Death Denial, Death Drive

Content warning: suicide, depression

If you’re at all aware of my online presence, you’ll know that I have great respect for Richard Beck’s work at his blog Experimental Theology and in his books known sometimes as the Death Trilogy. (You may be more aware of this than you'd like to be, since I doubt a month goes by before bringing his work up in some comment thread or another.) In particular I appreciate his work on Terror Management Theory and how it pertains to religious authenticity, hospitality, and the creation of culture. He gets the bare-bones of his theory from Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, but adds to it using experimental psychology that was unavailable to Tillich. I’ll give a summary.

Humans fear death. We fear particular threats of death, but we also experience anxiety from the knowledge that we will necessarily die one day. In order to manage the terror of death, we create systems of meaning which promise us some kind of immortality. This might be a promise of an afterlife, but it might simply be the idea that our lives had meaning—we were remembered, or we descendants, or our actions contributed to the creation of some great cultural work (like the progress of science or what have you). However, these cultural projects, or worldviews, can only eliminate our fear of death if we believe in them fully. Therefore we react to anything which threatens our belief in these worldviews in the exact same way that we would react to the possibility of death, because the loss of our worldviews is identical to the loss of immortality. And the mere existence of other plausible worldviews might constitute a threat to one’s own worldview. This is why most people defend their worldviews and reject other people’s worldviews so violently; violent defense of worldviews makes things like hospitality, charity, and justice difficult or impossible. Even a religion like Christianity, which is founded on the idea that we should side with the oppressed, became and in some cases remains violently oppressive because of these forces. Some people, however, do not use their worldview and cultural projects to shield themselves from the reality of death. These people, instead, face their fears of death directly; they also face their doubts about their own worldviews directly (these are, after all, the same thing). These people are in the minority, but they exist. Thus there are two things a person must do in order to prevent themselves from violently defending their worldviews: they must be willing to face the possibility of their own death (which means they must be willing to face doubt, the possibility that their worldview is false and their actions meaningless), and they must try to adopt a worldview that is not easily threatened by competing worldviews (which doesn’t necessarily mean relativism, but at the least worldviews should be easy on people who don’t adopt them).

I find this theory very compelling, not just because Beck marshals a lot of evidence for it in his work but also because I can use it to explain so many things. In particular, it seems to explain why so many religious people can be so hostile, and why their hostility seems to come from their religion, but at the same time religion motivates others to be hospitable instead. The theory can’t explain why people choose one religion over others, but that’s OK: other theories can do that. Beck’s work simply explains why people need to choose a worldview of some kind (even if that’s not a religion) and why they behave the way they do in relation to their own worldview and in relation to other people’s worldviews. And it is powerful when it does this.

However, I think there might be a problem with it. It presupposes that all people fear death.*

Now, I readily admit that most people fear death, and that complaints that certainly cultures do not fear death simply confuse the effects of a highly successful worldview with the lack of a natural fear of death. But I do not admit for a second that all people fear death. Some people actively desire death (that is, they exhibit marked suicidiality), but others simply have neither fear nor desire for death. When my depression is at its worst, this is me: I am generally unperturbed by possibly dangerous situations (unsafe driving, for instance). Moreover, however my mental health looks, I feel no anxiety at all about the fact that I will inevitably die. This does not scare me; it relieves me. There is little that gives me more comfort that the thought that I will one day die. I cannot state this emphatically enough: the only emotion I feel when contemplating my eventual death is relief. Of course I realize this might be pathological, but it means I fit into neither of Beck’s populations: I am not a person who denies death and my fear of it, and I am not a person who faces my fear of death. I face death and simply have no fear. I am surely not the only one, either.

Perhaps you object that I do not fear death because I have a fairly successful meaning-making worldview. And I do think my life probably has meaning. But, if that were true, my response to doubt would be fear of death. Contemplating the possibility that my life might be meaningless should, if Beck is right, cause me to grasp for life more readily. But the opposite happens: when I contemplate the possibility that my life has no meaning, I am even less interested in living out the full allotment of my life. If I came to believe that my life was meaningless, I would probably tip over into actively wanting to die. That’s opposite the prediction you would make if what Beck said applied to me. And I’m in good company as far as that goes; Camus felt the same.

Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus as follows: 

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Notice that the question of life and death is contingent on the question of meaning and meaninglessness; if life is meaningless, there is no reason to live. If life has meaning, there is a reason to live. This exhibits causality reverse to Beck’s. Camus’s answer was peculiar to him, a last-minute dodge from nihilism: suicide is the refusal to face the meaninglessness of life, and we must face the meaninglessness of life. This smuggles meaning back into absurdism, however, and creates a contradiction.** Camus’s answer doesn’t interest me, however; what interests me is the fact that the absurdists and existentialists seemed to have experiences parallel to mine, which suggests that Beck’s theory cannot describe all people. That is, it does not apply to the admittedly small population of people who simply don’t fear death in the first place.

Of course, it doesn’t have to address those people (us). As a theory of religion and culture in general, its failure to describe a small subset of the population, one which has not had much hand in shaping either religion or culture, is hardly a fatal error. In fact, this disjoint explains the general hostility most cultures and religions have shown towards suicide (as distinct self-sacrifice): suicide, as a repudiation of the meaningfulness of life, threatens the culture’s worldview and thereby exposes people to the fear of death. And since worldviews are designed to assure people that death isn’t real, they don’t have much to offer people who mostly fear that life is worthless and all meaning is uncertain, except to simply insist on their own validity in a louder and angrier voice. Maybe this is why it is difficult to find resources in Christianity which are at all effective at dissuading people from suicide or ameliorating their depression without making things so much worse (fear of damnation, sense of shame, etc.).

It is worth noting that I do have a fear of death, but it’s a different one: I fear other people’s deaths. I fear the deaths of those who matter to me. Perhaps Beck’s theory can be applied to that? The attempt to understand another person’s life as meaningful, in order to deny their death? Or the attempt to honestly face another person’s death or our fear of it?

So my complaint is not that Beck’s theory is wrong because it omits the population of which I am a part; my complaint is simply that I find it difficult to use Beck’s theory to determine what I should do, in regards to my own worldview, or to predict or understand my own anxieties regarding the meaningfulness of my actions, the role of doubt in hospitality, and how to face my particular anxieties (of meaninglessness, but also of the deaths of people who matter to me) without harming others.

For more on my depression and assorted philosophy I've worked through in response to it, see this index post.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, please contact a local suicide hotline. In BC, call 1-800-784-2433, or 1-800-SUICIDE. If you are feeling depression generally, get therapy. I am serious about this: it helps so much.

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*There are other problems I can think of: for instance, Beck does not seem to account for a desire to believe that which is true. However, I won’t deal with it here; it’s possible that we do have a reality principle in our psychological make-up which competes with the meaning-creating and death-fearing components, but I’m not entirely sure that we do; if we do value truth for its own sake, that value is likely nonetheless a product and component or our worldview and appears after we choose a worldview to manage our fear of death. Beck, however, found some inspiration for his work from the American pragmatists, whose sense of truth is different from the intuitive one: a proposition which works, which bears fruit, which makes you the person you think you should be, is true and is true precisely for those reasons. Truth is not about correspondence between a proposition and an external reality or about coherence within a system of propositions. While Beck might not sign off on American pragmatist epistemology, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Beck’s work focuses on whether beliefs make you a hospitable or inhospitable person rather than on whether beliefs meet some other benchmark of truth.

**This paradox may be resolvable, in the sense that it may be cognitively impossible for us to truly acknowledge meaninglessness. Any attempt to do so might smuggle meaninglessness in somehow; an absurdist might therefore say that absurdism is simply the philosophical system which gets closest to acknowledging meaninglessness, even though it smuggles in the imperative “You must authentically acknowledge meaninglessness.” As it stands, I prefer existentialism to absurdism, since it acknowledges that meaning can be created and only asks that you acknowledge that you created that meaning yourself; it still contains the paradox (you did not yourself create the imperative “You must acknowledge that you created all meaning yourself”), but it contains a more hospitable version of that paradox.

