The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Chapter 10, Vital Lies and Cultural Heroics

In Part 3 of The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience we will wade into the waters of modern psychological research to evaluate how the theories of William James and Sigmund Freud are faring in psychological laboratories. As noted at the end of Part 2, many of the techniques being used to assess the Freud/James debate were created and perfected in the 1990s. These techniques are a part of a new movement in psychological research called experimental existentialism. Surveys and handbooks about experimental existentialism are now being published. Interestingly, parallel innovations are being seen in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. Taken together, these innovations are allowing researchers to empirically investigate questions that had hitherto been considered too abstract or vague for laboratory research. Our focus will be on the developments in experimental existentialism. To understand this literature and its associated techniques we need to trace the changes in psychodynamic thought from Freud to the present day.

i.
In the years and decades following Freud's death, psychoanalysis split into various factions. Many continued with Freud's focus on the family and the effects of early life upon adulthood personality and psychopathology. Others followed Freud's more charismatic followers such as Alfred Alder or Carl Jung. But a significant number of psychoanalysts began to blend Freud's theory with Continental existentialism. This was a easy merger because existentialism involves human experience, phenomenology and meaning-making. It was easy for these followers of Freud to see how many of the psychological problems in modern life were, in fact, existential problems. What is the purpose of my life? What makes life significant? This conflation of psychology and philosophy is nicely captured by Camus in the opening lines of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus:

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. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

One can see in Freud's later works how the founder of psychoanalysis was gravitating toward existential reformulations of his work. All his life Freud fiercely defended his theory of infantile sexuality but one can see his nascent existentialism in his amendment to the libido theory when he added a "death instinct." In addition, we've already noted how in The Future of an Illusion Freud's analysis of religion there has less to do with sexuality than existential anxiety. Although Freud's other significant work on religion, Totem and Taboo, does attempt to link the origins of religion to the the Oedipus Conflict (and a primal murder of the father), Freud's more mature analysis in The Future of an Illusion elevates the existential over the Oedipal. That is, the God-Father figure is less an object of sexual and aggressive impulses than a protector and comforter in the face of a terrifying existence.

After Freud's death many of his followers continued to follow the existential trajectory of his later works. For these thinkers, deeply informed by existential philosophy, death and existential terror begin to displace sexuality as the prime mover in the human psyche. Otto Rank, Rollo May, and Victor Frankl did important pioneering work in this area. Today, Irvin Yalom is a leading thinker, practitioner and author in the area of existentially-based approaches to therapy. Yalom's book Existential Psychotherapy is a widely read clinical manual.

ii.
But many think that the most important and influential work integrating psychology, Freud and existentialism was done Ernest Becker. Becker died of cancer on March 6, 1974. Two months after his death Becker's monumental work, The Denial of Death, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Becker's work is important for our purposes because the experimental innovations in the 1990s were directly inspired by his work, particularly his book The Denial of Death. Consequently, we need to review Becker's ideas as they form the theoretical foundation for much of the research in experimental existentialism

The genius of Becker's synthesis in The Denial of Death is the notion that existential anxiety can function as a creative social and psychological force. When we think about existentialism we often think of despair, suicide, meaninglessness, and the absurd. But in Becker's work we discover the creative facets of existential terror. In this, Becker follows Freud. Freud showed how anxieties associated with amoral and primitive sexual and aggressive drives are redirected into creative outlets. In a similar way, Becker shows how existential anxieties are channeled into significant psychological and cultural outlets. Take a simple example. I endeavor to write a book. For Freud, guided by his drive theory, the energies behind my book are sexual and aggressive impulses. In writing the book I redirect Id drives into an outlet that is acceptable to both myself and my culture (e.g., maybe my sex drive comes out in the steamy sex scenes I write in the book). Becker, following the existential psychologists, replaces the Id with existential motivations. I write the book, in this view, to feel significant. I write the book because I find it meaningful. In activities such as these we have, to echo Camus, answered the question of suicide. We've found reasons for living.

But if we scratch at these feelings of "significance" and "meaning" we uncover some anxieties. Our efforts toward attaining significance often seem frantic and obsessive. Something is at stake. Meaning seems fragile. In short, these accomplishments are important because they occur against the backdrop of an indifferent universe and a clock ticking down to death. Meaning is meaningful because it is effortful, rare and fleeting. Meaning isn't given. Meaning is constructed.

iii.
But it's not like you have to do this all on your own. When we are born life doesn't come at us like a Jackson Pollock painting. Life might be a Jackson Pollock painting, but that's not how we first encounter it. Thousands of years before we were born humans had been imposing structure upon existence. When we are born we step into those structures. We are given a language, norms, a history, a religion, a race, a class, nation and, most importantly, a general sense of what makes for a good and happy life. At birth we are handed well-worn existential structures that, for the most part, allow us to answer Camus's question. In fact, these structures are so effective that Camus's question--Why is life worth living?--never occurs to most people. Life seems intrinsically meaningful, significant and full.

But these structures are not intrinsic to existence. They are imposed upon life. Anyone who has gone through an existential crisis knows this. We suddenly ask, why am I chasing the gold ring? Only because everyone says I should. Chasing the gold ring is what we do to make life meaningful, to be a success. But a bit of reflection suggests that all this might be nonsense. The blind leading the blind. Such reflections drove Thoreau into the woods. He looked around and saw people leading lives of quiet desperation. Suddenly life did look like a Jackson Pollack painting. Take, as an example, this account from Irvin Yalom:

Not too long ago I was taking a brief vacation alone at a Caribbean beach resort. One evening I was reading, and from time to time I glanced to watch the bar boy who was doing nothing save staring languidly out to sea—much like a lizard sunning itself on a warm rock, I thought. The comparison I made between him and me made me feel very snug, very cozy. He was simply doing nothing—wasting time. I, on the other hand was doing something useful, reading, learning. I was, in short, getting ahead. All was well, until some internal imp asked the terrible question: Getting ahead of what? How? And (even worse) why?

