Notes on Reading Ernest Becker's Escape From Evil

I wrote these notes a long time ago, but I think they still work pretty well.


Notes on reading Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil (Free Press, 1975)
By Roger Albert, Winter 1999.
Becker starts his argument with the premise that human beings are animals. All animals must devour other organisms to exist (both vegetable and animal, I might add). This is part of our dedication to Eros, to survival that we call our instinct for self-preservation. The difference between us and other animals is that we know we will die... and that throws us into a tizzy. So we seek prosperity as a major driving force in our individual and collective lives. Problem is, “Disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is alive, and death cuts prosperity off coldly.” (3).
We know we must die, but we don’t want to accept it. How could such wonderful creatures (humans) just die like other animals? No, no. We must be special under the sun.
Primitives invented ritual to satisfy the craving for the good life, for prosperity. “Ritual is a technique for giving life. The thing is momentous: throughout vast ages of prehistory mankind imagined that it could control life!” (6). “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 above material decay and death” (7). Let’s make this clear, ... “ritual is actually a pre-industrial technique of manufacture; it doesn’t exactly create new things... but it transfers the power of life and it renovates nature”(8). Primitive man invented a huge array of imaginative ritual schemes for controlling nature. Of course, in reality, we cannot control nature, not now and not then... so we are left with a number of intractable problems. For us, our anxiety over our inability to control nature is evident in our need to know the exact cause of a plane crash... so that we can attribute the crash to human error and not machine failure.
Primitives split their worlds into two... as is evident in moity social organization. What this accomplished was the creation of a theatre for contests of skill and excellence. Becker quotes Hocart “...for men divide themselves into two groups in order that they may impart life to one another, that they may intermarry, compete with one another, make offerings to one another, and do to one another whatever is required by their theory of prosperity” (11). “The fundamental imperative of all ritual is that one cannot do it along; man cannot impart life to himself but must get it from his fellow man. If ritual is a technique for generating life, then ritual organization is a necessary cooperation in order to make that technique work” (11).
Becker writes: Man needs to work his magic with the materials of this world, and human beings are the primary materials for the magic wrought by social life. We saw in the Introduction that one of the main motives of organismic life was the urge to self-feeling, to the heightened sense of self that comes with success in overcoming obstacles and incorporating other organisms. The expansion of self-feeling in nature can come about in many different ways, especially when we get to the human level of complexity. Man can expand his self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or demonstration of his own excellence. He expands his organization in complexity by games, puzzles, riddles, mental tricks of all types; by boasting about his achievements, taunting and humiliating his adversaries, or torturing and killing them. Anything that reduces the other organism and adds to one’s own size and importance is a direct way to gain self-feeling; it is a natural development out of the simple incorporation and fighting behaviour of lower organisms” (11). “By the time we get to man, we find he is in an almost constant struggle not to be diminished in his organismic importance” (11). This leads eventually to all forms of distrust and loathing, to fear and assault. Envy, as Becker notes, is the “signal of danger that the organism sends to itself when a shadow is being cast over it, when it is threatened with being diminished” (12). According to Becker, then, we naturally seek self-aggrandizement, to puff ourselves up... like the peacock... to show how impressive we are. Endurance and continued life shows that we are somehow special but it’s only by comparison to other organisms and people that we can confirm for ourselves our worthiness of failure. “Obviously it is not very convincing about one’s ultimate worth to be better than a lobster, or even a fox; but to outshine ‘that fellow sitting over there, the one with the black eyes’ – now that is something that carries the conviction of ultimacy. To paraphrase Buber, the faces of men carry the highest meaning to other men.”
Society, then is a stage for continuous contest for the forcing of self-feeling... for competition, for the playing of “intricate games of one-upmanship.” However, primitive society was also organized in thousands of ways (as ours is, I might add) with elaborate rules for protecting ourselves against social damage and deflation... against losing face. People “impart to one another the daily sense of importance that each needs...” (12). We acknowledge others in many ways in daily life. Our own rituals, however, as contrasted with those of the primitive, are decadent and lacking in cosmic connection... (16).
“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. But if your theory is to control by representation and imitation, then you have to include all sides of life, not only the side that makes you comfortable or that seems purest” (17).
The primitive either represented nature by ‘microcosmization’ or ‘macrocosmization.’ In the first, “man simply takes himself or parts of himself and blows them up to cosmic importance” ... as in entrail reading or liver reading. In the second, “man humanizes the cosmos by projecting all imaginable earthly things onto the heavens, in this way again intertwining his own destiny with the immortal stars” (18). That is man, “humanized the heavens and spiritualized the earth and so melted sly and earth together in an inextricable unity” (18). And “by opposing culture to nature in this way, man allotted to himself a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled him to transcend his animal condition and assume a special status in nature” (19).
Sacrifice stands at the centre of ritual in primitive life. “In order to control nature, man must drive away evil-sickness and death. And so he must overcome hostile demons and hostile forces. If he makes a slip in the ritual, it gives power to the demons. The ritual triumph is winning of the contest with evil” (20). The contests abounded where one had to prove oneself worthy and thus a worthy warrior against evil. The act of sacrifice established a footing in the invisible dimension of reality; this permitted the sacrifice to build a divine body, a mystical, essential self that had superhuman powers” (21).
We sometimes make fun of primitive people for their ridiculous rituals designed to ward off evil or bring good luck, but we are just as obsessed as primitive people were with control of nature by sacrifice and ritual. Sacrifice still is very important part of our lives, both individual and collective.
Becker writes: It is true that primitive man was kinder to nature, that he did not cause the kind of destructiveness we are causing and, in fact, did not seem capable if our kind of casual disregard for the bounty of the natural world. It would take a lot of study and compilation of comparative data to bear these impressions out, but I think that if primitive man was kind to nature, it was not because he was innately different in his emotional sensitivity nor more altruistic toward other living forms than we are. I think, rather, that it was because his techniques of manipulation were less destructive. He needed a tree, the spirit of an animal or plant, the sacrifice of one animal of a species. As we shall see, we grind up astronomically larger quantities of life, but it is in the same spirit and for the same basic reasons. If we talk of about a certain primitive quality of “reverence” for life, we must be very careful. The primitive’s attitude towards animals considered sacred was sometimes more cruel than our own is. They did not hesitate to sacrifice those whom they considered their benefactors or their gods, or even hesitate to kill their chiefs and kings. The main value was whether this brought life to the community and whether the ritual demanded it. Man has always causally sacrificed life for more life.
In chapter 2, Becker explains that economics has never been and will never be simply the quest to satisfy human survival needs. Economic activity is sacred to the core (26). Primitives understood that nature gives freely of itself to man. What they get from nature is a gift giving as Marcel Mauss observed demands reciprocity. “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.” In order for repay the debt and maintain balance, one had to give in return, by offering to the spirits. This is the way primitives came to accumulate a surplus “...primitive man created an economic surplus so that he would have something to give to the gods; the giving of the surplus was an offering to the gods who controlled the entire economy of nature in the first place, and so man needed to give precisely in order to keep himself immersed in the cosmology of obligation and expiation” (28-29).

