Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
[112]
Chapter Ten
CULTURE: THE RELATIVITY
OF HERO-SYSTEMS
"If the end of all is to be that we must take our sensations as simply
given or as preserved by natural selection for us, and interpret this
rich and delicate overgrowth of ideas, moral, artistic, religious and
social as a mere mask, a tissue spun in happy hours . . . how
long is it going to be well for us not to 'let on' all we know
to the public?"
William James
...
[113]
...: in things social, man is the only discreditor of man. ...
One of the main reasons that cultures can be so directly undermining to one another is that, despite their many varieties, they all ask and answer the same basic questions. So that when two different ways of life come into contact they clash on the same vital points. There are only a handful of such vital points or "common human problems" (cf. Kluckhohn, 1950);... One of the great advantages of being able to boil the human situation down to the same questions the world over is that it partly lifts the screen that divides us from other peoples and ways of life. ...there is what anthropologists have long recognized as "the psychic unity of mankind":... ...even if you can never actually feel and see as another, you can understand strange premises and see sympathetically why people do not act as we do. ...
[114]
...
The Six Common Human Problems
1. What is the relation of man to nature? That is, what are we supposed to get out of nature, and how do we relate to her and transact with her, in order to get what we need? ...
[115]
...
In Western society nature came to be looked on as a grab bag to be treated with scorn, or at least limitless greed. Nature was physical, not spiritual;... Man takes what he can get, and deserves what he gets. ... By treating nature as merely physical and one-dimensional, man also treats her products as mechanical things. The most that you get out of a tree that someone has "zapped" down with a power-saw is a nicely grained board. But a tree that has been sacrificed remains a "presence." ... We can only recapture some of this feeling by imagining that our Cadillacs were each named after a different god and radiated his power to our touch,... We would enjoy it all the more because we were under obligation to pass it on to another, and we would thrill seeing it go from owner to owner, growing in richness and beauty, happy only that it resided with us for a time. In comparison
[116]
to this experience of the primitive, the standardized possessions of modern man, despite all their glitter, are shallow. True, they become parts of our ego,... But they are essentially few-dimensional objects; they do not take root in an eternity or seal our union with higher powers.
2. What are the innate predispositions of men? ...what can one expect of them? ... Each one of us has a theory of human nature, or tacit assumptions about human nature, whether he is conscious of them or not, that permits him to navigate in the social world.
3. What types of personality are most valued? This is the basic question of status. When we answer it, it reveals to us the hierarchy of heroes in the cultural plot, into which we can strive to take our place.
4. What are the modes of relating to others? That is, how do we treat others, how do we join with them or against them in the social drama? This is the basic question of role. When we answer it, it reveals to us what we are supposed to do with our social lives, how we chart the worlds of kinship, friendship, and career.
Actually, we can see that questions two to four are all aspects of the same problem, and they have to be answered together. ...
[117]
...
5. ...: In what kind of space-time dimension does human action take place? ... Time can go in cycles and be renewed every hundred years, as in ancient Rome; it can be measured by moons, as among some Indian tribes, rotations of the planets, or by atomic clocks;... One can exist only in physical time, here on earth; or one can extend into spiritual and eternal time, and into the time dimension in dreams. ...
...a modern physicist understands space as spherical, extending to the furthest reaches of the universe and then curving back: somehow finite, yet unbounded and expanding;...
[118]
...; whereas for the Australian aborigine the land in which he lived was sharply marked out with sacred spots into which gods were reborn,...
6. ...: What is the hierarchy of power in nature and society ( and where do I fit into it)? If we don't get this question right we fail right away in all the others. After all, we are physical organisms transcended by nature, and if we are to survive at all we must immediately tally up the relationship of our powers to those of the world that surrounds us. The problem of power is the basic, natural animal question. ...
...life, from childhood on, is an exploration of the problem of evident and hidden power. Children are forever asking questions about the hierarchy of power:...
