Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)
[xv]
Prefatory Note
Approaching death, Ernest Becker requested that the original manuscript of this, his final book, rest private and unpublished in a desk drawer, no energy remaining in him for any further barter with the gods. Believing the work to be an eloquent closure of his scientific literary career, Robert Wallace and I (with some initial anguish over the risk of irreverence) firmly decided upon publication realizing that had the time remained, the author himself would have done so for what he considered to be his magnum opus. ...
Marie Becker
[xxvi]
Preface
... In The Denial of Death I argued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil . ...
In my previous writings... I thought it was enough to use the unifying "principle of self-esteem maintenance." But... it was too abstract, it lacked body, a universal, energetic content in the form of specific, inflexible motives. These motives I found in the work of Rank,...
My previous writings did not take sufficient account of truly vicious human behavior. This is a dilemma that I have been caught in, along with many others who have been trying to keep alive the Enlightenment tradition of a science of man:... If man is as bad as he seems, then either we have to behaviorally coerce him into the good life or else we have to abandon the hope of a science of man
[xviii]
entirely. This is how the alternatives have appeared. Obviously it is an enormous problem:... to move beyond this to... some kind of third alternative beyond bureaucratic science and despair.
...if I have changed my views on many things, this change leaves intact, I believe, the basic premise of the Enlightenment which I feel we cannot abandon and continue to be working scientists—namely, that there is nothing in man or nature which would prevent us from taking some control of our destiny and making the world a saner place for our children. ... There is a distinct difference between pessimism, which does not exclude hope, and cynicism, which does. I see no need, therefore, to apologize for the relative grimness of much of the thought contained in this book; it seems to me to be starkly empirical. Since I have been fighting against admitting the dark side of human nature for a dozen years, this thought can hardly be a simple reflex of my own temperament,... Nor is it a simple function of our uneasy epoch, since it was gathered by the best human minds of many dispositions and epochs,...
Finally, it goes without saying that this is a large project for one mind to try to put between two covers;...
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... But... I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. ...
...
Vancouver, 1972E.B.
[1]
INTRODUCTION
The Human Condition:
Between Appetite and Ingenuity
What could we say in the simplest possible way that would "reveal" man to us—show what he was, what he was trying to do, and what it all added up to? I now see that we must make a clear distinction between man's creatureliness—his appetite—on the one hand and his ingenuity on the other.
... The upshot of the modern body of work called ethology... is that it reminds us... that man is first and and foremost an animal moving about on a planet shining in the sun. ... The only certain thing we know about this planet is that it is a theater for crawling life, organismic life, and at least we know what organisms are and what they are trying to do.
... Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed—a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. ...
[2]
... Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet,... If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. ...
Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist—... This absolute dedication to Eros , to perseverance, is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth, and because we are mystified by it we call it the instinct for self-preservation. ...in the words of the anthropologist A. M. Hocart, this organismic craving takes the form of the search for "prosperity" —... ...in man the search for appetitive satisfaction has become conscious: he is an organism who knows that he wants food and who knows what will happen if he doesn't get it,... And so we understand how man has come, universally, to identify disease and death as the two principal evils of the human organis-
[3]
mic condition. Disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is alive, and death cuts prosperity off coldly.
Extinction: The Dread of Insignificance...the unique paradox of the human condition: that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive organism;... But man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die.
Wanting nothing less than eternal prosperity, man from the very beginning could not live with the prospect of death. ... His culture gives man an alter-organism which is more durable and powerful than the one nature endowed him with. ...
... Man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life,... ...spirituality is not a simple reflex of hunger and fear. It is an expression of the will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because he has lived,...
[4]
... what man really fears is not so much extinction , but extinction with insignifcance . ...
... As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, "not so much from . . . fear of natural death as of final destruction ." But it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not. ... For a long time students of society liked to think in terms of "sacred" versus "profane" aspects of social life. But... there is really no basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of men . ...
[5]
... The reader has surely already seen the rub, and objected in his own mind that the symbolic denial of mortality is a figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood organisms, that if man seeks to avoid evil and assure his eternal prosperity, he is living a fantasy for which there is no scientific evidence so far. To which I would add that this would be all right if the fantasy were a harmless one. The fact is that self-transcendence via culture does not give man a simple and straightforward solution to the problem of death; the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression ... What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created . And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity , rather than his animal nature , that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes about, how man's impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.
[6]
CHAPTER ONE
The Primitive World:
Ritual as Practical Technics
The object of ritual is to secure full life and to
escape from evil. . . .
