The Denial of Death (39 page)

Authors: Ernest Becker

BOOK: The Denial of Death

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But this brings up the second great problem raised by the therapeutic revolution, namely, So What? Even with numerous groups of really liberated people, at their best, we can’t imagine that the world will be any pleasanter or less tragic a place. It may even be worse in still unknown ways. As Tillich warned us, New Being, under the conditions and limitations of existence, will only bring into play new and sharper paradoxes, new tensions, and more painful disharmonies—a “more intense demonism.” Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and if men could become
noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing, they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven madmen have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolution touch the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in Russia, the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and ignorant populations of almost every continent? When one lives in the liberation atmosphere of Berkeley, California, or in the intoxications of small doses of un constriction in a therapeutic group in one’s home town, one is living in a hothouse atmosphere that shuts out the reality of th
e rest of the planet, the way things really are in this world. It is this therapeutic megalomania that must quickly been seen through if we are not to be perfect fools. The empirical facts of the world will not fade away because one has analyzed his Oedipus complex, as Freud so well knew, or because one can make love with tenderness, as so many now believe. Forget it. In this sense again it is Freud’s somber pessimism, especially of his later writings such as
Civilization and Its Discontents,
that keeps him so contemporary. Men are doomed to live in an overwhelmingly tragic and demonic world.

The Fusion of Science and Religion

Therapeutic religion will never replace traditional religions with the messages of Judaism, most of Christianity, Buddhism, and the like. They have held that man is doomed to his present fo
rm, that he can’t really evolve any further, that anything he might achieve can only be achieved from within the real nightmare of his loneliness in creation and from the energies that he now has. He has to adapt and wait. New birth will keep him going, give him constant renewal, say the Christians; and if he has perfect righteousness and faith, and enough of it spread widely enough among his fellows, then, say the Hebrews, God Himself will act. Men should wait while using their best intelligence and effort to secure their adaptation and survival. Ideally they would wait in a condition of openness
toward miracle and mystery, in the lived truth of creation, which would make it easier both to survive and to be redeemed because men would be less driven to undo themselves and would be more like the image that pleases their Creator: awe-filled creatures trying to live in harmony with the rest of creation. Today we would add, too, that they would be less likely to poison the rest of creation.
⁴²

What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object; as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist. What is unique about their perception of reality is that it is alive to the
panic
inherent in creation: Sylvia Plath somewhere named God “King Panic.” And Panic is fittingly King of the Grotesque. What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the k
illerbees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out—not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in “natural” accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusi
on that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness. “
Questo sol m’arde, e questo m’innamore
,” as Michelangelo put it.

Science and religion merge in a critique of the deadening of perception of this kind of truth, and science betrays us when it is willing to absorb lived truth all into itself. Here the criticism of all behaviorist psychology, all manipulations of men, and all coercive utopianism comes to rest. These techniques try to make the world other than it is, legislate the grotesque out of it, inaugurate a “proper” human condition. The psychologist Kenneth Clark, in his recent presidential address to the American Psychological Association, called for a new kind of chemical to deaden man’s aggre
ssiveness and so make the world a less dangerous place. The Watsons, the Skinners, the Pavlovians—all have their formulas for smoothing things out. Even Freud—Enlightenment man that he was, after all—wanted to see a saner world and seemed willing to absorb lived truth into science if only it were possible. He once mused that in order to really change things by therapy one would have to get at the masses of men; and that the only way to do this would be to mix the copper of suggestion into the pure gold of psychoanalysis. In other words, to coerce, by transference, a less evil world. But Freud
knew better, as he gradually came to see that the evil in the world is not only in the insides of people but on the outside, in nature—which is why he became more realistic and pessimistic in his later work.

The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don’t take life seriously enough; in this sense, all science is “bourgeois,” an affair of bureaucrats. I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the t
error of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know—with Rilke—that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow? Manipulative, utopian science, by deadening human sensitivity, would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory. And we know that in some very important way this falsifies our struggle by emptying us, by preve
nting us from incorporating the maximum of experience. It means the end of the distinctively human—or even, we must say, the distinctively organismic.

In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons. Not even psychology should meddle with this sacrosanct vitality, concluded Rank. This is the meaning of his option for the “irrational” as the basis for life; it is an option based on empirical experience. There
is a driving force behind a mystery that we cannot understand, and it includes more than reason alone. The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism. Science, after all, is a credo that has attempted to absorb into itself and to deny the fear of life and death; and it is only one more competitor in the spectrum of roles for cosmic heroics.

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. Or, alternatively, he buries himself in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems. But psychology was born with the breakdown of shared social heroisms; it can only be gone beyond with the creation of new heroisms that are basically matters of belief and will, dedication t
o a vision. Lifton has recently concluded the same thing, from a conceptual point of view almost identical to Rank’s.
⁴³When a thinker of Norman Brown’s stature wrote his later book
Love’s Body
, he was led to take his thought to this same point. He realized that the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence was in the time-worn religious way: to project one’s problems onto a god-figure, to be healed by an all-embracing and all-justifying beyond. To talk in these terms is not at all the same thing as to talk the language of the psychotherapeutic religionists. Rank was not so naïve
nor so messianic: he saw that the orientation of men has to be always beyond their bodies, has to be grounded in healthy repressions, and toward explicit immortality-ideologies, myths of heroic transcendence.
^‡

We can conclude that a project as grand as the scientific-mythical construction of victory over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science. Even more, it comes from the vital energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation—and it is not even in man’s hands to program. Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahe
ad or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.

References

Note:
As the following works of Otto Rank are mentioned frequently, for the sake of convenience they are abbreviated in the references as follows:

PS
Psychology and the Soul
, 1931 (New York: Perpetua Books Edition, 1961)

ME
Modern Education: A Critique of Its Fundamental Ideas
(Agathon Press, 1968).

AA
Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development
(Agathon Press, 1968).

WT
Will Therapy and Truth and Reality
(New York: Knopf, 19
36; One Volume Edition, 1945).

BP
Beyond Psychology
, 1941 (New York: Dover Books, 1958).

Excerpts from new translations of other of Rank’s works have appeared in the
Journal of the Otto Rank Association,
along with transcriptions of some of Rank’s lectures and conversations; this publication is cited as JORA.

I have also cited frequently Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
(New York: Viking Books, 1959) and abbreviated it LAD.

I have also abbreviated often-cited titles of papers and books by various authors after the first complete reference.

Preface