Average Terror | thedenialfile.
Now, this is worth re-posting! What do we have to fear most? Being average?
immortality
The Greeks, the Christians and Women: We are a tragic species.
In Greek myth, humankind started out as exclusively male. The gods created men, mortal beings, but in the age of gold, their mortality was scarcely given any thought because men always died peacefully, in their sleep, with no pain and suffering and it didn’t end there for them. After death they became pure spirit ‘daemons’ who are essentially given the task of ‘dispensing wealth to men according to individual merit.’ (Ferry 2014, 146) That’s not a bad gig, really, not unlike how classical economists see the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. These were invisible daemons doing the same job.
Pandora is the first woman. She is Zeus’ creation and is given something by every god. Of course, she’s drop-dead gorgeous but she also comes with a lot of, let us say, unsavory characteristics. Without going into detail, Prometheus, the creator of men (males only at this point) has pissed off Zeus because he’s been trying to help his creation with getting on with the job of creating civilization. (What really pissed Zeus off was that Prometheus had stolen fire from Olympus and given it to man so that he could now cook his food…a very civilized thing indeed). Up to this point, still in the golden age, men are living a pretty cool, decent life. But because of the internecine pissing contests between the gods, things start going sideways for humans. It comes to pass that Pandora seduces Epimetheus, Prometheus’ hapless brother at which point all hell breaks loose (which is what Zeus wanted in the first place). Mankind is cast from the golden age into the age of iron, forced to feed himself, etc., and because of the nasty contents of Pandora’s box (pain, fear, old age, death) doomed to lead a miserable life with nothing but hope for succor. (Hope being the only thing not to escape from Pandora’s box.)
So, the point of all of this is that it’s at this stage in the development of the cosmos that men are now born from sexual intercourse between men and women. Pandora gives birth to other women and that’s it for man. Sex is where it’s at now. We come to be born, as it were, between shit and piss and the rest is history.
What I find interesting here as much as anything is the similarity of this account of the origins of people on this planet with the one offered by Christianity. The details are obviously very different, but the principles are the same and so are the results. As the story goes, God creates man who is pure and spiritual, living in the Garden of Eden, the golden age. Almost as an afterthought, God creates woman and she seduces the pretty dumb male and is punished for his stupidity by having to work for a living and by having to put up with woman who is never satisfied and reminds him of death every day.
Because this is the whole point and the tragedy of the relations between the sexes since forever. Woman is associated with the body, temptation and death. Men are associated with purity, spirit and life. Women successfully seduced the stupid men and now we all pay the price of mortality. How’s that for blaming half the world’s population for what came out of Pandora’s box. Unfortunately, our world is still driven by these old stupid ideas. Are we ever going to get over this crap and actually start real human history? Of course, it’s much more complicated than this, but this is an important dimension of the issue especially when laid next to our incessant warlike behaviour and our drive for puffing ourselves up and smiting our ‘enemies.’ Dumb species we are. Just plain dumb. This is not to say that every man is a stupid mysogenist. The fact is that our cultures are fundamentally mysogenistic. Individuals can be better than that, but our lives are governed to a great extent by mysogenistic principles and practices. Hard to escape. I know some men and women who have. For me, that’s grounds for optimism and for what little there is left in Pandora’s Box. More later (of course).
Women as weak and unclean!
Barbarian Status of Women, Part 2: Women as Weak and Unclean.