[119]
... "Can a space rocket kill God?"... they may seem to us idle because we know very finely the order of power, but to a child power is a mystery... As Cooley observed, children are interested only in evident power, which is the only thing that presents itself concretely to their minds, and so they admire pirates and desperadoes (1922, p. 324). ... When we grow up we have already established the hierarchy of power and rarely dwell on it, but merely live it implicitly. ... A person's whole sustenance comes to be based in a power source unknown or unacknowledged to himself. One of life's most shattering and self-revealing experiences is to have divulged to oneself the unconscious sources of his power:...
...
The Invisible World
Probably for a half-million years mankind has believed that there were two worlds, a visible one in which everyday
[120]
action took place; and a greater, much more powerful world—the invisible one, upon which the visible one depended, and from which it drew its powers. ... The problem of life, in such a dual universe, is to control and tap the powers of the invisible, spirit world. From earliest times this has been the function of the religious practitioner,...
In the West the belief in a dual universe lasted right up until the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and then gradually faded away,... If you ask someone "where" babies come from he will tell you that they come from the union of the sperm and the egg: so sure is he that everything takes place on tangible physio-chemical levels that he thinks that one causal link in a process of unknown origin explains that process. Do we know where babies come from? Do they not indeed mysteriously spring from an invisible void? ... We enter rooms, houses, theatres, stadiums, full of faces that were invisible eighty years ago—and yet most of us claim we "know" where they come from.
[121]
... there are signs that the scientific view itself may be bending . I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers. ... the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it . ... There seems to be empirically an invisible inside of nature from which powers erupt into the visible world from an unknown source. And since our bodies are all composed of elements which break down into atoms which break down into energy, it truly appears that we are constantly generated out of a void, that our physical form emanates from an unknown dimension which sustains it.
All of this seems to make the ancients less childish in their beliefs;... We are learning that the Bantu peoples possessed an ontology, a philosophy of existence, as sophisticated as any we can think up today—in fact, need to think up to explain the whole of experience. Once you retrain yourself to imagine an invisible dimension of experience, you begin to understand what the ancients meant by "heaven," the realm of timeless eternity. In the invisible world everything is more perfect, permanent, changeless. If you can get some of this eternal perfection to erupt into our visible dimension, it renews us: that is the basis of miracles—a break-through of power from the invisible world
[122]
that enriches and transforms our own. At the same time, it is a message, a message that the more perfect and powerful invisible world does indeed exist.
Ah yes, I had almost forgotten that this was written in the 1960s.
I agree that "materialism" will always be brought up short by questions such as, "Where do babies come from?" But I don't agree that we
need
an ontology
which
explains
the whole of experience
. Perhaps on the whole it bodes poorly for us ourselves if we do not evince a certain degree of curiosity about the "whole," but that is beside the point. If there will always be some level of material detail that we cannot explain, perhaps the lesson is: don't offer an explanation for the inexplicable. Thinking you have the answer when you can't possibly have it: that is where "evil" comes from, not from accepting that you have no answer.
As we keep reading, we find that this is Becker's conclusion, more or less:
Man's answers to the problem of his existence are in large measure fictional
(126)
anthropology has taught us that when a culture comes up against reality on certain critical points of its perceptions, and proves them fictional, then that culture is indeed eliminated by what we could call "natural selection."
(127)
the curious fact is that reality rarely tests a culture on salient points of its hero-system.
(128)
And of course,
One of the terrifying things about living in the late decades of the twentieth century is that the margin that nature has been giving to cultural fantasy is suddenly being narrowed down drastically.
(128)
Hence,
for the first time
[129]
in history man, if he is to survive, has to bring down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-systems.
(128-9)
You can also understand why primitives give spiritual causality priority over material causality, in all events that they cannot control: the real locus of cause-and-effect power is in the invisible inside of nature. So you turn your attention to priestly and magical manipulation of the spirits to try to get your world straight. ...
...the corollary to this is most important: people in the visible world can renew and augment the powers of the invisible one by proper ritual observances. In fact, their major duty in life is to the invisible spirits and gods : they must live and act so as to please these gods and to augment the gods' powers. When we put it this baldly it sounds humanly demeaning— the true tyranny of the departed spirits over the world of the living that characterized traditional society . And this tyranny was indeed a real one in life under the great dualism. But there was a positive side, and an important one. In traditional and primitive societies the family was essentially a religious group , a priesthood,... Every adult member of primitive and traditional society had a personal and family contract to help uphold the workings of the invisible world, in this visible one. All of nature and all the spirits were watching you. ...
