Gods with anuses

Content warning: discussions of mortality, a very brief and indirect mention of fictional suicide

I love anthropologist Ernest Becker's take on mortality, especially since it inspired terror management theory, and this was an interesting read.

A very brief outline of Becker's views.

According to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, our basic human predicament is that we are “gods with anuses.” By this humorous phrase, Becker suggests that we are part material, instinctual animals, and part psychic, cultural, homo sapiens

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To be human is to exist within nature yet to be alienated from it. Whereas other animals fret over predators, starvation or injury, humans, due to their elevated cognitive capacities, must reckon with the psychological possibility of insanity and the complete obliteration of meaning. Humans are bound to the same finite limitations as other animals yet have the mental powers to transcend the knowledge of their finitude. This predicament leads to what Becker calls “death anxiety.” We are cursed with the knowledge of our own inevitable mortality.

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One of Ernest Becker’s central arguments is that much of human behavior is governed by an attempt to stave off our unconscious death anxiety. At one point, Becker writes, “culture is composed of the mechanisms of defense of an infant afraid of being alone in the dark.” This may be a hyperbolic statement, but it gets at something important. When we realize our existential catch-22, the fact that we are cognizant of our mortality and can do nothing to stop it, we devise all sorts of ways to evade this crushing reality.

This alienation from nature, despite being part of it, due to a "paradox" because of awareness of death is something I often feel, and think it's one of the common human experiences. In the colorfully pessimistic yet kind of profound words of True Detective's Rustin Cohle.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.

Some of the author's views resonated so much with me. Especially these parts.

The “hole” describes how unlike other animals, humans are never fully at home in the world. Even with our elevated cognitive capacities, we can’t escape our finitude or mortality. We continue to be gods with anuses. There is no way to escape the shit. This is a crucial requirement if there is to be a common humanity.

Far from being a reason to despair, our non-belonging /existential hole can be a way to reframe our common humanity. What we all have in common is that none of us are whole or at home in the world. We are all connected, not by a positive cooperative spirit, but through a common negative existential trauma and wound.

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There’s a Buddhist parable where a young mother carries her dead infant as she is desperately looking for a physician to bring him back to life. She runs into the Buddha, and he offers direction. He tells her to bring back mustard seeds from a family in the village that has not experienced death. The woman goes out and is unsuccessful in finding a single family who has not been struck by bereavement. In the process, the woman realizes she is not alone in her dukkah and ultimately finds a way to let go of her deceased child. She is confronted with a profound sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness in both her child’s death and realizing that this is the human condition.

The efficacy in this parable, is that the absence, loss, and pervasive unsatisfactoriness is precisely what brings people together through the shared trauma of being human. Suffering and loss are not dismissed or celebrated; they are experienced and accepted as the only way to be connected to the larger human story.

These parts remind me of another philosophically pessimist thinker, Peter Wessel Zapffe. In his essay 'The Last Messiah' he says tells this tale (told in a sexist way, but still important).

One night in times long since vanished, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under the cosmos, homeless in his own body. Everything opened up before his searching thoughts, wonder upon wonder, terror upon terror, all blossomed in his mind.

Then woman awoke, too, and said that it was time to go out and kill something. And man took up his bow, fruit of the union between the soul and the hand, and went out under the stars. But when the animals came to their water-hole, where he out of habit waited for them, he no longer knew the spring of the tiger in his blood, but a great psalm to the brotherhood of suffering shared by all that lives.

That day he came home with empty hands, and when they found him again by the rising of the new moon, he sat dead by the waterhole.

The rest of the essay is anti-natalist, but I think this part captures a fundamental element of the existential condition of humanity: awareness of suffering and death. I feel this "great psalm to the brotherhood of suffering shared by all that lives" is maybe at the heart of... well, a lot of positive things about humanity. There is no compassion, caring, and love without recognizing the suffering of others. Awareness of death maybe makes this even more profound.

With this being said, I don't agree with the conclusion, because I think there definitely are enemies. I don't see them as demons or essentially different beings, but there are people who want to kill me and people I -personally or impersonally- love, or at the very least subject us to so much violence that we are filled with suffering and left a shell of ourselves. I recognize that there is still a commonality in our existential condition, but it doesn't change the existential threat posed by them.

This predicament, I think, is overlooked by the author. Even if you recognize the conditions of an extremely hostile opponent that wants to significantly hurt you, it doesn't change the fact that they want to take so many things away from you and people you love, sometimes -and increasingly- including your very existence. I don't think these categories are hard-coded and unchangeable, or require a fatal response in every context, but it's not something one can overlook. This especially becomes apparent the more threatened you are.

Still, an interesting read, and this is just my personal take on it. I think alienation from nature (or maybe better expressed as alienation from being) as the human condition and its implications for ideology, morality, politics are very worth the effort of pondering.