A. M. Hocart
... Even the voluminous brilliance of a Lévi-Strauss never really tells us why primitives are doing such complex and ingenious intellectual work. I have read only one anthropologist who has given us the larger view of the primitive world—A. M. Hocart. ...
Hocart... saw the universal human ambition as the achievement of prosperity—... To satisfy this craving, only man could create that most powerful concept which has both made him heroic and brought him utter tragedy—the invention and practice of ritual,... ...ritual is a technique for giving life. ...throughout vast ages of prehistory mankind imagined that it could control life! We scoff at the idea because we do not believe life can be controlled by charms, spells, and magic. But... just that we do not believe in the efficacy of the technique is no
[7]
reason for overlooking the momentous place that ritual has had...
The fact is that primitive man imagined he could transfer life from one thing to another,... ...ritual could generate not only bears or yams, or the life of the whole universe, but the individual soul as well. This is the meaning of the "rites of passage"... Life was not a curve as we see it,... ...very often death was considered the final promotion of the soul to a state of superhuman power and indefinite durability.
...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,... In the world of ritual there aren't even any accidents,... ...if life can be so subject to
[8]
chance, it mustn't have too much meaning. But how can that be, since we are alive and since creatures are so marvelous? Primitive man takes care of this problem by imagining that his control over nature is fairly complete, and that in any case nothing ever happens unless somebody wants it to happen. ...
As I see it, the history of mankind divides into two great periods: the first one existed from time immemorial until roughly the Renaissance or Enlightenment,... The second period began with the efflorescence of the modern machine age and the domination of the scientific method and world view. In both periods men wanted to control life and death, but in the first period they had to rely on a nonmachine technology to do it: ritual is actually a preindustrial technique of manufacture; it doesn't exactly create new things, Hocart says, but it transfers the power of life and it renovates nature. ... there is no need to postulate a mind differently constituted from our own. Man controls nature by whatever he can invent , and primitive man invented the ritual altar and the magical paraphernalia to make it work. ...
We call it magic because we don't believe it worked, and we call our technology scientific because we believe it works. I am not pretending that primitive magic is as efficacious for the control of nature as is our science, but in our time we are beginning to live
[9]
with some strange and uncomfortable realizations. Primitive ritual manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the universe, but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it. ... Besides, our belief in the efficacy of the machine control of nature has in itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are supposed to work, ... ...when they fail to work our whole world view begins to crumble just as the primitives world view did when they found their rituals were not working in the face of western culture and weaponry. ...
...
...passion for splitting things into two polar opposites that were complementary was a most striking and widespread feature of primitive man's social organization. ... A person belonged either to one half or the other, traced his descent from a common ancestor, often identified with a particular animal totem representing his half, usually married someone in the other half, and had rigorously specified types of relationship with people in the other half,...
...
[10]
...the primitive mind was just as intelligent as ours, just as intent on examining the minute facts of existence and putting order into them. ... Did we wonder at the complexity of primitive symbolism and social organization? Well, it was because primitive man tried to organize his society to reflect his theory of nature.
... Technically we call it "moiety" organization—a dry and forbidding anthropological term that makes the study of primitives so dull, until we give the term life... Lévi-Strauss too was taken with what he regarded as a natural tendency of the human mind to split things into contrasts and complementarities ,... It has given a great boost to the computer freaks, this binary tendency of the primitive mind, because it seems to show that man functions naturally just like the computer—and so the computer can be championed as the logical fulfillment of basic human nature,...
But Hocart did not get carried away into abstractions as many did. ...
Perhaps it is a law of nature, but that is not sufficient to explain the dual organization. . . . Nor does it explain the curious interaction of the[11]moieties; in fact it is this interaction which must explain the dual division ; 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.... The reason for the dual organization is so foreign to us that we may not at first see it: it was necessary for ritual. The fundamental imperative of all ritual is that one cannot do it alone; man cannot impart life to himself but must get it from his fellow man. ...
The deeper level of explanation for the dual organization is so simple we may not see it: it is phenomenological. 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. ... Man can expand his self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or demonstration of his own excellence. ... Anything that reduces the other organisms and adds to one's own size and importance is a direct way to gain self-feeling;...
By the time we get to man we find that he is in an almost constant struggle not to be diminished in his organismic importance. But as he is also and especially a symbolic organism, this struggle against being diminished is carried on on the most minute levels of symbolic complexity. ...
[12]
...
This explains too the ubiquitousness of envy. Envy 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. ...
