For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself in this terrible reality, and he tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ‘ideas’are not true. He uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.7
To comprehend fully the true nature of the human condition means, unfortunately, to be full of fear and trembling.
One cannot say with absolute conviction that a belief in an afterlife is a form of self-delusion. One can say with assurance, however, that no one knows for sure, because in all of recorded history no living mortal has returned to tell those who remained among the living exactly what happens on the other side. Given the current state of our knowledge, it would be appropriate to maintain an attitude of hopeful expectancy; to be dogmatic concerning one’s belief in the existence of an afterlife would be self-delusional. As Bertrand Russell observed, “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”
Once humans learned to deceive themselves about death, they began to apply this novel talent to other areas of their lives. Unfortunately, denying the evidence of the senses blunts the sharp edge of reason—Homo sapiens’ most effective weapon. Self-delusion eventually threatened to become a factor that could undo the species. An attribute that diminishes an organism’s ability to compete in the race for resources reduces its overall survival chances. Hunters blithely charging a dangerous rhinoceros because they believed that an amulet flopping from a thong around their necks would magically protect them from harm substantially increased their likelihood of being injured or killed. As self-deception became embedded in human behavior, its more florid examples invited the destruction of its possessor. An example from history illustrates this point.
Early in the sixteenth century, the Aztec ruler Montezuma commanded a vast army and presided over an empire that extended from Mexico to Honduras. By an extraordinary coincidence, the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés strode into his court on the date that Montezuma’s astrologers had predicted the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, who had made his last appearance 476 years earlier. The god, the priests had foretold, would appear in the form of a bearded white-skinned man. Montezuma believed that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl.
Despite a modest contingent of troops, Cortés quickly took advantage of Montezuma’s delusional belief. He conquered the Aztecs and nearly exterminated them. The king and his subjects could not be disabused of their faith in Cortés’ divinity until it was too late.
A cursory reading of history confirms countless examples of how self-delusion wreaked havoc on the social fabric. The witch craze of the Renaissance, the Nazi Holocaust, or the religious and “ethnic-cleansing” wars that continue to plague the planet expose its dark aspect. Fear of individual death leads some individuals to revel in someone else’s death. They seek power in order to destroy. To feel alive and make sure that they are not doing the dying,these death-drenched individuals order the slaughter of others for the purpose of mocking death. Fear of death became a factor shaping the evolution of the human species. Self-delusion evolved primarily as an antidote to ameliorate the anxiety created by the wrenching suspicion that death is final. The now eyes-wide-open-with-fear hominid was in serious need of an anti-antidote to counter the antidote.
Fortuitously, irony and humor evolved in parallel to balance the bane of self-delusion and irrationality. Irony is the juxtaposition of two circumstances that lead to the opposite of what might have been predicted. For example, an ambulance rushing to the scene of an accident is itself involved in an accident. Not until an animal developed the capacity to anticipate what might occur could a sense of irony emerge. That other animals read irony into events they see happening around them is highly doubtful.
The perception of irony bootstrapped the evolution of humor. Behind the door leading to irony, absurdity lies in wait, ready to leap out and startle us into laughing aloud. When we suddenly apprehend a cause-and-effect conjunction between two events that are wildly incongruous, we burst out laughing. The punch line of a joke is hilarious because it is so surprisingly removed from what we might have predicted. If we can correctly guess where a joke is headed, we will not laugh as hard, or will not even laugh at all. The more absurd and unexpected the joke or situation, the funnier it is.
Seeing a man who walking down the street suddenly slips and falls on a banana peel may strike many as funny because it is not what we have come to expect when we watch someone walking. Our expectation is that walking in the future will follow the pattern of walking in the present. The disruption of our prediction so surprises us that we laugh. As Mel Brooks deadpanned, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”
Joy and mirth are emotions experienced by other higher animals, but humans are the only ones who can be incapacitated by the sudden intrusion of absurdity. Rolling on the floor, holding our sides, and trying to catch our breath while we are temporarily blinded by tears is a uniquely human behavior.* There is neuroanatomical evidence to suggest that laughter is the antidote to self-delusion. Reason and logic are left-brain functions; laughter and humor are decidedly right-brain ones. Laughter complements reason and is an evolutionary mechanism to reduce anxiety. When we are in stressful situations, we tend to laugh harder and longer than when we are relaxed.
