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For some people life is very simple. They decide that this is good, that is bad, this is wrong, that’s right. There is no right in wrong, no good in bad, no shadings and grays, all blacks and whites…. Now others of us find that good, bad, right, wrong are many-sided, complex things; we try to see every side, but the more we see, the less sure we are.
The Wolf Man, 1941
Biosocial transcendence is derived from the literal connection to future generations by passing on one’s genes, history, values, and possessions, or by identification with an ancestral line or ethnic or national identity that perseveres indefinitely.
The theological mode entails faith in a soul and the possibility of literal immortality; it can
From a terror management perspective, it seems to us that there are two viable approaches to foster better living with death. First, we can become more aware and accepting of the reality of our mortality. Second, we can strengthen our sense of death transcendence in nondestructive ways.
Some thirty years and more than five hundred studies later, there is now overwhelming evidence confirming Becker’s central claim that the awareness of death gives rise to potentially debilitating terror that humans manage by perceiving themselves to be significant contributors to an ongoing cultural drama. We found, as Becker posited, that self-esteem buffers anxiety in general and anxiety about death in particular. We discovered that subtle, and even subliminal, reminders of death increase devotion to one’s cultural scheme of things, support for charismatic leaders, and confidence in the existence of God and belief in the efficacy of prayer. They amplify our disdain toward people who do not share our beliefs even to the point of taking solace in their demise. They drive us to compulsively smoke, drink, eat, and shop. They make us uncomfortable with our bodies and our sexuality. They impel us to drive recklessly and fry ourselves in tanning booths to bolster our self-esteem. They magnify our phobias, obsessions, and social anxieties.
Examining history, the sciences and the humanities, findings from laboratory experiments, and people’s day-to-day struggles would expose death as the worm at the core of the human experience.
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We may take for granted that the fear of death is always present in our mental functioning…. For behind the sense of insecurity in the face of danger, behind the sense of discouragement and depression, there always lurks the basic fear of death, a fear which undergoes most complex elaborations and manifests itself in many indirect ways…. The anxiety neuroses, the various phobic states, even a considerable number of depressive suicidal states and many schizophrenias amply demonstrate the ever-present fear of death which becomes woven into the major conflicts of the given psychopathological conditions.
—GREGORY ZILBOORG,
“Fear of Death”
When you are conscious of death, proximal defenses work to purge death thoughts from your mind as soon as they arise. You tell yourself, “I still have a long time to live.”...
And as you go about your day, proximal defenses enable you to distract yourself, or suppress or rationalize away the daily reminders of mortality—the bags under your eyes, the news of distant earthquakes and bombings, and so on. As long as you can tell yourself “Not me, not now,” reminders of death are like so much white noise. In the absence of such defenses, you could be panicking about death all the time.
Only after death thoughts have been banished from consciousness do the distal defenses kick in. Back at your desk in the office, you daydream about getting the firm’s highest bonus this year and imagine your name on the plaque at company headquarters marking this achievement. By shoring up the sense that you are a significant person in a meaningful universe, you become a viable candidate for transcending death via immortality. “Not me,” you think. “Not ever!”
Being an embodied animal aware of death is difficult indeed. We simply cannot bear the thought that we are biological creatures, no different from dogs, cats, fish, or worms. Accordingly, people are generally partial to views of humans as different from, and superior to, animals. We adorn and modify our bodies, transforming our animal carcasses into cultural symbols. Rather than thinking of ourselves as hormonally regulated gene reproduction machines bumping and grinding our way toward oblivion, we “make love” to transform copulation into romance. And when women ooze hormones, blood, and babies, men blame them for their own lustful urges, which serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about, and justify abuse of, women.
Terror of death is thus at the heart of human estrangement from our animal nature. It isolates us from our own bodies, from each other, and from the other creatures with whom we share noses, lips, eyes, teeth, and limbs, everywhere on the planet.
Our bodies and animality are threatening reminders that we are physical creatures who will die. To manage our terror of death we have to be much more than that; and a fundamental function of cultural worldviews is to prevent our bodies from undermining our pretentions of meaning and significance. So we transform our bodies into cultural symbols of beauty and power. We hide bodily activities or turn them into cultural rituals.
The body is the closest that we come to touching any kind of reality. And yet we have the desire to flee the body: many religions are based entirely on disembodiment, because the body brings with it mortality, fear of death. If you accept the body as reality, then you have to accept mortality and people are very afraid to do that….
—DAVID CRONENBERG
Ironically a good deal of evil in the world results from efforts to rid the world of evil.
“Natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”
-Ernest Becker
Prior to 9/11, Bush’s presidency was viewed as ineffectual and uninspired, even to many of his Republican supporters. However, the president’s approval ratings reached historically unprecedented heights a few weeks thereafter. That Bush’s tremendous popularity was in part a result of the dramatic and ongoing reminders of death and vulnerability provoked by the attacks was confirmed by experiments we conducted in 2002 and 2003 showing that following a reminder of death, Americans felt more supportive of President Bush and his policies in Iraq.
Then, as the standing president, confidently purveying the classic charismatic message that “we are divinely ordained to defeat the forces of evil,” Bush served Americans’ terror management needs far better than his opponent, Senator John Kerry, in the 2004 presidential election. In a control condition in which we reminded participants of intense pain, Americans rated Senator Kerry more favorably than President Bush. But after a reminder of death, Bush was more favorably evaluated than Kerry. Six weeks before the election, control participants reported that they would be voting for Senator Kerry by a 4-to-1 margin. But other participants, after thinking about death, favored President Bush by an almost 3-to-1 margin.
Because people need some tangible and potentially controllable cause of their residual death anxiety, they will identify or create different “others” to serve this purpose. “If we could only get rid of those [fill in the blank: terrorists, infidels, socialists, globalists, homosexuals, liberals, Tea Party Republicans, Jews, Muslims, illegal immigrants, or what have you], then all our problems would be solved!”
In fact, when death is close to mind, people prefer their out-groups to fit simple stereotypes. Following a death reminder, Americans prefer Germans to be neat and organized, male homosexuals to be effeminate, men to pay for dinner, and women to babysit the neighbor’s kids.
Reminders of death make Christians more intent on persuading atheists to embrace Jesus and make evolutionists more determined to persuade creationists to embrace Darwin. Furthermore, studies show that proselytizing is prophylactic: if I learn that you have adopted my beliefs, I feel more confident of their validity and consequently don’t worry so much about my own death.