Oh Catsup, Catch-up
The past few weeks have been action-packed, to say the least. I completed my first year of graduate school with a 4.0 GPA and a number of writing projects for this summer. I've also met a girl, who, at face value, may not be further from the type of person I'd normally date. She's a fundamentalist Christian who initially moved to Colorado to attend the now-infamous New Life Church where Rev. Ted Haggard resided in the pulpit. She soon became alienated with the hate preached in that evangelical monstrosity of a congregation and now lives according to Christ's teachings, rather than to many of the modern Falwell-ian churches' teachings. It makes me think of a great Gandhi thought I came across recently:
I like your Christ.
I do not like your Christians.
For they are not like your Christ.
At any rate, I've really enjoyed being with someone who has such strong beliefs that are not identical to mine. We both share the sentiment of loving people and contributing good to the interdependent web that contains all of life, but have different labels for what direct us to behave and think as we do. It's interesting.
I think I am abandoning the label of atheist. I recently encountered an interesting argument against the label. My beliefs have not changed because I see no evidence suggesting the presence of a god, but my perception of groups and labels has changed. There are no names for people who do not believe in unicorns or fairies, why should there be a name for people who do not believe in some other supernatural being?
Jumping tracks a bit, I recently went hiking at Cheyenne Canyon Park. It was absolutely beautiful. Under the cut are 4 of the 80+ pictures we took.
Jumping tracks again, I recently finished re-reading Ernest Becker's most acclaimed work. The Denial of Death. It's a 1973 Pullitzer Prize winning title that has influenced the 3 subsequent decades of social psychological research. It was more powerful of a read this time than ever before and I was repeatedly moved by Becker's brilliant social commentary and jotted down a number of quotes for possible usage as epilogues in a paper (and just general personal edification).
Bolded are some quotes that jump out at me as particularly powerful.
Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will choose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless, and supremely meaningful.
- 6
The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed-for better or for worse-a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet.
- 7
Of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is the terror of death.
- 11
Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most he courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of specifically human evolution. But even before that our primate ancestors deferred to others who were extrapowerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly.
- 11 - 12
Maslow:
We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments… We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.
- 48
Maslow:
We are just not strong enough to endure more! It is just too shaking and wearing. So often people in… ecstatic moments say, “It’s too much,” or “I can’t stand it,” or “I could die”… Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness…
- 49
Maslow:
For some people this evasion of one’s own growth, setting low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock-humility are in fact defenses against grandiosity.
- 49
Maslow:
It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.
- 51
[We are] gods with anuses.
- 51
Man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.
- 56
Man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car and works his electric toothbrush.
- 74
For Kierkegaard “philistinism” was triviality, man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him: in today’s world the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security.
- 74
The social hero-system into which we are born marks out our paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
- 82-83
Modern man’s defiance of accident, evil, and death takes the form of sky-rocketing production of consumer and military goods. Carried to its demonic extreme this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don’t have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods.
- 85
The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself, he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his ‘cultural lendings’ and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man’s urge to freedom. He knew comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defense. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them… To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics-what we might call ‘prison heroism’: the smugness of insiders who ‘know.’
- 86
The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once [you] admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his limitation.
- 87
To yield is to disperse one’s shored-up center, to let down one’s guard, one’s character armor, admit one’s lack of self-sufficiency. And this shored-up center, this guard, this armor, this supposed self-sufficiency are the very things that the entire project of coming-of-age from childhood to manhood is all about.
- 107
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
- 132
By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified.
- 133
No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man’s terror is always a “holy terror”-which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.
- 150
If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself… This explains why people chafe at sex, why they resent being reduced to the body, why sex to some degree terrifies them: it represents two levels of the negation of oneself. Resistance to sex is a resistance to fatality.
- 163
To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. One has to stick his neck out in the action without any guarantees about satisfaction or safety. One never knows how it will come out or how silly he will look.
- 183
Rank saw Christianity as a truly great ideal foolishness in the sense that we have been discussing it: a childlike trust and hope for the human condition that left open the realm of mystery. Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals, and Rank was talking about Christianity not as practiced but as an ideal. Christianity, like all religions, has in practice reinforced the regressive transference into an even more choking bind: the fathers are given the sanction of divine authority. But as an ideal, Christianity, on all the things we have listed, stands high, perhaps even highest in some vital ways as people like Kierkegaard, Chesterton, the Niebuhrs, and so many others have compellingly argued.
- 204
If you can’t be a hero within a communal ideology, then you must be a nagging, whining failure in your family. From this perspective, the problem of heroism and of mental illness would be “who nags whom?” Do men harangue gods, the armies of other nations, the leaders of their own state, or their spouses? The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can; in our impoverished culture even-as Harrington so truly put it-“if only for his skill at the pinball machine.”
- 217
When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person’s ideas and then another’s, depending on who looms the largest on one’s horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.