[Gift giving is the origins of trade.]
Food is a sacred element because it gives the power of life (29). The original sacrifice is always food because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis of life. ‘Give us our daily bread...’ (28-29). Food is sacred in other ways too... the way it gives life is mysterious to the primitive... When a primitive man gave milk as a gift “...he did not give a dead thing... but a piece of life... the gift had mana power, the strength of supernatural life” (30). To give and to counter-give is necessary to keep the cycle of power going... We feel good when the economy is moving, when we are buying and selling. Growth is the sign of a healthy economy. When everything is in movement, it’s hard to keep track, after a while, of who gave what... and there was no need to care, really, because the flow of gifts and power was what was essential.
“Primitive man gave to the gods. Hocart sees this as the origin of trade: the fact that one group made offerings to the gods of their kinsmen and vice versa” (30-31). The hero of primitive society, the big man, was the one who could accumulate the greatest surplus to give away to the gods. Cosmic heroism.
The role of guilt... another central fact of social life. “Guilt is a feeling of being blocked, limited, transcended, without knowing why...” (33). One can feel guilt when he “...has unintended consequences on others” (34). We feel guilt when we haven’t fulfilled our potential... when we weren’t heroic enough... and we feel guilt because we stick out too much. ...But... “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, the group has represented big power, big victory, much life” (36).
Becker concludes this section with: “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... Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself (37).
In chapter 3, Becker addresses the issue of the origins of inequality. He writes that the great disillusion of our time is the fact that the enlightenment and Christianity have not delivered what they promised... equality and the “liberation of man” (39). Even in primitive society where equality was evident in all, “even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation” (41). But why did personal distinction and quality lead to class society... why did we go along with it so easily? For the following reason: “We have to say with Rank, that primitive religion ‘starts the first class distinction.’ That is, the individual gives over the aegis of his own life and death to the spirit world; he is already a second-class citizen... It isn’t much of an intellectual stretch then to see that individuals with special powers had some connection to the gods and the division between them and other mortals was the inevitable outcome. Heroes are close to the gods, but they can also be very dangerous because of that very power... They were like a conduit to the gods. Shaman and chiefs were quick to seize the advantage. They collaborated in “...what Radin called ‘clearly a form of gangsterism’” (47). On the simplest levels of culture they were already organizing themselves into an exclusive fraternity so as to get and keep maximum power. How does one get maximum power. How does one get maximum power in a cosmology where ritual is the technics that manufactures life? Obviously be getting control of the formulas for the technics” (48). “The central question of... a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, and how does he keep it?” (49).
“People take the overwhelmingness of creation and their own fears and desires and project them in the form of intense mana onto certain figures to which they then defer. They follow these figures with passion and with a trembling heart” (51).
“...men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation” (51).
In chapter 4, Becker addresses the consequences of the above statement. He ask: But why? How did this situation come about? The answer is that man wanted a visible god always present to receive his offerings, and for this he was willing to pay the price of his own subjection” (52).
In primitive societies, “Prosperity and chiefs were associated because the tribes with great chiefs were actually more prosperous... The Jews were mocked in the ancient world because they had no image of their god, he seemed like a mere figment of their imagination; next to the visible splendour of the Pharaoh, the God of Israel seemed like a phantom of a deluded mind” (53). Visible gods... political leaders become vulnerable, however, when they seem to be losing power. The more they become suspect, the greater the urge to ‘do away with them.’ “...we tend to vote for the person who already represents health, wealth, and success to that some of it will rub off on us” (55). “Once men consented to live by the redistribution of life’s goods through a god figure who represented life, they had sealed their fate. There was no stopping the process of the monopolization of life in the king’s hands” (56). Larger than life, the king controlled custom and became the supreme regulator of the world. The king was always judged on results, however... and a successful king meant that the “people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of tyranny” (57).
“Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together as naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centralization also came to mean control of the power to punish” (57). “...men seem first to have allowed or even welcomed the ascendancy over them of visible gods; after that, to accept punishment from the agents of these gods is a natural and logical step” (58).
