In the midst of death
In summers, I try to read books that I probably wouldn’t get to or through during the academic year, whether or not they’re directly relevant to whatever summer research I’m doing. This year I’m starting light – Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973) and Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski’s The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015). I finished Becker’s book the other day, and it’s got me going in a way I didn’t expect.
Becker’s main argument is that, among animals, humans are uniquely driven by their knowledge of their eventual death. This means we not only experience terror at the time death may be near, as other animals do, but constantly as a result of, for example, reminders of the frailty and mortality of our physical forms. Thus, Becker spends a lot of time counterarguing Freud’s obsession with sexual anxiety as the core of human psychological dysfunction; instead, Becker says, sex and other bodily functions are reminders of our inescapable “creatureliness,” which is linked with the necessity of our deaths. I’m not going to write a book report here as there are much better sources, but I will note that I appreciate the frequency with which Becker repeats and revisits this conclusion throughout the book, in connection with ideas pulled from philosophy, anthropology, theology, psychology, and more. That he does this in entertaining prose is also welcome – as he at times counters the likes of Freud, Jung, and Norman O. Brown, he strikes something of an “And Brutus is an honourable man” tone:
There seems to be so much truth in the Freudian world view, and at the same time so much of it seems so wrong-headed. The ambiguities of Freud’s legacy were not in the wrong ideas that he had, since it has been relatively easy to lay these aside; the problem has been in his brilliantly true insights, which were stated in a way that they fell just to one side of reality; and we needed an immense amount of work and clarification in order to bring the two into line.
Instead, I want to focus on one area of potential current application that I am thinking about and two major shortcomings of the work. I’ve been thinking a lot about whether and how 2020 might be instructive for 2024 in American politics, given how out of range most things about 2020 were. Much of the discourse on this has focused on the wild economic effects of the pandemic and the way that Black Lives Matters protests may have mobilized marginal voters.1 The pandemic itself and especially the constant presence of death in our thoughts are often seen as afterthoughts – even the massive death toll that can be attributed to public policy decisions. Becker’s insights are directly applicable here, and though I’ve only just begun Solomon, Solomon, and Pyszczynski’s book, it appears they have done some of the application (not to 2020 voting specifically) within their terror management theory framework.
But the priming of death maybe contributing to 2020 isn’t the only application of interest. More generally, I’m interested in the ways that “safety” has become an omnipresent frame in our politics, conceptualized in many different and sometimes mutually exclusive ways, despite death itself being much less commonplace than it was even in the mid-20th century. Dangers and risks are historically low right now and have been for a couple decades, and even a little longer if we focus specifically on health. The US infant mortality rate in 1950 was about 32 per 1,000 live births; last year it was about 5.5. So where is this coming from? It would be easy to construct a just-so story about 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, about the racist backlash to the election of the first Black president, about untreated mental illness, etc. Becker suggests something else – that this progress actually makes death a more salient anxiety. Writing about utopian ideologies, and specifically those that promise indefinite corporeal lives, he quotes Jacques Choron noting that postponement of death (as modern medical advances and reductions in violent interactions do) does not eliminate death. Becker continues in his own words:
The smallest virus or the stupidest accident would deprive a man not of 90 years but of 900—and would be then 10 times more absurd. … If something is 10 times more absurd it is 10 times more threatening. In other words, death would be “hyper-fetishized” as a source of danger, and men in the utopia of longevity would be even less expansive and peaceful than they are today!
In 2024, “today” is a world in which many people grasp at shadows, looking not for comfort but for fear. Real risks are fewer, and Becker (building on Nathaniel Southgate Shaler) suggests we seek to make that up with increased imaginary risks, both to ourselves and the social identities and cultural structures that buttress our quests for symbolic immortality.
