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GliderGuider

(21,088 posts)
Mon Mar 16, 2015, 11:59 AM Mar 2015

A perspective on the work of Ernest Becker

Last edited Mon Mar 16, 2015, 04:19 PM - Edit history (3)

Anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924-1974) provides a very interesting perspective on the questions of morality and human behavior in his posthumously published book Escape from Evil. Becker used a psychoanalytic framework based heavily on the work of Otto Rank and Norman O. Brown, and concluded that men do evil because of rather than in spite of good intentions. The elevator speech goes something like this:

Humans are the only animals that are aware of our eventual death. This is terrifying to us, and in order to reduce the angst we do everything we can to ensure our own survival, either as individuals or as the social groups into which we project our collective selfhood. This urge to transcend our apprehended inevitable deaths causes us to perform heroic constructive acts in an attempt to achieve some kind of immortality. It also causes us to project any perceived risks to our survival outwards onto other groups or individuals. These acts of scapegoating and sacrifice have the unconscious intention of purifying the physical and psychological environment in which we live.

Examples of heroic constructive acts abound - civilization itself falls under this rubric. Recent examples of scapegoating include blacks, Jews, Muslims and atheists, the CIA, socialists, capitalists - virtually every identifiable group has served as a scapegoat for some other group. Indigenous examples of sacrifice include ritual human sacrifice, ritualized feasting, "no prisoner" ethics in combat, and the potlatch (sacrifice of food and goods).

Becker traces this psychological effect back throughout history, and sees its operation in today's militaristic, disposable consumerist culture as well as in indigenous cultures.

I still hold to my view that the origin of most human morality, especially in its specifics, can be traced back to regional histories and local biophysical environments.. The moral choices the larger collective deems permissible seem to be constrained to those that promote the heroic death-defying belief systems as described by Becker. This bounded domain of the morally permissible is intertwined with the constrained set of growth-oriented choices that are permissible in the economic and social domains. The two appear to be mutually supportive.

Such heroic moral and economic choices seem to require the existence of surplus resources in the natural environment as their starting point. Research published in 2003 by Dwight Read and Steven LeBlanc observes that both conflict and growth in H-G societies are low when there are few available resources, as reflected in the following quote:

"Hunter-gatherer groups living in low-resource-density areas are more likely to display long-term demographic stability, and the higher the resource density, the more likely is the occurrence either of intergroup conflict or of Malthusian growth constraints such as disease and starvation."

I would also suggest that low-resource environments a primary factor in the development of various growth-reducing, Earth-honoring moral codes. This would explain the progressive loss of this aspect of our morality as our access to the Earth's resources has increased

Unfortunately, Becker's conclusions leave me even more convinced that the onset of global resource limits is going to prove psychologically damaging on a very large scale, as it becomes impossible to deny the imminent death of our primary in-group, Homo sapiens. This awareness will likely result in an orgy of scapegoating, and the leading edges of this wave are already in view. We will probably see a parallel orgy of sacrificial consumption, identical in psychological origin but far larger in physical scale to the iconic stone heads of Easter Island.

https://www.academia.edu/819616/Population_growth_carrying_capacity_and_conflict
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A perspective on the work of Ernest Becker (Original Post) GliderGuider Mar 2015 OP
Thank you for the post. safeinOhio Mar 2015 #1
Marvin Harris took that view in "Cultural Materialism" GliderGuider Mar 2015 #2
 

GliderGuider

(21,088 posts)
2. Marvin Harris took that view in "Cultural Materialism"
Mon Mar 16, 2015, 03:03 PM
Mar 2015

Especially in his principle of probabilistic infrastructural determinism. I agree to a large extent with Harris' view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_%28anthropology%29#Theoretical_principles

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