To start, I include here a sample of Thorstein Veblen’s writing to give you a sense of what it would be like to read a more substantial piece of his work, like his book The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. Of course, this long quote is relevant to what I want to pursue in this post, that is, the general cultural institutional perception of women as weak and unclean, associated with the earth, dirt, blood, the night and death. After all, Gaia, the first of the gods in Greek mythology was female, she was the earth. [She wasn’t personified as later Greek gods were, but she is a god helping to bring order into a chaotic universe.] Veblen doesn’t go in all of these directions, but others do, including the Freudians. We’ll have a little visit with them today too. Now for Veblen:
In such a community [of barbarians] the standards of merit and propriety rest on an invidious distinction between those who are capable fighters and those who are not. Infirmity, that is to say incapacity for exploit, is looked down upon. One of the early consequences of this deprecation of infirmity is a tabu on women and on women’s employments. In the apprehension of the archaic, animistic barbarian, infirmity is infectious. The infection may work its mischievous effect both by sympathetic influence and by transfusion. Therefore it is well for the able-bodied man who is mindful of his virility to shun all undue contact and conversation with the weaker sex and to avoid all contamination with the employments that are characteristic of the sex. Even the habitual food of women should not be eaten by men, lest their force be thereby impaired. The injunction against womanly employments and foods and against intercourse with women applies with especial rigor during the season of preparation for any work of manly exploit, such as a great hunt or a warlike raid, or induction into some manly dignity or society or mystery. Illustrations of this seasonal tabu abound in the early history of all peoples that have had a warlike or barbarian past. The women, their occupations, their food and clothing, their habitual place in the house or village, and in extreme cases even their speech, become ceremonially unclean to the men. This imputation of ceremonial uncleanness on the ground of their infirmity has lasted on in the later culture as a sense of the unworthiness or Levitical inadequacy of women ; so that even now we feel the impropriety of women taking rank with men, or representing the community in any relation that calls for dignity and ritual competency ; as for instance, in priestly or diplomatic offices, or even in representative civil offices, and likewise, and for a like reason, in such offices of domestic and body servants as are of a seriously ceremonial character ‚ footmen, butlers, etc.
Veblen, then, in his odd style, explains that women are considered lesser than men because they can’t fight. What they do around the house is fine, but the really important stuff, like hunting and protecting the group, is the purview of men and that type of activity becomes entrenched as the value standard by which to judge all action. So, men, powerful men, manly men, become the standard by which to judge all of humankind.
Veblen’s explanation, then, remains at the level of performance. The tabu on women is a result of their ‘infirmity’, their inability to pursue the hunt and to fight. Because this ‘infirmity’ is infectious, men must avoid women, especially at certain times of the year and when women’s infirmity is most obvious during their time of her ‘customary impurity’ otherwise they risk losing their prowess. There have been obvious residual instances of this proscription when it’s been made clear to professional athletes by coaches and others interested in winning. So I googled: Is it ok to have sex before a high level athletic competition? There were enough ‘hits’ to suggest that its still on people’s minds, mindless though that is. After all when the French refer to orgasm as ‘la petite mort’ what they are referring to is the overwhelming bodily release of tension and semi-immobilization that comes with it. One dies a little upon ejaculation. At least that’s my interpretation and I’m sticking by it. Others have suggested that ejaculation and orgasm give up a little of a man’s ‘life’ every time it happens. I don’t think so, but it does bring up the notion that bodily functions in general, especially those that involve orifices, ejaculates, evacuations and such are subtle little reminders of our mortality. Why else do Catholic priests and others vow to be chaste? Why else would people (men, that is) in certain societies wear butt plugs? Well, both practices deny the body and its downright nasty habit of getting ill, diseased and eventually dead. Men can delude themselves into thinking that if they just abstain from bodily stuff and stick to the symbolic, spiritual side of life then they can live eternally. Yeah, right.
Next class, we visit the Freudians via Norman O. Brown and Ernest Becker. It might be fun later to look at Greek philosophy and myths to get a sense of how they see this stuff.
When I poop, does that stuff just disappear down the toilet into oblivion?
As I promised a few posts ago, here’s what I consider to be my immortality-project. Before reading Luc Ferry the other day, I had no idea that my immortality-project has been around for a long time. In fact, the Greek poets and philosophers came up with the idea probably 7,000 years ago. It goes something like this: we are star stuff. Every atom that makes up my body at the moment has always been around in the universe. We think of ourselves as individuals, but we’re more like a link in a process. First we are born. But what exactly does that mean? Well, it means that our mommies had sex with our daddies, egg met sperm cell and voilà. Of course, that’s just the start of it. All the time, mommy is eating and transforming the cells of plants and other animals into cells for herself and the fetus growing inside of her. (She is also breathing, of course, another way of ingesting molecules.) In this process, organisms (a particular organization of atoms and molecules) are constantly processing matter, exchanging atoms and molecules and creating energy in the process. When I poop, that stuff doesn’t just disappear down the toilet into oblivion. It gets used up by other organisms as their own building blocks. (Not always as we intend, of course.) We eat, we poop, we breathe as do all other animals in one way or another. Even plants transform cellular material found in the soil into leaves, fruit, seeds and then, when they’re finished with the leaves, seeds, fruit, etc., they return them to the ground so that they can then be used themselves as building blocks for other plants. I feel a little pedantic writing this, but I don’t think many people give it a second thought.
