So, last weekend I attended a conference at Simon Fraser University in downtown  Vancouver. The conference was entitled: Death, Ideologies and Cultures: The Legacy of Ernest Becker. 

I must say to start off that I commend the organizers and the conference sponsors, in particular the SFU Institute for the Humanities, the Psych Department and the Ernest Becker Foundation, led by Dr. Neil Elgee (who attended the conference too). Except for some confusion over communication about the actual venue of the conference, it was run smoothly. Sessions started and ended on time, by and large. The speakers were excellent. The keynote speaker, Sheldon Solomon, who has been heavily involved in promoting Becker’s work for decades now, is a very compelling and engaging speaker. Thank you, Sheldon! I’ve heard him speak via film before in an excellent movie called Flight from Death directed by Patrick Shen and produced by Greg Bennick and Shen. It’s an excellent documentary about Becker’s work and addresses in its second half what’s called Terror Management Theory, created by Solomon and colleagues, the very successful attempt to operationalize some of the more salient aspects of Becker’s work. If you want to see Solomon at his best, check out this documentary. 

When I was still teaching, the volume of research into Becker was not particularly impressive, but it’s growing splendidly as can be attested by the evidence presented during this conference. I have always, and still do, find it interesting how so many disparate ideological perspectives on the world use Becker to support their findings or to help underpin their practice, from Buddhists to Protestant theologians to psychologists of all kinds and even to the odd Marxist. Jack Martin, the first presenter on Saturday morning gave us a Cole’s Notes overview of Becker’s life and work. He’s writing (written?) a biography of Becker. Becker’s wife, Marie and her son were on hand for his presentation. In fact, Marie was present for most of the conference. I wondered how she felt listening to Martin go over details of her life with Becker. There was no  telling by the expressions on her face. I expect she was and is a very stoical person but I only spoke with her briefly so that’s probably an erroneous assessment. Her son (I can’t remember his name) wasn’t too impressed with the gathering, I sensed. I recall that he made some comment about the futility of conferences like this or even about the value of his father’s work. Fair enough. 

There is no substitute to reading Ernest Becker’s work itself. The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil are his last two books. The Ernest Becker Foundation has a list. I do a blow by blow outline of Escape From Evil on this blog. Check out the archives for that. It was some time ago now. I have more thoughts on the conference and some of the presenters. I’ll be back tomorrow.

See the Ernest Becker Foundation: http://ernestbecker.org/?page_id=125

I posted this on another of my blogs back in 2011. However, I thought it would be good to re-post:

In my last post I wrote something to the effect that our lives are like dances between self-aggrandizement and self-effacement, between self-expressive individuality and the need to pay homage to our collectivities, those groups and associations upon which we completely depend for life and prosperity.

All of us are caught in a tango of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand we need to express ourselves as individuals while not turning our noses up at our collectivities (societies, nations, families, workplaces, etc.). We ignore our collectivities at our own peril. It’s built into our genes. There is research that demonstrates clearly the importance social connection is to us. In 1945 Rene Spitz conducted research comparing children raised in orphanages and those raised with their mothers in prison. After four years, a quarter of the orphanage children were dead, the others seriously socially impaired. By contrast, those children raised by their mothers in prison were fine. The difference between the two groups of children was the amount of daily physical and emotional contact they experienced. Children in prison had lots of physical and emotional contact, those in orphanages very little sporadic attention. The sparse research done on feral children supports the idea that without human intimate contact we do not fully develop as humans. Our very intelligence (IQ) is dependent on social contact. A longitudinal study conducted by Skeels and Dye (in Roberta Berns, 2009; Shackne: http://www.schackne.com/Nurture.htm) starting in the 1930s and concluding in 1966 found that two children removed from an orphanage as hopelessly retarded and were moved to an adult facility that cared for retarded adults substantially improved within a few months and displayed increased sociability and intelligence. They subsequently moved 13 children to the adult facility and all of them improved dramatically. In a follow up study done 25 years later, “they found that all of these “hopelessly retarded” children had grown up to live normal and productive lives. Some even made it to college and became professionals.” (Shackne) In contrast, the control group of children left in the orphanage for ‘retarded’ children experienced no such improvement. More recently a study found the same kind of results with Romanian children confined to orphanages and moved to foster homes.(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/feb/18/medicineandhealth.lifeandhealth/print)

So we are by definition social animals, so much so that in the absence of social contact we die or are severely cognitively and physically impaired, sometimes permanently. We are beholden to our societies for all that we are. As Ernest Becker points out repeatedly in his books The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, our societies are the source of all power. It behooves us to keep a watchful eye out to make sure we don’t get irretrievably cut off from this source of power by exhibiting too much individuality. The glue that holds us together in societies is tested every day in every aspect of our lives. Shame, guilt, embarrassment and opprobrium are institutions that maintain strong social ties as much as love does. And we dance. We try a little self-expression and see how that goes. We try a little more and see how that goes. We test the limits of individual possibility. We retreat. We get up on the dance floor but soon sit down if we notice people noticing us too much. Our language is replete with mechanisms for enforcing and re-enforcing social ties and for allowing the expression of individuality without compromising our social connections.