I read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker many years ago. It was one of those books that left a strong imprint on my mind. After I first read it, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about it, especially when I was doing something that demanded a bit of attention like walking or driving. But over time, the ideas stuck with me, and every now and then I would find myself thinking about it.
There are many things that made the book great. Becker was a terrific writer. But the content itself was salient; it distilled truly deep ideas about human nature. The sections on Otto Rank and Kierkegaard are enough to preoccupy a mind for a lifetime. But it wasn’t just the profound ideas, the thesis of the book seemed to me ‘almost true.’ In short, Becker argues that each person primarily represses a deep fear of mortality. That is the real taboo that we don’t talk about. While Freud focused on repression that was sexual or aggressive in nature, Becker that there is a deeper thing being repressed than our instincts. He thought that we repress our knowledge of our finitude. And the way we do so is through the construction of great monuments, ‘immortality projects’ like books, institutions, and social symbols.
All these social games, according to Becker, are nothing more than a large scale cover-up, that we are deeply terrified of the inevitable moment of our demise. Of course, Becker gives due credit to others who recognized this fact, such as Kierkegaard, who was keenly aware of man’s dual nature, and the angst that each person experiences.
The point of this observation is not to say (as some do) that these social systems ought to be destroyed. On the contrary, socially constructed meaning are essential to life, and the tragedy in the world today is not that we have repressed death too much, but that we have lost touch with the ‘meaning’ systems that have sustained our civilizations for so long.
It is this disintegration that is worrisome. When Nietzsche warned, through the prophetic figure of Zarathustra, of the ‘death of God’ – he was not commemorating a joyful event. Nietzsche understood that once civilization loses its central orientation, and when all mythologies have been demystified, we are not left with feelings of glory and triumph, but with an emptiness.
During the last few years, some have tried to plug the hole in this ‘meaning crisis’ – including people like Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, and Jonathan Pageau, each in their own way.
But I want to go back to Ernest Becker, who may have been on to something. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the right thing. The fundamental repression may be, as is always the case, multi-faceted. In other words, it is not that there is a fundamental repression, but that there are many repressions. The individual represses fear of mortality in addition to their instincts. But they also repress uncomfortable truths.
Take two juxtaposed origin stories that we ought to believe in. One is the religious story, the other is the atheistic story. Of course, there are many religions, and to say that all religious stories are the same or that they fit into the same category is unwise, but for the sake of simplicity, let us take one religious narrative – the Christian one. (There are many different Christian accounts, but I will focus on the one that is the least controversial).
In this story, the world was created by a supernatural being. And God did not merely create the heavens and the earth, but He created all humans and animals. Not only that, but He is deeply preoccupied with trivial things, such as the food we choose to eat, who we choose to love, and what we do when we alone.
This supernatural entity knows everything, can do anything, and yet, chooses to concern himself with every little trifle of a profoundly fallible creature such as ourselves. In fact, God even sent his only son, who was born from a virgin, to save mankind from their sins. And this story is not merely an event in history that happened, but it’s a continuous story that civilization collectively participates in.
To the atheist, the entire story, from start to finish is absurd. What is a supernatural being? How can posit the existence of an entity for which we have no collective agreement on? If one religion is true, then doesn’t that imply that all other religions are false? If God is good, then why does evil exist? If Jesus saved man from his sins, then why is man expected to do anything more? Why would an all-powerful God care about the actions of weak-willed ignorant creatures who are ruled by biological instinct and environmental circumstance?
Why should we believe in miracles when there has never been documented proof of a miracle? How can we trust the contents of a text that has been altered repeatedly over centuries? Why should the moral foundations of an ancient people who lived in the Middle East have any influence over moral decisions in the modern world? Why should children be born to a life of blind and endless suffering in a world that is created by a benevolent Creator? And if God does exist, then why is the evidence for His existence so controversial and ambiguous? And if grace is required for the belief in God, then why are some people endowed with it while others are not?
Atheists have advanced some version of these arguments in their skepticism of religion. And these are all good questions. But what do atheists believe?
Since atheism is simply a lack of belief in God, there isn’t really a universal atheist worldview. But the plurality of atheistic beliefs, like the plurality of religious beliefs, does not necessarily forbid us from presenting a generic atheistic story.