Ridicule remains the most potent weapon to shock or shame someone out of a false belief or delusion. Attempts to point out logical inconsistencies to a true believer are notoriously unsuccessful. Laughing at another’s aggrandizing self-inflation is a persuasive social tool used by the many to control the few who might believe they are entitled to more power. But laughing at oneself also plays a critical role in mental health. A dollop of self-deprecating humor, and the awareness of how often we humans can be gulled, are necessary adjuncts that maintain mental balance. Margot Fonteyn, the great ballerina, remarked, “One should always take one’s work seriously, but one should never take oneself seriously.”
Laughter is a key defensive measure a sapient can deploy against its most implacable foe, death. During the bubonic plague that harrowed the fourteenth century, comedians were in great demand, and “gallows” humor continues to remain the rampart behind which we can stick out our tongues and waggle our fingers at our ears, mocking death.
Despite the benefits conferred on one with a well-developed sense of humor, there remains a disquieting irony between the feeling of well-being associated with the glowing health of the prime of life, and the dread associated with the somber realization that everyone is destined to age decrepitly and then perish. This dissonance can induce the mental state of depression, to which humans, more than any other animal, are susceptible. Sometimes, the human awareness that we are destined to die no matter how we act or what we do leads a few to be unable to justify going on living. Apathy and loss of libido, two prominent manifestations of depression, interfere with an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce. To counter this susceptibility, selective pressures honed a human’s sense of humor. Laughing easily at the exigencies of life and indulging in a modicum of self-delusion remain the two best defenses against existential despair.
An exceptionally severe depression can lead to another unique human behavior—suicide. We are the only animal that can be so overwhelmed by a deep sense of life’s futility that under certain circumstances afflicted individuals will voluntarily end their life. The rise of despair impelled the evolution of another uniquely human adaptation to mitigate these potentially devastating feelings. Along with humor and self-delusion, the search for meaning and purpose evolved.
Albert Camus, the French existentialist novelist and philosopher, began his elegiac paean to futility, The Myth of Sisyphus, with these lines: “There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”8 Sisyphus was a legendary king of Corinth whom the gods p
unished for his overweening hubris. His sentence was to roll a huge boulder up a hill in Hades, only to have the boulder roll down again as soon as he reached the top. He was condemned to repeat this meaningless labor over and over throughout eternity.
Camus used the myth as a metaphor for human existence. Why strive? At some point in almost every person’s life, he or she becomes convinced that no matter what he or she may accomplish, death will intervene to make it all pointless. After the car Camus was in swerved and hit a tree while he was driving on a dry road in good visibility, those who knew him well speculated that he had somehow contrived to live—and die—his philosophy.
Upon learning of the death of his wife, and knowing that his turn must come soon, Shakespeare’s Macbeth utters this most famous of mournful passages:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Does a member of a lion pride, resting in the noontime shade, ponder what exceptional things it must accomplish to justify its existence? Do cows chewing their cud ruminate on the meaning of it all? Other animals do not, I suspect, expend time or energy lost in contemplation about why they are here.
Only humans demand an answer, because we are the one animal that has glimpsed the land of the future. Humans created the unique construct that their striving to make a difference gives meaning to their lives. Thus, human ambition has been the force advancing culture, rapidly propelling our species away from its animal roots. Individual ambition has been behind virtually all of the great strides forward in art, law, science, technology, and philosophy. And, unfortunately, the kind of “vaulting ambition” Shakespeare attributed to Macbeth has been behind history’s most spectacular follies and tragedies.
The deep need for a purpose to justify one’s life fuels the desire to accomplish something that will both be self-satisfying and win the approval of others. These goals often translate into the acquisition of sex, money, and power, the iron triangle that goads the vast majority of human strivings. (The pursuits of beauty, knowledge, service, or spirituality, though qualitatively different, are also uniquely human quests.) But there is a more subtle reason behind the human penchant for setting goals and striving to succeed. We believe that if we accomplish something extraordinary then we will be remembered. The Guinness Book of World Records concerns posterity. In his poem “Carmina,” the poet Horace, reflecting on his fame, exulted in his triumph.
I shall strike the stars with head sublime….
I have completed a monument
more lasting than bronze and far higher
than that royal pile of Pyramids,
which the gnawing rain and furious
north wind cannot destroy, nor the chain
of countless years and the flight of time.
My death won’t be complete.
I shall not altogether die….
Striving, ambition, and heroism are, in one sense, our attempt to try an end run past death.
Collectively, men convert their fear of death into history-making. Hegel developed the startling idea that civilization results from what men do with death. Among nonhuman animals, there is no history because there is no sense of individuality, and, without time awareness, no knowledge of death.