An Apology to Authenticity

I have perhaps been unfair to what I've been calling the Polonius virtue. While, when I started out writing about it, I said that I thought you could likely build an argumentative robust version of it, I haven't been doing the best job of keeping that in mind. Instead, I've generally been thinking of people who adhere to the Polonius virtue as being pretty seriously mistaken. Of course even thinking that they're mistaken might be kind of strange, since I first came up with this idea in the context of Moral Foundations Theory, and there are real questions about whether moral foundations (or values) are even opinions anyway, at least in the sense that we think of them; we don't seem to choose which foundations matter to us. But I still want to make a case for valuing authenticity to oneself, in some shape or another.

To recap, I suspect that authenticity is value that a statistically significant proportion of humans care about. One version of this is the Polonius virtue, so called because of this line from Hamlet, spoken by Polonius: "This above all: to thine ownself be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man." To whit, it is a moral good to be true to yourself, a proclamation taken to mean many things. I think the problem, in fact, is that it's taken to mean so many things, and so many of those things are silly that I forget that some of them may not be so silly. For instance, I won't apologize for thinking that acting "true" to your every impulse is a good thing; hardly anyone can believe that if they keep in mind how many times people have conflicting impulses. But I think there might be one possible reading which isn't so silly: you shouldn't lie about yourself to yourself.

If you want to navigate the world with much hope of success, it will be much better if you are honest about yourself. This isn't a claim that there is some deep, immutable self to which you might be honest, nor is it even a claim that there is a temporary but nonetheless coherent self-of-the-moment about which you might be honest. I can fully recognize that I'm conflicted, that I'm partially opaque to myself, etc. and so forth, and still say that I tend to feel certain ways about certain things (so, for instance, I am afraid of heights, I have depression) and that I tend to do certain things (so, for instance, I usually articulate inchoate emotional content in logical, procedural ways). If I'm going to make it, I ought to know all of this about myself.

Another take on it: I need to recongize when people around me are making demands of me which don't honour the ways in which I differ from their ideas about what humans are. I typically see drives for authenticity as being a little anti-conventional, and I think this insight--that people do make demands of you which just don't mesh well with your personality, your needs, your cognitive style, etc.--is where that anti-conventional attitude might come from. Sometimes the dominant narrative just won't work for us; we aren't all or always so easily caught up in our culture's folkways. Being honest about this does seem rather important, at least as a condition of other goods.

And, for goodness sake, this is precisely the sort of thing I've been hoping other people would start adopting (particularly ones I think of as being uber-logical, disembodied rational types, like the Less Wrong people--and that may be unfair caricature, as well). I guess I've been an advocate for particular version of the authenticity ethic and I didn't even know it. Which is ironic in the technical sense. I'm a perfect example of what can go wrong if you aren't aware of yourself: I spent most of my life with dysthymia and I didn't even know it. Had I known it, things might have gone much better for me. And I'm also a decent example of what can go well if you are aware of yourself: I knew in advance that I was going to have a depressive breakdown, and I got a medical leave in time to weather that storm without damaging my academic career. So this specific kind of authenticity ethic is one I'm deliberately cultivating.

I think there are a few ways the Polonius virtue can go wrong, however. The first is when knowing yourself becomes an excuse to remain static. The second is when people start generalizing about what people are like; this can be a case of thinking other people are more like you than they are, or in can be a case of reasoning out from beliefs you have about human behaviour, even when it does not correspond well with the evidence/other people's experiences. The third is using an authenticity ethic to support selfish behaviour. The fourth (perhaps a superset which contains the third) is privileging authenticity over other goods. I'd explicitly disagree with what Polonius actually says: you can be true to yourself (whatever you take that to mean) and still be false with other people. (The most obvious example is that you could lie, and know you're lying.) And I think a lot of the metaphysics or anthropology that people build around the authenticity is unfounded .As an example, you could say that Freudian psychoanalysis is a huge and erroneous mythology built out of the valuable recognition that we are opaque to ourselves and spend a lot of time trying to repress/suppress our desires so that they correspond with societal norms.

Another way it can go wrong, too, is that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we know ourselves when we don't. Smart people prone to introspection are, apparently, really bad for this: smart people are terribly good at rationalization, and trick themselves into thinking they know their own mind. I'm inclinded to think that a fairly good knowledge of psychology--maybe not formal education but at least some commitment to following academic psychology, rather than folk psychology--would help people in this, but maybe not. That might just improve the plausiblity of their rationalizations, not improve the accuracy of their rationalizations. Really, awareness of the limitations of self-awareness is a kind of honesty to oneself, isn't it?