[123]
... Even the small daily tasks were part of a larger scheme, with ramifications not confined to earth. Everything a person did was done , in other words, partly in heaven. ...
...
...imagining a space mission which would last a whole lifetime, or even several lifetimes, before the space ship reached another star cluster. The generations on board would surely expect nothing great for themselves on the ship, but would feel that their lives were justified as part of a duty to mankind, to cosmic life. This is the way traditional Christians looked at their mission to earth: nothing here was really for one's own pleasure or fulfillment—or at least only incidentally. As Bossuet so well summed up the Christian view, it is not that Christians are unworthy of worldly honors, but that worldly honors are unworthy of them. ...
[124]
...
Seen in this way, the visible world was like a stage with a rear entrance on one side, and an exit on the other, to the invisible, power world. The individual pops into physical embodiment from the entrance, comes to the center of the stage and plays out his life role. ... His whole performance on stage is a duty, and when his role is played out he exits by the far door and goes back into the invisible world of ancestors and gods.
When we see the closet-full of clothes of a departed dear one we may feel deep pangs of injustice:... Life seems an accident, its span useless, death unfair. But this is largely because we live only on the visible dimension; our lives are an intensified self-seeking for fulfillment and possessions, largely because we believe there is nothing else, and life itself is so precarious. But when clothes are merely loaned for duty to another dimension of things, the feeling of injustice dims, and is replaced at least partly by a sense of the proper. ...those who lived in primitive and traditional society could achieve even in the smallest daily tasks that sense of cosmic heroism that is the highest ambition of man. ...
[125]
...
..."How does the dignity, control, bearing, talent, and duty of my life contribute to the fuller development of mankind, to life in the cosmos?" Now we can see that primitive and traditional hero- systems provided a clear-cut answer to precisely this question; and we can also judge that modern society provides no easy answer, if it provides any at all. ...
[126]
...the heroics of the visible world are as fragile as are all material things, and as limited as a single life span; these are easily undermined, and when they are, the heroic is undermined with them. The crisis of middle- and upper-class youth in the social and economic structure of the Western world is precisely a crisis of belief in the vitality of the hero-systems that are offered by contemporary materialist society. ... With the breakup of agreed patterns of heroism, you see the emergence of all kinds of special heroics by sub groups, and private heroics by individuals—everyone decides to be heroic in his own way. Some understand this as anarchy, others see it as the genuine meaning of the idea of an "open society."
The Fictional Nature of Human Meanings
... "How can we tell which hero-system is best for man, or even true?" Yes, there's the rub,... Man's answers to the problem of his existence are in large measure fictional. His notions of time, space, power, the character of his dialogue with nature, his venture with his fellow men, his primary heroism—all these are embedded in a network of codified meanings and perceptions that are in large
[127]
part arbitrary and fictional. This begins in earliest childhood,... The symbolic, psychological world becomes... the contrived means whereby his real limitations are overcome. Here the child can grow, and grow to "enormous size" as he identifies with giants, gods,... The whole ego or self becomes indistinguishable from the cultural world view, precisely because the world view itself protects the finite individual against anxiety;... The mind flies out of its limits in the puny body and soars into a world of timeless beauty, meaning, and justice. And this is how men come to exist in largely fabricated worlds of their own contrivance, and derive their basic sustenance from these fabrications.
Monists eat your hearts out.
...can it all be a fiction, a mirage, "a tissue spun in happy hours" as James put it? ...von Bertalanffy wrote in a masterful essay (1955) that evolution would soon have weeded man out if his cultural categories of space, time, causality, etc., were entirely deceptive. And anthropology has taught us that when a culture comes up against reality on certain critical points of its perceptions, and proves them fictional, then that culture is indeed eliminated by what we could call "natural selection." When the Plains Indians hurled
[128]
themselves against White man's bullets thinking themselves immune due to the protection of Guardian Spirits in the invisible world, they were mowed down pitilessly. ...
