The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

260 Pages·2015·7.76 MB·English

by  Sheldon Solomon

The Worm at the Core is a work of nonfiction.
Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2015 by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC,
New York.
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution: Painting entitled “Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched
Cottage” by T’ang Yin. Courtesy Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.:
Purchase, F1939.60.
Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House: “The Cultural Presupposition” from W.
H. Auden: The Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1945 by W. H. Auden and copyright
renewed 1973 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and
division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Solomon, Sheldon.
The worm at the core : on the role of death in life / Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom
Pyszczynski.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6747-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-67960488-4
1. Death—Psychological aspects. 2. Fear of death.
3. Terror. I. Greenberg, Jeff, 1954– II. Pyszczynski, Thomas A. III. Title.
BF789.D4S66 2015
155.9’37—dc23 2014033937
eBook ISBN 9780679604884
www.atrandom.com
Frontispiece: Hans Thoma, Adam and Eve (1897).
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman
Cover design: Anna Bauer
v4.1
a
Contents
——
Cover
Title Page
Frontispiece
Copyright
Introduction
PART ONE: TERROR MANAGEMENT
1. Managing the Terror of Death
2. The Scheme of Things
3. Self-esteem: The Foundation of Fortitude
PART TWO: DEATH THROUGH THE AGES
4. Homo Mortalis: From Primate to Human
5. Literal Immortality
6. Symbolic Immortality
PART THREE: DEATH IN MODERN TIMES
7. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
8. Body and Soul: An Uneasy Alliance
9. Death Near and Far
10. Cracks in the Shields
11. Living with Death
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Authors
Introduction
——
Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-
encompassing blackness…. We need a life not correlated with
death…a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies
beyond the Goods of nature…. And so with most of us:…a little
irritable weakness…will bring the worm at the core of all our usual
springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy
metaphysicians.
—WILLIAM JAMES,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
On a rainy, gray day in december 1973, philosopher Sam Keen, writing for
Psychology Today, trundled down the halls of a hospital in Burnaby, British
Columbia, to interview a terminally ill cancer patient who doctors said had just
days to live. When Keen entered the room, the dying man told him, with a touch
of mortal irony: “You are catching me in extremis. This is a test of everything
I’ve written about death. And I’ve got a chance to show how one dies…how one
accepts his death.”
The man in the hospital bed was cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. Becker
had devoted his academic career to writing books synthesizing insights from
anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, religion, literature, and
popular culture to get to the bottom of the ancient question “What makes people
act the way they do?”
In his latest book, The Denial of Death, which he described as his “first
mature work,” Becker concluded that human activity is driven largely by
unconscious efforts to deny and transcend death. “We build character and
culture,” he told Sam Keen, “in order to shield ourselves from the devastating
awareness of our underlying helplessness and the terror of our inevitable death.”
Now, lying on his deathbed, Becker explained that his life’s work had been
about coming to terms with the grinning skull looking back at him.
Ernest Becker died on March 6, 1974, at the age of forty-nine. Like many
visionaries, Becker died too young. Two months later, The Denial of Death was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Back in the late 1960s, Becker was an intellectual insurgent. He was
immensely popular with students, who flocked to hear his lectures. However,
colleagues and university administrators were not particularly enamored with an
interdisciplinary thinker who drew together ideas from all corners of the
academy, public discourse, and popular culture, and who challenged their
academic and political orthodoxy.
Becker thus became a kind of academic vagabond, drifting from Syracuse
University (1960–1963) to the University of California, Berkeley (1965), where
students offered to pay his salary after the anthropology department declined to
renew his contract. After a stint at San Francisco State (1967–1969), he found an
academic home at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia
(1969–1974), where he wrote the second edition of The Birth and Death of
Meaning, The Denial of Death, and his posthumously published Escape from
Evil.
A few years later, in the late 1970s, the three authors of this book met after
enrolling in the doctoral program in experimental social psychology at the
University of Kansas. We quickly discovered a shared interest in understanding
the fundamental motivations that direct human behavior. Our studies and
discussions led us to focus on two very basic human proclivities. First, we
human beings are driven to protect our self-esteem. Second, we humans strongly
desire to assert the superiority of our own group over other groups.
But we had no idea what underlies these prides and prejudices until we
stumbled upon Becker’s books as young professors in the early 1980s. Like the
Rosetta Stone, they were to us a revelation. Mixing deep philosophical prose and
straightforward layman’s language, Becker explained how the fear of death
guides human behavior. He illuminated many of the key social-psychological
phenomena that we had for years been studying and teaching but without fully
grasping. Suddenly, we had a way to understand why we so desperately crave
self-esteem, and why we fear, loathe, and sometimes seek to obliterate people
who are different from ourselves.
Brimming with youthful enthusiasm, we were excited to share Becker’s ideas
with fellow social psychologists at the 1984 meeting of the Society of
Experimental Social Psychology. There we introduced what we dubbed terror
management theory in order to build on Becker’s claim that people strive for
meaningful and significant lives largely to manage the fear of death. The
audience started drifting away as soon as we mentioned that our theory was
influenced by sociology, anthropology, existential philosophy, and
psychoanalysis. When we got to the ideas of Marx, Kierkegaard, Freud, and
Becker, renowned psychologists were storming the conference room exits.
Bemused but undaunted, we prepared a paper for the American Psychological
Association’s flagship journal, American Psychologist. Feedback arrived a few
months later. “I have no doubt that this paper would be of no interest to any
psychologist, living or dead,” read one rather pithy singleline review. But we
kept at the editor, repeatedly asking him to explain why our ideas were
unworthy. Our queries outlasted the original editor’s tenure, and finally a
second, more sympathetic (or perhaps more beleaguered) editor gave us
something we could work with: “Although your ideas may have some validity,”
he told us, “they won’t be taken seriously unless you can provide evidence for
them.” That’s when it dawned on us that our graduate training in experimental
social psychology had prepared us to do just that.
We’ve spent the last quarter century investigating the influence of the fear of
death on human affairs. At first, we conducted the research with our own
students. Later, as our theory gained traction, we were joined by colleagues
around the globe. Today, terror management theory is widely studied by
psychological scientists and scholars in other disciplines as well, yielding an
array of findings that go well beyond what Becker could ever have envisioned.
There is now compelling evidence that, as William James suggested a century
ago, death is indeed the worm at the core of the human condition. The awareness
that we humans will die has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors in almost every domain of human life—whether we are
conscious of it or not.
Over the course of human history, the terror of death has guided the
development of art, religion, language, economics, and science. It raised the
pyramids in Egypt and razed the Twin Towers in Manhattan. It contributes to
conflicts around the globe. At a more personal level, recognition of our mortality
leads us to love fancy cars, tan ourselves to an unhealthy crisp, max out our
credit cards, drive like lunatics, itch for a fight with a perceived enemy, and
crave fame, however ephemeral, even if we have to drink yak urine on Survivor