Ernest Becker: A Memoir and an Appreciation

By Keith Helmuth | March 5, 2019

*Keith presented this essay at an informal colloquium in Fredericton and Woodstock, New Brunswick called “Philosopher’s Soup” in 2017.

Ernest Becker published his second book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, in 1962, the year before I became the manager of a new academic bookstore on the campus of Syracuse University. Ernest received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Syracuse University in 1960 and remained there in teaching capacities for several years. The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man had garnered accolades in a certain part of the social science community, so I knew the book before I met the author.

I hadn’t long to wait. Ernest and his wife Marie returned from a sojourn in Italy in 1964 and he was thereafter a frequent customer of the Syracuse Book Center. In particular, he came in to order a regular stream of books for his research. There is no better way for a bookseller to get acquainted with customers from academia than to show an interest in their research. With Ernest’s work I didn’t just show an interest, I had an interest since its various themes and concerns coincided to a large extent with my own. But, in addition, I quickly saw that a great deal could be learned from conversations with him and horizons opened that I had not yet explored; Ernest was then 40, I was 27.

Ernest’s first book, Zen: A Rational Critique, had been published in 1961. By 1964 it was no longer in print and I wondered why. I had previously enjoyed a period of study in the East Asian Studies program at the University of Iowa, which included particular attention to the transmission of Indian Buddhism into China and the influence of Taoism in its transformation into Chan Buddhism, or what came to be called Zen Buddhism when it moved into Japan. During this time, I also explored Buddhist discipline, but, being familiar with the Quaker practice of collective meditation, I had a comparative awareness of the individualistic focus of Zen Buddhist practice and its limitations.

By 1963, I had read about as much Buddhist literature, both primary and secondary, as I cared to, but the subtitle of Ernest’s book intrigued me – a rational critique. I asked him about the book and why it was no longer available. He told me he had prohibited its reprinting because he was now embarrassed by it. He said it was not so much the content or the analysis but the tone he had taken in writing it that now made him wish for it to disappear from circulation. Here, in this self-criticism, is one of the characteristics that made Ernest Becker an unusual and enormously appealing scholar and teacher. His work and life describe a trajectory of continuous self-critique and openness to learning. As he refined and deepened his analysis of the “human problem,” and moved from book to book, he was never reluctant to point out the shortcomings in his previous thinking and understanding.

In a certain sense, Ernest was devoted to the tradition of the Enlightenment, but the progressive thrust of its anthropology was deeply tempered in him by the charnel house history of the 20th century, not to mention the episodes of horrific human violence in previous centuries. Even as we held our Enlightenment-like conversations, the American war in Vietnam was ramping up in an increasingly sickening way. The evil consequences of human behaviour seemed an endless historical parade that gave the lie to the Enlightenment vision. This was the conundrum into which Ernest Becker, at this time, was moving with all the intellectual honesty, analytic intuition, and profound concern for humanity that was central to his character and commitment.

Ernest Becker’s grounding in cultural anthropology was the platform from which he saw the potential for unearthing, bringing together, and articulating a new interdisciplinary construct he called a “science of man,” which would enhance our understanding of the “human problem.” Reaching back to Vico’s (1725) prescient New Science, moving through the rich and various ranges of Enlightenment observation and social thought, delving into the existential terror of Kierkegaard, incorporating and moving beyond Darwin, Marx, and Freud, pondering the brilliant sociology of Max Scheler, the psychodynamic insights of Otto Rank, the pragmatic realism of William James and John Dewey, and the depth theology of Paul Tillich, Ernest Becker developed a synthesis of social psychology and human social and cultural development that had not previously been achieved. This is only a short list of the intellectual and analytic heritage of which Ernest was a master and on which he drew to chart a new understanding of the “human problem.”

