Death and culture in eternal embrace

All cultural creation arises as a defence against death, including terror and war

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

The nights are getting longer, around the world stricken birds are falling, and a loved one’s life is nearing its end. Thoughts of death are weighing heavily upon me tonight.

I remember the night I first learned about death. I was five years old, and I’d asked my mother a question about dying, a subject I found quite confusing. She gently explained that everyone had to die eventually, even her; even me.

Later in bed, surrounded by shadows darker than any I’d known before, I wept. I’ve never been able to adequately describe the thoughts and feelings that troubled my inarticulate mind on that distant evening. Last week, the opening lines of Patrick Shen’s 2005 documentary, Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality did it for me: “. . . to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression. . . and with all this yet to die.” The original quotation, taken from Ernest Becker’s 1973 book, The Denial of Death, follows up by saying “It feels like a hoax.”

Becker was a cultural anthropologist who taught at Simon Fraser University before his death in 1974. His work, and the work of the researchers who’ve since provided empirical support for his theories, are the focus of this most extraordinary film.

Becker believed that because of our imaginations, our lives are permeated by the terror of death. Unlike animals, we can imagine systems of profound complexity, as well as places and times far removed from our current situation. Tragically, our liberation from the present moment makes us aware of our own mortality. We know that regardless of the number of dangers we successfully avoid, we're still doomed to die, and that our deaths may well be preceded by terrible suffering. Once acquired, this awareness can't be shaken. Whether or not we're consciously aware of it, this fear stalks us, influencing both our thoughts and our actions.

To deal with this problem, we rely upon the very imagination that helped create it. Through our imaginations we produce culture. According to Becker’s theory, culture is a collective illusion designed largely to defend us from our awareness of death. Culture provides us with a stable and authoritative world-view, as well as a sense that we have a valued and meaningful place within the world. It offers seemingly eternal symbols that we can identify with and thereby imaginatively escape our own finitude. Culture also gives us the promise of heroism. By pursuing heroism—that is, by striving to achieve a cultural ideal, such as religious purity, artistic excellence, physical perfection, political power or economic clout—we persuade ourselves that we can become superhuman, that we can transcend our mortality and enter a realm of enduring cultural significance. Our most precious pursuits are, in this reading, little more than clever strategies for avoiding awareness of our inevitable fate.

Of course, culture creates problems of it’s own. If culture depends upon our collective faith in the absolute authority of our world-view, then anyone who denies that authority raises the possibility that our world-view's mistaken. This denial threatens to expose the illusory nature of our cultural assurances, which, in turn, reopens the floodgates of terror. We interpret such defiance as "evil," emotionally associating the defiance with death itself. We typically respond by identifying more intensely with our most beloved cultural symbols and by attacking the dissident.

The documentary examines several studies that support Becker’s ideas. In one such study, municipal judges completed questionnaires that asked them to describe their feelings about either pain or their own deaths. They were then asked to decide upon a dollar figure for a prostitute’s peace bond. The researchers hypothesized that the judges who were reminded of their deaths would be more punitive towards lawbreakers than judges who were simply reminded of pain. This was borne out by the findings. The average peace bond decided upon by the judges who were reminded of pain was $50.00. The average for those who were reminded of their deaths was $450.00.

In another study, students were asked to fill out a questionnaire that, again, reminded them of their deaths. They were then asked to assist in an “unrelated” experiment that required them to put some hot sauce into a cup that, they were told, would then be tasted by some unfortunate person whose political views challenged their own. Those students who were reminded of their deaths put far more hot sauce into the cup than did the students in the control group.

Studies like these, and there have been over 150, strongly suggest that thoughts about our own deaths not only prompt us to cling more tightly to our cultural symbols, but also to behave more aggressively towards those who challenge them. This effect still held when the experimenters merely exposed research subjects to the word “death” subliminally by flashing it on a computer screen faster than their conscious minds could process. This is a very disconcerting finding, given the many reminders of death the media exposes us to every day.

Becker believed that his theory could explain a great deal about our species’ propensity for collective violence. Because we can't defeat death itself, and because we can’t fully suppress the terror it causes, we often try to achieve a symbolic victory over it by “heroically” defeating the people who threaten our death-defying cultural symbols. Paradoxically, to reinforce our attachment to these symbols we regularly go looking for "evils" to conquer through either conversion or annihilation. As both al-Qaeda’s Jihad and the neoconservative’s crusade so amply demonstrate, in the process we often commit the greatest evils ourselves.

For all its seeming morbidity, Flight From Death is a strangely comforting film. In its closing segments, the documentary outlines some of the ways that culture can truly help us deal with our mortality. Culture does this best when it directs our attention to its own inadequacy in the face of the infinite, when it helps us become more conscious of our fear, and when it shows us how to use this fear to deepen our appreciation of every living moment. It can teach us to be at once humble and brave.

The trees outside my home are nearly bare. Their branches are trembling and their leaves are soaking on the pavement. I know the trees will someday fall, but tonight they're standing, and though they stand in poverty, still my heart is with them.

****