Hi All Since no one offered any objections to Becker's theory, I'll offer some of my own.
Does all of social and intellectual patterns reall have their root in the fear of death as Becker asserted? There is something very unpragmatic and reductionist about "everything is really this one thing" sort of theories such as Becker's. For example, when William James explored "The Varieties of Religious Experience" his emphasis was on the plurality of human motivations and needs corresponding to different temperaments such as the "healthy minded approach" to spirituality of Emerson and Whitman perhaps best exemplified today by wellness gurus like Deepack Chopra and the Dalai Lama and the "morbidly minded" or "sick souled" temperament of Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards typified today by the notion that a good person is a God-fearing one and by Pat Robertson who sees our worst natural disasters as supernatural punishment for our impurity. Becker cited James frequently in The Denial of Death and was well aware of James's pluralism. It is doubtful that James would have approved of characterizing all of humanity as having a single driving need. Since those closer to the "once born" or "healthy minded" end of the spectrum seemed to him to be far less driven by the fear of death than the "twice born" or "morbidly minded" sort, I think James would have agreed with me that some of Becker's rhetoric went too far in emphasizing the importance of death denial as an explanation for all of human behavior when he said things like, "Culture is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creatureliness." Sometimes we erect a building only because we don't want to be cold and wet rather than due to an unconscious motivation to create an enduring monument to ourselves (though Becker is right that many of us are motivated to create such monuments). Everything need not function as a symbol for something else that we have repressed. Even for Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. When we buy a Big Mac, sometimes it is just because we are hungry rather than an attempt to achieve immortality through participation in a system of symbols. Becker was aware of objections to his position and described the sides of the argument using James's categories for religious temperment. One sort of pposition to Becker's view comes from the healthy-minded camp. Such objectors wonder, in Becker's words, why "the living of life in love and joy cannot...be regarded as real and basic." He says the healthy-minded objection is a nuture over nature argument since it can be asserted that no real notion of anihilation exists in the mind of a young child, so it must get put there by society. Becker charitably admits that "the child has no knowledge of death until about the age of three to five," and this gradual realization doesn't come to fruition in understanding that death is inevitable for all of us "until the ninth or tenth year." Though the young child has no concrete concept of death, the fear of abandonment by one's parents while one's psyche is not yet a differentiated ego from his parents is a sort of fear of anhilation since to be abandoned would be to lose onesself. The healthy-minded claim is that if loving parents do a good enough job helping their children feel secure, the child will not develop such anxiety, so repression of death terror need not be regarded as fundamental and universal. Becker doubts that such healthy-mindedness is possible through good parenting and sides with what he calls the morbidly-minded camp with regard to the universality of this anxiety. He quotes James to describe his perspective, "Let the sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet." Becker also quoted another of James's colorful trurns of phrase in calling the fear of death "The 'worm at the core' of man's pretentions to happiness...whether they admit it or not." (James is not lending his weighty support for either camp here, he is "only describing their variety.") In addition to some distinguished authority siding with him on the issue, Becker refers to some scientific research confirming his belief in the reality of the psychological phenomenon of repression. However, he admits that such research cannot confirm that fear of death is fundamental and universal and present below all appearances of healthy-mindedness, even though his entire argument rests on this claim. Becker said that both camps can claim distinguished authority and that the argument "can pobably never be cleanly decided." I am not so much concerned that we can never know the truth of the matter as I am concerned that his theory may be something like Intelligent Design in that whatever is observed about us no matter what can be made to fit his theory. Becker recognized this trouble when he wrote, "if you claim that a concept is not present because it is repressed, you can't lose; it is not a fair game, intellectually, because you always hold the trump card. This type of argument makes psychoanalysis seem unscientific to many people, the fact that its proponents can claim that someone denies one of their concepts because he represses his consciousness of its truth." I think Becker is correct that "repression is not [just] a magical word for winning arguments," though unfortunately it could be used to do so. I think repression of death is a real psychological phenomenon that can reveal many of our hidden motivations. It seems likely to me that scientific studies such as those described on the Ernest Becker Foundation website can be helpful in demonstrating that we really do develop mechanisms for repressing the knowledge of our deaths; however, I am not sure how to get around the problem that if an experiment fails to demonstrate repression, a researcher may simply say that the repression must be even deeper than was previously thought. Perhaps a researcher could never imagine an outcome that would be inconsistent with the universality of repression of death. A reseacrhcer wielding the "repression trump card" can function like a Creationist who can shrug off the discovery of ancient fossils that "appear" to be tens of thousands of years old by simply saying that they must have been created to appear precisely that way (after all, the Garden of Eden was not like a barren new housing development with tiny sapplings planted here and there. It had vegetation that appreared mature even when it had first been created). However, it is not only science that can help us to understand what truth there may be to repression of knowledge of death. We can also look to our own experience of repressed fears. As Becker said, "...there is nothing like shocks in the real world to jar loose repressions." Perhaps we ourselves have had our repressed fear of death made clear to us when we were taken by surprise by our own responses to events like the death of a former classmate with whom we were not even very close. Such a death could constitute not so much the unexpected a loss of an important relationship but the destruction of the illusion that death is something that could only happen to other people. There is that feeling you may get just before comforting yourself with probabilities when informed that someone you don't even know was diagnosed with cancer or had a heart attack and just happens to be your exact same age. You may have noticed others reacting to events in unexpected ways suggesting the need for some additional