What I’m saying here is that the ‘stuff’ that makes up my body at the moment or that’s ‘passed through’ in the last 67 years or so has always been around and always will be. Oh, when I die, my consciousness will pass on and that’s probably not a bad thing, but the rest of ‘me’ will just get used up making other things. So, we’re all immortal in a real sense of the word. Of course many of us aren’t satisfied with that. We want more. We want it all. We want to live on forever and we’re willing to listen to anyone or any set of cultural institutions that promise us that.
Escape 29: Can psychology do it?
Escape 29: Can psychology do it?
My, my, this is a tough question for all of those people who would want science to provide prescriptions for future behaviour or for the amelioration of the human condition. Can psychology do it? Becker writes:
We can talk for a century about what causes human aggression; we can try to find the springs in animal instincts, or we can try to find them in bottled-up hatreds due to frustration or in some kind of miscarried experiences of early years, of poor child handling and training. All these would be true, but still trivial because men kill out of joy, in the experience of expansive transcendence over evil. If men kill out of heroic joy, what direction do we program for improvements in human nature? What are we going to improve if men work evil out of the impulse to righteousness and goodness?
if men are aggressive in order to expand life, if aggression in the service of life is man’s highest creative act?
Doesn’t look too promising does it? Not only that, Becker reflects on the idea that crazy, twisted people don’t do anywhere near as much damage to life as idealistic leaders. Leaders, no matter how screwed up they are, are still for people an ‘expression of the widespread urge to heroic transcendence.’ (p. 156)
Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even eventually defeat all of mankind. Still, there are no ‘twisted’ people whom we can hold responsible for this.
Well, I’m thinking there may be the odd ‘twisted’ bastard out there in the ranks of the world’s ‘leaders.’ I’m thinking Dick Cheney might qualify. If nothing else he and people like him, including Stephen Harper, are prepared to sacrifice anything including the viability of the only home they have, the earth. That’s twisted in my mind. Freud admitted himself that ‘there is no dependable line between normal and abnormal in affairs of the human world.’ (p. 156) WFT. So is there any hope for psychology, real psychology? I don’t really know. Not sure exactly what hope would look like. Becker was not convinced that the ‘psychical’ sciences could offer much in the way of advice to the human race.
Still, Becker notes, that Freud, no matter how cynical he got, always trusted psychoanalysis. In the end he believed in it as anyone believes in their particular hero system. That’s probably true of a lot of psychologists.
Well, the simple answer to the question in the title of this blog is no. How does psychology deal with problems of ‘cosmic heroism?’ So, now we come to the end of this Becker marathon. Tomorrow, in my last post in this series, I see what Becker has to say again about The Science of Man.
Escape 28: What is the heroic society?
Escape 28: What is the heroic society?
So, I’ve come to the last chapter of Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil in this series of posts I’ve come to refer to as my Becker marathon. In this post and the last 2 to follow in the next couple of days, I work through this last chapter called Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? It’s divided into 4 sections, History, Psychology, The Science of Man and the Conclusion [to this last chapter] Today, I take on his section on History, tomorrow, the section on Psychology and on the last day, this Thursday, The Science of Man and the Conclusion.
In this last chapter, it’s clear to me that Becker is grasping at straws. He has produced this mind-boggling analysis of what drives us and has driven us throughout history, our fear of death and our fear of life. Now what? How are we to suddenly lose our fear of death and put down the weapons we’ve used in their increasingly terrifying effectiveness in our determination to eliminate evil on the planet in the form of the ‘other’? We’ll get to his final thoughts on this in the last post in this series, but for now, History.
In the opening three paragraphs of this chapter Becker notes the emptiness of a classical Marxist analysis for the ‘liberation’ of humankind, which it claims will come after capitalism has run its course. I don’t think Becker is correct in his analysis of Marx because the only foray into utopianism that Marx attempted was in his book The German Ideology and he regretted that for the rest of his life. After he got over his youthful enthusiasm and humanism, he sat in the British Museum and studied until he got bum boils and concluded that the only thing he could say for sure about the fall of capitalism was that there would be no more exploitation of labour by capital because capital will have virtually eliminated labour in successive waves of overproduction. Becker wants to see Marxism as a failed potential immortality ideology for the masses. So, what is to be done? [Yes, that’s the title of one of Lenin’s books]
Well, we now know a lot more about the psychodynamics of history. It’s…
From the outside a saga of tyranny, violence, coercion; from the inside, self-delusion and self-enslavement.
