate others in our self-expansive strategies.  If I say to you ‘thanks for your time’ I’m tacitly acknowledging that I’m using you for my own purposes.  If I ask you for a coffee I’m asking you to take time out of your life to do something for me.  That may be a small thing, but small things add up so that sometimes we all but become slaves to others.  Human relations are not always ‘win, win.’  Corporations appropriate the labour of thousands of people.  As Becker writes:

We might say that there is a natural and built-in evil in social life because all interaction is mutual appropriation…social life seems at times life a science-fiction horror story, with everyone mutually gobbling each other like human spiders….My point in lingering on this is to show that we can have no psychology of evil unless we stress the driving personal motives behind man’s urge to heroic victory.

Of course, heroism is only possible within a society’s boundaries.  No one can be a hero in a vacuum.  Heroes can only be heroes if we collectively consider their actions heroic.  And, as we know, heroes can lead us all into an orgy of personal self-expansion.  That’s why we follow them with such devotion, but more so, we follow the group that creates the heroic possibility in the first place:

The individual gives himself to the group because of his desire to share in its immortality; we must say, even, that he is willing to die in order not to die. 

Of course: if our group is the source of life and if that group dies, then we die permanently, body and spirit.  So we have to defend our group with our lives.  Don’t forget the aphorism from the first chapter in EFE.  Evil is disease and death.  To defeat evil means to defeat anyone or anything that would contest the values, morality and power relations in the group.  “Men kill lavishly out of the sublime joy of heroic triumph over evil.  Voilà tout.” (p. 141)

I think it is time for social scientists to catch up with Hitler as a psychologist, and to realize that men will do anything for heroic belonging to a victorious cause if they are persuaded about the legitimacy of that cause.

­The ‘cause’ in the last sentence of the quote above could be a marriage, a friendship, a small business, art, a hockey tournament, saving whales, fighting Stephen Harper, building pipelines or opposing them.

Enough for now.

Straight talk about cannibals

~ Roger JG Albert

For those of you that have been following my Becker marathon, here’s a blog post by Kirby Farrell that is very well written and carries such an important message. It is ‘Beckerian’ in its inspiration but uses current events in an inspiring message about the US and cannibalism.
Check it out.

k1f's avatarthedenialfile

"k1f" Kirby Farrell “k1f” Kirby Farrell

Cannibalism is taboo. It makes the neighbors nervous, and, if you carry it far enough, leads to extinction. Yet the Internet is buzzing with fantasies of a “zombie apocalypse.” When you read news stories about naked lowlifes high on “bath salts” and biting strangers’ faces, Jeffrey Dahmer, who dined on local kids and lovers, doesn’t seem so odd after all.[1]

We’re built around appetites for life: for food, sex, companionship. We cherish the symbols of fertility in culture. From infancy we learn to manage appetite. Fairy tale ogres and giants warn you not to let outsized greed make you a predator. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” bedridden Granny lives alone, widowed, frail, and hungry enough to need Red’s gift basket of grub. Like food stamps, Red’s family gift is feeding someone needy. After all, only a few centuries ago famine still periodically spoiled dinnertime. This is one…

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Escape 20: Why do we have to fight the death star?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Escape 20: Why do we have to fight the death star?

No, this post isn’t exactly about Star Wars, but that movie is such a brilliant commentary on a power mega-machine gone mad that it could easily serve as a basis for the discussion here. In many ways, movie makers have been more intuitively in tune with the insanity of the world today than most intellectuals and politicians, of course. Maybe after I finish this Becker marathon, I’ll turn to how movies and books have given us insights into our basis fears of life and death.

Chapter 8 in Becker’s EFE is called The Nature of Social Evil.  It’s a very dense chapter in which Becker can now get to the nitty-gritty.  He’s laid the groundwork and summarizes it in the first paragraph of the chapter, which I reproduce here in its entirety.

