Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  As reassuring as a culture can be, it’s often not enough. We need more. Becker again: “Mankind has reacted by trying to secure human meanings from beyond. Man’s best efforts seem utterly fallible without appeal to something higher for justification, some conceptual support for the meaning of one’s life from a transcendental dimension of some kind.”18 Of course: God.

  Quite clearly, the most enticing method to manage one’s terror is religion. In addition to providing a soothing culture in which to belong, religion makes everything we do much more meaningful than it seems. Our behavior is no longer human (that is, animal) activity but now spiritual, glorifying the Creator or otherwise becoming part of His Plan.

  Most importantly, however,

  religion solves the problem of death, which no living individuals can solve, no matter how they would support us … religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind cannot even begin to approach, the possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic—and in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter.19

  Yes, religion does solve all the problems of “living matter.” Death? Not a problem, because it’s not really the end. In fact, something that is so much greater than life that it’s inconceivable awaits me. Life until death? Well, it’s not the drudgery it seems, because no matter what I do, I “do all to the glory of God.”20 And when it all becomes too much to handle, I just put everything in his hands. That may sound like a cop-out to some, but it’s not. Oh no, to the contrary: The more I’m able to trust God and surrender to his will, the greater being I am!

  Indeed, one still gets to be a hero by pleasing his gods and deferring to them even if he never does anything productive in his life otherwise. He can even be destructive, having more incarcerations to his name than dollars, but still be heroic by practicing, in some ill-defined capacity, religiosity. A mantra of some of the forensic patients I meet at work these days, often expressed in the medium of tattoo, is that “Only God Can Judge Me.” The perspective would be comical, if some of the perpetrators weren’t using it to justify acts of violence and even murder. And of course it’s not just gangsters; many law-abiding, white-collar folk employ a similar maneuver to validate the less productive things they do, too.

  Otherwise, insofar as adulthood has deprived us of that “illusion of invulnerability” that we experienced during infancy and childhood, God can bring it back. Becker paraphrases psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel: “people have a ‘longing for being hypnotized’ precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the ‘oceanic feeling’ that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents.”21

  And religion does even more: It puts reason in its place. Religion is the one forum where we are not only allowed to ignore logic, but we are commended for admonishing it. In religion, faith is king. And the more faithful you are (that is, the less logical you are), the more heroic you get to be.

  Religion is truly brilliant. No wonder it’s so popular. It really can cure everything.

  Coming down the home stretch of The Denial of Death, I felt disappointed as I began to realize that Becker had no solution for us atheists. He never gets to the part about the joys of being liberated from repression. On the contrary, he teaches that “Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day … It can’t be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying.”22 Dang, man; I was afraid of that.

  So, apparently Becker was not suggesting that we abandon all of our defensive quests for immortality, despite their ultimate futility. There is a place for some repression. He asserts that

  when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa sui [that is, meaning-of-life] project, there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a “second” world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in.23

  But we have to be careful. Repression becomes neurosis when “the techniques that they have developed for holding [the terror of mortality] at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself.”24 Recall Yalom’s crusadism from earlier. Even ambition and productivity can be destructive and unhealthy if they have us instead of us having them.

  Worth acknowledging, being choked as such is just fine for some folks—it can even be addictive. We really can get caught up in our neuroses, perhaps because they are preferable to the alternative, that is, fully engaging reality. Becker: “Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.”25 People like Freud and Becker seem to be suggesting that even our neuroses can have an ulterior function, as they can distract us from the real anxiety that we should be having.

  Sure enough, one of the first things they prepare us for while studying to become psychologists is that some patients will quit just as they start to get better. I now appreciate why, because even pain can be paradoxically soothing, if it’s familiar and predictable. Sure, it hurts, but at least I know what to expect from day to day. Plus, if I change—even for the best—it necessarily means that I’ve been wrong about reality until this point. Never mind; I’ll just stay put, as I prefer predictable and right. Finally, another fear with which improving patients must cope is responsibility, as they lose their entitlement to be cared for, to be swaddled.

  So, then, what is mental health? Becker suggested there really is a middle ground, an amount of repression that allows us to navigate life but without camouflaging reality so much that it cripples us or even makes us dangerous: “A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality …”26 It’s okay to use whatever you need to get by, but if you’re so invested in the mechanisms that give your life meaning and a sense of immortality that you’re being selfish, antagonistic, or destructive, then you’re being counterproductive, in the grand scheme of things.

  I’ve encountered criticisms of Becker’s perspective that are pitched something to the effect of the following: “Why would evolution, if it’s so sensible, equip us with such a debilitating fear of death in the first place?”