Furthermore, the greater the power of the visible gods, the less emphasis on the ritual renewal of the world and re-establishing the balance between the visible and invisible worlds, and the more emphasis on the “piles of things he actually possessed, by the glory of his person...” (59). Hocart calls this the growing conceit of man. Becker notes the huge modern “potlatches” practiced by the Carnegies and Macmillan-Bloedel’s of the world... this was (and still is) the “flaunting of power with very little mixture of repentence” (61). Primitive ritual has been eclipsed.
Chapter 5 is called “The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power.” In it, Becker revisits the introduction where he establishes the idea that what we want most is prosperity, self-preservation and transcendence of the world of flesh and blood. “We can see that what people want in any epoch is a way of transcending their physical fate, they want to guarantee some kind of indefinite duration, and culture provides them with the necessary immortality symbols or ideologies; societies can be seen as structures of immortality power” (63). Immortality striving is a universal principle according to Rank, “firmly anchored in each individual person...; it was present in each culture, no matter how varied its beliefs might seem, or how much mankind itself seemed to change from epoch to epoch” (64). Beliefs varied, but “What was fixed was the principle of a ‘dominant immortality-ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. History then can be seen as a succession of ideologies that console for death. ...all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the individual life... Culture means that which is supernatural; all culture has the basic mandate to transcend the physical, to permanently transcend it. All human ideologies, then, are affairs that deal directly with the sacredness of the individual or the group life, whether it seems that way or not, whether they admit it or not, whether the person knows it himself of not” (64).
“With the discovery of agriculture began the breakup of the primitive world, the rise of the early states; and now social organization came to be focussed in the patriarchal family under the state’s legal protection” (66). [family comes from the Latin word famulus, meaning slave or servant]. Family members become property to be disposed of at the will of the patriarch. Fathers imitated the kings so as to re-enact the “the divine plan in their homes; in this way they got a reflection of the king’s power (67). Dependence on the power of the priestly class and the king, nonetheless, became absolute. “...there has never been, historically, any fundamental change in the massive structure of domination and exploitation represented by the state after the decline of primitive society” (71). Christianity was harnessed in the interests of the state and failed to deliver its promised democracy and equality. “Not that the promise of the ancient world and of Christianity failed completely. Something potentially great did emerge out of them: what Rank called the ‘era of psychological man.’ We can look at it as a development out of the ‘era of the son.’ 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 kind of secular-humanist immortality base on the gifts of the individual (71).
Eventually, gold became the new immortality symbol... as rulers attempted to pile it as a high as they could. “Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things; money is the man; the immortality of the estate or a corporation resides in the dead things which alone endure... Money is the new totemic possession” (75). ...The thing that connects money with the domain of the sacred is its power. We have long known that money gives power over men, freedom from family and social obligations, from friends, bosses, and underlings; it abolishes one’s likeness to others; it creates comfortable distance between persons, easily satisfies their claims on each other without compromising them in any direct and personal way; on top of this it gives literally limitless ability to satisfy appetites of almost any material kind... All power is in essence power to deny mortality” (81). When we die and give money to our children we extend our power in time... giving us a semblance of immortality as [they] live... In short, money is the human mode par excellence of cooly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature. ...’money negotiates immortality and therefore is God,’ this is a scientific formula that is limpidly objective to any serious student of man (83). “The symbols of immortality power that money buys exist on the level of the visible, and so crowd out their invisible competitor. Man succumbs easily to the temptation of created life, which is to exercise power mainly in the dimension in which he moves and acts as an organism... No wonder economic equality is beyond the endurance of modern democratic man: the house, the car, the bank balance are his immortality symbols. Or put another way, if a black man moves next door, it is not merely that your house diminishes in real estate value, but that you diminish in fullness on the level of visible immortality- and so you die... Modern man cannot endure economic equality because he has not faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life. No wonder that people segregate themselves with such consuming dedication, that specialness is so much a fight to the death: man lashes out all the harder when he is cornered, when he is a pathetically impoverished immortality seeker. He dies when his little symbols of specialness die” (85).
