Democracy

The best I can recall, I first encountered Ernest Becker when he was mentioned in my “Abnormal Psychology” class in college. The teacher, a medical school professor who was teaching this undergraduate course, mentioned Becker’s name when we were discussing existential psychotherapy. He had a great respect for Becker’s work The Denial of Death. I think the book may make a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall.
In the coming years I read an interview Sam Keen had done with Ernest Becker following the publication of The Denial of Death and following Becker’s cancer diagnosis. That interview, published in a volume called Voices and Visions, a collection of interviews Keen did for Psychology Today, was fascinating. Keen pressed him on why he had so come to emphasize the tragic dimensions of human existence in his work. Becker took well Keen’s observation about overemphasis, and then went on to say, “If I stress the terror, it is only because I am talking to cheerful robots.”
As with too many authors I would like to explore, it took me years to return to Becker more fully. It took me until 2009 to read The Denial of Death. It is an experience I cherish. Becker writes with incredible insight, and with a genuine talent for the turn of a phrase. Wrestling with this work has deepened my own thinking immeasurably, and contributed something to the enlargement of my soul.
Fortunately for me, being the book magnet that I am, I had over the years managed to collect a few other of Becker’s book, mostly used copies. Not long ago, I read the second edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning. Becker, throughout his work, wanted to combine insights from psychological, sociological, political and theological sources. Though not quite as rich and fecund as The Denial of Death, The Birth and Death of Meaning has a lot of wonderful moments, and the insights have lost little for being written over forty years ago.
In the face of the shutdown of our government, here are a few of Becker’s reflections on democracy.

Democracy needs adults more than anything (163).

So how are we doing? But if you just want to look at Washington and blame less-than-adult behavior on those we have elected, you miss the richness of Becker’s thought. True, our elected officials don’t always act like adults, but often we elect them because we have not exactly come into our own adulthood.

Becker argues that society teaches us lessons about what it means to be a success, a hero, and that we absorb such lessons at a very young age, in part, to ward off the anxiety that comes from being human, which means to “live in the teeth of paradoxes” (177). These lessons may not always be helpful. They often cut us off from seeing reality more fully and richly. When one becomes too rigid in adherence to cultural hero-systems you bring up people who are closed against the world, armored, brittle, afraid, people whose last resource would be easy adaptability to new choices and challenges (163). Is part of our political problem the deeper problem of too many of us being armored, brittle and afraid?

But democracy needs adults more than anything, especially adults who bring something new to the perception of the world, cut through accustomed categories, break down rigidities. We need open, free, and adaptable people precisely because we need unique perceptions of the real, new insights into it so as to disclose more of it (163).

All of this seems fresh and relevant to our world.

And Becker addresses me as a person of faith. Might faith help us develop into the kind of people more open to the world, more adaptable and free?

Religion, like any human aspiration, can also be automatic, reflexive, obsessive. Authoritarian religion is also an idol. (197)

Not terribly comforting, but true to life. Aren’t we seeing in some part of our political life today the mutual reinforcement of political and religious rigidity? Yet there is more. Forgive Becker’s lack of inclusive language here.

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they seem. The ideal critique of a faith must always be whether it embodies within itself the fundamental contradictions of the human paradox, and yet is able to support them without fanaticism, sadism, and narcissism, but with openness and trust. Religion itself is an ideal of strength and of potential for growth, of what man might become by assuming the burden of his life, as well as being partly relieved of it. (198)

Someday, I hope soon, the government will re-open. It will be business as usual, but business as usual isn’t getting us very far. Democracy needs adults.


With Faith and With Feathers,

David