Steve said:
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."
dmb says:
I agree. Becker is just repeating Freud's reductionism. Jung and Freud talked
all night long and finally Jung said something like, "Well, if what you say is
true, then all of human culture is nothing but the sublimation of primal,
animal instincts". Freud's response was something like, "Yes, that exactly what
I mean to say". That's when Jung parted company with Freud and started his own
school of thought.
Steve said:
...Becker would not have been surprised as I was by the way Americans became
fiercely nationalistic in response to the (9/11) 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.
dmb says:
I guess Becker has a point but I think he takes it too far. It seems to me that
this coming together in the face of a threat is in direct proportion to the
hate and anger that sent to to war. But there are neurological studies that
show how fear makes people stupid and compliant. Instead of responding to the
actual threat, we were taken to war against one of the most secular Arab
nations on earth, one that posed no threat to us and was thoroughly hated by
the militant Islamists. I mean, everybody knows that war is going to entail
more death and in fact many more have died in Iraq than were killed on 9/11.
It's hard to imagine how such an adventure would serve to help us deny or
repress the knowledge of death. The whole tone and tenor of the leadership at
the time was a constant refrain of the epic death theme: "The smoking gun
(proof of the danger) could come in the form a mushroom cloud". And then the
"shock and awe" spectacle of the bombing of Baghdad was set to music and played
on TV as glorious entertainment. ("Shock" and "Awe", by the way, are also what
my friend Becky has named her right and left breasts. I don't recall which is
which but I must admit that they're shockingly awesome either way.)
Steve said:
, 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.
dmb says:
I disagree with the notion that pragmatist can use a theory "for whatever
purposes we find it useful". I think you want to be careful how you say that so
that it doesn't sound like we're allowed to measure the value of theory
according to our own personal standards or personal goals. I mean, we don't
want to make it sound like truth hinges on our whims, do we? Isn't the question
hinge on whether or not the theory explains things well or not? What are the
consequences in future experience going to be if we ACT as if it were as true?
If all of human culture is built of unconsciously motivated immortality
projects and if these projects are the cause of misery and evil, then acting as
if the theory were true means that civilization itself is evil and getting rid
of evil means getting rid of human culture. That would be a solution that's
much worse than the problem. I can see how the theory might be applied to
individuals in the process of psychotherapy and it has a way of provoking some
self examination but as a theory of evil, it's way too reductionistic and
simplistic. As you said, I can't "take too seriously his claim for fundamental
universality" and it "can be applied to do what Socrates told us to do: examine
our lives".
Steve said:
...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.
dmb says:
The reasoning here seems to be that everyone has a repressed fear of death that
motivates various immortality projects, therefore all immortality project are
the same. But if everyone has this unconscious motive, then it makes no sense
to condemn for that. But surely we can say that some immortality projects are
better than others. The most famous bible verse (John 3:16) explicitly promises
eternal life, and that is constantly used as the main selling point for
Christianity. In a very real sense, the whole thing is an elaborate form of
denial with respect to death. The guy who wants to paint a painting that will
last beyond his own lifetime and hang in museums isn't hurting anyone and his
attempts to gain that modest form of secular temporary immortality can't really
be compared to the suicide bomber's quest for 72 virgins in the afterlife. Or
how about the guy who sets up a scholarship fund or builds a public library so
his name will be remembered? How does that count as a form of evil? Pirsig's
books will outlive him by a long shot and if they were motivated by this quest
for secular immortality, then I'm all for it. I think Becker is throwing the
baby out with the bath water in an epic way.
Steve said:
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.
dmb says:
Here's a thought but it's not about the levels of static quality. Do you
remember the section of ZAMM where the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece is
described? The passages I have in mind come from chapter 29.
Early Greek philosophy represented the first conscious search for what was
imperishable in the affairs of men. Up to then what was imperishable was within
the domain of the Gods, the myths. But now, as a result of the growing
impartiality of the Greeks to the world around them, there was an increasing
power of abstraction which permitted them to regard the old Greek mythos not as
revealed truth but as imaginative creations of art. This consciousness, which
had never existed anywhere before in the world, spelled a whole new level of
transcendence for the Greek civilization. But the mythos goes on, and that
which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos, and the new mythos under
the first Ionian philosophers became transmuted into philosophy, which
enshrined permanence in a new way. Permanence was no longer the exclusive
domain of the Immortal Gods. It was also to be found within Immortal
Principles, of which our current law of gravity has become one.
.........
The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish a
universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around them.
Their common effort united them into a group that may be called Cosmologists.
They all agreed that such a principle existed but their disagreements as to
what it was seemed irresolvable... The resolution of the arguments of the
Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to
feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach
was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single
absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are
relative, they said. ``Man is the measure of all things.'' These were the
famous teachers of ``wisdom,'' the Sophists of ancient Greece.
Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending
the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the
decadence of the Sophists.
dmb continues:
I'm not taking up our debate about truth here. These passages explain how
Platonic philosophy was born in the quest for the immortal. It had morphed from
god to principle as the social level gave birth to the intellectual level. They
say all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Pirsig points out that "our
current law of gravity has become one" of these "Immortal Principles". So are
"subjects and objects". So is Truth and Knowledge as "That which is independent
of what anyone thinks about it." "The ideas of science and technology and other
systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it."
And yet Pirsig is taking sides with the Sophists. And pragmatic truth isn't
immortal or independent of what anyone thinks. The MOQ is against all that
immortality stuff and instead it presents a completely different picture of
reality where flux and change rule, where even the static forms are provisional
and evolutional. Is that a word? Evolutional? Even if it's not, you know what i
mean.
This seems to deny Becker's theory and yet it explains how he could conclude
that immortality projects are universal. If Pirsig is right, our culture has
been dominated by one giant immortality project. And yet the fact that we have
alternatives shows that this is not universal or law-like.
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