“Immortality power, then, came to reside in accumulated wealth... Compounding interest is one of the few meaningful things to do in an irreversible time stream that is wholly secular and visible (87). Money and cumulative interest have become our unequivocal god” (88). We have become irreversible secular. Christianity has failed as an “idealistic interlude” in history. Problem is that, having abandoned the invisible world, we can no longer address gifts to the gods, so we cannot achieve expiation through sacrifice... man has changed from the giving animal, the one who passes things on, to the wholly taking and keeping one” (89). We no longer have a way of dealing with guilt. “History is the tragic record of heroism and expiation out of control and of man’s efforts to ear expiation in new, frantically driven and contrived ways... The point that I am making is that most of the evil that man has visited on his world is the result precisely of the greater passion of his denials and his historical drivenness” (90).
What we have in chapters 7 and 8 are the final stages of Becker’s preliminary argument. In these chapters, Becker establishes the essence of what he considers to be human evil. Psychoanalysis, not the Freudian variety, but that of Rank, Jung, and Reich has uncovered and documented the “twin fears of life and death” (92). “...men do not actually live stretched openly on a rack of cowardice and terror; if they did, they couldn’t continue on with such apparent equanimity and thoughtlessness. Men’s fears are buried deeply by repression, which gives to everyday life its tranquil facade; only occasionally does the desperation show through, and only for some people. It is repression, then, that great discovery of psychoanalysis that explains how well men can hide their basic motivations even from themselves. But men also live in a dimension of carefreeness, trust, hope and joy, which gives them a buoyancy beyond that which repression along could give.
This... is achieved by the symbolic engineering of culture, which everywhere serves men as an antidote to terror by giving them a new and durable life beyond that of the body” (92). And cultural leaders, politicians and others, are all too ready to announce to one and all that they are the embodiment of salvation, the only way to prosperity... and that those who are not a part of our culture are ‘dirty’ and inhuman. This is a lie, of course. We catch our politicians in the big lie all the time and then we can’t wait to get rid of them and replace them with the ‘true’ heroes of our culture, the ones that will ‘really’ and finally bring us lasting prosperity. As Becker notes: “All you have to do is say that your group is pure and good, eligible for a full life and for some kind of eternal meaning. But others like Jews or Gypsies are the real animals, are spoiling everything for you, contaminating your purity and bringing disease and weakness to your vitality... It is all in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in those frightening pages about how the Jews lie in wait in the dark alleys read to infect young German virgins with syphilis (93).
Primitive man could not unleash the mega-destruction that is possible in modern times with our huge polluting factories, intensive agriculture, automobiles and nuclear weapons. But their intentions were the same. In Polynesia, “no one was ever safe from capture and sacrificial slaughter. This is hardly the ideal of altruism, and there are very few today who have a romantic image of primitive man’s peaceful nature; one look at the blunt stone sacrificial slave-killing knives of the Northwest Coast Indians is enough to set the record straight. Since we do not experience the terror of the occasional victims of primitive raids, we can look back nostalgically at the small numbers consumed at random, and compare then with those who died in one day at Dresden, or one flash at Hiroshima” (97). Our new class of conquerors and “leaders” have the mega-machine of war at their disposal or the inexorable advance of global corporate power. “The state had its own built-in wisdom; it ‘solved’ its ponderous internal problems of social justice by making justice a matter of triumph over an external enemy. This was the start of the large-scale scapegoating that has consumed such mountains of lives down through history and continues to do so today... what better way to forge a nation into a unity, to take everyone’s eyes off the frightening state of domestic affairs, than by focusing on a heroic foreign cause?: (98).
In essence, “...man staged whatever size death potlatch they were technically capable of, from Genghis Khan to Auschwitz... as societies increased in scale and complexity, incorporating high gods, a priesthood, and a king, the motive for sacrifice became frankly one of pleasing the gods and building power, and then mountains of war captives began to be sacrificed” (104). ...if you kill your enemy, your life is affirmed because it proves that the gods favour you... And so the more dead the better” (105).
“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... Freud saw that when it comes to enemies and strangers, the ego can consign them to the limbo of death without even a second thought” (109). There is a problem, however, in war: what we might call today “friendly fire” and casualties amongst our own. This would seem to make war irrational... but, as Freud found, “Not only enemies but even friends and loved ones are fair fuel for our own perpetuation...This is the price of our natural animal narcissism; very few of us, if pressured, would be unwilling to sacrifice someone else in our place” (109).