...only if we understand how natural this motive is can we understand how it is only in society that man can get the symbolic measures for the degrees of his importance,... ...it is only by contrasting and comparing himself to like organisms... that he can judge if he has some extra claim to importance. ...
[13]
...
...why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that includes straight men for "joking relationships" and talented rivals with whom to contend for social honor... Sociologists have very nicely described the dynamics of "status forcing" and similar types of behavior, in which people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in... But you cannot force your status vis-à-vis someone else unless there is a someone else and there are rules for status and verbal conventions for playing around with status ,... If Hocart says that man cannot impart life to himself but must get it via ritual from his fellow man, then we can say even further that man cannot impart importance to himself ; and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing life:...
However, I don't want to seem to be making out that primitive society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self-aggrandizement, or that men can only expand their sense of self at the expense of others. This would not be true, even though it is a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. ...
[14]
...men in society manage to give to each other what they need in terms of good organismic self-feeling in two major ways: on one hand, by codes that allow people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outshine rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender human feelings...
But now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature worked—how well it served the actors who played the parts. We can really only get "inside" primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to play in the generative rituals. ... Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think
[15]
that the ritual generation of brown kangaroos is a valid causal affair, but the primitive feels the effect of his ability to generate life, he is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. ...our historical disenchantment is a burden that gives us a certain sober worldliness, but there is no valid difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books are written to support the distinction. As Hocart pointed out so succinctly, magic is religion we don't believe in, and religion is magic we believe in . Voilà tout.
What Huizinga did in Homo Ludens was to show that primitive life was basically a rich and playful dramatization of life; primitive man acted out his significance as a living creature and as a lord over other creatures. It seems to me like genius, this remarkable intuition of what man needs and wants; and primitive man not only had this uncanny intuition but actually acted on it, set up his social life to give himself what he needed and wanted. ... He staged the dance of life, with himself at the center. And to think that when western man first crashed uninvited into these spectacular dramas, he was scornful of what he saw. That was because, as Huizinga so well argued, western man was already a fallen creature who had forgotten how to play, how to impart to life high style and significance. Western man was being given a brief glimpse of the creations of human genius, and like a petulant imbecile bully who feels discomfort at what he doesn't understand, he proceeded to smash everything in sight.
Many people have scoffed at Goffman's delineation of the everyday modern rituals of face-work and status forcing; they have
[16]
argued that these types of petty self-promotion might be true of modern organization men hopelessly set adrift in bureaucratic society but these kinds of shallow oneupmanship behaviors couldn't possibly be true of man everywhere. ...I think these critics of Goffman are very wrong,... When you set up society to do creation rituals, then you obviously increase geometrically the magnitude of importance that organisms can impart to one another. It is only in modern society that the mutual imparting of self-importance has trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work;... Our own everyday rituals seem shallow precisely because they lack the cosmic connection. ... I think it is safe to say that primitive organization for ritual is the paradigm and ancestor of all face-work, and that archaic ritual was nothing other than in-depth face-work; it related the person to the mysterious forces of the cosmos, gave him an intimate share in them. This is why the primitive seems multidimensional to many present-day anthropologists who are critical of modern mass society.
...
As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out according to a particular theory of prosperity—...
[17]
... If you are going to generate life, you have to determine its principles and imitate the things that embody them. ... Very early man seems to have isolated the principles of fecundity and fertilization and tried to promote them by impersonating them. And so men identified with the sky or the heavens, and the earth, and divided themselves into heavenly people and earthly ones. ... The moieties stood for these opposing yet complementary principles. ... The point was that reality in the round had to be represented in order for it to be controlled. ...
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. ... 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.
[18]
...: "'microcosmization" and "macrocosmization." ... In macrocosmization man simply takes himself or parts of himself and blows them up to cosmic importance. Thus the popular ancient pastime of entrail reading or liver reading: it was thought that the fate of the individual, or a whole army or a country, could be discerned in the liver, which was conceived as a small-scale cosmos. ...
Microcosmization of the heavens is merely a reverse, complementary movement. 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. So, for example, animals were projected onto the sky, star formations were given animal shapes, and the zodiac was conceived. ...
...
...by means of micro- and macrocosmization man humanized the heavens and spiritualized the earth and so melted sky and earth together in an inextricable unity. By opposing culture to nature in these ways, man allotted to himself a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled him to transcend
[19]
his animal condition and assume a special status in nature. ...