We have seen with Rank that the driving force behind evil in human affairs stems from man’s paradoxical nature: in the flesh and doomed with it, out of the flesh in the world of symbol and trying to continue on a heavenly flight.  The thing that makes man the most devastating animal that ever stuck his neck up into the sky is that the wants a stature and a destiny that is impossible for an animal; he wants an earth that is not an earth but a heaven, and the price for this kind of fantastic ambition is to make the earth an even more eager graveyard than it naturally is. 

 In the primitive world heroism and expiation were small time affairs.  Primitives weren’t capable technologically or ideationally to wreak havoc on the planet.  That’s changed now.  There is no comparing even the destructive power of an Aztec murderous ritual of thousands of victims with Hiroshima.  What can be said of a species that can pull off a Hiroshima and then (to make the point absolutely clear) a Nagasaki, a blood potlatch like the Nazi Holocaust or the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao?

Today we are agreed that the picture looks something like this: that once mankind got the means for large-scale manipulation of the world, the lust for power began to take devastating tolls…Masses of men were forged into obedient tools for really large-scale power operations directed by a powerful, exploitive class.  [in the process]… We see this in the degradation of tribal peoples today, when they hire themselves out for money to work monotonously in the mines. Primitive man could be transformed, in one small step, from a rich creator of meaning in a society of equals to a mechanical thing.

 It’s been ten or twelve thousand years in the making, but we’ve now unleashed this “colossus of power gone mad…” (p. 99)

…and with it began mankind’s real woes.  The new class society of conquerors and slaves right away had its own internal frictions; what better way to siphon them off than by directing the energies of the masses outward toward an ‘alien’ enemy?..this was the start of large-scale scapegoating that has consumed such mountains of lives down through history and continues to do so today, right up to Viet Nam and Bangladesh [and Rwanda, Eritria, Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, Syria, etc.]: what better way to forge a nation into a unity, to take everyone’s eyes off the frightening state of domestic affairs, than by focusing on a heroic foreign cause? 

 …even if it has to be contrived, as in George Bush’s Iraqi ‘war’, probably the most blatantly contrived invasion of a country since Hitler invaded Poland. (http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-consp.htm)

Keeping up the lie for the sake of power takes its toll although people like Dick Cheney have no regrets because they are willing to make the sacrifice for domestic peace and future profits for oil producers.  This goes back a long way, way before Bush, of course, but as Becker notes:

Once you start an arms race, you are consumed by it.  This is the tragic fatality of power, that it leads to a fundamental distortion of the reality of man’s relationship with nature – and so can undermine his own well-being. 

How can this be?  Tomorrow we tackle the role of sacrifice in all of this.  We’ve had a taste of it in previous blogs.  Now for the main course.

 Let me tell you again that there is no substitute for reading Becker’s Denial of Death or Escape From Evil if you want to understand his thought in its richness and wholeness.  I must say, though, that his message is not in the least upbeat.  This is scary stuff and it requires a certain degree of courage and detachment to wrestle with it.  I know it nearly drove me crazy, but it seems so familiar to me now, comforting in a way.  And let me say here and now that I do have an immortality-ideology and at the end of this Becker marathon I’ll tell you exactly what it is.  But for now, let’s carry on with the task at hand.  

Escape 19: All you wanted to know about human evil but were afraid to ask!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Escape 19: All you wanted to know about human evil but were afraid to ask!

Well, it looks like I may just get through this 30 day Becker marathon in 30 days.  I’m on Chapter 7 now, which starts on page 91.  Since there’s 170 pages in the book I’m close to half way there.

As noted earlier, Becker is the great synthesizer.  He gleans in a critical way the works of others to build his own model of how the world works.  Those ‘others’ include hundreds of scholars of all disciplines as can be verified by a glance at the bibliographic entries in his many books, but major influences have been Hocart, Huizinga, Brown and Rank.  The school of psychoanalysis to which Becker subscribes is the school, which broke away from Freud.  Rank was a special protégé of Freud’s but could not accept Freud’s Oedipus Complex and other aspects of his work.  Freud was no slouch, of course, but his work was nowhere near as historical as his detractors, Brown and Rank, not to mention Jung and Adler.  For Rank and Brown, following Freud, the basic foundation of an understanding of humankind’s evolution on this planet is our fear of life and death.  Of course we wouldn’t be able to stand it for long if every day of every year we were consumed by fear of life and death.  Rank accepted without any resistance one of the pillars of Freud’s work and that’s the idea of repression.  As Becker writes:

