I've forgotten for sure, but the search query was probably something like:
"becker denial death site:blogspot.com"
At some point I wrote:
early assessment from blogspotting:
people are REALLY hung up on the psa/Freud stuff, as if Becker's argument(s) here are called into question in direct proportion to how (admittedly profoundly) the psa enterprise as a whole can be called into question. This would be worth teasing apart. The too-obvious rejoinder is that Becker's main source is a dissident and the first use this dissident work it put to is to show the "closure" of psa upon a PRIOR body of knowledge. But there must be more to it also.
This from donemmerichnotes seems like a good/useful summary of DoD's "companion" work
Also,
this from socratific.
This from New Savanna hints at some actual scientific research in Becker's wake
The terror management theorists turned Becker’s sweeping analysis into a scientific theory amenable to empirical testing. ...
...hundreds of further experiments have explored the much broader effects that thinking about death has on our desire to achieve some form of immortality. For example, studies have demonstrated that thinking about death increases our desire to have children and even to name our children after ourselves. It also increases our desire for fame,...
(rtwt)
Also
this
from Integral Options Cafe.
This
post from Half an Hour
responds and links to
Dave Pollard
"A Paean to Activists"
Some people think my beliefs make no sense. They tell me that if they were as pessimistic as I claim to be, they would kill themselves.
And then I tell them that I believe in the inherent good nature of every human, that I think all the problems we have created in this world are the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions .
Then they tell me they think I’m crazy.
...
The community is at a scale within our control , and it can be rescued from stupid, unimaginative, greedy, uninformed people and the parochial systems and processes that they have put in place, and which can be changed for the better. ...
As much as I rail against corporatists and lawyers and real estate speculators and other reprobates, at the community level they’re an awful lot like us, doing what they’ve been taught is right or necessary or useful or productive or beneficial. In some cases we can educate them, persuade them, show them a better way. In other cases we need to mobilize, connect, reframe, intervene and subvert. So, to all the local activists in the world, bravo! You really do make a difference, and you are making the world a better place than it would be without you.
But if you believe that the sum of a million local efforts is somehow more than the sum of a million local efforts, I must beg to differ . For every local success there are many local failures, dozens of errors of stupidity and unimaginativeness and greed and ignorance and disinformation, that will need us to act to educate and persuade and mobilize and connect and reframe and intervene and subvert, next week and next year, to undo the damage that grows everywhere and every day. The battle of the local activist is always a heroic but rear-guard action, a minimizing of cumulative losses.
So, a scale-Becker nexus.
Commenter Jon Husband adds:
A real dyed-in-the-wool pessimist would (probably) not blog as prolifically, with as much advice and “solutions” to the problems, as do you…in my opinion. ... I think you are an activist, merely by the practice of writing regularly about the range of wicked challenges upon which you are supremely well-informed,...
Commenter David Parkinson:
One of the most surprising things I’ve learned is that a deeply pessimistic attitude is not necessarily an impediment to living a happy life and being effective. In fact, it almost strikes me as a precondition to a clear understanding of the limits of our powers and what we can reasonably expect to accomplish...
Amen.
More from Half an Hour:
the explanation for why we (as a species, as a network) die isn't that we were not "fit". It's the other way around. We evolve because we die; we do not die because we failed to evolve.
Also interesting:
I think it is uncontroversial to agree that, if there is an intervention by a third party, whether that party be a computer programmer or the hand of nature, then there will be a change in the way something learns. This is also true with students - if we feed them better, they learn better. If we give them Seroquel, there will be other changes. And we can call this learning, if we want. But it's not clear what we gain from that. Not all change is an instance of learning. The connectivist perspective, as I understand it, describes network-based changes in connectivity to explain learning. True, there is a different sort of learning that is created through the use of a sledge hammer. But that is not the sort of learning we are talking about.
And, against "the pragmatist suggestion that it doesn't matter whether or not a theory is true or right, so long as it works"...
we can (and do) talk of how to die a meaningful death. And if we just use whatever theory we want to explain these things, with no regard to whether they are right or true, then there will be cases in which it is useful (even if literally false) to speak of a meaningful death.
We might even begin to use this language to teach people (if you will) 'how to die'. Of course, they don't really need instruction in how to die - every person will accomplish this feat eventually. But we can with our theory talk about right ways and wrong ways to die. We can talk of a "fitting end" using the same language and metaphors of evolution. We can speak of a person's death being 'meaningful' if this, that or the other condition is attached to it.