... I said that primitive society was organized for contests and games, as Huizinga showed, but these were not games as we now think of them. They were games as children play them: they actually aimed to control nature, to make things come out as they wanted them. Ritual contests between moieties were a play of life against death, forces of light against forces of darkness. One side tried to thwart the ritual activities of the other and defeat it. But of course the side of life always contrived to win because by this victory primitive man kept nature going in the grooves he needed and wanted. If death and disease were overtaking a people, then
[20]
a ritually enacted reversal of death by a triumph of the life faction would, hopefully, set things right again.*
The Logic of Sacrifice
At the center of the primitive technics of nature stands the act of sacrifice, which reveals the essence of the whole science of ritual;... The sacrificer goes through the motions of performing in miniature the kind of arrangement of nature that he wants. ... If he does things exactly as prescribed, as the gods did them in the beginning of time, then he gets control over the earth and creation. ...
... The ritual triumph is thus the winning of a contest with evil. ...dice and chess probably had their origin as the way of deciding whether the king really could outwit and defeat the forces of darkness.
... Hocart comes back again and again to this point, that our notions of what is possible are not the same as those of archaic men. ...
*We will see later, when we consider the historical evolution of evil, how fateful these ritual enactments were for the future of mankind. By opposing the forces of light and darkness, and by needing to make light triumph over dark, primitive man was obliged to give the ascendancy to the actors representing light and life. In this way, as we shall see, a natural inequality was built into social organization , and as Hocart so superbly speculates, this gave rise to the evolution of privileged "pure" groups and outcast "evil" ones.
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... The whole thing seemed ridiculous to us because we looked only at the surface of it and did not see the logic behind it, the forces that were really at work according to the primitive's understanding of them. ... The key idea underlying the whole thing is that as the sacrificer manipulates the altar and the victim, he becomes identified with them—not with them as things, but with the essences behind them,... The primitive had a conceptualization of the insides of nature just as we do in our atomic theory. He saw that things were animated by invisible forces,... All he wanted to do, with the technique of sacrifice, was to take possession of these invisible forces and use them for the benefit of the community. ...
In a word, the act of sacrifice established a footing in the invisible dimension of reality;... Hocart warns us that if we think this is so foreign to our own traditional ways of thinking, we should look closely at the Christian communion. ...
I think here of an important passage from The Birth and Death of Meaning:
"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."
(120)
"the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it"
(121)
Less exaltedly but equally to the point, I recall a podcast guest, somewhere, who marshaled more or less the same points against "materialism." Materialism per se can't really ever say where babies come from. It can progress through a series of ever more detailed and predictive proximate causes but without ever getting all the way to something that could be considered an ultimate cause. Or something like that.
There seems to be more agreement that there is an "invisible dimension." But I'm not sure I buy the line that "materialism" or "western science" are also
necessarily
"religious" efforts to control this force. They
are
that, it certainly seems, as currently constituted; but they do not
need
to be, because there is plenty that can be done (most of the worthwhile stuff!) without total control or understanding.
"I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers."
(121)
Indeed. But this has not precluded the building of bridges or the flying of planes.
Materialism always comes up short. Indeed.
That is a feature, not a bug.
It does not purport to explain things that it cannot really explain.
Conclusion
...
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... Man used his ingenuity to fill his stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of his organism; this is only logical and natural. But this stomach-centered characteristic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. ... All of man's higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power. Nietzsche was one of the first to state this blatantly, and he shocked the world with it: that all morality is fundamentally a matter of power ... It is all right for man to talk about spiritual aims; what he really means is aims for merits that qualify him for eternity. This too, of course, is the logical development of organismic ambitions.
...
No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual emotions that man is capable of. ...
[23]
... But the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as Hocart would seem to make out. ... For most men faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organismic stomach project.
There is a small debate being aired in certain circles of anthropology today about the many ways in which primitive life was superior to our own. ... I don't want to go into the pros and cons of it... But it does help us to understand the primitive world if we agree to the old anthropological tenet about "the psychic unity of mankind"—that is, that man everywhere, no matter how exotic a particular culture, is basically standard vintage Homo sapiens,... ...having agreed that the primitive is no worse than we are, it might be in order to add that he is no better. Otherwise, as we shall see, we cannot really understand what happened in history,...
...
[24]
...I think that if primitive man was kinder 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 technics of manipulation was less destructive. ... If we talk about a certain primitive quality of "reverence" for life, we must be very careful. The primitives' attitude toward 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. ...