If we didn’t have transference, we wouldn’t be able to stand life. We localize our fear and terror, make it manageable all the while exchanging our freedom for life. We are sorry creatures indeed, because unlike other animals we have ‘made death conscious.’ (p.148) Evil is in anything that makes us sick, wounds us or even ‘deprives us of pleasure.’ (p.148)
The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to ‘fetishize evil,’ to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. It is tragic precisely because it is sometimes very arbitrary; men make fantasies about evil, see it in the wrong places, and destroy themselves and others by uselessly thrashing about.
We do this so much it’s quite pathetic, really. Note what the Ugandan government has just done. The Ministry of Ethics and Integrity there is charged with seeing gays and lesbians punished and outlawed. Several US states would do the same and some are actively pursuing action against gays and lesbians. They see gays and lesbians as threats to their values. Wow, they obviously have very weak and precarious values to see gays and lesbians as a threat to them. As Nietzsche concluded, ‘all moral categories are power categories; they are not about virtue in any abstract sense.’ (P. 149)
Purity, goodness, rightness – these are ways of keeping power intact so as to cheat death; the striving for perfection is a way of qualifying for extraspecial immunity not only in this world but in others to come. Hence all categories of dirt, filth, imperfection, and error are vulnerability categories, power problems.
You can see why Tea Party Republicans and their counterparts in Uganda are so intent on persecuting gays and lesbians. They are vulnerability categories in their world! They need to be eliminated. Of course, we all need to individuate ourselves, to feel that our lives are meaningful. What better way of showing that we are special and deserving of power and life is to dedicate ourselves to eliminating dirt, filth, imperfection and error? Now that’s a heroic thing to do.
In other words, man is fated, as William James saw, to consider this earth as a theatre for heroism, and his life a vehicle for heroic acts which aim precisely to transcend evil…To be a true hero is to triumph over disease, want, death.
Even better sometimes, to be a true hero is to lay down one’s life to secure the lives of others. Think here of Jesus and scores of other heroes in history who died to secure mankind…‘by their blood we are saved.’ (p.151)
Freud was very pessimistic about the future of humankind. For Freud we humans are doomed by our own instincts for evil. Becker doesn’t buy that. For him, we are born hunters so it may seem that we ‘enjoy the feeling of maximizing [our] organismic powers at the expense of the trapped and helpless prey.’ (p. 152)
The tragedy of evolution is that it created a limited animal with unlimited horizons. Many is the only animal that is not armed with the natural instinctive mechanisms of programming for shrinking his world down to a size that he can automatically act on…Men have to keep from going mad by biting off small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some organismic satisfaction from.
The thing that feeds the great destructiveness of history is that men give their entire allegiance to their own group; and each group is a codified hero system. Which is another way of saying that societies are standardized systems of death denial; they give structure to the formulas for heroic transcendence. History can then be looked at as a succession of immortality ideologies, or as a mixture at any time of several of these ideologies.
And so it came to be that we could only become heroic by following orders. Oh, I’m really summarizing Becker here and doing him an injustice in the process, no doubt. He seems most comfortable when he is chastising our species in a sense for a history filled with greater and greater paradigms for death denial, ones that expect us to be heroes as individuals, all right, but by ‘following orders.’ This is as true for Christianity as it is for Capitalism. Follow orders and you will be saved. The word ‘orders’ here may seem a little harsh and arbitrary because this is not a military type order. It’s a prescription for salvation that does not tolerate defiance. In capitalist terms, the ‘order’ means to consume.
Now a new type of productive and scientific hero came into prominence, and we are still living this today. More cars produced by Detroit, higher stock market prices, more profits, more goods moving – all this equals more heroism. And with the French Revolution another type of modern hero was codified: the revolutionary hero who will bring an end to injustice and evil once and for all, by bringing into being a new utopian society perfect in its purity.
Escape 26: It’s all about you and me. Yes, it’s personal, but the personal is the social.
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.
