Otto Rank and Rousseau meet Canticle for Liebowitz

Last weekend I went to an Orthodox Easter service at an OCA (Orthodox Church of America) church near Montpelier. It was very interesting, and I should have written about it. Interesting things always happen when you’re too busy to stop and record them—not coincidentally, just as a matter of course.

I finished Escape from Evil. More evil than escaping from it, frankly. My classmates and I complained loudly about the systematic way in which the book makes meaningful life impossible, with the result that Prof. Schine got sort of annoyed with us and told us that if the result of the book is greater honesty in our views of ourselves and our lives, it shouldn’t be ‘depressing.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually it’s a fairly amazing book. I was a little disappointed for the first fifty pages, as they didn’t seem to serve up the grand drama of good and evil promised by the introduction, at least not in the same medium that the introduction suggested. It has footnotes. Still, when I got over my initial disappointment at its extreme academicness, I was pretty damn impressed by its brilliance. Becker is one of those people who has read everything and then can still see over the pile of books; he just effortlessly tosses around the intricacies of Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, ancient and modern philosophy, pretty much every social theorist ever, and it never seems superfluous.

The argument (I think) is that all human evil is due to man’s attempts to achieve immortality of some kind. It is demonstrated, very convincingly and with many examples, that pretty much everything you do is part of a rather unattractive scheme of some kind to hoard life, generally at the expense of other people. I’m sort of sorry I started on this explanation, because I am not doing a very good job. But anyway, the various forms of “immortality schemes” are traced through history, from primitive ritual to stratified society to economic exchange, and it is pointed out how every cultural structure and ideal is designed to feed the myth that we will not end at death, as do all organisms. Do you like to give other people presents? Part of an ancient ritual of sacrifice, feeling that surpluses pacify fate, expending your possessions to expiate your guilt at the space you take up in the world. Do you admire fast cars? Are you pleased with the numbers on the stock ticker go up? Do you aspire to make a name for yourself in literature, art, academia, anything? Do you love your country? All to cling to constructed ideals that you imagine are undying, and to distract yourself from the primary tragedy of humanity: that we are the only animals that can imagine our own deaths, and every attempt to make ourselves less animal only increases our capacity for evil. Nazis killed out of a drive to create more life for themselves, not from a need to destroy. It’s all more convincing in the book. I think the conclusion is that, as it is impossible to live without myths, we should be aware of the subjectivity of these myths, and try to choose less destructive ones.

The main problem with Becker’s outlook (though I think it is probably a bad policy to argue with someone so much smarter than you), as far as I can see, is that he doesn’t show why we should be guilty about the evil we create. If human beings are animals like any other, why should we feel guilty about taking what we need? If we, as a species, are so designed that we need to subjugate or kill others in order to survive psychologically, why should we feel worse about this than a male elephant does when he kills a rival, or a mink does when it eats a fish? Becker takes guilt as a given for the human condition: man, because of his consciousness of life and death, knows that he is necessarily destructive of life, and he makes great efforts to expiate this guilt, generally then tying into an attempt to deny his own death. But I don’t see any reason why Becker, with his seeming confidence that the ultimate reality is the finality of death, should consider this guilt a consciousness of evil, rather than simply irrationality.

Final note: Becker scored about fifty points with me for his frequent, admiring citation of William James. But he scored about ONE HUNDRED POINTS for citing the “great science-fiction tale Canticle for Liebowitz.”