Life Anxiety, Part Eleven: Holy War

(Earlier posts in this series.)

So Becker argues that "to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life."

This is no easy task. "Self-knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to [us] how [our] self-esteem was built: on the powers of others in order to deny ... death."

Doing a little analysis on the hero myths provided by culture, he finds that "every society ... is a 'religion' whether it thinks so or not: Soviet 'religion' and Maoist 'religion' are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer 'religion,' no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves."

All wars are holy wars.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill Maher.

Merely realizing the fundamental need for a heroic purpose, which society is built to meet, will not somehow cure humanity of this need.

Instead he suggests that we need "healthy repressions, ... explicit immortality-ideologies, myths of heroic transcendence."

Next: Unfreedom

Life Anxiety, Part Four: Immortality

(Part One)

Last time the poet Rilke taught us that you can be extinguished, but you can't be revoked. You were. In the face of outstanding odds, despite the obscene and the absurd, you happened.

How far is it, really, the distance between seeming irrevocable and being immortal? How far to any one of the direct immortality narratives provided by the world's many religions and mythologies?

Our mere existence suggests some kind of permanence to us, if only because we aren't cognitively capable of conceiving of our consciousness ceasing to exist.

For Becker (an anthropologist, remember) the consistency with which all cultures have invented immortality narratives suggests that there must be a need for them. Becker questioned the purpose of these stories that guarantee our permanence.

More than that, he asked why these stories meant to assure our permanence are worth sacrificing our actual lives.

He concluded that "what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance."

We have to do more than happen. We have to leave our mark on the world. Something of us has to remain.

We all need some bid for immortality.

Fortunately, immortality narratives seem to be in abundance. Certainly our children are a direct route to leaving a part of ourselves in the world, moving forward beyond our deaths. But many also believe that when their body dies, their spirit or soul will hang around, even transcend to paradise.

Some believe they will come back again in another form. Even science takes as a basic principle that energy cannot be destroyed -- and matter is just a form energy sometimes takes.

In the same way that our body is made up of star matter, we know that something does remain of us after death.



If only that were enough.

Next: Inheritance