So, what do atheists believe in? Science. Again, in brief, let’s take a look at the scientific worldview (caricatured) as it pertains to the origin of life and the purpose of existence. The universe began around 14 billion years ago, uncaused by any intelligent agent. Through the random interaction of arbitrary physical laws over the course of billions of years, the earth was created, which gave rise to single-celled organisms. These organisms, through a process called ‘natural selection’ eventually culminated in the creation of human beings. Miracles don’t exist. Everything that happens abides by physical laws. There is no inherent purpose in the universe. And the only meaning in life is whatever you make of it.
The existence of life, natural laws, physical matter, consciousness, and morality are explainable by one of two things, (1) randomness or (2) scientific knowledge we don’t yet have access to. In this worldview, the suffering that exists in the world is blind and has no purpose. People who get away with evil and do not get caught will never be punished in the afterlife. The virtuous and the wretched will all experience the same fate, eternal nothingness after a brief stint of time on earth.
The only reason people should act morally is for their own benefit, and for the benefit of their communities, which are arbitrarily defined by them. Beauty, truth, and the good are not mysteries but serve some kind of function in nature. Either they are useful for nat selectiom o y
Take two extreme stories. One is the religious story. Two is the atheist story. Of course there many religious stories. But just for the sake of argument, let’s focus on the Christian story. Now, let’s think about how our lives are explained by this story.
We are supposed to believe that a man, who was God, came down to earth, somewhere in the middle east, did miracles, was killed, rose on the third day, and we have historically accurate information about everything since then. Therefore, there is literally magic that happened and that’s how we got here and that’s the meaning of life.
The atheist story is that there was no Jesus, and no God. Everything is the result of blind chance. The only purpose and meaning in life is what you make of it. There is no objective moral law giver, there may or may not be objective morals. We are here because of a chance event that could easily not have happened.
Or take the debate between materialism and idealism. One says that consciousness comes from physical interactions, the other says that everything is fundamentally mind. Who’s right? And how can we tell?
Each argument is incredible, and requires us to take many leaps of faith. To the theist, the atheist has more faith than they do because they believe that so many contingent things just happened to occur and that life is not directed or designed in any way. This is faith in randomness. On the other hand, the atheist thinks the religious person has too much faith, since they posit the existence of a supernatural creator that goes against everything we know about how nature works.
One side believes that infinitesimal probabilities entail a designer, the other side thinks that such low probabilities entail nothing more than natural laws which simply exist, without any external cause whatsoever.
What is more absurd?
My point is that all positions are absurd. And that is the predicament of human life and in fact, that is the best repression. Whatever we believe is necessarily an absurdity and yet we must act that it is not so. It is not fear of mortality or denial of mortality, it is not sexual repression that characterizes our deep angst, but rather the repressed uncertainty about everything that we feel in our core. We can know nothing for sure. And whatever it is that we do know, we must act and behave and convince ourselves and others that it is more reasonable than the stories and fantasies of other people. And if we do that, we are granted a temporary pass.
We get to live in denial for a while. But inevitably we will need to contend with the deep uncertainty that we have, and that never goes way.
Imagine you suddenly find yourself at an undisclosed location. You don’t really know how you got there. You look around and there are some clues. But thye can be interpreted in any way you like. Suddenly, there are others around you and they seem to know what it’s all about, but talk to them for a while and soon you notice that they are none the wiser. And then you wonder if there is some sort of way you can get to the bottom of things, and to at the very least, know which position is more rational. And then you discover that all the stories people have for how we got to the undisclosed location are both logical and nonsensical at the same time. Reality feels like a dream. Dreams feel like reality.
It is the ambivalence, the fact that we must accept an absurd stories, or rather, many absurd stories. If we are to function at all that imbues us with existential angst. We must act with certainty in a world where nothing is certain. We must believe an unbelievable story. We must create our own unrealistic standards of excellence and progress and success to imbue our days and lives with purpose and all the while we must keep a straight face and act like everything is simply the way it should be, and that nothing is out of place.
Then at some point, we discover that there are poeple in society who don’t quite understand this inside joke. They tend to spend their time conversing with themselves. Unlike us, thye don’t know how to act like everything is just the way it should be. They cannot simply take reality for granted. They are utterly confused and bewildered by their own thoughts, by the split in their identity, and by the madness of the world around them. We call these people psychotic and we lock them up…