…men do not actually live stretched openly on a rack of cowardice and terror; if they did, they couldn’t continue on with such apparent equanimity and thoughtlessness.  Men’s fears are buried deep by repression, which gives to everyday life its tranquil façade; only occasionally does the desperation show through, and only for some people.  It is repression, then, that great discovery of psychoanalysis, that explains how well man can hide their basic motivations even from themselves.  But men also live in a dimension of carefreeness, trust, hope, and joy which gives them a buoyancy beyond that which repression alone could give.  This, as we saw with Rank, is achieved by the symbolic engineering of culture, which everywhere serves men as an antidote to terror by giving them a new and durable life beyond that of the body.

 I don’t think I could find a quote in EFE that better represents Rank’s thought as expressed here by Becker.  Following this quote Becker introduces Wilhelm Reich and his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism.  In his conclusion that much of the misery on this planet is a consequence of our attempt to deny our animal nature, the question for Reich is: how could we so willingly give over [our] destiny to the state and the great leader? (p. 93) Because we’re such suckers for promises of prosperity and good times ahead if only we follow the great leader, the steady, thoughtful great leader.  But, unfortunately, in attempts to avoid natural plagues and disasters by investing our trust in great leaders we unwittingly unleashed another plague brought on by our thoughtless allegiance and obedience to the politician.

Reich coined the apt term “political plague-mongers” to describe all politicians.  They are the ones who lied to the people about the real and the possible and launched mankind on impossible dreams which took impossible tolls of real life.  Once you base your whole life-striving on a desperate lie and try to implement that lie, try to make the world just the opposite of what it is, then you instrument your own undoing…all you have to do is to say that your group is pure and good, eligible for a full life and for some kind of eternal meaning.  But others, like Jews or Gypsies are the real animals, are spoiling everything for you, contaminating your purity and bringing disease and weakness into your vitality. 

It’s all about scapegoating…a theme we’ll run into again in this exercise.

Escape 16: Promises, empty promises of immortality!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Escape 16: Promises, empty promises of immortality.

A group that doesn’t promise its members immortality doesn’t exist for long.  Of course promises of immortality in a secular society are hard to figure out, but we manage.  If your group has power and its proven it over and over again by military action and by delivering prosperity to most of its members then you’d be crazy to cross it.  We get locked into group ideologies precisely because our group delivers on its promises of prosperity.  We resent dissenters, we think protesters are fools and ingrates.  Not only that,

[man] accepts the social limitations on his appetites because the group gives expression to the most important appetite of all, the hunger for the continuation of life. (p. 65)

We’ve given over our power to the state sometimes reluctantly, sometimes gleefully but we do it because of the power we feel and see everyday exercised around us.  Of course, there are police, the military, the courts, and virtually the whole apparatus of the state to ensure its continuity.  And, of course, there’s our complicity.  As we saw earlier, be barter away our freedom for promises of immortality.  We don’t ever get immortality if we think of ourselves only as physical things but we do if we think of ourselves as being symbolic creatures as well as physical ones and who or what controls the symbols in our lives?  The groups in which we are born, learn language (an ultimate symbol system), and the values we live by, that’s who.  The groups I refer to here can be as small as a nuclear family or as large as ‘Western Civilization’.  We often relate to our countries as our group, but they aren’t necessarily so.  In fact, there is increasingly a global power emerging to challenge the nation-state.  The era of the nation-state is coming to an end, but slowly, bit by bit.  We hardly notice it, really, until we lose our job because the company we work for has decided to manufacture in Malaysia the products it sells.  How it will continue to sell product to unemployed workers is besides the point.  It’s anarchy out there.  There is no global economic planning, just economic activity that increasingly jumps borders.  People normally stay put, capital need not.  It moves freely anywhere for the most part.  So it could be that our nation-states, our secular gods, are losing their gloss.  The poor poll ratings of most ‘Western’ leaders is an indication that the tarnish is rubbing off on them too.