But the curious fact is that reality rarely tests a culture on salient points of its hero-system . ...man seems to have been permitted by natural bounty to live largely in a world of playful fantasy. Whole societies have been able to persist with central beliefs that bore little relation to reality. About the only time a culture has had to pay has been in the encounters with conquerors superior in numbers, weapons, and immunity to certain diseases. ...
One of the terrifying things about living in the late decades of the twentieth century is that the margin that nature has been giving to cultural fantasy is suddenly being narrowed down drastically . The consequence is that for the first time
[129]
in history man , if he is to survive, has to bring down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-systems . ...
[130]
Chapter Eleven
WHAT IS NORMAL?
The Convergence of Sociology,
Anthropology, and Psychiatry
". . . culture consists in the sum total of efforts we make to avoid
being unhappy . . . defence systems against anxiety are the stuff
that [it] is made of . . ."
Geza Roheim
Anthropologists were never very popular at stuffy gatherings because they had a way of puncturing self-righteousness: for almost every timeless truth that one thought dear to the human heart, the anthropologist would name a tribe or a people who did not hold that truth dear—...
[131]
As we might expect, the grossest differences from our modern Western definition of "normal" behavior would be found among those societies that lived in a dual universe. ...
Little wonder that when psychiatrists set out to study mental illness in strange cultures, our understanding of these matters did not advance. Was mental illness entirely relative to the kind of hero-system a society lived under? It didn't seem possible, and on closer look, it wasn't. Cultural fictions can provide parts for the oddest types of behaviors, for the
[132]
"queerest" people, but every society has individuals it cannot tolerate. ...Ralph Linton once observed that when the French opened their first mental hospital on Madagascar, natives brought relatives happily out of the bush and handed them over to the French instead of putting them to death themselves, as had been the custom. For people whose life is hard, extreme eccentricity may represent a threat to the survival of all;...
But this is a sort of bare minimum global standard of psychosis, everyone can agree on it. It is when we leave it and go into the larger part of the spectrum of abnormality that our simple picture changes,... ...one of the characteristics of our times is that industrial civilization is spreading all over the world. This is bringing a certain uniformity of culture that is tending to standardize notions of what is abnormal, and tending to set up institutions to diagnose it and segregate it. ... Not only are traditional societies passing, but psychiatrists from these societies are being trained in Western medical centers,... We might say
[133]
that mental illness, like spying by a foreign power, tends to grow as we increase the numbers of people paid to ferret it out. With standardization of industrial culture, and with standardization of medical-psychiatric perceptions, we are narrowing and bureaucratizing the spectrum of normality. ...the way of life of traditional society often sheltered most of them, and when that way of life begins to break up, these people begin to emerge as genuine social liabilities. ...
... Is bureaucratic psychiatry in the service of industrial culture and nationalism going to have the ascendancy over the other sciences of human behavior? ... Can't relativity give us the basic, liberating insights into man that it at first promised? ...relativity can, but before we come to the end of it, in this chapter, we will appreciate why we have generally been so willing to tuck ourselves automatically under psychiatric textbook rubrics: to keep
[134]
from learning the things about ourselves that are the most threatening of all.
A Sociological Perspective on Abnormality
The first question we have to ask is what is really going on in society—what makes people seem queer and wholly unacceptable to us? ... The ability of some primitive cultures to accommodate the "textbook" psychotic types of shaman is simply an extreme case of adaptability. But what about the broad spectrum of others we call "mentally ill"—... ?
One of the major things we concluded in Chapter Nine was that the self exists in a world of social performance. People have to be able to play in their social ceremonials predictably and well. ...
Now, when we talk about someone who is "socially awkward" this is precisely what we mean—someone who was poorly socialized, poorly trained as a performer. ... In every situation there are
[135]
certain stimuli which must be excluded from perception. ...