Probably more to the point, man has always treated with consideration and respect those parts of the natural world over which he has had no control . As soon as he was sure of his powers , his respect for the mystery of what he faced diminished . Hocart makes a telling point about the evolution of man's attitude toward animals:
... There is no objection to an animal's being the object of a cult when this does not imply respect but is merely a procedure for causing the animal to multiply. It is a very different thing when ritual becomes worship; man is loath to abase himself before an animal.
[25]
Hocart attributes this to "the growing conceit of man." But we could just as well see it as a result of natural narcissism. Each organism preens itself on the specialness of the life that throbs within it, and is ready to subordinate all others to its own continuation. Man was always conceited; he only began to show his destructive side to the rest of nature when the ritual technology of the spiritual production of animals was superseded by other technologies. The unfolding of history is precisely the saga of the succession of new and different ideologies of organismic self-perpetuation—and the new injustices and heightened destructiveness of historical man. Let us turn to this.
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CHAPTER TWO
The Primitive World:
Economics as Expiation and Power
Now that we have talked about how primitive man created or helped create natural bounty, we have to look at what he did with this bounty, how he applied his concept of the natural order of things in daily life in addition to performing it in ritual. ...The whole burden of [Norman O.] Brown's argument is to show that economic activity itself, from the dawn of human society to the present time, is sacred to the core. It is not a rational, secular activity designed simply to meet human survival needs. Or, better, it is not only that, never was, and never will be. If it were, how explain man's drive to create a surplus, from the very beginning of society to the present? How explain man's willingness to forgo pleasure, to deny himself, in order to produce beyond his capacity to consume? ... We know that many of
[27]
their choicest trade items, such as bits of amber, were entirely superfluous;... And finally we know that historically this creation of useless goods got out of hand...
Economics as Expiation
What was the "economic" activity most characteristic of primitive society? Marcel Mauss revealed it a half century ago... On the primitive level we see compellingly that social life is a continual dialogue of gift giving and counter gift giving.
To the anthropological observer the thing was simply marvelous: goods were shared and freely given; men observed the principle of social reciprocity and respected social obligations to the letter. ...the hunter who killed the game distributed it with pride and often took the least desirable part of the animal for himself. But often this continuous gift giving and taking seemed to the western observer to be perverse; a native would work very hard at the trading post to earn a shirt, and when he came back a week later someone else would be wearing it. ... Or more alarmingly, missionaries would find that na-
[28]
tives came to their hut and simply took valuable knives, guns, clothes, etc., without so much as a "thank you,"...
How could traders, missionaries, and administrators understand something that often eluded anthropologists themselves: that primitive man did not act out of economic principles,... Unlike us, primitives knew the truth of man's relation to nature:... Whatever one received was already a gift, and so to keep things in balance one had to give in return—to one another and, by offerings, to the spirits. ...
...why weren't natives content to live in the primitive "paradise," why couldn't man simply relax and consume nature's bounty, why was he driven from the very beginning to develop a surplus beyond basic human needs? The answer is that primitive man created an economic surplus so that he would have something to give to the gods;...
[29]
... When man gives, "the stream of life continues to flow," as Van der Leeuw so beautifully summed it up... In order to understand this, we have to abandon our own notions of what a gift is. It is not a bribe by one who is a stranger to you and simply wants to "get in good" with you, or by a loved one who wants to draw close to you...
Economics as Power
... Many people today think that the primitive saw the world more under the aspect of miracle and awe than we do,... But we don't need to romanticize about the primitive (whether truly or not) in order to understand his valuation of nature's bounty. We saw that the main organismic motive was self-perpetuation; it is logical that when self-perpetuation became a conscious problem at the level of man he naturally tended to value those things that gave him the power to endure,... Food is a sacred element because it gives the power of life. ...
[30]
... The gifts had mana power, the strength of supernatural life.
...to give and then to counter-give kept the motion going, preserved the cycle of power. ...everyone participated in the powers that were opened up—the giver, the community, the gods. ... The more you give, the more everyone gets.
This feeling of expenditure as power is not strange to us moderns either. We want to keep our goods moving with the same obsessive dedication... We feel that there is health and strength in the world if the economy moves,... Like the primitive, modern man feels that he can prosper only if he shows that he already has power. Yet of course in its one-dimensionality this is a caricature on the primitive potlatch, as most of modern power ideology is; it has no anchor in the invisible world, in the deference to the gods. ...
[31]
... The exchange of offerings was always a kind of contest—who could give the most to the gods of their kinsmen. We can see what this did for a person: it gave him a contest in which he could be victorious... ...it gave him cosmic heroism,... He was a hero in the eyes not only of the gods but also of men;... Roheim very aptly called this state of things "narcissistic capitalism": the equation of wealth with magic power. ...all this seemingly useless surplus, dangerously and painstakingly wrought, yields the highest usage of all in terms of power. ...
