Escape From Evil

"This was controversial, because he wasn’t finished with the book. His wife Marie, who I’ve met, made a difficult decision. She thought it was too important not to put out there. This is actually a darker book. It starts with a quote by Thomas Hardy, the British novelist: “If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” You’re reading that and thinking, ‘What do you mean worst? I’m already demoralized!’ After I read this book I quit my job as a professor for a year. I worked in construction, I worked in a kitchen. I felt I really had to think about it. Which was good. Then I realized that eating was good as well, so I went back to being a professor… In Escape from Evil , he focuses on two areas. One has to do with modernity, and humankind’s insatiable preoccupation with wealth and conspicuous consumption. The penultimate chapter is ‘Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology.’ Economists say that money is just a symbolic medium of exchange that rational people use to exchange goods and services, because it’s easier to carry a dollar than a cow in my pocket to exchange with you for coffee. But Becker points out that money has always had psychological connotations above and beyond the rational exchange part. Historically, money was first minted in temples, and the first treasurers were priests. On the back of the US $1 bill it says “In God we trust” and there’s a pyramid with an eyeball on top of it. According to Joseph Campbell, that’s an ancient Egyptian symbol of immortality. Throughout history, people have wanted money not just to buy stuff, but because it has been associated psychologically with power — and all power is, ultimately, the power over life and death. In Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , the Big Daddy character says, “The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!” Becker points out that in the Middle Ages , there were religious mandates against excessive greed. Avarice was considered a mortal sin. In the 20th century, we raised it to a moral virtue. That’s turned the earth into a smouldering heap of disposable plastic bottles, and it’s rendered us incapable of being happy unless we have more than the person next to us. I find this an arresting point. The way Becker puts it, we should always be curious and skeptical of insatiable desires. With any natural desire – and John Locke pointed this out back in the day — if you’re hungry and you like apples, there will come a point when you don’t want any more apples. Same thing for everything: I like football but I’ve had enough, I love sex, but I’ve had enough. The only two things there’s never enough of are money and life. “In the Middle Ages, there were religious mandates against excessive greed. Avarice was considered a mortal sin. In the 20th century, we raised it to a moral virtue.” The other point he makes in the book, more ominously and apropos of the title, Escape from Evil , is that because our beliefs about reality serve to deny death, there’s going to be two consequences. One is that whenever we run into somebody who is different it’s going to be a problem, because if we accept their view of the world, we’re undermining our own. The other thing he says is that, because they’re symbolic, no belief system is ever going to completely eradicate our anxiety. There’s always going to be a panicked rumbling beneath the surface of consciousness. We call it residual death anxiety, but it doesn’t matter what you call it. We repress that anxiety and then we project it onto other groups of people that we designate as the all-encompassing repositories of evil. Then, of course, we have to proceed to kill them, in order to rid the world of evil. My favourite scary phrase in this book is when he says that the main cause of evil in the world are the righteous-indignation-fuelled efforts to rid the world of evil. I think there’s ample evidence, both historically and in the lab, that that’s the case. By the end of the book, he is wondering whether we are a viable form of life. But to put a not-bad spin on what is a dark book, he says, ‘I’m pessimistic, but I’m not cynical.’ So he ends the book by saying, ‘What do we do with this? I wish we could go to the United Nations and maybe tell world leaders to think about it…’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He was considered an entertaining clown. People said, ‘You’re an amusing lecturer of undergraduates, but this is not serious.’ I would say today he is taken more seriously. He was trained by, and got caught in the crossfire of the controversy surrounding, Thomas Szasz, who wrote The Myth of Mental Illness . He claimed there was no such thing and that it’s just a cultural label. That’s clearly an overstatement. That didn’t help Becker’s reputation. Then he got to Berkeley and refused to teach anthropology courses. He said he wanted to be interdisciplinary. This was long before interdisciplinary studies were well regarded. Then he was at San Francisco State but resigned and ended up at Simon Fraser University where he wrote these books. Everyone said that what he wrote was bullshit, that these ideas are highly speculative. I would say that almost point for point, for every statement that he made and that I have just talked about, we’ve done studies that provide empirical support for them. When people are reminded of their mortality, they hate people who are different, they love money more and they become more uncomfortable with their bodies and their sexuality. Good point in principle, but empirically, both believers and non-believers, when reminded of their mortality, respond in defensive and often unsavoury ways. Atheism itself, it turns out, is a death-denying belief system. So, for example, there are studies that show that when devout Christians are shown logical inconsistencies in the Bible, unconscious death thoughts come more readily to mind. That suggests that when you undermine their belief system, that anxiety comes to the psychological foreground. Equally, if you show atheists a bogus but convincing argument for spirituality, that raises their level of non-conscious death thoughts. None of them would be pleased to hear this, but religious fundamentalists and the Richard Dawkinses and Sam Harrises of the world are different sides of the same psychological coin: They dogmatically proclaim that which none of us can know for sure."

"Becker was a very interesting anthropologist, working within a tradition of psychoanalysis, who tried to bring together a lot of different disciplines in the sciences and the arts, to create a kind of third culture in order to explain humanity. He thought the point of the human sciences – and indeed all science – was to stop us from being evil, and that evil resulted from our terror of death. We’re aware of our mortality, he argued, and would do anything to escape this prospect of death. Whatever we associate with death – with the challenge to our very existence – we think of as being evil. And if we have an idea of evil personified, it justifies any action. George W Bush called terrorists “evil doers”, and that seemed to legitimise everything, from Guantanamo to drone strikes . If something is defined as evil, we think it must be attacked at all costs. So the personification of death becomes the personification of evil. And in the name of combatting evil, we can do all sorts of terrible things – we do evil ourselves. Becker would see almost any ideological or religious context in these terms. Jihad is the clearest example of people trying to cleanse the world for their own system, in order to legitimate their own beliefs in the promise of immortality. The Crusades were the same. Or take Nazism for example, which is less obvious than jihad but was the example more in the minds of those writing in the sixties and seventies. Nazism was also a system that promised immortality for being part of the German volk . In order to become immortal Germany had to become pure, and in order to become pure it had to destroy what was impure – and that was Jews, homosexuals and so on. This was a ritual act of cleansing, purging the evil as they saw it in order to create something pure. This is the continuation of The Denial of Death , and it’s easier to read I think. The Denial of Death got a lot of attention when it came out [in 1973], and won a Pulitzer prize. But in Escape From Evil , you feel he is more free to express his own views. He was dying when he wrote it, and a lot of it was done posthumously by his estate. It’s much more passionate and clear. It’s wild in places, speculative in places, but it’s full of ideas and wonderfully written."