“The exception to this is of course the hero. We admire him precisely because he is willing to give his life for others instead of taking theirs for his. Heroism is an unusual reversal of routine values, and it is another thing that makes war so uplifting. As mankind has long known: war is ritual for the emergence of heroes, and so for the transmutation of common selfish values” (109). However, “...the logic of killing others to affirm our own life unlocks much that puzzles us in history, much that with our modern mind we seem unable to comprehend, such as the Roman arena games” (110). We are heartened by the controlled display of dying... and the realization of our own escape from the same fate. The logic of sacrifice and scapegoating explain all forms of butchery and feuds and hatreds... [And] “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” (114). [And more can be said, of course... about the myriad ways in which we diminish others or “put them down” so that we can stand over them in self-righteous satisfaction.]
We need enemies, whether in the form of Sadam Hussein or our own family members. They have ritual role to play. “Nietzsche observed that ‘whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to reveal himself therefore; we others will by his victim...” (115). Men try to qualify for externalization by being clean and by cleansing the world around them of the evil, the dirty; in this way they show that they are on the side of purity, even if they themselves are impure” (115-116).
“Since everyone feels dissatisfied with himself (dirty), victimage is a universal human need. And the highest heroism is the stamping out of those who are tainted. The logic is terrifying. The psychoanalytic grouping of guilt, anality, and sadism is translatable in this way to the highest levels of human striving and to the age-old problem of good and evil” (116).
In modern terms, and writ large, the effect is that “...the nation represents victory and immortality or it has no mandate to exist” (117). We can put the fall of the Soviet Union in this perspective... it failed live up to the highest ideals of the socialist revolutionaries. Where can we see other nations going? The lie of equality in democratic countries will soon be too obvious to ignore. What will be the outcome? “If it is no longer the clan that represents the collective immortality pool, then it is the state, the nation, the revolutionary cell, the corporation, the scientific society, one’s own race. Man still gropes for transcendence, but now this is not necessarily nature and God, but the SS or the CIA; the only thing that remains constant is that the individual still gives himself with the same humble trembling as the primitive to his totemic ancestor. The stake is identical-immortality power-and the unit of motivation is still the single individual and his fears and hopes” (119).
The conclusion to chapter eight is entitled Cultures as Styles of Heroic Death Denial. In this conclusion Becker gets to the crux of his work. Sociologists and thinkers from Marx through to Weber, Mannheim, Veblen, and Mills have laid out a new style of social theory... they have revealed” ... precisely those secular forms which the traditional religious dramas of redemption now take” (124). The upshot of the whole argument is that... “Since there is not secular way to resolve the primal mystery of life and death, all secular societies are lies... Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death” (124). Of course, no society can deliver on this promise. The role of social science, then, according to Becker, is the “...revelation of the lie... and the assessment of how high are the costs of this lie” (125). But Becker goes even further. He states that the role of social science is also to conceive of alternatives to the destructive exploitation of the fears of all of us in the name of an impossible immortality (126).
The ultimate paradox of human life is that “...evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil” (136).
“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” (139).
“Men kill lavishly out of the sublime joy of heroic triumph over evil. Voila tout” (141).
“...man is fated... to consider this earth as a theatre for heroism, and his life as a vehicle for heroic acts which aim precisely to transcend evil. Each person wants to have his life make a difference in the life of mankind, contribute in some way toward securing and furthering that life, make it in some ways less vulnerable, more durable. To be a true hero is to triumph over disease, want, death. One knows that his life has had vital human meaning if it has been able to bring real benefits to the life of mankind. And so men have always honoured their heroes, especially in religion, medicine, science, diplomacy, and war... From Constantine and Christ to Churchill and De Gaulle, men have called their heroes ‘saviours’ in the literal sense those who have delivered them from the evil of the termination of life, either of their own immediate lives or of the duration of their people even more, by his own death the hero secures the lives of others, and so the greatest heroic sacrifice, as Fraser taught us, is the sacrifice of the god for his people... The giants died to secure mankind; buy their blood we are saved. It is almost pathetically logical how man the supremely vulnerable animal developed the cult of the heroic” (150).
In the last few pages of the book, Becker turns to the question “What is the Heroic Society?” His answer is multifaceted and it’s worth reading the entire final chapter of the book to unravel its complexity. What is possible? What is the role of social science? To expose the mystifications and to work against “structural and psychological unfreedom in society” (165). “One of the reasons for our present disillusionment with theory in the social sciences is that it has done very little in this liberating direction.
Not page 142: “Toward the Merger of Animal and Human Studies,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol.4,nos 2-3, June-September 1974, pp. 235-254. This article is one of the last he wrote because it was not long after it was published that Becker was dead.