...in the strict utilitarian sense in which we understand the term, primitive "work" cannot be economic;... Primitive man worked so that he could win a contest in which the offering was made to the gods; he got spiritual merit for his labors. ... Sometimes a chief would even offer his own life to appease an injured party in a quarrel; his role was often nothing else than
[32]
to be a vehicle for the smooth flow of life in the tribe. ...primitive man immersed himself in a network of social obligations for psychological reasons. Just as Rank said, man has to have a core psychological motive for being in the group in the first place, otherwise he would not be a group-living animal . Or as Brown, who likes to call a spade a spade, put it, "man entered social, organization in order to share guilt. Social organization . . . is a structure of shared guilt . . . a symbolic mutual confession of guilt." ...
The Nature of Guilt
But this kind of picture risks putting primitive man even further beyond our comprehension, even though it seems logically to explain what he was doing. The problem is in the key motive, guilt. Unless we have a correct feeling for what guilt is,... the sacred nature of primitive economics may escape us. ...[Brown] draws partly on Nietzsche and Freud, and some of their scorn of guilt as a weakness seems to have rubbed off on him. Even more seriously, by his own admission he does not have any theory of the nature of guilt... even though he bases his whole argument on it. ...
This is one explanation of guilt that comes from psychoanalysis:
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the child in his boundless desires for gratification can't help feeling love for those who respond to him; at the same time, when they inevitably frustrate him for his own good, he can't help feeling hate and destructive impulses toward them, which puts him in an impossible bind. ...
One of the reasons guilt is so difficult to analyze is that it is itself "dumb." It is a feeling of being blocked, limited, transcended, without knowing why. ... Man experiences this uniquely... ...the world of men is even more dazzling and miraculous in its richness than the awesomeness of nature. Also, subordinacy [to one's culture] comes naturally from man's basic experiences of being nourished and cared for; it is a logical response to social altruism . ... An attitude of humble gratitude is a logical one to assume toward the forces that sustain one's life;...
Another reason that guilt is so diffuse is that it is many different things: there are many different binds in life. ... Man also experiences guilt because he takes up space and has unintended effects on others—...
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... To use Rank's happy phrase, this is guilt we feel for being a "fate-creating" object. ...our wives and children are a burden of guilt because we cannot possibly foresee and handle all the accidents, sicknesses, etc., that can happen to them;... the world is too much with us.
If we feel guilt when we have not developed our potential, we also are put into a bind by developing too much. Our own uniqueness becomes a burden to us; we "stick out" more than we can safely manage. ... Man is... the animal whose development is not prefigured by instincts, and so he is open to becoming what he can. This means literally that each person is already somewhat "ahead of himself" simply by virtue of being human and not animal . ...even the average person in any society is already more of an individual than any animal can be;... We might say that the development of life is life's own burden.
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I linger on these ontological thoughts for a very good reason: they tell us what is bothering us deep down. ... I believe Levin is right when he says that "it is a crime to own a head" in society; historically societies have not tolerated too much individuation , especially on primitive levels. ...probably the underlying thing that the various forms of head-taking have in common is that the head is prized as a trophy precisely because it is the most personal part, the one that juts most prominently out of nature. ...a destruction of individuality at its most intensive point,... If we extend these thoughts one logical step, we can understand a basic psychoanalytic idea that otherwise seems ridiculous: "in the eyes of culture, to live is a crime." ...
If we take all this into view, we should find more palatable to our understanding what Brown meant when he said that social organization was a structure of shared guilt, a symbolic mutual confession of it. Mankind has so many things that put it into a bind that it simply cannot stand them unless it expiates them in some way. ...
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...the main general characteristic of guilt is that it must be shared: man cannot stand alone. ... We can conclude that primitives were more honest about these things—about guilt and debt—because they were more realistic about man's desperate situation vis-à-vis nature. Primitive man embedded social life in a sacred matrix not necessarily because he was more fearful or masochistic than men in later epochs, but because he saw reality more clearly in some basic ways.
Once we acknowledge this, we have to be careful not to make too much of it; I mean that group living through the motive of guilt is not all humble and self-effacing. ... If guilt is the experience of fear and powerlessness, then immersing oneself in a group is one way of actively defeating it:... From the beginning of time the group has represented big power, big victory, much life.