People who have these heightened sensitivities, this inability to exclude perceptions, tend to be diffuse, vague, slippery: they don't seem solidly in front of us, don't oppose us with a convincing self with which we can transact. By the peculiar logic of social ceremonial, our interlocutor who does not have solid self-regard is a threat to us. ... Even while we insist that a man be humble, we expect this humility, as Cooley observes, to imply self-respect. Humility with self-respect means that the individual acknowledges something superior to himself, even while he believes himself to have value. Thereby, we can have faith in a hierarchy of excellence and be assured that life contains degrees of good and bad. ...
[136]
... Cooley quotes Shakespeare to the effect that self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting . If you lack pride you have no claim to social honor. There must be actors in our play if we are to feel its meaning, and not simply a stage propped with non-entities. ... we want others to claim a share so that we can feel there is something worth claiming . ...
[137]
...
... What we call the psychiatric syndromes are, from a sociological point of view, theatrical monstrosities to whom we cannot expose our fragile self-esteem. ... The depressed person actually shows up our whole social ceremonial by choosing to opt out of it:... ...it unnerves us that someone can be indifferent to everything that we cherish.
...
[138]
...
For all of these reasons we can understand that the sociological view of mental illness will depart radically from the traditional psychiatric one . It will center on the self, and on performance, as the primary deficits of the one we call mentally ill. As Erving Goffman so boldly concluded, the label "mental illness" would refer, simply, to those individuals "who are the least ready to project a sustainable self":...
...
[139]
The Fragile Fiction
At this point someone might be tempted to object: "But is this deficit so terrible—is the play really the thing, isn't there some deeper level of compassion or humanity on which we react to those who are mentally ill?" The answer is, for the most part, no. ... The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious, and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man. It is a largely symbolic creation by an ego-controlled animal that permits action in a psychological world,... Man's freedom is a fabricated freedom, and he pays a price for it. He must at all times defend the utter fragility of his delicately constituted fiction, deny its artificiality. That's why we can speak of "joint theatrical staging, "ritual formulas for social ceremonial," and "enhancing of cultural meaning," with utmost seriousness. There is no cynicism implied here, no derision, nor any pity. We must realize simply that this is how this animal must act if he is to function as this animal. ...
The most astonishing thing of all, about man's fictions, is not that they have from prehistoric times hung like a flimsy canopy over his social world, but that he should have come to discover them at all. It is one of the most remarkable achievements of thought, of self-scrutiny, that the most anxiety-prone
[140]
animal of all could come to see through himself and discover the fictional nature of his action world. ...
Despair and the Death of Meaning
...for every great advantage that his nature gives to man there is an underside, a cost that he must pay. Now we are ready for the biggest paradox of all,... ...it goes so directly to the heart of the human condition that most people cannot fully savor it even after reading and reflecting about it;...
... One culture is always a potential menace to another because it is a living example that life can go on heroically within a value framework totally alien to one's own. ...
If you reveal the fictional nature of culture you deprive life of its heroic meaning because the only way one can func-
[141]
ton as a hero is within the symbolic fiction. If you strip away the fiction man is reduced to his basic physical existence—he becomes an animal like any other animal. And this is a regression that is no longer possible for him. ...unlike other animals he has an awareness of himself as a unique individual on the one hand; and on the other he is the only animal in nature who knows he will die. ...despair and the death of meaning are carried by man in the basic condition of his humanity. It is an appalling burden which weighs most heavily, naturally, on those who are unique, most individuated... ; the pressure of the paradox is so intense in them that they live literally on the brink of distraction—which is what makes them so tormented, so unlike other men, and which gives them such "odd" beliefs:... It is an affront to all reason that several billions of years of evolution and a few thousand of history, plus the unique circumstances of an individual life, would create gifts which might have no more reverberation than the ripples off a beaver dam.
The problem of despair can be met only in one way, as we already saw in Chapter Seven: by being a cosmic hero, by making a secure contribution to world-life even though one may die. But if the fiction is discredited then one has no way
[142]
of triumphing over despair,... The thing that makes the fiction so fragile... is that it is the only rationale one has, the only defense against the despair that is naturally inherent in man's condition. And so we understand the problem. There lurks constantly on the fringes of heroism the doubt and discredit of that heroism. ... If he knew for sure how things were supposed to come out and where his part fit into the outcome, then he could relax and accept death because his life would be lived in the Truth of Creation. But this is precisely what he cannot know, can never know. And so the bitter defensiveness of his fictions, the desperation of his pretense of certainty that his cultural hero-system is the true one.