Escape 25: Prisoners of Death
Escape 25: Prisoners of Death
In Chapter 9 of EFE called Social Theory: The Merger of Marx and Freud Becker tackles the question that he poses at the end of Chapter 8 about human nature. He notes that we haven’t come yet to understand it, or really know about it so we flail around looking at aspects of human nature in disciplinary purity just as blind men might touch bits of an elephant’s body without ever recognizing it as an elephant. This is a chapter full of insight but before I get to a fairly long quote that ends the first section of it, I want to summarize the essence of Becker’s thought in this short book but ‘tainted’ on occasion by my own take on things.
So, here we are, a sexually-reproducing mammalian species that through a series of evolutionary events develops enough cerebral cortex to come to be outraged by the fact that members of this species die. Of course, people eons ago may have been ‘primitive’, but they weren’t stupid. They knew that all things died. Plants, animals, everything. Bodies die: we, effectively, have bodies that make us prisoners of death. No escape is possible. People generally ate dead things and they knew that they themselves died. However, as I said earlier, they were outraged by this prospect. Something had to be done about that. Well, I have no first hand knowledge of this and the anthropological record is spotty, but I surmise that people’s dreams, somnolent musings, epilepsy or drug induced visions were the source of the solution to the problem of life and death.
Because life was such a constant struggle with the invisible forces which caused floods, fires, droughts, volcanoes, earthquakes and a host of other disasters, if a person were especially well respected, his or her dreams or visions might be taken very seriously by the group because any hint that an accommodation was possible with the said forces would be welcome indeed. More so, if dead ancestors could be communicated with, well, what a bonus. That killed two birds with one stone. If we could communicate with dead ancestors because a respected member of the group reported that he or she did just that in a dream or vision, that meant that they were still ‘alive’ sort of. It wasn’t much of a stretch then for people to think of themselves as body and spirit. Yes the body dies and that’s too bad, but the spirit lives on into eternity. Problem is that like living people, ancestral spirits can be helpful or malevolent. In both cases, the living had to deal with them. So, eventually we came up with the idea that communication with the spirit world was essential for such a weak species. It wasn’t even much of a leap to think that just about everything that happened in life was governed by invisible forces. The big deal, of course, was to be able to barter with the invisible forces (gods) that could help or hinder living human beings in their determination to live.
So, we come to the invention of ritual, the ‘technique of manufacture’ of life. Done exactly as prescribed in a vision or dream and life would ensue. Fail to perform the ritual exactly as prescribes by the gods or the ancestors in a dream and disaster would ensue. Things haven’t really changed much. The Christian world works exactly in this way.
A difficulty with all of this is that, as Becker argues, groups of people eventually split up to form clans and moieties so that they could compete with each other in attempts to show clearly who was more in tune with the invisible world of gods and ancestors. Becker doesn’t argue, but I think, that it is also entirely plausible that autonomous groups encountered other groups in their wanderings on this planet. In these encounters, it would have been difficult not to notice that their ideas about how to connect with the invisible world might differ substantially from their own. Then what? Whose ideas were the true ones? All of life was at stake. No wonder people fought to the death and were willing to pile corpses upon corpses. Killing became a surefire way of guaranteeing the truth of our own stories and to convince ourselves of our immortality. So, eventually, the group and its ideas and rituals came to be seen as the repository of truth. No other group need apply. Enter scapegoating, war, holocausts and mass executions.
So, to end this already too long post, a quote from Becker:
Each society elevates and rewards leaders who are talented at giving the masses heroic victory, expiation for guilt, relief of personal conflicts. It doesn’t matter how these are achieved: magical religious ritual, magical booming stock markets, magical heroic fulfillment of five-year plans [as the Soviet Union had], or mana-charged military mega-machines – or all together. What counts is to give the people the self-expansion in righteousness that they need. The men who have power can exercise it through many different kinds of social and economic structures, but a universal psychological hunger underpins them all; it is this that locks people and power figures together in a life and death contract.
Escape 23: Each society is a hero system that promises victory over evil and death.
Escape 23: Each society is a hero system that promises victory over evil and death.
Since there is no secular way to resolve the primal mystery of life and death, all secular societies are lies…Each society is a hero system that promises victory over evil and death. But no mortal, nor even a group of as many as 700 million clean revolutionary mortals, can keep such a promise…it is not within man’s means to triumph over evil and death. For secular societies the thing is ridiculous…cultures are fundamentally and basically styles of heroic death denial.