This is what Dron is saying about learning. The very idea of teaching someone how to learn presupposes that there must be some purpose to learning. But really, what he means is something like 'how to meaningfully learn'. And meaningful learning presupposes a purpose. As a theory of living, the theory of 'meaningful death' is internally inconsistent. Yes, you can teach people how to live by teaching them that their death is meaningful. But such teaching can (and often does) result in people seeking death, or risking death, resulting in the ending of their lives. A consistent theory of living would truthfully reflect that a person's death has no meaning, and that the purpose if life (if the concept has any meaning at all) has everything to do with what is done during a lifetime, and very little with the manner in which it ends.
The same is true with a theory of learning.
From where I sit, a theory of learning which tells people 'how to learn' is essentially telling them that the way to learn is to not learn. It is a way of telling them to subsume their own best interests under those stipulated by some third party (where the authority of this third party is inevitably an appear to a black box or magical mechanism).
It is, in the end, a way of saying that learning is not actually a network phenomenon at all.
Now of course we know that actual evolutionary theory is nothing like what has been described in this post at all. Actual evolutionary theory doesn't trade in needs and wants and desires - it doesn't even presuppose on the part of the species a will to live or any such motivations at all. It says, simply, that mutations occur, and that some species that mutate continue to exist, and other species do not continue to exist, and this process is what explains the diversity of life today.
If you just think of 'evolution' as a 'family of ideas' that brings together every thought and theory related to selection and survival and the rest, it's not a leap to start describing things like 'survival of the fittest' as a part of evolution, and not far from that to describing things like eugenics as a socially worthwhile activity. It's the sort of thing that happened to Nietzsche, it's the sort of thing that happened to Darwin, and it shows that actually getting the theory right matters.
More
from donemmerichnotes,
linking to
on Becker's The Birth and Death of Meaning
Becker pointed out that people view the natural sciences positively because the fruits of their investigations make us feel powerful: they enable us to take control of our environment, cure and control diseases, build better cars, better cellular phones, more potent weapons, etc, and that feels good. There are usually clear, useful, and profitable applications of knowledge gained from the natural sciences.
In contrast, by studying ourselves, the social sciences often make us feel exposed and reveal things about ourselves, our fears, our flaws and limitations that we perhaps don’t want to know. In addition, because of political, moral, and practical issues, its not always clear what we should do with the knowledge gained about ourselves.
Dare I say this dynamic is palpable even in so sober a commentator as Lasch, and certainly also in some of the drunker things I've written here. Still, with sociologies of art there is usually plenty of room for asking, "What have we actually learned here?"
The Schimel doc seems like a decent alternative to actually reading this Becker book, given some very mixed opinions of the book on Goodreads.
I do have some questions though:
Becker saw one big distinction in the type of worldview that a culture can have. It can be one in which there is either a strong belief in the invisible world (a spiritual world beyond what one can see) or one in which belief in the visible world (the physical and material world) dominates. ...
Based on anthropological evidence, Becker posited that if you believe in the invisible world then that typically becomes primary and the material world becomes secondary because the former is where the power comes from. ...
This immersion in an invisible world allows for cosmic heroism wherein your heroism is potentially on a higher plane - it is on a larger, cosmic scale because your existence is in the service of something much greater than yourself. ...
In contrast, within the visible world, people strive for material bases of self-worth and identify with more fragile things (i.e., car, job, relationships, etc.). Meaning and purpose is less shared and less grand. Because the bases of self-worth are totally material, they also have the potential to be lost or destroyed.
Somehow visible gets equated both to material and to relationships ?
The materialistic visible world focus also leads to us to think that we know everything; that we know the causes of all things; but as Otto Rank pointed out, we really don’t. For example, we think we know where babies come from. We can provide a fairly detailed answer about how the sperm fertilizes an egg, which then forms into a cell, etc. But what motivates the movement of the sperm and the dividing of the cell? What energy and design motivates and directs the transformation of a blob of cells into a complex highly differentiated organism? We are still left with the miracle of life.
... The point Becker makes is that we may be too quick to dismiss the invisible inexplicable forces because even if we accept a scientific worldview, our explanations always ultimately rest on an invisible world of power that we can not directly see or fully explain.
While I'm all for living within one's epistemological means, and for scaling back our "efforts to try and control nature" (17), the above also seems to calculatedly elide the crucial concept of predictive power, and in its place to proffer the indeed much broader-but-weaker explanatory power.
True predictive power is the rarest of epistemological elements. It does, however, manifest from time to time, and at that point, within the scope of the given enterprise, I would think that the extent of our absolute understanding of invisible forces like electromagentism, subatomic particles, and epiphenomena of relativity would be irrelevant to the properly social-psychological issues raised by Becker et al.