Understanding the “human problem” is, in large part, understanding why it is that human groups have generated world historical blood-lettings and socio-political catastrophes in horrendously systematic and recurring ways. Ernest was no ivory tower scholar in search of intellectually satisfying truth, but rather a kind of frontline psychosocial and cultural archaeologist who assembled the evidence for a very uncomfortable truth about the “human problem” and, in assembling this evidence, sought insights that could help ameliorate the worst effects of the behavioural problems involved. His research and interdisciplinary analysis assembled this uncomfortable truth in a way that once you see it, you can never again not see it. He created a highly cogent paradigm, a lens of depth perception, as it were, about why and how humans both individually and in groups get themselves into such severe and often lethal conflict with each other and with the environments of Earth.

I earlier used the word “ameliorate” in referring to Ernest’s contribution to addressing the evils of human conflict, aggression, revenge, and aggrandizement. The word “solve” momentarily came to me but I knew it would not do, not in the context of Ernest’s intensely realistic assessment of the degree to which heroic cultural defenses against diminishment and death have led to behaviours both overtly and covertly evil. Ernest had been an American infantryman who helped liberate Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. He had seen the worst. His quest had no blinders.

Although, his last book was titled, Escape from Evil, Ernest became increasingly cautious in his outlook on the human prospect. In his penultimate book, The Denial of Death, he brought together all the strands of synthesis on which he had been working and laid out the paradigm of understanding to which his work led. When he died from colon cancer at age 49 in 1974, the manuscript for Escape from Evil had been put away. He considered it not fully polished and at the end he had no energy for further work. It’s true, it’s not fully polished, but fortunately Marie made sure the book was published after his death because she knew Ernest would not want his final assessment to remain unknown.

While still at Syracuse, Ernest incorporated an in-depth study of psychoanalysis and psychiatry into his philosophical anthropology. In 1964 he published Revolution in Psychiatry: The New Understanding of Man in which he develops a post-Freudian understanding of the functioning and malfunctioning of human beings. He showed why “mental illness” cannot be defined as simply a medical problem, but is also often bound up with the entire scope of personal development within a social and cultural context.

Much to our loss in Syracuse, but to Ernest’s professional gain, he secured a teaching position at the University of California Berkeley in 1965. This was, of course, smack in the middle of the Anti-Vietnam War and Free-Speech movements, which turned into a student uprising that threatened the authoritarian structure of the University. Ernest was on the side of the students who were demanding curriculum and administrative changes. His appointment was not renewed.

Two thousand students signed a petition for his retention. When University administrators rejected their demand, they proposed that student funding could pay his salary. The University agreed, but said his course would be non-credit. The students said, fine, he’s a great teacher, and we’ll take the course anyway. As much as Ernest appreciated the support, he opted to accept a position at San Francisco State University where S. I. Hayakawa had become president. Hayakawa, following, Alfred Korzbski, had helped establish the field of General Semantics in communication and media studies, a movement of frontline scholarship and cultural analysis with which Ernest had an affinity.

Three years later, SFSU blew up in student protest and the occupation of buildings. Hayakawa called in the National Guard and the campus became an armed camp of authoritarian oppression. This was not an educational environment that Ernest could accommodate. In 1969 he was recruited to an interdisciplinary program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he happily spent the rest of his working life.

Out of all this social upheaval and professional turmoil, Ernest Becker produced one of the best books on education I have ever read. Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy was released in 1967. Seven years earlier, Paul Goodman had published, Growing Up Absurd: The Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, a book that helped galvanize the movement for alternative education environments relevant to the lives and full human development of students and teachers alike. Beyond Alienation extended the analysis and prescription into the world of higher education.

In 1968 Ernest published The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man, a book on which he had been working for a number of years going back to his time in Syracuse. I was aware of this long gestation because the first time I saw Paul Tillich’s three-volume Systematic Theology was when we ordered it for Ernest at the Syracuse Book Center. I was curious how theology fit into his research and queried him when he picked up the Tillich books. This was the beginning of a series of conversations that foreshadowed the organization of thought articulated in The Structure of Evil. Tillich shows up in an important way in this book.