  Well, it didn’t. Most of us, even us existentialists, don’t routinely kill ourselves. Sure, there has always been suicide, but not many people resort to it, proportionally. In fact, even today—a time in history in which I suspect suicide is relatively common, if not peaking—it remains unusual, something on the order of 0.01% of the world population a year.27 As long as large portions of the population are not suiciding, the gene pool doesn’t mind too much. So, existence and the fear of death may be overwhelming for some individuals, but it’s not, on average, for whatever reasons.

  Otherwise, genes couldn’t care less if the organisms who carry them are merely depressed or anxious, as long as those organisms continue to procreate. In fact, we all know that feeling bad doesn’t necessarily deter humans from wanting to have sex—indeed, it may encourage them! For many, nothing treats a case of the blues like a good ol’ roll in the hay. And for more chronic existential anxiety, what better way to cope with one’s mortality than by mating and making a baby, a fresh new person that is half of you, literally.

  Although still not debilitating for most, the fear of annihilation must be as rampant as ever in modern times, as technology keeps us overly informed regarding the mayhem throughout the world. Mass media has not been available for most of human history, so we have only recently become confronted with the actual extent of human suffering, destruction, and hatred. Typically, for the average person throughout history, facing death has probably been a relatively infrequent event. And when it did happen, it wa
s typically a more intimate experience, followed by legitimate interpersonal mourning with others—instead of simply putting the paper down and having to go to the office.

  Today, it’s a challenge to avoid being bombarded with news stories and images that affirm our mortality, in Technicolor and very large numbers. So, of course we’re freaked out. And of course we cope by distracting ourselves through rat-racing, shopping, and trying to leave our marks through accomplishments, including children and books like this one. And of course society isn’t complaining, because our productive distraction is the machine that makes society function. And of course religion has irresistible appeal, because it readily accounts for all the chaos without demanding much introspection, contemplation, or analysis, instead appealing to faith. Perhaps religion itself is just another mindless distraction.

  * * *

  1 Cramer, P. (2006). Protecting the self (p. 52). New York: Guilford Press.

  2 Ibid., p. 64.

  3 Burgo, J. (2012). Why do I do that? Psychological defense mechanisms and the hidden ways they shape our lives (pp. 83-84). Chapel Hill, NC: New Rise Press.

  4 Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, 66, 1085-1086.

  5 Protecting the Self, p. 45 & 60.

  6 Baumeister & Sommer (1998), p. 1085.

  7 Epstein, M. (1998). Going to pieces without falling apart: A Buddhist perspective on wholeness. New York: Broadway Books.

  8 Existential Psychotherapy, p. 450.

  9 Despite all the worthy praise, some of Becker’s discussion is dated, such as the suggestion that homosexuality is necessarily a symptom of pathology (e.g., p. 118).

  10 The Denial of Death, p. 87.

  11 Shattered Assumptions, p. 13-14, etc.

  12 The Denial of Death, p. 66.

  13 Ibid., p. xvii.

  14 Ibid., p. 96.

  15 Krishnamurti, J. (1969). Freedom from the known (p. 51). New York: HarperOne.

  16 Greenway, M. B. (2012, September 6). Interview by MK Ondergrond. [Audio recording, with video animation]. Retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/MKOndergrond (Italics added, I think.)

  17 Al-Mutar, F. S. (2012, November 30). [Facebook post].

  18 The Denial of Death, p. 120.

  19 Ibid., p. 203.

  20 1 Corinthians 10:31.

  21 The Denial of Death, p. 132.

  22 Ibid., p. 59 & 60.

  23 Ibid., p. 189.

  24 Ibid., p. 178.

  25 Ibid., p. 271.

  26 Ibid., p. 204.

  27 According to the WHO, there are about 800,000 suicides a year (out of about 7 billion people). World Health Organization. (2014, September). Media centre - suicide fact sheet. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs398/en/

  CHAPTER 7

  The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways … but Evolution Just Works!

  What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue … Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures.

  — Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, I and a fellow graduate student at Kansas, Adam, took a road trip to Keystone, Colorado to go mountain biking. I was so excited I could hardly stand it. There was no snow and hardly anyone else around so we essentially had the place to ourselves, free to explore that majesty as much as the sunshine would allow. We had a sweet setup, too, another old friend’s timeshare condo right at ground zero, so we could just jump on our bikes and be in the mountains in no time.