We think that our perceptions, beliefs, interests, values, and customs are inherently true, right, and meaningful when in fact, as already noted in the section on cultural relativity, they are largely creations by people for people that are meaningful only because we all agree that they are. ...
If you like hockey and you are lucky enough to get tickets to an Edmonton Oiler’s game, you’ll probably cheer wildly, jump out of your seat, yell and scream as if it is the most important thing in life. But would you be doing that if you were the only one in the stands watching the game?
If the apostrophe in the team name didn't give away that the writer doesn't actually know anything about sports, this last faux-rhetorical question sure does.
Admittedly, sports do seem to be taking the same relational turn as the rest of mass culture, but I would conjecture that we are not quite there yet, and we that set out on the journey more recently than dyed-in-the-wool relationalists think.
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life—and herein lies its secret—takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
Milan Kundera
And so,
coming back around to matters bearing more directly on our long-term project here,
in the assertion of Christopher Small,
e.g.,
that
"The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening
a set of relationships,
and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies,"
we understand,
in light of Becker here,
both
the motivation for thinking so
and
the vehemence with which contrary assertions are denied.
On the one hand, we have an unparalleled capacity for terror and for understanding the human existential dilemma, and on the other hand, we have an unparalleled capacity for awe and creativity. Becker notes, however, that they are both overwhelming if left controlled -- we can’t really handle the awesomeness of reality --being a living creature among billions on a big rock full of plants and animals hurtling around one of millions of stars in a galaxy etc... so in socialization we necessarily mute the child in both directions; mute the terror and along with that, we also mute the awe.
If the world is irrevocably headed for connectivity and interdependence,
then,
the smaller the population
the lesser the anxiety.
At by least a little bit.
Just sayin'.
Becker struggles with the problem of what is the ideal meaning system, perhaps because there is no answer. ... However, Becker’s musings on this are worth thinking about. Becker notes that although religion, religious leaders, and social scientists come from very different perspectives, they converge on some basic points. They generally acknowledge human limitations and the contradictions of human existence and recognize that we need to be humble as there are things out there beyond our control -- and basic fears we all share. In addition, social scientists and religious prophets converge in their critiques of cultural fictions: they realize that most people invest in false cultural fictions in order to feel meaningful and valuable and that this leads to idol worship,...to prizing artificial things, and to defending these cultural fictions to the detriment of ourselves and others.
It is only the odder, in light of this, that Lasch, that prophet of "a sense of limits" and "a realistic appraisal of life's possibilities" as cornerstones of a just "populism", also vehemently defended certain "fictions" and sought to make a pathology of the "cool, detached, and realistic outlook on the world" which was in the process of superseding parental authority and making impossible "the affective identification of the younger generation with the older".
Becker felt that these cultural fictions lead the potentially “most free” creatures on the planet into a new kind of enslavement, that out of freedom people fashion a prison. Becker calls this symbolic reinstinctivisation. ...
One way to say this is that we give up freedom for security -- we give up the pure freedom of action to buy into a cultural worldview (or meaning system) so that we can feel secure. ...Becker’s analysis suggests we can never truly be self-reliant. Maybe that is okay,... But Becker wanted to find a way around this dilemma and considered 4 levels of power by which we can derive meaning...1. Personal meaning : “the secret hero of one’s inner scenario”...
2. Social meaning :consists of close family relations, friends, and pets
3. Secular meaning : refers to identification with something greater than ourselves...
4. Sacred meaning : the invisible and unknown sources of power, spirits and deities
... Becker argued that we rarely get to ask [where we fit into this scheme] because, when born...we lack the cognitive complexity to think of it, and by the time we mature, it has already been answered for us...
Becker then asks: What is the psychological value of the different levels of meaning? He offers these answers:1. Personal meaning : Being truly alone is unsustainable or pathological -- one can’t sustain it in the absence of social validation.
2. Social meaning: Depending on others is too limited and fragile
3. Secular meaning : This third level is typically used by most -- it is broad and grand enough to serve our needs for meaning and self-esteem, and death transcendence through symbolic immortality,... However, Becker claims it is falling short of ultimate reality and consists of living in a world of idols in which the bottom can drop out at any time.
4. Sacred meaning: Becker argued that the fourth level is the truest heroism -- cosmic heroism-- the most comforting and the one that can best serve the needs for security. With this, you link your own personal, invisible mystery of your depth and subjectivity to the highest power which is also personal, invisible, and a mystery -- and you have the possibility of literal immortality.
Well,
on which of these levels does Small's admonition operate?
And,
according to the above,
what is the particular limitation of this solution?
