Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
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Chapter Twelve
WHAT WOULD A SCIENCE
OF MAN THEN BE?
The Merger of Social, Psychological, and
Political Theory
"The real possibility is one which can materialize, considering the
total structure of forces interacting in an individual or in a society.
The real possibility is the opposite of the fictitious one which
corresponds to the wishes and desires of man but which, given the
existing circumstances, can never be realized."
Erich Fromm
(1964, p. 140)
One
thing that right away lightens the burden of our inquiry into the real is that all of human evolution and history has been a search for the true interrelationships of things; we have been probing reality for hundreds of thousands of years. When man found that certain ways of doing things worked to bring him satisfaction and survival, these ways became true and right; ways that didn't work became false and wrong. And so moral codes grew up around the interrelationships of things, theories of good and evil that tried to separate the real from the illusory.
The curious thing about this long search for reality, as
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anthropologists have long known, is that a large part of it was accidental. Primitive man did not know the interrelationships of things in many areas of his life, and he thought these interrelationships were primarily invisible and spiritual. As a result, when something important did not work, he looked for any clues he could get, any kind of chance hints and associations.
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The second curious thing about accidental causal explanations is that they did not vanish from the earth with prehistoric evolution, but remained an intimate part of human beliefs all through human history, right up to yesterday, so to speak. The Athenian civilization that we so much admire for its noble reason began to expire in the blood of its soldiers on the beaches of Sicily, while its admirals cut open chickens to try to get a good entrail reading for a propitious time of departure.
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