As I continued to order books for him, I could see the range of disciplines he was incorporating in his study and could anticipate new books that I knew would interest him. He was delighted to find books arriving at our store that he had not been aware of but were cogent for his work. This is the kind of thing booksellers do. One evening he came into the store while I was busy with a customer and began browsing through the history section. I hadn’t seen him for a week, so, when I was free, I greeted him and said, “What kick are you on now, Ernie?” He looked down at me (he was tall), put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Keith, I don’t go on ‘kicks.’” Fair enough, I had spoken carelessly and needed the reprimand to bring our conversation back to an appropriate level. After his death, I wrote to Marie with this little story. It so well illustrates the seriousness with which he regarded his work.

Then, in 1973, came the book that is built on all his previous work and lays out a fully rounded articulation of the “human problem.” The Denial of Death is one of those books that opens a door in the mind that cannot thereafter be closed. This is partly because the explanatory power of his central analysis, when you see it, becomes transparently obvious, and partly because Ernest Becker is such a master of intellectual history and cultural narratives that his synthesis of them into a coherent story of human development is particularly convincing. The Denial of Death was widely reviewed and highly praised. He was pleased but also wistful that he would not be here to participate in the dialogue the book was generating. It won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize two months after Ernest died.

Somewhere in his writing – I can’t at the moment put my finger on it – Ernest Becker says that one of the unique things about our time is how we can now talk seriously about religion in a scientific book. He goes further; he argues that you can’t have a credible “science of man” – we would say science of the human – without including religion. And this is what he comes to at the end of his work; while religion is one of the constructs that has been built up within the denial of death and the quest to assert cultural domination, and has, therefore, often fallen into evil ways, it also has the potential for opening to a dimension of cosmic experience that may enable humans to abandon the cultural amour which is the cause of so much conflict, aggression, violence, and oppression.

* * * * * *

The remainder of this memoir sketches out the core of Ernest Becker’s insight into the “human problem.” I have added a few comments.

As human animals we have a neurological system that enable us to 1) be aware of our existence, to be self-conscious, 2) be aware that we are aware of our existence, i.e. to be objectively aware of our subjective experience, and 3) to be aware that our existence will come to an end, to be aware of our coming death.

Following Kierkegaard, Ernest Becker observes that this level of awareness leads to both awe and terror; awe at the sheer wonder being here, alive in this amazing world with this level of awareness, and terror at the prospect that a time will come when it will end and we won’t be here anymore. And the worst of it is that we are also aware that death can come at any time for no reason we can foresee or control. This inexplicable psychodynamic conflict and the behaviour it engenders at both the personal and social level is at the core of the “human problem.”

The awareness of our own death and the uncertainty of its timing is not easy to live with. In fact, we can’t live with it in the forefront of consciousness. To do so is depressing at best and immobilizing at worst and that’s no way to live. There is a Woody Allen movie in which Woody Allen is playing his Woody Allen character with all his usual existential angst, when a flashback to childhood occurs. As an elementary school student, he has learned that the sun will eventually burn out. He, thereafter, refuses to do any more homework. We all laugh, but with a shudder because the logic transfers immediately to our own moment in the sun, our own short trajectory. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately for the biosphere), the human species has a complex neurological system capable of not only self-awareness but of abstract and symbolic thinking, which we have used to develop various strategies for coping with the “problem” of death, strategies we call culture.

A few pages into The Origin of Species, Darwin made a simple observation: living things want to go on living. That’s pretty straightforward and about as foundational as it gets. It then gets more complicated: living things make various adaptations that advance the chances of continuing to live. And here it gets really interesting: as the human species has engaged this evolutionary process, it has produced both symbolic and material culture. Cultural constructs are the way groupings of humans increase the chances that the group can go on living. Humans can do this in ways that no other animal can (although the beaver, for example, is extraordinarily good at material culture as well).