From Becker’s perspective, sacred meaning potentially allows for freedom from control by material and cultural influences because they are not your ultimate bases of heroism and security. Thus, spirituality can enhance individuality, self-reliance, and openness. However, there are two down sides:
1. The paradox of individuality-within-finitude is still there and haunts us. ...
2. Organized religion does not always lead to openness but can be automatic, reflexive, obsessive, and authoritarian. ...
Yep.
Becker argued that [sustain[ing] personal, spiritual faith without transforming that faith into rigid belief systems and idol worship] is very difficult to do. People tend to fall back into idol worship and can’t sustain the spiritual element. People construct statues and build churches and make distinctions..., thereby concretizing something that is really abstract. When these symbols are threatened, people respond defensively. ...people tend to protect the symbols more than the ideals the symbols were created to represent. So...Becker ends up recommending a personal spirituality not dependent on material trappings or social affiliations.
Oddly, without knowing much of anything or having thought through any of this in the ways it demands to be thought through, all it took for me to start to question the fitness of social affiliations for the weight customarily heaved onto them were some chance encounters with Social Theories Of Art. I continue to think this is an excellent lens through which to consider all of this.
He concluded by arguing that if we could sustain this, then maybe it could provide a basis for security that would lead to true openness and self-reliance.
Let's hope so.
But certain pessimistic conclusions are unavoidable.
This exaltation of
a personal spirituality not dependent onmost certainly is, as Fox says of Lasch,
material trappings or social affiliations
cognizant of the moral opportunities with which modern subjectivitybut it is not quite so
and the liberation of the individual self had made possible,
insistent upon the need to never valorize suchIn fact, these
liberal possibilities as foundational
.
possibilitescome to look
quite precisely
foundational
.
Also,
if
we rarely get to askwhich of the
4 levels of power by which we can derive meaningwe would like to pursue
until that momentous question
has already been answered for usthen there's no point at all
,
in speculating as to
the psychological value of the different levels of meaning
.
Rather,
this well-meaning search for
individuality, self-reliance, and opennesscan only end in accusations
that
the product of any such search is merely another
automatic, reflexive, obsessive, and authoritarianideology,
and that
the levels-of-power thereby rejected
are
merely the enemies one has invented in
the service of a divine cause .
In other words,
if
our own cultural realityis
just as arbitrary as the one we are judgingthen we might as well all go our separate ways.
,
Right on cue, from torpedo the ark:
a fantasy of immortality remains just that and, ultimately, no life matters and no great work will be remembered.
In other words, in the grand scheme of things, there is no grand scheme and Becker's privileging of religious illusion in which our animal and mortal nature is given spiritual significance - over what he dismisses as hedonistic pursuits and petty concerns - is just conventional moral prejudice
Also a link to this from THE GEMSBOK.
I'm not sure I agree with most of these criticisms, but the bit on "structuralism" may be helpful. This bit may be "reductive and dismissive," as the author grants, but goddamn it if anything less "reductive" could be halfway comprehensible.
And so, a yet further reduction:
a movement in Theory known as structuralism, whereby cultural objects...could be analyzed in terms of their overall structural content. What this often meant...was that people would approach analysis...as the search for big oppositional concepts...on which the object of analysis was apparently commenting. ...if you found the key oppositions and mapped their relationships, then you would have revealed the structure of that thing,... From a broader perspective, the project of structuralism was to discover common structures underlying all human thought and activity.
...
...critics...point out that the structures one might possibly draw in structuralist analysis are arbitrary...thus each analyzed work lacks a unifying center that holds the structure in place. Instead, there are as many possible centers that can be substituted for each other as there are possible structures...
To believe that one can map a definite, final structure for each analyzable thing is to buy into a couple very old (and very persistent) mistaken beliefs: that one can gain access to true objectivity (completely external positioning relative to an object of study) and that one can gain access to things-in-themselves (not as they are perceived by people, but as they truly are). But a human can never escape their own point-of-view, and will always only be able to see things as they appear to be.
A Rank/Becker Group from Comox Valley, BC!
Here is another useful summary of Escape From Evil.
(This was the final entry on the seventh page of search results. What more do you need to know about search engines?)
Many mentions of sports as an example of an "immortality-ideology" and of "moieties" a la Becker. I think we see less and less of this in sports today as it has become increasingly fashionable to "root for players, not for teams," i.e. as we continue to take the "relational turn" I referred to above. News flash for people veering around this turn: team sports are competed in teams, and there's no "I" in "team."
This comes from Imperfect Cognitions.
Ironic to say of a manifesto of negativity that it sounds promising or some such compliment.
Browing the archives, this caught my eye.