I encountered Becker’s book in Dannagal Young’s Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation (2023), where she connected it (and terror management theory) to the need for control, specifically in the face of consciousness of one’s own mortality. This may involve, for example, explaining away real dangers, such as climate change or COVID. But she also notes that maintenance of cultural worldviews and community standing is vital to the processes Becker identifies, which creates the need for enemies that can justify the threat we feel from the nature of life itself. In Young’s book, this is about explaining misperception – that is, our drive not to be correct in our beliefs, but to be validated by them. But more generally, this is something that may help to explain a lot about 21st century American politics and the tools political elites have developed and refined in recent decades. What I like about the potential here is that this isn’t a replacement explanation for anything else – elite polarization, identity alignment, the decline of journalism, etc. By positing fear of death as “present behind all our normal functioning,” Becker attempts to fill a gap that political communication and public opinion scholars have mostly not even noticed.2
All that said, I’m given pause by a couple things that I hope further reading will clear up. First, like much of what he draws on, Becker relies on weak to non-existent empirical support, instead reasoning his way to conclusions with what was generally understood about human social psychology at the time. But for a book about humanity’s mind/body duality, he gives essentially no room to neuroscience or psychopharmacology – that is, the physical foundation of the mind’s operations. Becker was writing more than a decade before the first SSRI was briefly available on the market, so it’s not totally surprising; however, it does cast his treatment of mental illness in almost a pre-modern light. And indeed, to the extent that he relies on Freud and other psychologists of that era, much of the work is far too credulous – you will probably want to overlook chapter 7’s section on hypnotism.
The other thing I’m going to give short shrift to, because full shrift would be an entire article. Women scarcely exist in Becker’s work except as objects. He uses the term “man” for a generic person throughout, and most of the time it feels reasonably attributed to such gendered language being the norm of the time. And then he’ll suddenly be in a situation where it’s clear he means specifically a man, not a woman, often but not always in connection with something from Freud. It’s all the more ironic, then, that he notes how central Freud’s own misogyny was to his theorizing, and that it fed into his “addiction to sexual explanations and biological reductionism.” But for all of Becker’s explorations of the way bodies’ functions are reminders of their eventual decay and our own imperfect corporeal agency, he simply ignores all biology that is unique to the female body. He reconfigures Freud’s castration complex around the realization by the son that the mother is a fragile animal rather than an immortal and invulnerable god. That is, learning that the mother has “species consciousness” and that she can and will die is the inciting event for the (male) fear of death; but the mother’s role in Becker’s figuring is automatic. Sexual dysfunction is entirely a consequence of the “creaturely” character of sex arousing the (male) fear of death. There is so much that is simply missing from what purports to be an analysis of how the symbolic self and corporeal self interrelate that I’m not sure if the entire thing shouldn’t be tossed. Again, I hope that further reading on this reveals the critique has already been leveled and the theory made whole. But to explore the role of reminders of physical vulnerability, mortality, and corporeality in social structures without women is simply not to explore those things.
I’ve just started The Worm at the Core and I’m excited to get into it. But I have been feeling a lot of anxiety the last few days, and while it may be a coincidence (I have a lot of stressful travel coming up), this is somewhat troubling material to read. My summary response to it is a lot like Becker’s own to Freud, which is to say that it feels like there is a lot of truth here masquerading as unsupportable gobbledegook. This is the case in my research areas, but perhaps more so outside of them – the idea that failure to negotiate the constant fear of death is a core driver of mental illness has me thinking differently about a number of people I know, for example. My takeaway, then, on Becker’s sense of how we must repress just the right amount in order to remain sane comes in his reference to Freud comparing primitive religion with neurotic obsession: “But he didn’t see how natural this was, how all social life is the obsessive ritualization of control in one way or another.”
As an aside, we really seem to overlook the role of significantly expanded access to voting, both through mail and other means, in boosting turnout. Trying to model 2024 turnout without looking at how access changed before and after 2020 is leaving out something important.
An alternate version of this post that I began drafting in my head, and maybe will write at some point, was called “The est to Fight Club to QAnon pipeline,” and would’ve used Becker’s engagement of “hero systems” as vehicles for symbolic immortality to think about how disaffected people may seek out the validated connections they need through toxic social and political communities.