Another adendum

Watching TV the other night and a commercial appeared about the Women's Concacaf tournament happening in Vancouver January 19th to 22nd. The voiceover goes on about how the team screwed up in 2011, but now there's a new coach and new players and a new attitude. The commercial concludes with the observation that this year the Canadian team is (and I quote) "on the road to redemption." Woohoo. It was a team of sinners last year. This year the team will atone for the sins of yesteryear and be, again, on the road to salvation. Religion isn't dead...it's alive and well in competitive sports!

Addendum to my last post. A little more Canucks philosophy.

Ok, so at the end of the second period the score is Canucks 4, TB 2. I figure, well we can all relax now. Canucks have got this thing under control. So I go downstairs to do some chores, come up some time later and the score in the early third period is now Canucks, 4, TB 3. Well, shit, more sins. More turning the face away from god. More breakdown of the defence. Then 1 minute to go in the game and TB scores again to tie the game! Well, what the hell? Verging on capital sin now...let the guard down, succumb to the temptation to relax, take it easy...hell, they won't score in the last minute of the game. Well, they do...and it's overtime. No score. Shootout time. Mason Raymond becomes the redeemer. Scores the single goal in the shootout and the Canucks win. Yea! We are again on the road to heaven...

Canucks sin and redemption

Just watching the second period of the Canucks and Tampa Bay game tonight. The score was 3 to 1 for the Canucks with one minute left in the second period. Things get a little loose towards the ends of periods, and sometimes if a team is on the ball it will take advantage of loose play and score the 'dreaded' last minute goal. So, sure enough, Tampa Bay scores with a great rush with 31 seconds left. Stamkos drives in shoots, the rebound comes out and Lecavalier puts in in the back of the net. Defensive unit breakdown...sinful behaviour for the Canucks. Then, with less than 2 seconds left, the Canucks don't give up and take the puck into the Tampa Bay goaltender and Ryan Kessler comes charging in and virtually pushes the puck past Roloson. Redemption.
Sin and Redemption in the last minute of the second period. What a great way to think about sin, a breakdown of morality and redemption, a reconnection with morality! Yeah!