So in future I will try to be fairer to this ethic, and recognize that it probably has a place, when articulated in a certain way and when it is not burdened with baseless metaphysics. In retrospect, it seems appallingly obvious that, at minimum, being honest with oneself about oneself is pretty important to proper functioning. We've just got to pair that with the twin insights that 1) we can never really know ourselves entirely and 2) we are constantly in flux.

And I'm sorry if I offended anyone with my callous dismissal of authenticity as a moral good.

Which Myths Must Be True?

(This post is jam-packed with ideas and sources which I'm pulling together; I apologize in advance if it's a little dense. That's not a humble-brag; I am sincerely sorry conditional on your discomfort.)

An atheist friend once told me that the thing which frustrated him most about most of his atheist friends is that they didn't seem to understand that everyone has a mythology. His mythology is that birth is traumatic and then life is a downhill run to the grave. Other people have other mythologies: maybe it has something to do with the struggle between reason and conservatism, or maybe it's about the universe's basic indifference. Not everyone is aware that they have one. But everyone has one nonetheless. (To be fair, I don't think it's just his atheist friends who don't get this. A lot of Christians, for instance, think that non-religious people can't have a mythology; you'll have heard this as, "If there is no God, the world has no meaning.")

So that's a fair question to ask yourself: what's your mythology? I suppose we could think of mythologies as metanarratives, the big stories which make sense of all the little stories: Marxism's class struggle, Christianity's life-death-and-resurrection of Jesus Son of God, the Enlightenment's slow dawn of progress. But I don't know that all myths have to be big. The zodiac comes to mind: I know people who care about their sign, who understand themselves in light of that sign, but I don't think they believe the zodiac is the big story which gives meaning to all of the little stories. Myths can be medium-size stories which give some meaning to our experiences, but not all of the meaning. (In other words, you don't have to be a hedgehog to have a mythology; foxes have mythologies, too.)

Ambaa at the Patheos blog The White Hindu wrote a post a few months back called "Krishna is a Myth; Jesus is a Myth," arguing that it doesn't matter whether or not religious myths are historically true or religious figures were historically real; rather, what matters is how those myths and how those figures' teachings impact your life. It's the wisdom tradition that matters, she says. She speculated that insistence on historical reality was generally an attempt to claim religious supremacy. I commented to disagree with the motives she ascribes to Christians who believe that Jesus is historically real (counting myself among them): in general, the idea is that Jesus must have been real (and crucified, and resurrected...) in order for the Christian wisdom tradition to make any sense. So while many Christians probably do use Jesus' historicity in order to insist that Christianity is the one true and good religion, I think the theological (if not always emotional or social) motive for this belief is just that most Christians think that Jesus' historical reality is necessary to make Christianity coherent. The Christian wisdom tradition just doesn't make sense otherwise.*

However, I must say that the mythical truth/historical truth distinction is one that many Christians make. In particular, many Christians (I don't know about most) think that Genesis is not literally historically true; it really is a myth in the more anthropological sense. I know that some conservative Christians have argued that if we say Genesis isn't literally true, then soon we'll be saying Matthew isn't literally true, either; this may be a stretch, but certainly Ambaa is arguing for something like that. So there's another question: what parts of Christianity are necessary, and which are optional? Which parts must be history?

Or, a better way of putting that might be, which parts of my mythology require historical, scientific, logical, philosophical, or otherwise external justification in order to be sensible/useful/helpful? Which myths could still be useful and good if false? And which myths must be true?

(Technically I mean, "Which myths must be true in order to function as myths?", but that's far less pithy.)

