The Ernest Becker Foundation

In Ernest Becker’s death bed interview with Sam Keen we have the text of Ernest’s spiritual last will and testament which, as with Socrates before him, is in the form of a living dialogue. That dialogue ended in two men sharing a sacrament, a paper cup of medicinal wine, the fruit of vine and vein, a narrowing capillary carrying the vintage of human continuity up to that point in time. The legacy of that dialogue is the challenge to go beyond Becker, to pick up any one of the many ends of thread that Becker had to drop as he entered the labyrinth’s mouth; the challenge to start our own wandering and weaving toward source and destination. If you hear the bluster of a lyrical philosophical squall blowing through this review, it’s my attempt to come alongside Keen’s little boat as it hops the whitecaps (the booklet fits easily in a jeans pocket). Like a surfer, Keen rides this poetic, prophetic little book to crest at new heights and then dive to new depths. (The image of Keen swinging and falling on the trapeze informs my reading of this book. Google his memoir Learning to Fly: Trapeze--Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go.)

The Future of Evil, is very brief and to the point, necessitating the pruning away of detail. Readers who feel protective of the complete Becker may feel that only a caricature of him pokes its head out of Future of Evil, a brooding naysayer turning away from the candle and pointing toward the terror in the darkness. That notwithstanding, Keen makes it clear that he is using Becker’s strong shoulders as his launch pad. Keen’s monograph abounds in fresh conceptualizations and a spirit both familiar and longed for, the spirit of the moving edge of intentionally created experience, or as Keen names it “a memory of the future.” The Future of Evil takes up three major strands of Becker’s work. First the thick, major cords of existential dread trap us at our individuality and next the demonic logic of power in groups robs us of our full autonomy in exchange for an illusory sense of security. These two seemingly opaque cords, tightly bound together by denial, restrain vast energies that could be unleashed through the heroic possibilities of courage and hope. Sam Keen unravels enough slack from those knots to weave a tapestry of philosophy, a credo that picks up a third, rainbow-thread. To what could be caricatured as Becker’s spidery, black and white, skeletal webwork, Keen has added the Dionysian thread handed to Becker by Norman O. Brown. This is the bright thread for coats of many colors, like that worn by Joseph the Dreamer, the thread of wonder, fascination, cosmic praise and bodily rejoicing in human agency and re-creation. Yes, biblical allusions reverberate throughout The Future of Evil and Keen’s agnostic Bible thumping may rankle readers on both sides of the great divide of traditional religion. But it is clearly Keen’s own voice we hear intoning worldly wisdom and dignity like the Book of Proverbs, shouting out the voice of prophesy that calls us to authenticity, proclaiming the arrival of apocalyptic fireworks.

The wonders Keen trumpets are not hidden in the mists of some promised, otherworldly resurrection or postponed to an ever-receding end-time. His is the path of the secular saint mapped by Francis Ambrosio in his course Philosophy, Religion and the Meaning of Life. Keen has hope in the resurrection of the individual’s inherent capacity to give birth to a new being. And all this takes place, as poet Alan Ginsberg said, in the “now, now.” Like those other prophetic secular saints Blake, Ginsberg, and Whitman(to my ears, Sam’s poetic lineage is clear), Sam Keen grooves with the cosmic tremor, echoes the eternal Om, sings the Body Electric, and hums a lullaby to the devouring worm. (Don’t worry, if you find any whistling past the graveyard in his book it is fully aware and intentional.)