...the person's character is built on a denial of anxiety, loss of support, and obliteration. This anxiety stems from the child's smallness, helplessness, felt finitude. ... Character... is a reflex of the impossibility of continuing one's early situation. What we call character is really a series of techniques or a style of living, aimed principally at two things: to secure one's material survival; and to deny the fact that one really has no control over his finitude:...
[143]
...
...we must understand that for man it is not a question of "control" in any narrow sense but of the inability "to take in hand" the desperate paradox of human life. ... When man emerged into self-consciousness he could no longer, like other animals, take creation for granted. ... He would now have to bear the awareness of the miraculous instead of merely bovinely pulsing in time with the rest of nature. But, still being an animal, he still had to live like one. ... One direct way to counter despair would be to give in completely to the thrill of the miraculous, but this is as self-negating as to admit despair because then the animal couldn't function; he would be rendered impotent: we are just not constructed to function practically in the everyday world and at the same time to be overawed by the miraculous. ... Which explains something that often puzzles us, why children lose their natural sense of wonder so easily, why they "abdicate their ecstasy" as Mallarmé put it,... ...the first struggle against the power of the miraculous takes place by learning to conciliate and manipulate the parents, cut them down to earthly
[144]
size. We might say that the child becomes social partly by triumphing over the miracle of the parents. ...
... By the time the child grows up he has already banished from consciousness the sense that to have been created at all is an inexplicable miracle;... In order to function as a man in the world of men we must reassert enough animal equanimity to ignore both awarenesses: of despair as well as of miracle. There is no way out for us, we are truly "fallen" creatures: we cannot be wholly animals, serenely living miracles, or wholly angels joyfully heralding them,...
Kierkegaard is still contemporary because he understood better than anyone before or since that a man's character was a defense against impotence and the threat of madness; in fact, he is more than contemporary because most people will still not admit this basic truth. ... Erich Fromm said that all human strivings are an attempt to avoid insanity in the face of the contradictions of man's existence, all man's passions are an attempt to relieve the terrible paradox of his nature,...
[145]
... Or, as Rank had so much more fully and incisively analyzed it earlier, the polar twin fear of man everywhere: the fear of emerging into life and the fear of descending into death. ...
... The challenge of growth and change always goes back to one's earliest childhood, to his basic character. In order to grow he needs to renounce precisely that form of comfort and salvation that have become inseparable from his deepest values as these are grounded in the muscles and nerves of his organism. ... We can understand, then, that "getting over one's
[146]
Oedipus" is not a matter of simple reflection about his early family life , or even bringing to consciousness some of the most distasteful events of his childhood, or least of all a hard, rational scrutiny of one's motives. It is, as the Stoics and Shakespeare had already taught us, the going through hell of a lonely and racking rebirth where one throws off the lendings of culture , the costumes that fit us for life's roles, the masks and panoplies of our standardized heroisms, to stand alone and nude facing the howling elements as oneself—a trembling animal element. ...such a growth crisis has elements of a suicide crisis because if it is authentic, one's life is thereby already almost ended and it would be but a small step to completing the ending physically;... The question of personality growth and change, if it is deep-going and authentic, is usually whether one will end in madness or suicide or whether one will, somehow, be able to marshal the strength to take the first few new steps in a strange world.
Psychoanalysis and Society
It is over a dozen years since I read Roheim's famous definition of culture: that it was composed of the mechanisms of defense of an infant "afraid of being alone in the dark." ...when noted authorities in anthropology pooh-poohed Roheim I was relieved. ...
[147]
...