In case you think that all myths must be true to be useful, I humbly submit that that's nonsense. Lots of really tenuous myths are helpful if they help you articulate something about yourself that you otherwise couldn't articulate. Freud, for instance, produced a massive mythology which has no real empirical basis, but some of his language--id and ego, repression--and some of his overarching concepts--the difference and relation between the conscious and unconscious minds--have been incredibly useful, at least until we came up with better language. And certainly science education has thrived on basically-flawed metaphors; when our best ways of understanding the universe is a set of advanced equations, you have to teach myths. I've written about how useful the idea of introversion has been to me; I was able to use that term to better articulate my needs and experiences. However, I am lucky: the concept of introversion does a very good job of articulating my experiences, but I know it that it doesn't help most people articulate their experiences. The fact that most people are ambiverts rather than introverts or extroverts suggests that the idea doesn't have much value as a scientific explanation of human behaviour generally. This does not change the fact that it has value as an explanation of my experiences. Introversion, as a myth, does not need to be true to be useful.**

This doesn't even get into the problems about what truth is, or what kind of truth we're talking about, and the distinction between "in order for this myth to be useful it must be true" and "in order for this myth to be useful I must believe that it is true." We have to tackle the nature of truth alongside the question, but I'm not getting into it again here.

So I have a lot of questions which I intend to ask of myself and I encourage you to ask of yourselves:

What is your mythology? And what are your myths?
Which myths could still be useful and good if false?
Which myths must be true?

(And let's remember that the map is not the territory...except when the map precedes the territory.)

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*I had a Religious Studies professor in undergrad who said that one particular problem has plagued Hindu-Christian conversations: Christian participants often do not realize that, when they are explaining Christianity, they are not distinguishing between Christianity's Incarnation and Hinduism's avatars, allowing the Hindu participants to think Christianity is basically a kind of Hinduism. As a result, the Hindu participants would often just try to absorb Christianity into its exuberant polytheism without realizing that Christianity really does not work like Hinduism does. The reason this problem is a big one is that it afflicts conversations in which the participants are trying to get along; the problem results in the participants disagreeing about the best way of getting along (conflating Hinduism and Christianity vs. observing their differences). I think Ambaa's post fits well in this tradition of mutual miscommunication (if it is a tradition at all, and not something my prof made up).
**As it happens, there might be good empirical evidence to suggest that there is something going on at the level of the brain that folks have called introversion, to do with well-measured things like the brain's arousal to stimuli. But when people use the terms introvert and extrovert, they rarely use them in the neurological sense.

Satanism's Ethics (Are Kind of Boring)

Today's post will be my six-hundred and sixty-sixth, according to Blogger (this may be untrue in that I think Blogger counts unpublished posts, and I have a half dozen or so unpublished posts). In light of this, I will write about Satanism.

I can't recall the first time I realized that Satanists were 1) real and 2) people, though it was probably around my fourth year of undergraduate. I recall hearing a very touching story that a human resources worker at Queen's University told to my Christian fellowship about a student who was complaining about the struggles of undergraduate university; when the student said that she thought she was losing her faith, the HR worker asked what faith that was, and the student answered, "Satanism." The HR worker then proceeded to treat her with sympathy and compassion, despite knowing that this student prescribed to a worldview deliberately built in opposition to the HR worker's own beliefs. Somehow this story went a long way to normalizing Satanism for me.

That being said, at the same time Satanism seems really weird to me, because it embraces the metaphysics it opposes; unlike atheism, its vehement rejection is a kind of affirmation in that, although it flips all of the moral values, it nonetheless maintains the cosmological beliefs. (Also, it is amply and inaccurately represented in movies, especially in the 90s and early 00s.) So when I made myself a course-reader style package of miscellaneous materials one summer, I include some readings about Satanism from a Religious Studies/Anthropology anthology I got out of the library. I thought this religion-of-conflict might have yield some interesting insights into religion and/or culture. And what I learned is this: Satanism is actually kind of boring.

I'll be more specific, because I suppose certain aspects of Satanism are not so boring, and I'm sure there are Satanisms, so maybe certain varieties of Satanism are more intellectually robust. What I find to be so boring about Satanism, as described and examined in Edward J. Moody's "Urban Witches,"  is its core ethical system. Moody writes that Satanist virtues are simultaneously defined as 1) that which Christianity considers a sin and 2) natural human motivations:

The seven deadly sins of Christian teaching--greed, pride, envy, anger, gluttony, lust, and sloth--are depicted as Satanic virtues. Envy and greed are, in the Satanic theology, natural in man and the motivating forces behind ambition. Lust is necessary for the preservation of the species and not a Satanic sin. Anger is the force of self-preservation. Instead of denying natural instincts the Satanist learns to glory in them and turn them into power.¹

Because of its emphasis on desires that are "natural" to some universal "man," these Satanic ethics remind me of what I call the Polonius virtue, the idea that acting authentically (or true to yourself) is a moral good. I've never found the Polonius virtue convincing because 1) it is not something I intuitively feel, 2) I've never encountered a justification of it, let alone a persuasive one, and 3) I do not believe in a coherent or stable self to which one might be obliged (and this last one's pretty lethal to any chances I might have of adopting the Polonius virtue).