Dancing with Stuff

So, Carolyn and I have had an ongoing discussion for years about ‘stuff.’ She generally argues against ‘stuff’ and I always argue for ‘stuff.’ We’re not too crazy or vehement in our ‘discussions’ but sometimes there’s something real at stake like whether or not I get to keep the pile of little bits of wood and metal that has been accumulating in the carport. Practically it’s about my shop, my studio, the carport and the things in them but philosophically and sociologically the issue is what role ‘stuff’ plays in our lives. I’ve got a book called The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (1981) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Halton which is all about domestic things we accumulate and why we do so. I’m not sure these guys have really captured the essence of the issue, but on the psychological level they do understand the fundamental role that things play in our lives. A cursory search of the Amazon website will bring up other sources too on things and their importance. It’s no mystery to me that there are television programs about ‘hoarders.’ It’s also no mystery to me that in listening to hoarders (who are most often described as mentally ill or close to it) the biggest reason they give for hoarding and being so reluctant to give up any of their shit is that they would be lost without it. They ARE their shit. All the meaning they have been able to squeeze out of life is tied up in their piles and heaps of junk. They would feel absolutely naked and vulnerable without being surrounded by their mountains of crap. How in the hell have we come to this as a species? Well, that’s not a mystery to me either. It’s built into our very culture, into ourselves. It hasn’t always been that way, but it sure is now. We need things, psychically and socially. ‘Our’ economies are built on things. We ‘bond’ around things and their production.


Our society (more global by the day) is based on the production (and control) of commodities and services. Commodities are things, but not just any things. Commodities are things that are produced specifically for sale on a market. Commodities are products, but not all products are commodities. To put it simply, If I go into my shop and build a table using my tools and my hands, then carry that table into the house and use it to sit at and eat my dinner, I have created a product, not a commodity, because my intention was to use the table, not to sell it. If I built the table with the express purpose of selling it, I would be producing a commodity. On a grander scale, when Ford Motor Company builds Ranger pickups or any of its many makes and models of automobiles, it aims to sell them on the market and thus, it is producing a commodity. Ford could not care less if the truck that just left the car lot in Delaware actually gets used or not as long as it gets sold. In fact, if someone in Wilmington, Delaware drives a pickup truck off of a dealer’s lot, gets a couple of blocks down the road and gets broadsided by a Volvo transport truck and gets totalled, Ford couldn’t be happier. It now, potentially, has another customer, if the driver of the pickup wasn’t killed in the collision with the Volvo he or she will be in the market for a new truck. Ford is not in the business of using its products but of selling them. The more trucks that get pounded into telephone poles the better. Ford is a commodity producer.

Ironically, so are you when you have a baby. The value we have as humans in our society is predominantly determined by the market, just as the value of Ford’s products is determined by the market. Families are little factories for the production of a commodity called labour-power. Ironically again, as parents, we cover all the costs of producing labour-power (potentially in our kids) but we don’t get to sell it when it’s ready to go to market. In our world, when the labour-power we work so hard to create gets old enough to sell, we don’t get to sell it. Our kids do, because now, magically, it belongs to them. It was different when families were production units. Then families could buy and sell the labour-power of their children. This is still the case in some parts of the world, but not here. Now, individuals are production units. (That’s why we have such a fixation on individualism and the ideology of ‘doing your own thing,’ but that’s a story for another day) When you enter the ‘labour market’ (more properly called the labour-power market) what are you really doing? What are you agreeing to in the contract you sign with your new employer? The answer is that you are selling something, of course. You are selling your time, your life, for a fixed amount of money, you are selling your ‘power‘ to work, your labour-power, your own personal commodity which you put up for sale. The amount of money you accept as payment for your life on the job is called the exchange-rate of your labour-power. What you actually do on the job is labour. What you sell when you contract with an employer is your labour-power.

Of course, as you might have guessed, there’s another side to this equation. If you sell your labour power, more or less successfully, on the labour market, you are selling it to someone or something. That something could be a number of things including a government, a police force, or a business, corporate or not. The point is that for there to be a seller of labour-power there has to be a buyer. Who has the most power in this equation? It depends on the market, but generally the buyer of labour-power has more power than the seller. That’s why sellers of labour-power have often tried to band together and form unions to give themselves a bit more power in the face of the overwhelming power of the buyers of the only thing they have to sell, and that’s their labour-power.

The point of all of this is to note that commodities are at the very core of our world. We are the embodiment of a commodity called labour-power, but ‘things’ are at the very core of our world, material things. They make our world go round. That’s why economists are so fixated on ‘consumer confidence’ and their insistence that the economy must grow and the only way for it to do that is for people to buy things. And more things. They get very fidgety when we stop buying things. They also get fidgety when we borrow too much money to buy things, but that’s another story. They love it when we borrow just the right amount of money. Economists seem to thrive of contradiction.