... With the discrediting of Freud's theory of sex, Roheim's attempt to reduce culture to aspects of childhood sexuality, or make inferences from the favorite sexual postures in a given society, could not go very far. More important still, there are urges in man that are not covered by childhood anxieties or the standardized beliefs of society. There is a sense of curiosity and mystery, a spontaneous natural delight, a stirring toward beauty and the unfolding of beauty, a pulse of hope that draws on natural wonderment—these things cannot be reduced to a reflex of fear. ... Of course there is always a large element of childhood conditioning in even the greatest genius,... But... these analyses—for all that they reveal... stop short of full satisfaction, as Rank, more than anyone, taught us decades ago (1932). Psychoanalysis is, after all, the science of the conditioned and not of the spontaneous , as Freud himself admitted. ...
[148]
...
But having said this the matter is not dismissed with easy satisfaction:... There is large truth in Roheim and in the whole psychoanalytic approach to society, if we read them broadly. The general character of a man, his life-style, his orientation in the world, the quality and scope of his perceptions—these are an attempt to deny his peculiar burdens. ... Since the child is partly conditioned before he can manipulate symbols, he is formed without being able to put any distance between himself and what is happening to him:... The result is that the person acts out his hero-style automatically and uncritically for the rest of his life—for the most part. Since his choice of mechanisms of defense, of a style of life, is the child's adaptation to superior powers , this choice does not reflect his own real feelings , his own true perceptions. In fact, it would be difficult to determine what these might be since, in large part, the child was not given the chance to have them. This means that the child's denial of his burdens is "dishonest," not fully under his control, unknown to him: his character, in a word, is an urgent lie about the nature of reality. His whole life is an attempt to "be cool" about his lie, to try to appear as though what he did made good, logical sense, and was the authentic expression of himself.
If we agree that this much of psychoanalytic thought is true... then it becomes easy to agree that Roheim was largely right about culture. Culture would reflect the particular style that a society adopts to deny despair, the particular ways it lies to itself about the nature of reality. ...
[149]
... If everybody lives roughly the same lies about the same things there is no one to call them liars : they jointly establish their own sanity and call themselves "normal." This total cultural style of denying despair is casier to see on simpler levels of social organization and in smaller societies where everyone is doing much the same thing. ...
It remained for Freud's followers to see that modern Western culture, in most of its forms, was just as obsessive-compulsive as some primitives: only now on the level of the visible world and not the invisible one. ...Erich Fromm went on to coin that beautiful, liberating yet empirical scientific expression: "the pathology of normalcy." Otto Rank held that all our human problems arose from man's ceaseless attempts to impose his fictions on the natural world , to over-control it. It was a great break-through in human self-consciousness, this development out of Freud, because it meant that man could now bring under critical scrutiny not only personal lies about the nature of reality but whole "social lies." ... Modern man is denying his finitude with the same dedication as the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, but now whole masses are playing the game, and with a far richer armamentarium of techniques. The skyscraper buildings, the cloverleaf freeways, the houses with their imposing façades and immaculate lawns—what are these if not the modern equivalent of pyramids: a face to the world that announces: "I am not ephemeral, look what went into me, what represents me, what
[150]
justifies me." The hushed hope is that someone who can do this will not die. Life in contemporary society is like an open-air lunatic asylum with people cutting and spraying their grass... , beating trails to the bank with little books of figures that worry them around the clock... This is truly obsessive-compulsiveness on the level of the visible and the audible, so overpowering in its total effect that it seems to make of psychoanalysis a complete theory of reality. I mean that in this kind of normal cultural neurosis man's natural animal spontaneity is almost wholly stifled: the material-technological character-lie is so ingrained in modern man, for the most part, that his natural spontaneity, his urges toward mystery, awe, and beauty show up only minimally, if at all, or in forms that are so swallowed up in culturally-standardized perceptions that they are hardly recognizable:... Modern man is closed off, tightly, against dimensions of reality and perceptions of the world that would threaten or upset his standardized reactions: he will have it
[151]
his way if he has to strangle the segment of reality that he has equipped himself to cope with.
...this is not mere impressionism or, least of all, personal peevishness: it is part of a scientific case being put forth by some of the leading minds of our times. ... Neurosis is a constriction of perception and action due to the need to maintain a positively valued self from within an inferior power position. And so we can flatly and empirically say that everyone is neurotic, some more than others.