The most interesting move that the Satanists make regarding morality is linking definitions 1 and 2 and explaining why what Christians call sins are actually virtues:

Satanic novices are taught that early church fathers deliberately picked on those aspects of human desire that were most natural and made them sins, in order to use the inevitable transgressions as a means of controlling the populace, promising them salvation in returning for obedience.

Were it not for this explanation, it would seem mighty convenient that everything Christians condemn is actually praise-worthy. The explanation itself is actually a not too different from things Christopher Marlowe was (probably falsely) accused of having said in the early modern period.²

I don't know why I was expecting something more interesting than this. I guess I thought that if anyone had a really wild and unexpected morality, it would be Satanism, but it turns out that it fits right in there with genetic determinism, pop-psychoanalysis, and what Walter Truett Anderson calls neo-romanticism (think hippies and New Agers), movements with an emphasis on the interior self as the source of morality and truth. It also has some things in common with existentialism, but it reminds me more of genetic determinism and pop-psychoanalysis. I presume more conservative Christian writers would say that it's boring because everything that's not the truth limits God, Creation, and humanity, or because anything that derives morality from the self cannot be as rich as something that derives morality from an institution/tradition/wellspring of all Being. But I'm not going that route: certainly there are lots of belief systems I consider to be factual wrong but still well-worked out and internally compelling (for instance, Nietzsche's immoralism). Satanism isn't that.

I suppose it's as pertinent to ask why I think this is boring as it is to ask why it is boring. I think it's boring because it has no room for growth or improvement. It's static and non-dynamic. The Christian vision (or, anyway, my Christian vision) of ethics involves a person striving to better themselves through action; it's not just that my past actions become increasingly more ethical, but that I change as a result of my actions. That self to which Polonius ethicists would say that I am obliged is shifting; how do I authentically act out a shifting self? Or how do I act out an internally conflicted self? Satanists seem to want to locate authenticity in desires and impulses, but these are not always consistent: I have impulses of charity as much as I have impulses of greed, and what of my desires to inhibit other desires? Authenticity to a certain self seems doomed or nonsense unless that self to which I am authentic is a deliberate self, that is, the self that I want or will rather than the self that I have. This kind of authenticity is not just more interesting but also quite simply possible, which can't be said for regular-old Polonius ethicism. I think there's still a lot of debate concerning what kind of self I ought to cultivate, though. Christians are already on top of this idea, but I'm sure Satanists could construct a more intellectually rigorous ethics on this model as well (if some haven't already constructed it); in order to do so, however, they could not appeal either to a dubious historical account of Christianity or to inherent desire any more, which means that they'd have to build a whole new set of justifications for the sort of authenticity to desire that they've been espousing. (Nietzsche would likely make a decent starting point for that kind of work.)

EDIT: I'm also kind of surprised that the justification given for lust is reproduction. That sounds, well, exactly like Christian doctrine about sexual attraction: it's good if it leads to reproduction. The Satanists aren't adding the corollary (it's bad if it doesn't), but even so, this similarity is striking. In other words, if Satanists define "lust" simply as "those feelings which are necessary for reproduction," then they have a really tame idea of what lust is, and don't seem to understand how the churches are using the word.

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1  Of course, since this and one other article are the sources of my understanding of Satanism, and these articles are old enough, what I'm writing here may not apply to Satanism generally, or to the Satanism of any particular individual you (reader) may know. All of what I say applies only to Satanism as I, through Moody, describe it.
2  It's actually possible that Marlowe did say a number of the things that the Baines Note accused him of saying, but at the time he did so he was a spy for the English government, acting out the role of traitor and conspirator in order to gain information. So, in a sense, the government was condemning him for doing what it was paying him for doing. Little wonder if Marlowe did become seditious.