Primitives knew that very powerful invisible forces ruled the world and that they had no control over them unless, just maybe, by engaging just the right sacrificial ritual at just the right time, those forces might just sit up and take notice.  Better still, pick a special person in the group and make them a representative of the invisible forces.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Then go one step further and give that person or his proxies ongoing power as a reward for bringing prosperity to the group.

Now, though, as Becker points out following Rank, we have entered a new era, what Rank called the ‘era of the son’ and it carried with it a new development.

It took the form of a new kind of scientific individualism that burst out of the Renaissance and the Reformation.  It represented a new power candidate for replacing all the previous ideologies of immortality, but now an almost completely and unashamedly secular one.  This was a new Faustian pursuit of immortality through one’s own acts, his own works, his own discovery of truth.  This was a kind of secular-humanist immortality based on the gifts of the individual.  Instead of having one hero chieftain leading a tribe or a kingdom or one hero savior leading all of mankind, society would now become the breeding ground for the development of many heroes as possible, individual geniuses in great numbers who would enrich mankind. 

…But alas it has been our sad experience that the new scientific Faustian man too has failed. 

 We haven’t created equality for one thing nor have we learned the Truth.  The Truth might have made us real gods, but we haven’t learned much.  As Becker so wryly notes:

…[man] is actually ruining the very theater of his own immortality with his own poisonous and madly driven works; once he had eclipsed the sacred dimension , he had only the earth left to testify to the value of his life.

 Ironic, isn’t it?

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…

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 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.

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

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

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 gets to the point of his Introduction and of his book:

 

The reader has surely already seen the rub, and objected in his own mind that the symbolic denial of mortality is a figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood organisms, that if man seeks to avoid evil and assure his eternal prosperity he is living a fantasy for which there is no scientific evidence so far.  To which I would add that this would be all right if the fantasy were a harmless one.  The fact is that self-transcendence via culture does not give man s simple and staightforward solution to the problem of death; the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression…What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meaning of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety is created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men.  In seeking to avoid evil [in the form of death and disease] man is responsible for bringing more evil in to the world than organisms could ever do merely be exercising their digestive tracts.  It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.  This is the main argument of my book…how man’s impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.

 

So there you have it.  Some of you might consider this a little hyperbolic, but it’s nothing of the sort.  Any casual student of history or anthropology will tell you that attempts by people to destroy others who threaten their immortality are the hallmark of our time on this planet.  Just a hint to where we’re going with this from page 125 of EFE:  Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

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

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

 

 

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 that man transcends death via culture not only in simple (or simple-minded) visions of gorging himself with lamb in a perfumed heaven full of dancing girls, but in much more complex and symbolic ways.  Man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life, some kind of larger scheme into which he fits: he may believe he has fulfilled God’s purpose, or done his duty to his ancestors or family, or achieved something which has enriched mankind…It is an expression of his will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because he has lived, has emerged on it, and has worked, suffered, and died…

 

This is man’s age-old dilemma in the face of death…what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.  Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning.  And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some way…

 

We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms is the basic motive for what is most distinctive about man – namely, religion.  As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, ‘not so much from…fear of natural death as of final destruction.’  But it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not…[it operates] to raise men above nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than purely physical things count.

 

So, culture is the mechanism by which we convince ourselves that we are immortal.  That has some pretty important consequences for us, and devastating ones at that as we’ll see tomorrow. 

 

These quotations may get shorter as we go along.  Right now it’s important to set the stage for what’s to come…

 

By the way, ellipses are used in the quotations to indicate that I’ve left some text out.  Square brackets include my interjections. 

 

Another ‘by the way’, you might be annoyed by Becker’s use of masculine pronouns everywhere and references to mankind and such.  Just remember that he wrote this in the early 70s, when I was getting married.  It was common to do this in those days and people still use masculine forms of speech to refer to all of us.  Be forgiving.  Exercise tolerance.  There’s not enough compassion in the world.