What sets humans apart is a neurological system that not only produces self-awareness, but with abstract reasoning and symbolic representation, can imagine things that are not real and proceed to make them real. It may be that a form of this neurological ability prompted a long ago beaver to envision what would happen if a watercourse were blocked in its flow, and then to experiment with sticks and mud to see if she could make it happen.

Perhaps an extraordinarily smart bank beaver responded to habitat crowding and resource depletion by moving up a small stream and building a dam to see what would happen. Or perhaps beaver cultural development happened the other way round; perhaps beaver dam and house culture was well established and a few characters that didn’t want to work so hard took off and started digging holes in the banks of rivers, ponds, and lakes. Or maybe both modes of beaver culture emerged together. However it happened, we can easily see that beavers are smart creatures with a culture all their own. Muskrats have the same house and bank culture but they don’t build dams.

Human communities are cut from the same evolutionary cloth. Even though, as far as we can tell, our abstract reasoning and symbolic imaging is way more powerful than that of beavers and other animals, a common pattern of adaptation underwrites our wish to go on living. In any event, thanks to our incredible powers of awareness, abstraction, and symbolic representation, we have the ability to resist, deny, outwit, and hold death at bay by means of cultural constructions. (This business about beavers is mine, not Ernest’s.)

Clearly, this is what a good deal of symbolic culture and a big chunk of material culture is up to. It doesn’t take an elaborate cosmic narrative or a highly complex material culture to provide the social and physical means for human communities to achieve and maintain a strong momentum in continuing to live, and to live pretty well. Why then do some humans groups have such incredibly complex systems of symbolic culture and such perilously overbuilt and habitat damaging forms of material culture? Why this penchant for both spiritual and material aggrandizement? Why this cultural overdevelopment to the point of diminishing returns and societal collapse? (See The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter.)

The answer to these questions that emerges from Ernest Becker’s evidence and analysis is the almost universal human effort to mute the awareness of mortality, to erect both symbolic and material forms of culture that support the denial of death. This is a further twist in the story of the “human problem.” The brilliantly complex and astoundingly intelligent neurological system that makes us aware of death cannot live with this awareness. Its brilliance, intelligence, and ingenuity are, therefore, launched into a countervailing effort that builds up elaborate and heroic forms of culture, which mask, thwart, and deny the reality of death. As these heroic forms of culture become ever more defining in unique and particular ways for specific human societies, they become invested with meaning and provide deep psychic alignment within communities; they fill the concept of truth with the power and security of their stories.

However, no matter the extent to which the denial of death is elaborated in the symbolic and material forms of culture, the irresolvable awareness of death continually threatens its facade of mastery and domination. As a result, the effort to deny mortality has to continually up the ante on the heroic forms and actions that keep its story believable and its social and cultural world from losing its meaning.

The enormous elaboration of cosmic mythology in Hinayana Buddhism is a good example of heroic cultural construction derived from the power of symbolic thinking, as are the various monotheistic narratives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Shamanistic and animistic societies have their own versions of this story-telling adaptation, but the angle of their cultural trajectory does not generally land them in the siege mentality that is characteristic of Abrahamic trio. (Aldous Huxley’s last novel, Island, explores the way this conflict in human neurological functioning might be addressed and a creative, benign, and ecologically sound society take shape.)

In the realm of material culture, a plethora of examples illustrate the effort to build up a heroic defense against mortality. The Egyptian pyramids are perhaps the most notable example, but virtually all monumental building strives to elevate the human over the world of organic process. The evolution of war-making weapons, the creation of empires both geographic and commercial, the mania for wealth accumulation, genetic engineering, and the growth of the industrial consumer economy way beyond utility and security, to name but a few, are all material forms of aggrandizement that attempt to mask the reality of death’s dominion.