explanation beyond the usual motivations we atribute to others. In such cases, Becker's theory may be helpful in predicating behavior that was previously not so well-understood. For example, perhaps, like me, you had not anticipated the shock in the world and wide-spread grieving upon the too-soon death of Princess Diana or the fascination with the notion of Superman paralyzed in a wheel chair. Perhaps we can come to better understand and anticipate such reactions in light of Becker's analysis of psychoanalytical "transference"--our use of external objects and other people for our own eternal self-perpetuation. Also consider that psychologists note that the death of a sibling can be much harder on one than the death of a parent even when the relationship with that sibling was not all that close. Our siblings are our peers. When a sibling dies, Becker's theory suggests, we cannot help but wonder "am I next?" Such a death causes us to confront the reality of our own future anihiliation in a way that we may never have done before and in ways for which we were unprepared. As a last example, there was no bigger public "shock in the real world" in my memory than the events of 9/11/2001. I was amazed by the instant-nationalism that emerged in the wake of tragedy. Many Americans noted that it simply never occurred to them that they could wake up and go to work and never come home again. I wish I could find actual quotes to back up my memory, but I recall many "word on the street" television and radio interviews where Americans expressed indignation that they now had to live with the fear that they could actually die. This is indeed a scary notion, and of course the fact is that not only can we die but we actually will all die. Such interviewees seemed to feel entitled to have this fear properly repressed for them by their society. For Becker, such is indeed the duty of society. Is its raison d'etre. The point of terrorism as a tactic is of course to get us to feel this mortal fear and to get us to panic presumably by giving concessions. This has been attempted throughout the world by various terrorist groups typically by committing indiscriminate murders and attacks on religious as well as secular symbols. Since we have come to understand attacks on our symbols as attacks upon our immortality projects we can now see how such attacks as much as indiscriminate murders can awaken knowledge of our own mortality provoking nationalism and holy war. 9/11 was not just an attack on thousands of human beings, this was an attack on America itself as a symbol for our ideals and our way of life, our symbolic system of heroism, our very means of striving for transcendence and immortality. Becker would not have been surprised as I was by the way Americans became fiercely nationalistic in response to the attacks. My feeling at the time was that we all needed to come together to mourn, to formulate a reasoned response, and to solve a problem that we had not realized that we had already been facing for some time. The popular sense, however, was that, as we heard so many times in those sad days, that the world itself had changed, and it had for many of us. The world had just become a place where people had become temporarily too aware of their deaths. As Becker would have predicted, in the wake of the attacks people needed to become a part of something bigger, something that is eternal, something that can't die. That something was America. Becker's theory is a paradigm for understanding popular reaction to such tragedy through which I would have had a much better understanding of what was going on in our culture at the time if I had been aware of his work. Like Becker himself, I see no way that we could every demonstrate the truth of Becker's broad assertion beyond doubt. But as with our consideration of materialism, we don't need to buy into it as the only true description of human culture. With regard to materialism, we said that just because everything can be given a material description doesn't mean it should only be given a material explanation. Likewise, even if Becker's theory of repression can explain all of culture doesn't mean it is the only explanation we should ever look to, and even if it turns out to only explain some of culture rather than all of it, as pragmatists we can use Becker's theory for whatever purposes we find it useful. I am convinced that repression of the fear of death is real. It may be useful as a way of thinking about our lives and our personal motivations and also as a "theory of evil" that may help to explain how our symbolic selves and our repression mechanisms rather than our "animal nature" could be responsible for much of the misery that humans perpetrate on one another. Whether or not death denying mechanisms are adequate to explaining all of culture, we would still do well to look at the possibly dangerous side-effects of such mechanisms that do reveal our motivations. My personal reading of Becker doesn't take too seriously his claim for fundamental universality. Instead I see his theory as just one paradigm that can be applied to do what Socrates told us to do: examine our lives. Ask ourselves why we do all the things we do. Since reading Becker, I have found it easy to find examples in my personal experience of people making one another miserable in pursuit of their hero projects. I have also found it useful to question my own motivations in regard to death transcending heroism. It is more difficult to analyze my own motivations in response to death anxiety than it is to guess at the motivations of others, but I think the attempt is more important. Since our symbolic selves are susceptible to conscious deconstruction and self-creation, we can become consciously aware our own previously unconsious responces to death anxiety or other anxieties we may have to to try to keep them from having ill effects on others. I think that Becker is right that repression mechanisms are varied and substantial (if not universal and fundamental) ranging from comsumerism, nationalism, and religion to romance and artistic expression. Religious practices are no more a response to our fear of death than many of our other practices. While the "smug atheists" alluded to earlier may claim that the believer just can't face death, perhaps he hasn't really faced death either. Perhaps he just has some different ways of repressing knowledge of death which are not explicitly religious. The "smug atheist" may have abandoned or never had an explicitly religious immortality project, but that does not mean that he has not been working on all sorts of other immortality projects to deny his own fear of death. Whether or not we view Becker's claim in the universality of repression of knowledge of death as "unscientific," the smug atheist who dismisses religion as a particularly cowardly response to human mortality is no more scientific about his assertion. What is left to be done is an analysis of Becker's theory of evil and repression of fear of death in terms of the MOQ hierarchy of value patterns. Perhaps Becker would have done well to distinguish between the biological, social, and intellectual aspects to this fear which perhaps may be regarded as, like all suffering, a negative face a quality that drives evolution. I'd appreciate hearing any thoughts you may have on that analysis as I try to get my own thought together on the matter. Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