Heroism and Repentance: The Two Sides of Man
...primitive man allocated to himself the two things that man needs most: the experience of prestige and power that constitutes
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man a hero, and the experience of expiation that relieves him of the guilt of being human. ... Man worked for economic surplus of some kind in order to have something to give. ...he achieved heroism and expiation at the same time, like the dutiful son who brings home his paper-route earnings and puts them in the family coffer. ...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.
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CHAPTER THREE
The Origin of Inequality
If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its
chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed,
sacred obligations which appear as objective
realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion.
Norman O. Brown
The origin of inequality among men! This was the question that excited thinkers of the eighteenth century as they combed the globe trying to find humanity in an uncorrupted state. ...
Nobody was very happy with the way history and civilization had turned out, and many thinkers of that time supposed that if the first steps in the process of the oppression of man by man could be pinpointed, then the decay of civilization might be arrested and even reversed. ...
...Rousseau, with his uncanny intuition of what was significant, began it all with his famous "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men" (1755). ...
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...Rousseau failed to bring about what he hoped for, and so too did the whole tradition which followed him; and I want to sum up why it failed.
The Marxist tradition seized on Rousseau's work because it was exactly what the Marxists needed: the accusation that the state acted tyrannically to hold men in bondage, deprived them of the fruits of their labors, and distributed these fruits mostly among the elite. ...
But the great disillusionment of our time is that none of this has led to the liberation of man. ...the great revolutions of our time... have not led to the disappearance of the state, and so they have not led to human equality and freedom.
... We have had to conclude that the question of the origin of inequality among men was not answered by the Marxist tradition. This... is what prompted the work of... the Frankfurt school... , "the union of Marx and Freud."
...the state is not man's first and only enemy,
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but he himself harbors an "enemy within." Brown...
...if force did not establish the domination of the master, then perhaps the slave is somehow in love with his own chains . . . a deeper psychological malady.
...
... Rousseau himself gave one of the very first psychological explanations in his famous essay. ...
The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
...the point is that Rousseau doesn't say that the person took the land by force, but rather because of something in the minds of those around him . ...he places wealth at the last stage and "personal qualities" at the first stage:...
The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality. . . .
...
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... Shortly after Rousseau wrote, Adam Ferguson came out with his famous work on social history where he too argued that social inequality was relatively absent on primitive levels because property was comparatively absent. ... Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence, and influence always stems from personal qualities:...
Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit. ... The elaborate decorations of the warrior and hunter were not aimed to make him beautiful, but to show off his skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. ...
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...
... Remember that as children we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neighborhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing that grown men want most—wives. They got them more easily than did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was common property of the tribe. And so on.
...there is little agreement on how exactly class society came into existence. There is general agreement on what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is shrouded in mystery. ... The most sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and
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stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing; it just "happened," gradually and ineluctably. The vital question, then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it was allowed to happen , what there was in human nature that went along so willingly with the process.
The answer to this question seems to me remarkably straightforward. I have said that primitive man recognized differences in talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat, granted them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. ... If you identified with these persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history: he is the one who gambles with his very life and successfully defies death,...
...we can now see how fanciful the idea is that in the "state of nature" man is free and only becomes unfree later on. Man never was free and cannot be free from his own nature. ... As Rank so well taught us, Rousseau simply did not understand human nature in the round: he "was not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison. . . . " ... We have to say, with Rank, that primitive religion "starts the first class distinction." ...
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... The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings.
...
Power Figures and Power Sources
...in a spiritual cosmology power is relatively undisguised: it comes from the pool of ancestors and spirits. In our society power resides in technology, and we live and use the artifacts of technology so effortlessly and thoughtlessly that it almost seems we are not beholden to power—until, as said earlier, something goes wrong with an airplane, a generator, a telephone line. Then you see our "religious" anxiety come out.
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...
...for the primitive it was often the dead who had the most power. In life the individual goes through ritualistic passages to states of higher power and greater importance as a helper of life. For many primitives death is the final promotion to the highest power of all, the passage into the invisible world of the spirits and the ability to use and manipulate the visible world from their new abode.* ...
...
One of the first things a child has to learn is how much power
*... Some tribes fear the dead for only a little while immediately after death, and then they are thought to become weak. Some tribes fear especially those spirits who represent unfinished and unfulfilled life,... Radin offers a frankly interactionist point of view by saying that the dead are feared because they cannot be controlled as well as when they were alive. ...
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he has and how much exists in others and in the world. ...power becomes the basic category of being for which he has, so to speak, a natural respect: if you are wrong about power, you don't get a chance to be right about anything else;... Anthropology discovered that the basic categories of primitive thought are the ideas of mana and taboo, which we can translate simply as "power" and "danger"...