Previously, higher organisms could only pass on something of themselves through DNA. With the development of a sophisticated human culture, a new way, independent of DNA, became possible. Deeds could outlive a person’s life span, safely preserved in the culture’s collective memory. Nobel laureate Peter Medawar observed, “In human beings, exogenetic heredity—the transfer of information through non-genetic channels—has become more important for our biological success than anything programmed in DNA.”9
In the Iliad, Homer repeatedly alludes to the contract between the community and its warriors. If a man performs heroic deeds, the bards will sing his praises for untold generations to come. Through the retelling, the hero’s name and his acts of heroism will be beyond death’s grasp. Innumerable college freshmen can attest to the thoroughness with which this ancient covenant continues to be fulfilled. The obituaries in the New York Times and entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica are testimony to the power of deeds, posthumous legacies that outlast one’s allotment of days.
A considerable gender gap exists concerning this feature of humanhood. Women who raise their children to maturity often satisfy their need to leave a mark through motherhood. Men’s relationship to their offspring in our species’ early history was unknown or poorly understood, and a man’s identification with his children (who may or may not be his) has, in general, tended to be more tenuous than that of their mother’s.
The male ambition to be a hero occurred at a fortunate juncture. To convert a vegetarian simian into a fully operational predatory anthropoid, the Homo sapiens nervous system required a huge infusion of courage. The most common early act of heroism revolved around hunting. Risking one’s life to perform daring feats is not a trait for which plant-eating animals are particularly noted.
The cascade of events might have been as follows. When men discovered the existence of the future with its accompanying booby trap of death, they longed to do something for which they would be remembered. Both a strong belief in an afterlife and the burning desire to leave a mark boosted their courage. Bold hunters greatly increased the quantity and quality of meat they brought back to the home base. Women applauded and rewarded male bravery. Courage became a defining male trait that increased the likelihood of women and children surviving. The entire species surged forward, as each interlocking evolutionary event reinforced the others.
Greed is a consequence of humans possessing an opposable thumb. Designed to grasp vines and branches, the primate hand evolved into an appendage like no other in the animal world. A primate can use its hands to hold and carry a variety of inanimate objects considerable distances. A bipedal primate can carry the most the farthest. For most other animals, the preferred method of transport is to use the mouth as a pouch, and teeth or beak to maintain a grip. In the majority of cases, the object carried is either a squirming tyke or a dead meal. For a variety of obvious reasons, this style of conveyance is inherently inefficient. Further, there would be no pressing need for a non-tool-using animal unaware of the concept of deeptime to hoard a cache of inanimate objects.*
Animals that lack hands generally do not covet possessions. They fight fiercely for sex, food, and territory, but neither copulation, sustenance, nor a valley filled with tasty tidbits can be categorized as “objects.” Besides a few of the apes, animals do not engage in barter.† With the exception of the flesh and sinew housing life itself, there is nothing tangible that one animal desires of another. In sharp contrast, among humans there exists no single word in the lexicon of any language that has caused more suffering and death than “mine.” Rousseau summed up this strange human obsession: “The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.”11
The avaricious surround themselves with accouterments to increase their pleasure and security. Surplus goods and money translate into dominance over others. A component of greed, however, also relates to mortality. People frequently become very miserly with money and possessions as they approach old age, ardently believing that stocks and jewels can be a bulwark with which they can keep death at bay. Money equates with vitality. To many of the aged, spending money is equivalent to wasting life.
Among the variety of reasons that humans
create art, one of them relates to fear of death. The impetus to make art arose from the confluence of several different urges, one of which was the desire to create something that would outlive its creator. The over nine hundred stenciled handprints in the cave of Gargas in southwestern France, created over thirty thousand years ago, give the impression that their creators made them for the generations to come. The making of a mark that will live past one’s allotted three score and ten is uniquely human, and embodies the longing of a primate equipped with its sense of death and time to touch the hem of immortality. As poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “When this you see, remember me.” Nearly everyone experiences a tingle of excitement when holding in his hand an artifact from a bygone age. Knowing that it was fashioned by someone very much like us links us to the past. Art serves as an umbilical cord connecting us to past generations, and can be seen as a novel form of DNA that transmits cultural values.
Hominid species have been in existence for over four million years. During a vast stretch of that time, hominids did not create art. Does it not seem like an extraordinary coincidence that art as a distinct human endeavor effloresced nearly simultaneously throughout the world approximately forty thousand years ago—the same time that the first lunar calendars also appeared? The advent of art also coincides with widespread mortuary practices. Art is deathless. So, too, is the human striving for immortality.
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