Sociology

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 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 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. 

Ernest Becker 2: Oh, Our Lovely Tummies

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

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 with others, of course.  So carrying on from where we left off in the last post Becker writes:

 

Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist – continuing to experience physical stimuli, to sense one’s inner pulsations and musculature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit.  Once the organism is satiated, this becomes its frantic all-consuming task, to hold onto life at any cost – and the costs can be catastrophic in the case of man…For man…this organismic craving takes the form of a search for “prosperity” – the universal ambition of human society…In man the search for appetitive satisfaction has become conscious: he is an organism that knows that he wants food and who knows what will happen if he doesn’t get it, or if he gets it and falls ill and fails to enjoy its benefits.  Once we have an animal who recognizes that he needs prosperity, we also have one who realizes that anything that works against continued prosperity is bad.  And so we understand how man has come, universally, to identify disease and death as the two principle evils of the human organismic condition.  Disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is alive, and death cuts prosperity off coldly.

 

Tomorrow we’ll see where Becker takes us from here.  But from what he’s established in the first two or three pages of his book in a chapter called The Human Condition: Beyond Appetite and Ingenuity we know that for us humans, death is a final insult to an organism that is warm and feels so wonderful with a full stomach.  We love our tummies.  How could they possibly melt away into insignificance?

Only 18.28% of Canadians voted for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2011

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

Just to be clear, as Stephen Harper always claims to be, I’m not arguing here that because just 18.28% of Canadians actually voted for Stephen Harper in the 2011 general election that he has no right to govern.  Given the ‘first past the post’ electoral system we have in Canada this is what we get, a prime minister who can rule the country with just a little over 18% of Canadians voting for him.  To put this in perspective, George W. Bush had only 14% of Americans vote for him when he first got elected president so Mr. Harper at least did better than George W.

Let’s look at the numbers.  On May 2nd, 2011, the day of the last federal election, Elections Canada reported that there were 31,612, 897 Canadians.  This does not jive with the Census numbers which came to 33,476,688, but that’s got nothing to do with the argument here.  Of those 31,612,897 Canadians, 24,257,592 (76%) were eligible to vote.  Some were only 1 week old and they were not eligible, neither were millions of others below the voting age.  A small number weren’t eligible to vote for a number of other reasons.

In any case, of those 24, 257,592 who could vote, only 14,823,408 actually did for a voter turnout rate of 61%.  We won’t ask the 9,434,184 registered voters why they didn’t bother to vote, that would be rude and intrusive.

It turns out that the Conservative Party with Stephen Harper as its leader got 39% of the vote.  That means that he actually got 5,781,129 voters who actually turned out vote for him and his party.  Who knows what would have happened if all eligible voters had turned out.

Now, how did I get to the 18% I announced in the first paragraph above.  Well, the 5,781,129 people who voted for Harper account for about 18.28% of the population.  Like I said, calculating the numbers this way isn’t entirely fair to Mr. Harper and the Conservatives, but it does reflect a certain reality that cannot be ignored.  A little over 18% of the population actually went to the polls and voted Conservative.  They elected our current federal government.  To me this is a great argument for a new system of electing our politicians.  Maybe we should try proportional representation.  See how that goes.  Have a look at this video by my friend, John Higginbotham:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0MDty7oXsI

My personal statement [from 1990!]

Video ~ ~ Roger JG Albert

This ‘personal statement’ was used as an intro for one of my Knowledge Network sociology telecourses in 1990.  By then I’d been doing it for a few years, but I still managed to perform in a very stilted way.  A KNOW crew and I drove all over Vancouver over a 12 hour period looking for suitable locations.  My favourite location is in Chinatown.  I ran across this video while looking through old computer files.

I still like the message.  I’d lose the delivery, though, and I could have made a better sartorial effort!  Apart from that, I think the message still holds even though I did this 24 years ago.  Focus on the message!