But power is an invisible mystery . It erupts out of nature in storms, volcanoes, meteors, in springtime and newborn babies; and it returns into nature in ashes, winter, and death. The only way we know it is there is to see it in action. And so the idea of mana, or special power erupting from the realm of the invisible and the supernatural, can only be spotted in the unusual, the surpassing, the excellent,... ...the most immediate place to look for the eruptions of special power is in the activities and qualities of persons; and so, as we saw, eminence in hunting, extra skill and strength, and special fearlessness in warfare right away marked those who were thought to have an extra charge of power...
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The most unashamed pretender to supernatural powers was, on the primitive level, the medicine man, or shaman. He invented the specialty of entering into the world of the dead and coming back from it unharmed;... The shaman was the hero who "died" and was reborn unfailingly, who thus regularly acted out man's triumph over death and evil,... Nothing strikes greater terror into man's heart than to witness an eruption of power from the depths of nature that he cannot understand or control—whether it is lava erupting from a volcano or the foam and convulsions of an epileptic. ... The shaman was the mystifier par excellence , and it was only logical that he should often be more powerful than chiefs,...
Radin's writings on the origins of inequality are the most sensitively probing and ruthless that I know. In his view primitive society was from the very beginning a struggle by individuals and groups for special privileges—... The elders always tried to arrange these for their own benefit, and so did the shamans. ... How does one get maximum power in a cosmology where ritual is the technics that manufactures life? Ob-
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viously by getting control of the formulas for the technics. ... In his brilliant chapter "The Crises of Life and Their Rituals" Radin argues that the religious systematizer built his symbolic interpretations around the crises of life,... where everything had to go smoothly in order for a flowering out or birth into a new status to take place. And so the puberty and the death rituals came to be surrounded by the greatest importance, wherein lay the greatest possibilities of bungling. ... Talking about puberty rites of the Australian aborigines he says:
. . . over and above all other reasons is the somewhat cynically expressed purpose of the old men of having novices supply them, for many years, with regular presents in the form of animal food, of reserving the choice dishes for themselves by the utilization of the numerous food taboos imposed on the younger people, and, finally, of keeping the young women for themselves.
And again, with another tribe,...
Rather . . . specific individuals banded together formally or informally, individuals who possess a marked capacity for articulating their ideas and for organizing them into coherent systems, which, naturally, would be of profit to them and to those with whom they are allied.
...Radin's views ...put closure on the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of inequality. Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive world had to break up because of man's burning ambition to improve himself to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection.
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Ferguson's was a very straightforward and unburdened view of man. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change his position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance;... ...the most immediate way to do this is in one's immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this isn't true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. But this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in the ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the world around it . Rousseau and Hobbes were right, evil is "neutral" in origin, it derives from organismic robustness—but its consequences are real and painful.
What Radin did was to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. ... Seen in this way, social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others . What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psychological dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history; it would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a "social contract" forged in desire and fear . The central question of such 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? We can see how naive the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it doesn't begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. ...
And so Brown could offer his own biting criticism of Rousseau:
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If the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from "primitive communism" to "private property" but in the transition from ape to man .
That is, from a type of animal that had no notion of the sacred to one that did . And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a psychological spell , not by physical coercion . As Brown puts it, "Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment." Thus Brown could conclude—in the epigraph we have borrowed for this chapter—that the chains that bind men are self-imposed.
If we left this idea unadorned, it would still need explaining: why are men so eager to be mystified, so willing to be bound in chains? The bind is explained by one idea,... : the phenomenon of transference.*
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. ...—it is all lived truth, an animal's reaction to the majesty of creation. If anything is false about it, it is the fact that thousands of human forms feel inferior and beholden to an identical, single human form.
In all this I am not negating the pure Marxian side of historical
*For a more detailed examination of the nature of transference please see my extensive summary in chap. 7 of The Denial of Death ...
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domination;... But there can never be a way of relieving or eliminating the domination of structures of power without coming to grips with the spell of power, a spell that explains voluntary self-alienation whether it deals with spirits or with Soviets. ...Marxism has to come to grips with the conservative argument: that there is something in human nature that invites inequality no matter what we do. ...as I would say with Rank, men are "fate-creating" agents: they coerce by simply existing ;... We can sum all this up in one sentence that presents to narrow Marxism the most fundamental challenge it has faced: men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation . What is the shape of a revolutionary philosophy of history that would begin to take full account of that?
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