I am very grateful to Patrick Shen and Greg Bennick who produced Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality. His film provided a direction to many of the views on the Middle East that I hold today, and pointed me to the leaders of research on Ernest Becker’s thought, much of which is now described, for short, as Managing the Terror. Theory (“TMT”). Becker’s breakthrough book was The Denial of Death, first published in 1973. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1974. It was made famous by President Bill Clinton, who said he took it with him on his moon of honey.
Psychology Professor Sheldon Solomon, at Skidmore College, is one of the principal investigators of this research. This interview with Sheldon Solomon, and another with his colleague Jeffrey Greenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, Tucson, took place shortly after seeing Flight from Death for the first time. This is how Sheldon defined TMT in our interview:
Sheldon:
“The theory of terror management was originally derived from the ideas of Ernest Becker, who, in the 1970s, wrote a series of books in which he argued that the unique human awareness of death has a lot to do with almost everything. what human beings do day by day His argument is that people are the only creatures intelligent enough to recognize that we are here, and if you know that you are here, you also realize that you will not always be around. we realize that we will die one day, and that our deaths can occur at any time, for reasons we could never anticipate or control, are no more significant than lizards or potatoes.
“According to Becker, all of these realizations would give rise to a potentially debilitating terror, were it not for the fact that human beings quite cunningly, though not necessarily consciously, solved this existential dilemma by creating and maintaining what humans anthropologists now call “culture.” Becker’s point was that human beings construct cultural worldviews, beliefs that we share with other people in our groups, which essentially give us the sense that we are valuable individuals in a world of meaning, a belief of that we have meaning and value, which in turn gives us a sense that we can live forever, either literally in the context of different religions, which provide hope for an afterlife, or symbolically, simply the idea that tangible representations of our culture will remain regardless.”
Skip:
“You’re calling it ‘Terror Management Theory.’ Did you call it that before 9/11?”
Sheldon:
“Yes absolutely.”
Sheldon went on to say that because our culture shields our psyche from the fear of death, if someone challenges our worldview or culture, we often feel the need to defend that worldview in various ways. If we’re desperate enough, we may even be willing to kill others, who don’t subscribe to our worldview, which elegantly enough explains most wars in human history. Professor Solomon points out that approximately 175 million people were killed in the 20th century alone, because one group tried to change another group’s world view through violence.
We can see with a little reflection that much of what is happening with life in the Middle East, and with terrorism, is directly related to these ideas.
Although I don’t like being compared to a lizard or a potato, I have to admit with regret that my death is inevitable and that, at the lowest level, I am a toothy stomach that leaves vast amounts of waste inside me. the World, consuming only other living things, in their herds, herds, schools, gardens and orchards. I speak only for myself! Still, I have a strong attachment to a supreme being, whom we call God, which is why I found Sheldon’s comment quite concerning, and probably unacceptable and dismissive of holy figures in many parts of the world.
Sheldon corrected me immediately. Sheldon said that Becker himself was a very religious man, and that psychology only leaves one on the threshold of religion.
All the children of God know that there are some points that neither now nor ever can be explained by science. It is at this point that religion provides us with faith in absolutes. But just as religions are modalities of great good, they can also be modalities of great evil. All spiritual paths and worldviews have been on both sides of this equation, from time to time. I believe that it is in the making of that distinction, in that holy/unholy seesaw, where the future of humanity hangs in the balance.