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Does our terror of dying drive almost everything we do?

#1
C C Offline
http://chronicle.com/article/Mortal-Motivation/230303/

EXCERPT: [...] In a new book [...], The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Random House), [ Sheldon] Solomon, [Jeff] Greenberg, and [Tom] Pyszczyn­ski argue that fear of death drives our actions to a much greater extent than people realize. "The terror of death has guided the development of art, religion, language, economics, and science," they write. "It raised the pyramids in Egypt and razed the Twin Towers in Manhattan. It contributes to conflicts around the globe. At a more personal level, recognition of our mortality leads us to love fancy cars, tan ourselves to an unhealthy crisp, max out our credit cards, drive like lunatics, itch for a fight with a perceived enemy, and crave fame, however ephemeral, even if we have to drink yak urine on Survivor to get it."

But as the authors seek a mass audience for their new book, within academe they remain locked in a lively debate over the validity of their ideas. Critics say terror-management theory conflicts with what we know about evolution. They complain that the theory is so elastic it can generate a story to explain any experimental finding after the fact. They criticize its overemphasis on mortality.

Can fear of death really explain that much about human behavior?

[...] One voice that appears over and over is [anthropologist Ernest] Becker’s. "Although the idea that humans dread death and are preoccupied with transcending it has been floating around since antiquity in both religious and philosophical thought," Solomon writes, "Becker seized readers by the throat in 1973 with his powerful articulation of this notion in The Denial of Death."

Becker’s book plumbed the depths of everyday human motivation. His analysis boiled down to the problem of death: We’re animals driven to keep living, but unlike other species we know that we’re going to die. Becker viewed this as a unique psychological burden. We wouldn’t be able to function if we faced it fully. So the fear of death, he argued, impels us to try to feel that we’re significant beings in a meaningful world. We do that by living out our lives in a symbolic reality in which we will somehow continue on beyond our physical death. We might believe in an immortal soul. Even if we don’t, we still believe in our identity.

As Greenberg puts it: "I can think to myself that, well, ‘Jeff Greenberg’ will continue. My body will die, but that’s not my identity. My identity is tied up in the things that I write, in the impact I have on other people, in my family — I have two kids, so they carry on my name, my memory." So much of what motivates human behavior, Becker argued, is this need to establish and maintain that sense that we are significant beings who will in some way transcend death.

[...] Aging, dating, smoking, marketing, parenting, robot-designing, health decision-making — those subjects and more have now been studied through a terror-management lens.

With that ubiquity has also come criticism. One of the most persistent challenges goes back to the theory’s origins: how humans developed into these worldview-protecting, self-esteem-seeking creatures in the first place. To some opponents, terror management conflicts with evolution.

In The Worm at the Core, Solomon and his colleagues hark back to the emergence of human consciousness to make the case that early forms of terror management altered the direction of history. Knowledge of death "arose as a byproduct of early humans’ burgeoning self-awareness," they write. That knowledge could have incapacitated people, they say, without simultaneous adaptations to transcend death. So early humans invented a supernatural world in which people do just that. The groups of humans who "fabricated the most compelling tales" could best cope with mortal terror, function effectively, and pass on their genes. "Psychologically fortified by the sense of protection and immortality that ritual, art, myth, and religion provided, our ancestors were able to take full advantage of their sophisticated mental abilities," the authors write. "They deployed them to develop the belief systems, technology, and science that ultimately propelled us into the modern world."

Lee Kirkpatrick doesn’t buy that story. Kirkpatrick, an evolutionary psychologist at the College of William & Mary, argues that self-awareness could not have evolved if its consequences included a debilitating terror of death. The genetic mutations producing that self-awareness would have been eliminated by natural selection. "I just don’t see how a brain system that produced such maladaptive effects could stay around long enough for people to figure out the proposed terror-management solution to the problem," he says.

Terror-management theory is spurring researchers to propose alternative interpretations....
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
Dying is something we learn to start doing in our sunset years. I'm 55 and I'm already seeing the pattern--the need to embrace fully, but also to let go when its time. Everything around me is becoming more beautiful and precious and dear to me, as if I have a growing sense of it all being temporary and fleeting. While I believe there is some sort of continuation of myself into an afterlife, I don't allow myself the luxury of using that as a means of allaying the tragedy of death and of permanent loss. Stories have to end. That's the way of things. And I'm fine with that. I'm also increasingly content not to know the why and whither of existence. I want to experience reality as it is--nothing spared and nothing edited out. That's what being here is all about I suspect. And it has something to do with the afterlife. For what I called soulbuilding, whatever state that may be.
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