The Denial of Death

"Becker's exploration of humanity's deep-seated fear of death and its influence on our motivations aligns with Mark Manson's work on confronting uncomfortable truths to live a more meaningful life."

"Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist who, ironically, died of cancer in 1974 at age 49. He did not know at the time that he was about to receive the Pulitzer Prize for this book. For me, The Denial of Death is one of the most profound and provocative books of the 20th century. Everyone these days knows Freud, but a lot people haven’t even heard of Becker. I find it shocking that these ideas are not in wider circulation, although one possibility is that, if he’s right that death is such an emotionally charged and unique threat to human beings, then it makes sense that people would be disinclined to ponder them directly… Yes, I would say so. It is a poignantly provocative, non-obfuscation of the way things are. In the first few pages, Becker says two things that grabbed my attention. One is that he’s not in any way trying to be original, that he’s just trying to synthesize all these ancient ideas. There’s so many good ideas in the intellectual mist from a variety of disciplines — theology, philosophy, psychology — and, in an era of increasing academic specialization, where you’re insulated and isolated from people who don’t work in your area, we’re missing the point by not stepping back and trying to tie these ideas together. He also pulls no punches. In the first paragraph of the book, he makes a bold statement: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else: it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” He then unpackages that statement. Putting it simply, he argues that, following Darwin, humans are like all other creatures: we’re hardwired to persist at all costs in the service of surviving and reproducing. But, besides being very social creatures, we have the benefit of an enlarged forebrain that enables us to think symbolically as well as to reflect on the past and anticipate the future. Becker then goes back to Kierkegaard , who pointed out that one of the consequences of our vast intelligence is that we come to recognize that we exist. We’re here and we know that we’re here. A rosebush doesn’t know it’s here, and neither does an armadillo. Kierkegaard says, if you’re smart enough to know that you’re here, that’s both awesome and dreadful. Becker dwells on the dreadful, but he doesn’t lose track of the fact that it’s great being alive and knowing it. That’s important — I say that also to remind myself. Unless you’re a baby or mentally challenged, if you know you’re alive you are also shackled with the collateral realization that like all living things you will someday die. That discomfort is magnified by the concurrent recognition that you could die at any time, for reasons that you can’t anticipate or control. Then, just to give us a little kick in the psychological groin, Becker tosses in the Freudian idea that we don’t like to admit that we’re corporal creatures, that we’re basically animals. We’re breathing pieces of defecating meat that are no more significantly enduring than lizards or potatoes. “For me, The Denial of Death is one of the most profound and provocative books of the 20th century.” Becker, following a variety of thinkers, says that those thoughts, which are hard to argue against, would literally paralyze us with abject terror if they were constantly on our minds. What we do to mitigate that anxiety is to embrace what anthropologists call culture: humanly constructed beliefs about reality that we share with our fellow humans. These give us a sense that life has meaning and that we have value. He points out that all cultures offer an explanation of how the world started, they all tell us what we’re supposed to do while we’re here. They all, some more obviously than others, give us some hope of immortality — either literally, through the afterlife or reincarnations of the world’s religions, or symbolically: I may not be here forever but, I’ll do something great and have a building named after me or amass a great fortune. When we stand up in the morning, we have to believe that life is meaningful, and that we, as individuals, are valuable contributors to that meaningful universe. He asks us to reflect on when we were kids. Did you ever think of doing something great — like curing cancer of becoming an Olympic athlete? He says that that is not pathological narcissism, but the normal yearning of a self-conscious creature to be of consequence. When you consider yourself a valuable person in a meaningful universe, he calls that self-esteem. Borrowing from William James, he says we want to feel heroic. That’s the way we manage the existential terror that the awareness of death would otherwise provoke. That’s correct. And because our culturally constructed beliefs and self-esteem that we derive from them is so important to us, we will go to extraordinary lengths — whether we’re aware of it or not — to maintain confidence in our world view, and in the proposition that we’re valuable members of that world. What the rest of the book does is to explore the personal and inter-personal consequences of the fact that this is what we do. He says there are often unfortunate consequences. Some people react by trying to deny the fact they’re embodied creatures — and he looks at schizophrenia. He says that if you look at the grandiose delusions of schizophrenics, they’re literally trying to escape from their bodies. This in no way undermines the prevailing view that psychological disorders are biochemical. He also talks about depression as a situation where people are unable to confidently subscribe to a sense that life has meaning. They literally get bogged down in their bodies and can’t get up in the morning. When we think about mental illness, we usually think about poor people that are deluded. He says that that’s backwards. People who struggle psychologically are literally choking on the truth. It’s their incapacity to adhere to a constructive illusion that’s rendering these psychological difficulties. Then he talks about regular people in a not particularly flattering fashion. He says, following Kierkegaard, that most of us are philistines. We just unreflexively accept the view of reality that our culture provides for us and proceed to tranquillize ourselves with the trivial. What do most of us do most days? We watch television, we go shopping and we drink ourselves into a perpetual stupor. Then he goes on to argue that what some of us do when existential concerns are aroused is to attach ourselves psychologically to dynamic and charismatic leaders. He uses Hitler as an example. I would use George W. Bush. Maybe you’d use Blair, in the aftermath of 9/11. He also talks about how some people use their significant others. We rely on our spouses and our partners to serve not only as companions, but as ambulatory gods. When that happens, things do not generally end well, because it’s asking too much of another human being. Then, there’s a spectacular section about how the awareness of death makes us uncomfortable with our bodies, and with our sexuality. There’s a phrase in there which I love, that sex and death are twins. Then, at the end of the book, he says, ‘Alright, what do we do about all this?’ And the book takes a surprising turn when Becker advocates embracing religion, broadly defined. The last sentence of the book is: “The most that any 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.” And of course a lot of people were like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Is that not just another death denying illusion?” And people of good will could argue about that, and they still do."

"A few years ago three of my friends and I decided to read "The Denial of Death," by Ernest Becker. It was too intimidating to tackle alone... that experience of meeting once a week in a beer garden to talk over our fears and the meaning of our lives was a bracing and bonding experience."