The point of all this, for Becker, is that much of the creative activity we see in culture is really being driven by vague existential anxieties. For the most part, on a day to day basis, this cultural activity does the essential work of repressing existential anxieties and worries. We simply move along with the culture, following the well-worn grooves leading to good jobs, good families, and a "significant" life. Psychologically, therefore, our sense of self-worth and self-esteem is rooted in how well we travel this path of "meaning" and "significance." Becker calls this process "heroism," the act of achieving significance as defined by the surrounding culture:

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of status and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call 'cultural relativity' is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural hero system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the 'high' heroism of a Churchhill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the 'low' heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count...In this sense everything a man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

Why the danger of fictitious heroics? First, as we have noted, we are generally unaware of why we are doing what we are doing in life. We are oblivious to the hero-system that surrounded us from birth. We breath it like air. Only occasionally, like Thoreau heading into the woods, do we stop and question the cultural path to heroism/significance:

But the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. There's the rub. [For] to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

But this "self-analytic problem"--What am I doing to feel significant?--is complicated when we uncover the existential anxieties driving the whole enterprise:

The first thing we have to do with heroism is to lay bare its underside, show what gives human heroics its specific nature and impetus...[namely] that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death...heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.

Now the objection might be raised, "It doesn't feel like the terror of death is driving my life goals, ambitious and projects?" Again, note that Becker is working a synthesis between Freud and existentialism. Thus, for Becker the "denial of death" is largely taking place at an unconscious level, outside of awareness. The reason for this is that, and here we have echos of Freud's The Future of an Illusion, the reality of death is too difficult to bear:

The fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one's mental functioning, else the organism could not function.

For example, compare the human experience with those of other animals:

The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it…But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days--that's something else.

This is why humans create cultural hero systems. These culturally conditioned routes to meaning and significance help take the existential burden off our shoulders. I don't have to, from scratch, face the indifference of the cosmos or the shadow of death. I can simply go to school, get a degree, get a job, raise a family and never once worry about what it all means. I don't have to feel like Sisyphus, that the sum total of my life is simply rolling a rock up a hill. And the reason I don't feel like Sisyphus is that every cultural voice I encounter--parents, teachers, God, nation--tells me I'm a leading a "meaningful" life.

But this sense of security is a lie, according to Becker. A kind of mass delusion that I participate in. I'm drinking the kool aid. Living in bad faith. That may seem harsh, but remember that the lie is a creative lie. It has built the entire cultural structure now surrounding me. Plus, this lie keeps me from facing my death every second of every day. Without this vital mechanism in place how could we function? We'd be incapacitated by the fear of death. We'd have to face, moment-by-moment, Camus's question: Why live?

We call one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary, a basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation...We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his 'courage to be' from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, a proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.

The defenses that form a person's character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity.

This, then, is the great danger in examining our cultural heroics too closely: When we confront our cultural heroics, what makes our life "significant," we find that this "significance" is culturally constructed, arbitrary, a "lie." And it is all motivated by attempts at death transcendence. Rather than peeling all this back to the existential core it's just much easier to adopt an unthinking "automatic equanimity" in the face of life and death.

iv.
We've gone on a long circuit in reviewing Becker's work. But we've ended up in a familiar place. We are back, in essence, to Freud's formulation in The Future of an Illusion. Only Becker has pulled in a much bigger fish. Freud's narrow focus was on the role of religion in repressing existential anxieties. Freud felt that once religious people "grew up" and became "educated to reality" they would have achieved a kind of maturity. But Becker cuts across Freud by noting that "cultural heroics" are not uniquely religious. Even atheists, living bravely with no God, need to lean on something, existentially speaking. We all need to answer Camus's question. Otherwise we are just rolling rocks up a hill and our life becomes absurd. Life is then just waiting around for Godot. Thus, while Freud might have despised religion he worshiped science. More, he worshiped his own theory and legacy. Passionately. Freud had a notion of heroics and, thus, a means to approach his own death with a feeling of significance and accomplishment.

The point that Becker makes is that every cultural product functions as a form of existential consolation. Freud's legacy was important to him for religious reasons: He wanted to live on. If not in heaven then in the hearts and minds of his followers. We all worship some kind of god and desire some form of immorality.

This conclusion might, in itself, function as a refutation to Freud's criticism of religion. It places him on the same footing with the religious believer. Both, according to Becker, orient their lives around "vital lies," illusions embraced to achieve significance. But Becker's analysis goes on, suggesting that some people can achieve greater or lesser existential honesty. If so, Freud could contend that the non-believer has a much better chance of achieving this end. After all, the non-believer is willing to live without God. That feat, it could be argued, represents a greater capacity for existential courage.

These are important issues to discuss. For now we'll note that our conversation with Becker is not done. But having duly reviewed Becker's ideas it is now time, in the next chapter, to tell the story of how psychological researchers in the 1990s took Becker's ideas concerning cultural heroism, self-esteem and death anxiety and tested it all in the laboratory.