Can our sense of smell be a source of aesthetic perception? The majority of opinions in aesthetic studies will give you a negative verdict or ignore the sense of smell altogether. ... These reasons were largely twofold. First, aesthetic experience is commonly considered to be about features of objects, not personal preferences (Carroll 2001). In this context, the assessment of odor quality is held as being heavily subjective. Odors seem to represent phenomenological 'feels' instead of objects (Batty 2010). Second, aesthetic perception has a strong cognitive load. By contrast, olfactory percepts may not possess sufficient differentiation in their content. Rather, they are seen as presenting us with a synthetic experience of an immediate but undifferentiated sensation (Lycan 2000).
Fundamental to the aesthetic experience of odors is observational refinement. Contrary to popular opinion, we can indeed distinguish and assess different perceptual layers and qualitative dimensions in olfactory objects (like perfumes or wines). This often requires perceptual and verbal training, both involving cognitive or top-down influences. In fact, recent studies on the neural basis of smell have been increasingly supportive of these explanations, for example, regarding the impact of expertise on olfactory experience (Royet et al. 2013). In this context, I showed that an active perceptual engagement with odor objects shapes our phenomenological content, meaning that the perceptual structure between trained and untrained smellers can differ radically.
A good Populist might chafe at the top-down aspects of all this. And yet,
Overall, my argument about smell as an aesthetic sense emphasized an active, not a passive understanding of perceiving. Aesthetic perception rests on the refinement of attention in order to deliberately analyze, compare, and judge distinctive features of objects, further linking them to previous experiences.Indeed, it takes at least a minimal refinement of attention to be able to link present experiences with previous ones. Certainly this is so in an art gallery or a concert hall. But it is true everywhere else too! When anti-aesthetic deconstructionists rail against this process, they rail not merely against "refinement" but actually against the very possibility of forming the granules out of which analytic thought is built up. Which is absurd.
High-level takeaway: there is an awful lot of blogging by religious people!
Becker explicitly embraces a "dualism" which many have taken issue with. Here is something from Eastern Christian Books which touches on the d-word:
My understanding is that God created us with bodies for a reason. Man was created for an intimate relationship with the creator unlike any of the angels or heavenly hosts. The image in Genesis where God breathed life and spirit into Adam’s nostrils is the picture of a very intimate relationship.
According to scripture, this is the living temple where our creator dwells. It is washed in the sacred waters of Baptism, anointed with Holy Chrism and nourished with the Body and Blood of Christ. It is a temple beyond price. Yet, through pride and jealousy we throw away that intimate relationship and desecrate the temple daily. In the history of the early church and the Lives of the Saints we read that the faithful would “rush” to retrieve the bodies of the martyrs, often at the risk of their own lives. They would kiss and caress them, clean and anoint them and give them an honorable burial. The physical remains of the martyrs and all the saints had, and have, value beyond price. We have never thought of the body as a disposable container for the soul. We have never had a dualistic understanding of the body and spirit as separate pieces of the human puzzle. Human beings were created to be a whole being, body and soul. It is sin and death that causes the rupture. The Lord said, “My Holy One shall not see decay.” We have evidence from every age, all around the world that his words are true. All over the world there are incorrupt, often wonder-working remains of saints. Obviously, these are very valuable relics that would not be with us today if they had been destroyed by cremation. As an Orthodox Christian, my entire life is supposed to be a reflection of our Lord’s own extreme humility. It is to be lived humbly and selflessly as an offering of love. Each day I try to place my whole life completely in God’s hands and trust Him to guide me in the way wherein I should walk. I trust Him with my life, my breath and my heart beat. Can I not trust Him to properly dispose of His own earthly temple? In that regard, cremation is my final act of pride. By choosing to have my body burned, I decide what will happen to my remains, not God.
Really good discussion here from The Splintered Mind.
This from Essay-eh:
The author's idea about pursuing of happiness is simple: Don't. "The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience." ...
..."the 'backwards law' -- the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place." ..."The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centred and shallow you become in trying to get there."
... Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski developed the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Studying people who'd survived horrific experiences during WWII, he was surprised to learn that after the war his subjects felt more confident and grateful. They were no longer fazed "by life's trivialities and petty annoyances." This was true even though many carried lifelong emotional scars.
Manson also reports fascinating stories from the lives of famous people who overcame failure and despair, then went on to make great social contributions. Psychologist and philosopher William James turned away from suicide by deciding to accept responsibility for everything in his life. Failed university professor Ernest Becker described the psychology of human "immortality projects." On his death bed, he wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book called The Denial of Death.
Finally,
this
from
Wit's End
is REALLY good.
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