Many aspects of material cultural development have been truly useful and have contributed to human betterment; others however, when pushed to a scale of aggrandizement, oppression, violence, and domination, have no rationale except as another chapter in the denial of death story, the story that builds up the hero systems of culture, both symbolic and material, in an attempt to transcend mortality. These hero systems of culture pretend we are not really animals, that we are not really subject to the same end, that our magical thinking and our ability to make the unreal real proves that humans are another order of being, categorically different from animals. See what we have built; see what power and wealth we command; see how we can, in fact, command and deal out death to other societies and cultures whose different hero systems, both metaphysical and material, pose threat to our own.

And so we come to the theatre of the world in which, for no reason we can explain, a great variety of cultures have emerged, each with their own death-denying hero systems providing security and meaning. The security is both symbolic and material, both a good cosmic story and a built environment, along with access to the means of life and the means of defense against danger. The meaning is largely social; a self-validating sense of significance in the life of the community.

All might be well with this picture if cultural groups around the planet had small populations, were widely dispersed, and preferred to stay home. Unfortunately, the population of humans has swelled to a massive scale, cultural groupings are everywhere cheek by jowl, and for various reasons a huge number of people are no longer staying home. In addition, the death-denying hero systems of culture are often unstable and thus require refurbishing and upgrading.

This upgrading often turns into aggrandizement especially when one cultural configuration comes into conflict with another and domination or diminishment becomes the issue – the so-called “clash of civilizations.” Aggrandizement typically takes the form of asserting metaphysical superiority, increased wealth accumulation, ramping up military preparedness, the acceptability of violent behaviour, denigrating those who are different, scapegoating, and outright aggression, which, in extreme cases, aims at the extermination of the offending parties. Thus we come to the generative context of much evil behaviour in the world and another piece in the puzzle of the “human problem” fits into place.

In Ernest Becker’s view, this is not a problem that can be entirely solved. Evil, in its most problematic form, emerges when the conflict of competing hero systems threatens to diminish or destroy one or the other of the contending parties. The quest for an alternative and ameliorating stance must strike deeply into the story of how and why cultural armour gets built up.

The trajectory of Ernest Becker’s work and the understanding to which he came does strike deeply into this story, but he did not imagine he had produced anything like a key for solving the “human problem.” At most, he hoped to increase the awareness of the problem at a level, which, if we are collectively wise enough, may allow us to “reread” the hero systems both symbolic and material which cultures have been building up with such mixed and often bad results, and reset the human project’s story-making process to a new kind of guidance.

Possibly a new direction will emerge from a clear-eyed view of the human animal in the kind of biosphere that is our home. If we are as smart as we think we are, perhaps we can work out a better adaptation than the one we now have going. This new orientation could start with harm reduction and building up a sense of mutually beneficial restraint. (The Paris Climate Accord?) Such new beginnings could ease off the cultural armour and provide a toehold for respect. If respect can get started, compassion and fair dealing may follow.

This isn’t much, but let’s be modest. It has been the overdevelopment of cultural armour in defiance of mortality that has landed our species on the edge of self-destruction. If we have to archive the stories that have brought us to this point, reconstruct a new kind of guidance, and redesign and rebuild much of the material culture that is now unravelling the habitability of earth’s ecosystems, we should probably approach this work in a cautious and humble way.

Even with improved insight into the dynamics of culture, Ernest Becker was not optimistic societies could pull up the kind of changes that would significantly reduce evil behaviour in the world. But he was hopeful that a better understanding would spread of how the denial of death damages the chances for a good life, and that new initiatives of cultural development, humbly grounded in the reality of the organic world, could emerge.

Keith Helmuth became the manager of an independent academic bookstore while still a student at the University of Iowa, a career that continued at Syracuse University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty of Friends World College in 1967 where he taught environmental studies and social ecology. Keith and his family subsequently established a small farm and market garden business in the St. John River Valley of New Brunswick (Canada). At the same time, he worked with a variety of community economic and social development initiatives in his home region. He is currently the Publisher and Managing Editor of Chapel Street Editions, a regionally focused non-profit publisher of natural history and cultural heritage books.

Author Contact: keithhelmuth@gmail.com