If each historical society is in some ways a lie or a mystification, the study of society becomes the revelation of the lie…We can then ask empirically, it seems to me, what are the costs of such denials of death, because we know how these denials are structured into styles of life. These costs can be tallied roughly in two ways: in terms of the tyranny practiced within the society, and in terms of the victimage practiced against aliens or ‘enemies’ outside it.
Enough for today. There is much I could disagree with Becker on this assessment of the role of the study of society and it begins with how Thorstein Veblen would coldly address the basic issue here and that is whether or not human life has intrinsic value. More importantly, would an assumption of intrinsic value form the basis of a valid social science.
Escape 21: Scapegoating 101: “Hell is other people.”
Escape 21: Scapegoating 101: “Hell is other people.”
This is going to be a shorter post than the last few…which have been way too long. I fear I’m getting pedantic in my old age. Say it ain’t so. I’ll carry on now, pedantry or not. One positive thing I’m getting out of this is that my typing skills are improving, if nothing else.
So, in the last post we looked at Becker’s use of the term ‘sacrifice’. This post is about a related term, scapegoating. Scapegoating is a form of sacrifice…in the early days using a real goat. Now we do it with people, mostly people we blame, realistically or not, for all of our troubles. Becker opens this part of Chapter 8 with a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist, who said “Hell is other people.” I need to put that on a T-shirt, damn it!
From the beginning, men have served the appetites of one another in the most varying ways, but these were always reducible to a single theme: the need for fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity. Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death…In one of the most logical formulas on the human condition Rank observed: ‘The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed. No wonder men are addicted to war…war is a ritual for the emergence of heroes.
What about heroes? This is where Becker introduces the concept of heroism as a major element in his whole thought. Heroes are not like the rest of us. Most of us would be willing to sacrifice just about anyone who stands in our way, friend or foe, because inevitably people offend us. A wife or husband ‘cheats’, another driver cuts us off in traffic then gives us the finger. As Becker notes, this is the price of our natural narcissism. We would like to kill people, or at least maim them, almost every day, but our fear of death prevents us. Heroes are different. They take the bullet, they take on the bad guys, they put themselves in harms way instead of throwing others in the way. So “war IS a ritual for the emergence of heroes.”
The logic of scapegoating, then, is based on animal narcissism and hidden fear. If luck, as Aristotle said, is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path – with special alacrity if he is a stranger to you.
Freud was right; in the narcissism of earthly bodies, where each is imprisoned fatally in his own finite integument, everyone is alien to oneself and subject to the status of scapegoating for one’s own life.
We kill others, literally or socially, in order to affirm our own life. Then killing others in mass rituals like war is spectacularly affirming. To bring it closer to home and in a bit of a less dramatic fashion, consider the way we treat the homeless and the poor and how desperately they try to hide their condition. We kill them socially; it’s almost better than killing them physically because we prolong their suffering and see their distress and immobility as it slowly unfolds before our very eyes. That affirms our life.
As we watch the Sochi Olympic Games, the victory celebration is a way of
…experiencing the power of our lives and the visible decrease of the enemy: it is a sort of staging of the whole meaning of a war, the demonstration of the essence of it – which is why the public display, humiliation, and execution of prisoners is so important. ‘They are weak and die: we are strong and live.’
We are disgusted by what is happening in North Korea but we turn a blind eye to the humiliation and degradation prisoners experience in our own prisons every day.
The U.S. is always keen to keep the torches lit and the electric chair warmed up. Guantanamo Bay is a celebration of American power.
It is obvious that man kills to cleanse the earth of tainted ones, and that is what victory means and how it commemorates life and power: man is bloodthirsty to ward off the flow of his own blood.
Other things that we have found hard to understand have been hatreds and feuds between tribes and families, and continual butchery practiced for what seemed petty, prideful motives of personal honor and revenge.
Nothing has changed much. We all think that we are the chosen people and if we don’t try literally to exterminate those who don’t agree with us or who aren’t like us therefore we can’t possibly ‘like’, we ostracize them, marginalize them, ignore them.
Here I would quote a passage that Becker uses from Alan Harrington, but it’s too long and I’m too tired. Suffice it to say, that that guy over there with the funny beard and strange looking clothes and hat, what if that guy is right in his beliefs. Can he be my equal? “All I know is if he’s right I’m wrong.” (p. 113)
In times of peace, without an external enemy, the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society, in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide.
Enough for today, don’t you think? Is anybody really reading this stuff anyway?
Roger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma 