From "The Birth and Death of Meaning" by Ernest Becker

For the second time in three days, I've been blown away by something I've read. This time, it was in a book entitled The Birth and Death of Meaning, written in the early 60s by Ernst Becker. The volume melds psychology, sociology, philosophy, and personal essay. Like two other books I'm slowly making my way through (Sagan's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel) Becker's book masterfully constructs The Big Picture from a seemingly limitless supply of real scientific observation and fact (though I'm not ready to subscribe completely to his understanding of human nature/motivations-it seems a little old-fashioned and anglocentric).

One side effect of reading books like these is that the reader can't help but be humbled and made speechless by the authors' intellect and deep insight. Yes, I'm feeling a loss for words again. So here, read some of what had such a powerful affect on me today. You'll see some lines in bold. These indicate the moments during my original reading that I thought "Yes! So true!":

pg 124-5 "When we see the closet-full of clothes of a departed dear one we may feel deep pangs of injustice: that life is so ephemeral, that these clothes once so full of throbbing vitality now hang dusty and empty. Life seems an accident, its span useless, death unfair. But this is largely because we live only on the visible dimension; our lives are an intensified self-seeking for fulfillment and possession, largely because we believe there is nothing else, and life itself is so precarious. But when clothes are merely loaned for duty to another dimension of things, the feeling of injustice dims, and is replaced at least partly by a sense of the proper. Immanuel Kant, whose pietistic parents lived such a schema, never remembers them having lost their temper or complained about their earthly lot in any way-even when they were cheated by a business partner, they had no angry words or recriminations. They were after all on the mission to earth, and expected nothing here. What they really got was something much more vital than mere physical fulfillment, and if we hearken back to our previous discussion we can understand how crucial it was: those who lived in primitive and traditional society could achieve even in the smallest daily tasks that sense of cosmic heroism that is the highest ambition of man. If one is a servant of divine powers everything one does is heroic, if it is done as part of the consecration of one's life to those powers. In this way meaning can be extended up to the highest level, to the cosmic, eternal level, and the problem of highest heroism is solved."

pg 125 "...the function of culture is to provide the individual with a sense of primary heroism; this is his basic need and right. He must be able to answer the question "How does the dignity, control, bearing, talent, and duty of my life contribute to the fuller development of mankind, to life in the cosmos?" Now we can see the primitive and traditional hero-systems provided a clear-cut answer to precisely this question; and we can also judge that modern society provides no easy answer, if it provides any at all."

pg 126 "'How can we tell which hero-system is the best for man, or even true?' Yes, there's the rub, the fulcrum point, the focus of our whole conclusion on the six common human problems. Man's answers to the problem of his existence are in large measure fictional. His notion of time, space, power, the character of his dialogue with nature, his venture with his fellow men, his primary heroism-all these are embedded in a network of codified meanings and perceptions that are in large part arbitrary and fictional. This begins in earlier childhood, and it occurs as Adler said: as a reaction to the child's impossible situation. As he is fashioned by means of language into symbolic functioning, he has a way of overcoming psychologically the anxieties of experience from within his physical insignificance and relative powerlessness. The symbolic, psychological world becomes, in other words, the contrived means whereby his real limitations are overcome. Here the child can grow, and grow to "enormous size" as he identifies with giants, gods, heroes of myth and legend, or historical figures of a particular culture. The burdens of is painful existence in the here and now are overcome as he projects himself into a heroic past or a victorious future. The whole ego or self becomes indistinguishable from the cultural world view, precisely because the world view itself protects the finite individual against anxiety; the ego now feels warm about its experiences whenever and wherever they are symbolically projected. The mind flies out of its limits in the puny body and soars into a world of timeless beauty, meaning, and justice. And this is how men come to exist in largely fabricated worlds of their own contrivance, and derive their basic sustenance from these fabrications."

pg 128 ... "Whole societies have been able to persist with central beliefs that bore little relation to reality. About the only time a culture has had to pay has been in the encounters with conquerors superior in numbers, weapons, and immunity to certain diseases. Or when, as in Athens and Rome, there has been consistent failure to give priorities to urgent social and economic problems for a period of several hundred years. These societies simply could not "turn around" the conventional hero-systems. Socrates was sentenced to death because he tried to do something of this, tried to urge Athenian youth to independently assess their hero-system. We glimpse again the tragedy of Athens and Rome in the U.S. today, as the entire society is beginning to crumble around an archaic commercial-military hero-system, unrelated to the needs and challenges of contemporary life; but to turn the hero system around to one of peace, social service, the reconstruction of society, seems beyond the imagination and capability of the people.

One of the terrifying things about living in the last decades of the twentieth century is that the margin that nature has been giving to cultural fantasy is suddenly being narrowed down drastically. The consequence is that for the first time in history man, if he is to survive, has to bring down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-systems. This is the critical challenge of our time and, as we shall see in a concluding chapter, the authentic preoccupation of a science of man." (Ernest Becker in The Birth and Death of Meaning)

(Back to your host, Josh)
First, let's state the obvious. Based on the topics and content that send me in a tizzy, you could say I have a healthy nihilistic streak. I've always felt that human intelligence and importance are overrated, and that meaning and purpose are quite often lame human constructs. With this cheery outlook, you'd think that I'd have no bouts of depression. You'd be wrong, of course.

But boiling beneath the surface of such a dark, tumultuous countenance, is an astounding optimism, an unreasonable manic excitement. Its this notion of "man, if he is to survive, [bringing] down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-system". Its the prospect of meeting "the critical challenge of our time" and advancing "the authentic preoccupation of a science of man." Sure, from time to time, this modern awareness of our fragile, apparently meaningless existence grows big and frightening, resulting in depression or even panic, but I'm here to declare that this state is only temporary. The human psyche is experiencing growing pains. We're still mere children-we've only just learned that Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy don't exist. We've shed ourselves of myths, which might leave a joyless void in our souls for a time. We've become aware of the fact that whatever future awaits us and whatever happiness we hope to achieve is going to be up to us to secure. And when I say "secure" I mean either through discovery or invention, because I'm not so naive to believe that the secret to happiness (on both an individual and a societal level) is Truth alone. I think that there may be transitional moments in history when a crumbling civilization, built upon old myths and understanding, must put Truth before all else in order to reset itself and help guide it on a course for the next few centuries. But I doubt that society stripped of culture or hero-systems (as the author puts it), is desirable. Truth is only the means to an end-healthy, happy, vibrant life. Human nature can't be contained within individual bodies and restricted to the fraction of scientific knowledge available at a time. Still, its the greatest travesty when human nature is perverted or enslaved by tyrannical myths or ideologies. So what gives me hope is the idea that here we are, still children, with so much truth laid at our feet, offered up by noble men and women of science, and the primary task we have now is in figuring out how to use it best to secure greater freedom and happiness for ourselves and future generations. The difficult question is what to tell ourselves about ourselves from here on out.