  About two or three hours into the very first ride of the trip, we found ourselves significantly removed from civilization, heading down a gradual slope through an open field, the type that simply demands that you go fast. At thirty-five years old, I didn’t care as much about velocity as I might have in my twenties (and even then I was never much of a sensation-seeker), but I got carried away by the scenery and the trail ahead of me, so took the lead and sped ahead with reckless abandon.

  After I had gotten some good speed, something on the order of 25 miles per hour (don’t laugh—that’s fast on a bike, especially in the dirt), the trail suddenly became more of a rut, a tiny canyon about eight or ten inches wide and equally deep. I hit a rock or a hole or something, which forced my front tire into the right wall of the little canyon-rut, and it bit like someone had thrown a crowbar into my spokes. I flew over the handlebars and hit the ground with that violent, vicious feeling so characteristic of a high-impact crash, where you’re totally helpless, your existence completely in the hands of physics, but it kinda doesn’t matter because everything is such a blur. I hit the ground hard as hell, something serious happened, and I rolled and finally came to a stop in some tall grass, remarkably far from my bike. I was all disoriented, only as you are after such chaos, not even sure if I was conscious or not, for a moment.

  As my faculties began to return I reflexively surveyed the damage. Obviously, at the very least, my right shoulder was totally fucked, but I wasn’t sure in precisely what manner. I had broken my left collarbone in high school gym class twenty years earlier, and it felt quite reminiscent of that. On the other hand, in addition to that familiar extraordinary pain, the whole shoulder joint just felt all distorted and wrong, giving me the impression that I had dislocated something this time. But after I conjured the nerve to look at it and touch it, it appeared it was indeed broken. Compared to the prior break in high school, this time the respective halves of the collarbone had shifted more dramatically, producing a very distinct lump and neighboring cavity on the other side of the break. Feeling sick and faint now. Head down. Deep, slow breaths.

  I lay there for a bit, just to give myself time to calm down, which I eventually did. Once the dust settled, everything began to feel increasingly similar to my previous break and I became pretty confident that nothing novel and catastrophic was happening, like internal bleeding or organ rupturing.

  Coincidentally, Adam had gotten flats in both of his tires right about the time I wrecked; I suppose he had run through some thorns or something that I had missed. I didn’t feel like waiting for him to fix them because I knew I was gonna be in excruciating pain until I got to the ER, which was very far away, where ever it was. So, I cradled my arm and started walking back up the deceptively tranquil trail from whence we came. Adam would fix his tires, then bring both of the bikes and the rest of our shit back.

  While walking through all that gorgeous country, I continued to calm down and even hit a stride of sorts, and ultimately had a very compelling experience, one of the most ever for me.

  It was a beautiful day, like 70 degrees, sunny with a few good clouds, and whatever perfect humidity is. And it was also perfectly quiet, and I was perfectly alone, like I often aspire to be while vacationing in the wilderness. Even though it had become pretty clear I wasn’t dying, the thought of death was still a little more accessible than usual. But the experience remained oddly peaceful. I remember feeling that I would prefer to die in a place like that, on a day like that. Just sit down and fade away, looking at the mountains and trees and clouds. It was one of those rare moments in which I was kinda willing to die.

  Alas, as with every peaceful moment in history, the calm eventually gave way to some anxiety. My mind wandered to the prospect of some wild dogs, a bear, or some kind of large cat finding me in my ridiculously helpless state—which began to make the thought of dying suddenly less appealing. There is no way in hell I could have run, much less climb a tree or rock or something. It would have bee
n an incredible challenge to even get a hold of a stick to try to scare a predator off. Right, good luck actually fighting it or them. With a broken collarbone you might as well be tied up.

  And, strangely, broken collarbones are not that rare. I’ve broken two bones in my life—my respective collarbones. It seems weird that human beings are so vulnerable but we’ve managed to make it this far. What a pusillanimous little bone, but how incredibly incapacitated you are when it breaks. To make up for it, they tend to heal well on their own; the doctor typically doesn’t place it, and there’s no cast, just a sling. But you have to have time to rest. When undisturbed, the fractured portions bleed marrow or some other goo that dries and binds them back together. Later, that stuff calcifies, and voila, you’re good to go. Again, the key is you have to rest and stay pretty still. Not such a big deal in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. But what an incredibly big deal back in caveman days!

  I hadn’t had much formal education on evolution at the time, having only picked up the basics of natural selection from high school biology books, the Discovery Channel, and fleeting regards during my liberal arts college education. But, walking alone through the Rocky Mountains debilitated like that, with relatively realistic thoughts of being consumed by wild cats or bears, some of it started to come together in a very tangible way. Suddenly, I was able to appreciate natural selection more than I ever could before—particularly the part about social bonds. I could almost taste it!