So do we. We love things but in some ways they trap us in a cycle of dependency. We need them to give us self-esteem as much as an addict needs drugs. Because our world runs on commodities and we’ve granted them virtual sacred status, we feel the best when we go out shopping, when we have the money (or borrowing power) to buy shit. Our personal value derives from how much stuff we have or how much money we have in reserve to buy stuff, including vacations in exotic places. We feel saddest when we’re broke, when we have no money to buy anything. We then feel immobilized. We are immobilized. And, of course, the most extreme form of immobility is death. So poverty equals death. It’s no coincidence that in the current spate of zombie movies, most zombies resemble street people caricatures.

The anxiety we feel about having things and enough real or potential wealth to “feel good about ourselves” as heroic members of our society is best exemplified in a song by Janis Joplin from the 60s:

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV ?
Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me.
I wait for delivery each day until three,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town ?
I'm counting on you, Lord, please don't let me down.
Prove that you love me and buy the next round,
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends,
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/janisjoplin/mercedesbenz.html

Janis is right on. We need things, even a night on the town, to make us feel good and to make us feel a part of society, to give us a sense that we are contributing members of something big, much bigger than us: our country, our economy. We feel stronger, more righteous, bigger, every time we see a panhandler or someone sleeping on a park bench wrapped in newspaper. Money equal life, the lack of it equals death. If we don’t have money we like to pretend that we do. We never want people to know if we’re poor. If they find out, we may be shunned like street people. As an aside, Janis probably hadn’t read Emile Durkheim’s book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life written in the early 20th century when she wrote her song in the 60s, but Durkheim argued that gods are personifications of society itself. She probably didn’t realize that when she was asking the Lord for all these wonderful things, she was actually pleading with her society itself (America) to come across. Then again, maybe she did.

Well, all this is fine and dandy. We are a commodity-based world, obsessed with things. Our societies depend on markets for prosperity. No surprise then that we like to hoard things. Psychologically, things provide us with insulation (or the illusion of it) against poverty and death. No wonder people like Donald Trump surround themselves with such big things! Maybe they have BIG insulation too! Probably not so much. There’s no escaping death, right Steve? But there’s another dimension to all of this too.

As Csikszentmihalyi and Halton point out in The Meaning of Things, things can also be traps to some extent. They create their own form of immobility as can easily seen by peaking through the front door of a hoarder’s house. Donald Trump has many people that depend on him. That’s a huge responsibility. He can’t just do as he pleases without compromising himself and countless other people. When we divest ourselves of our ‘baggage’ of material things, and release ourselves from the need to show others what we have as a necessary condition for our self-esteem, we may have more possibility for spontaneous individual action. We sure as hell have more space to move around. We may be able to ‘dance’ a little more to the tune of our own drum without banging into a random piece of extraneous furniture. But I still like my pile of wood and metal, and my shop full of tools and stuff. Yes, it’s a bit of an anchor sometimes but I like to make stuff just for the sake of making stuff, and my little piles of crap here and there in the yard are sometimes little treasure troves of raw material for making new stuff. So, stuff is good, but I’ve learned that compromise works best for social relations and that sometimes, throwing a little shit away goes a long way to making relationships go more smoothly. And I get to keep a fair bit of shit, really. It’s all good.

The importance of social intimacy for individual growth.

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. But more on that later.

Love

David K. Reynolds in Playing Ball on Running Water describes love this way: "To love is to lose ourselves in another. It is to give up ourselves for another, to abandon our former dreams as a sacrifice for another, to merge with that loved element of our environment. In other words, genuine love causes us to become part of our surroundings." Reynold, a Moritist practitioner, wrote these words in 1984 (p.49). True enough, I suppose. Love, from this point of view, says nothing about the 'quality' of the love object. I can say that Hitler loved to murder Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the physically and mentally ill because he loved the Aryan race even more, or so he said. The love of God by Christians is a complete denial of individuality and self-esteem. It is the subsumption of the individual in the collective (God). It is complete self-effacement. But of course this is impossible because even love requires some sense of self-worth; otherwise what value would one be to the collective? How is a useless thing of value to God? So a sense of self-worth is essential before it can be partially given up. We dance between self-aggrandizement and self-effacement, between individuality and collectivity.