- 255
Mankind can only transcend the terrible toll that the fear of death takes if it lives the body fully and does not allow any unlived life to poison existence, to sap pleasure, and to leave a residue of regret. If mankind would do this… then the fear of death will not longer drive it to folly, waste, and destruction: men will have their apotheosis in eternity by living fully in the now of experience.
- 261
At any rate, I start my summer job working for the Colorado State Department of Corrections tomorrow morning bright and early, so I should be off to bed.
I like your Christ.
I do not like your Christians.
For they are not like your Christ.
At any rate, I've really enjoyed being with someone who has such strong beliefs that are not identical to mine. We both share the sentiment of loving people and contributing good to the interdependent web that contains all of life, but have different labels for what direct us to behave and think as we do. It's interesting.
I think I am abandoning the label of atheist. I recently encountered an interesting argument against the label. My beliefs have not changed because I see no evidence suggesting the presence of a god, but my perception of groups and labels has changed. There are no names for people who do not believe in unicorns or fairies, why should there be a name for people who do not believe in some other supernatural being?
Jumping tracks a bit, I recently went hiking at Cheyenne Canyon Park. It was absolutely beautiful. Under the cut are 4 of the 80+ pictures we took.
Jumping tracks again, I recently finished re-reading Ernest Becker's most acclaimed work. The Denial of Death. It's a 1973 Pullitzer Prize winning title that has influenced the 3 subsequent decades of social psychological research. It was more powerful of a read this time than ever before and I was repeatedly moved by Becker's brilliant social commentary and jotted down a number of quotes for possible usage as epilogues in a paper (and just general personal edification).
Bolded are some quotes that jump out at me as particularly powerful.
Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will choose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless, and supremely meaningful.
- 6
The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed-for better or for worse-a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet.
- 7
Of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is the terror of death.
- 11
Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most he courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of specifically human evolution. But even before that our primate ancestors deferred to others who were extrapowerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly.
- 11 - 12
Maslow:
We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments… We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.
- 48
Maslow:
We are just not strong enough to endure more! It is just too shaking and wearing. So often people in… ecstatic moments say, “It’s too much,” or “I can’t stand it,” or “I could die”… Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness…
- 49
Maslow:
For some people this evasion of one’s own growth, setting low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock-humility are in fact defenses against grandiosity.
- 49
Maslow:
It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.
- 51
[We are] gods with anuses.
- 51
Man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.
- 56
Man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car and works his electric toothbrush.
- 74
For Kierkegaard “philistinism” was triviality, man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him: in today’s world the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security.
- 74
The social hero-system into which we are born marks out our paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
- 82-83
Modern man’s defiance of accident, evil, and death takes the form of sky-rocketing production of consumer and military goods. Carried to its demonic extreme this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don’t have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods.
- 85
The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself, he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his ‘cultural lendings’ and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man’s urge to freedom. He knew comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defense. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them… To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics-what we might call ‘prison heroism’: the smugness of insiders who ‘know.’
- 86
The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once [you] admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his limitation.
- 87
To yield is to disperse one’s shored-up center, to let down one’s guard, one’s character armor, admit one’s lack of self-sufficiency. And this shored-up center, this guard, this armor, this supposed self-sufficiency are the very things that the entire project of coming-of-age from childhood to manhood is all about.
- 107
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
- 132
By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified.
- 133
No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man’s terror is always a “holy terror”-which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.
- 150
If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself… This explains why people chafe at sex, why they resent being reduced to the body, why sex to some degree terrifies them: it represents two levels of the negation of oneself. Resistance to sex is a resistance to fatality.
- 163
To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. One has to stick his neck out in the action without any guarantees about satisfaction or safety. One never knows how it will come out or how silly he will look.
- 183
Rank saw Christianity as a truly great ideal foolishness in the sense that we have been discussing it: a childlike trust and hope for the human condition that left open the realm of mystery. Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals, and Rank was talking about Christianity not as practiced but as an ideal. Christianity, like all religions, has in practice reinforced the regressive transference into an even more choking bind: the fathers are given the sanction of divine authority. But as an ideal, Christianity, on all the things we have listed, stands high, perhaps even highest in some vital ways as people like Kierkegaard, Chesterton, the Niebuhrs, and so many others have compellingly argued.
- 204
If you can’t be a hero within a communal ideology, then you must be a nagging, whining failure in your family. From this perspective, the problem of heroism and of mental illness would be “who nags whom?” Do men harangue gods, the armies of other nations, the leaders of their own state, or their spouses? The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can; in our impoverished culture even-as Harrington so truly put it-“if only for his skill at the pinball machine.”
- 217
When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person’s ideas and then another’s, depending on who looms the largest on one’s horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.
- 255
Mankind can only transcend the terrible toll that the fear of death takes if it lives the body fully and does not allow any unlived life to poison existence, to sap pleasure, and to leave a residue of regret. If mankind would do this… then the fear of death will not longer drive it to folly, waste, and destruction: men will have their apotheosis in eternity by living fully in the now of experience.
- 261
At any rate, I start my summer job working for the Colorado State Department of Corrections tomorrow morning bright and early, so I should be off to bed.