Repost from October 19, 2012
A few weeks ago, I read “Escape from Evil” by Ernest Becker. It is a companion volume to Becker’s more famous work, “Denial of Death” (yes, the book featured in Annie Hall!). I came upon this book when I was perusing a list of books recommended by my favourite hive mind: Metafilter. Since I found one of the books listed — “I Am a Strange Loop” — a fascinating read, I decided to give it a try. Now that I have finished it, I must say this book has changed the way I see most of the values that people hold. Paradigm-changing, as one other reviewer has said.
The fundamental premise of Becker’s thesis is that man, like other organisms, is mortal. But, unlike other animals, man has the bad fortune of being aware of his own mortality. Thus, the life of man is driven by the pursuit of an eternally flourishing life that triumphs over death. Since Escape from Evil was written after the Denial of Death, a full-volume analysis about this phenomenon, Becker sailed through this idea rather fast. I will need to check out that earlier work to absorb the full context.
Given man’s aversion of death, he has developed a series of techniques to elevate himself above it. Here, the word “techniques” is a complete understatement, because the “techniques” span the entirety of human culture. How? Through different ages, different codes of behaviour emerged, each representing a set of beliefs that helped their owners to overcome death in the symbolic realm. The people who become most competent in those codes become our cultural heroes.
In more ancient time, primitive men practiced rituals of renewal, so that they can participate in the replenishment of organic life. Then, came the wars, through which divine kings won power through their victories, and bathed ordinary men, those who survived, in their glory. Money, arguably the most continuous line of heroic codes, allow rich men to ward off danger, protecting himself and his offspring by the accumulation of visible gold power. The faithfuls renounced the material world, and in their renouncement, they also denied the evil of death.
In more modern times, great scientists and artists hope to achieve immortality through their acts of creation. As Goethe has put it: Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time. The humanists are revolutionaries at heart, they took up the mission to bring about a new Utopian society, so that all evil and injustices may end. Finally, the technologists and their machines dream of controlling nature to produce material plenitude.
To Becker, each of those systems of belief is no better or worse than any other. But, the evil that looms darkly over our world is born of those pursuits, of men striving to extend the reach and the power of their beliefs. Examples abound around us, think of the earnest fanatics: fanatics of religion, of wealth, of scientific progress.
Although the book is named “Escape from Evil”, much of it is about the “origin” of evil, only a few pages were spent on sketching out an uncertain path to avert that evil. May the knowledge of the condition be the beginning of the cure…