The great break-through in the contemporary theory of mental illness is that it represents a kind of stupidity, a limitation or obtuseness of perception, a failure to see the world as it is... It is not a disease in the medical sense , but a failure to assign correct priorities to the real world . The neurotic bungles small quotas of reality, the
[152]
psychotic, large quotas. ...
In the light of all this we can today look back with a new tolerance at Ruth Benedict's characterization of some cultures as "megalomaniac" and others as "paranoid." ... Benedict ran into trouble because it seemed ethnocentric to pass psychiatric judgment on small primitive groups,... But now that psychoanalytic thought has developed to its inevitable critical conclusion, we can see that this line of approach has to be revived and made central to the global study of mental illness. If everyone distorts reality to some degree it is obvious that everyone is "sick," and general standards of normality cannot be matters of clinical judgment but are instead matters of cultural convention about the range and types of sickness that a society will tolerate. ...
[153]
... Now we see that the psychiatric nomenclature has to be applied not only to primitive societies, but turned on our own contemporary ones—... But we said that standards of normality are cultural, not clinical: how are we going to cut through the range of variability, the cultural relativism? ...
The answer would have to be to set up the highest possible standard we could, an ideal standard of health, and use that as a measure, a critique of mental illness. Then, the psychiatric nomenclature could be put to its proper use: it would work as an empirical measure within an ideal vision. Not, as it now works, as an empirical measure within cultural conventions ; which is why we are witness to the tragic uses of psychiatry as a means of social control of deviants... , or, at its most innocuous, as a way of fitting people uncritically into their standard hero-games... What, then, would be the highest possible standard? It could be nothing less than that of the most complete liberation of man: from narrowness of perception that prevents him from seeing a larger reality to which he must adapt; from rigid conditioning that prevents his changeability in the face of new challenges; from a slavish rooting in a source of power that constrains him and prevents his own free and independent choice; from uncritical functioning in a hero-system that binds his energies obsessively and that channels his life tyrannically for him. The syndromes we find would
[154]
then not be confirmations of psychiatric textbook rubrics, but a critique of society.
In other words, the highest possible standard of health for man would be a humanistic-critical one that would help him develop as a free, self-reliant, independent being;... ...the standard of health must at all times be "What is Real?" ...
But how can we hope to handle scientifically an evolutionary problem of such dimensions?—we who are ourselves culturally shaped in our perceptions of reality, we who are ourselves part of a normal neurosis, who must also struggle in a lie against despair. ...
I'm trying to keep annotations to a minimum, but let's pause to consider Becker's use of Psychoanalysis.
I very deliberately say "use of" rather than "reliance upon" or some such because the whole point seems to be that these conclusions do not "rely" only upon Psychoanalytic sources so much as it was Psychoanalytic sources which suggested some crucial connections with other bodies of knowledge, i.e. with Anthropology and with Existentialism.
Certainly I would be surprised if, specifically, the theory of early internalizations and the theory of mental illness presented here had not undergone some quite extensive revision in the interim. I have to plead ignorance on those points and fall back on my own meager resources. To me there does remain a heuristic rather than truly explanatory flavor to most of this. I have trouble believing it literally. But the ultimate conclusions here do not seem (not to me at least) to depend very much on the internal coherence of Psychoanalytic theory.
The question "What is real?" is not one I would volunteer to try to answer, but I don't have to. I think we can quite readily bring to bear some thoroughgoing negative empiricism in just about any area of "culture" as implicated here. We can at least say, if only we care to do so, that certain things in culture are not real. This at least holds some promise for liberation from the worst of our collective delusions. It is possible to observe, e.g., that when people today hear Lassus Trombone for the first time they do not hear an outrageous racial caricature. The piece's origin-in-caricature may be real as a matter of historical fact, but as a tone painting it fails to render its object reliably or in any detail, just like music almost always fails to do. If people are told of the history, this can "really" change their attitude. But if no one tells them, and if they don't make the intuition on their own, then I'm not sure there is a "real" problem here. There is surely a problem of warring "ideals," perhaps a full-blown problem of "cultural relativity" per Becker here,
but that is something else.
No comments:
Post a Comment