Publius Returns

Flounders Field

Ernest Becker, author The Denial of Death

Whereas Freud explained the motivations and neuroses of human nature to unconscious instinctual drives, Becker and Rank see man’s problems based on his basic split between his limited body and his limitless mind. This basic dualism is a universal form that can be seen throughout history in all works. Sartre’s being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Descartes’s division between mind and body, etc.

Socrates once mused that philosophy is practicing the art of dying. So, Becker would write, “…to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.” Becker believed that each of us carries a “vital lie”, that which gives our life meaning, and we would do anything to protect that lie. Becker’s hope was that by becoming conscious of the vital lies that we live by, we could by some degree be free from them. We, as a society, could choose better vital lies to live by such as the principles of freedom, truth, and peace. Ultimately, Becker wrote that the fullest achievement of man was his self-transformation, submission to being the creature that he is. We are neither animal nor god, only human. He understood religion in this light, as the presence of a transcendent that we submit our individuality for something greater than ourselves.

Cement House Cemetery, near Langemark in Flanders. Burial of three unknown soldiers, November 2005 (pictured at the top).

A cold November morning in Flanders fields where between the crosses, row on row, fresh graves wait. It is burial day. A few times a year corpses and parts of corpses, recently found, are given back to the earth.

Here, at Cement House Cemetery near the village of Langemark, the day starts with the burial of three unknown soldiers, whose remains were found by the Boesinghe Diggers in an industrial zone near the canal at nearby Boesinghe.

These Boesinghe Diggers are Flemish archeology amateurs, all fascinated by the Great War, all devoted to dig up as much as possible, while it still can. The industrial zone is expanding and the diggers excavate sites where modern factories will soon be built.

In 1915 the whole area near the canal at Boesinghe was a battlefield, Patrick explains. He is one of the Boesinghe Diggers. Every Saturday he and his friends dig up the former trenches. They use old trenchmaps to locate Nomansland and the frontlines.

The Idea of Death

It is incumbent on any intellectual consideration of death to also intellectualize life. Is it true that one must have lived to say that one is now dead? Pre-spiritual advocates might ponder that seemingly absurd question. It has become controversial in medical and religious circles to define what death really entails. One example of life seems to center around consciousness. But that is only a human attribute. For example, plants are assumed to be alive, but consciousness is not a part of their life-hood.

Some species of living organisms, hydra for example, seem to be immortal. Others such as one celled organisms are alive but do not exhibit any attributes of the rest of living organisms. While parts of more complex organisms may not appear to be alive, other parts of that organism do.

An almost universal human idea of life holds that life as we know it is simply a transient state between that of living protoplasm and that of spirit. That is, life will continue in some form after death. Is that superstition or fact? It might be either, but it is certainly improvable.

The idea of everlasting death is repugnant to all humans. In fact, one’s own death is the most terrifying thought a human being can entertain. Yet the religious zealot embraces life’s temporal status only as a bridge to a more sought after form upon his death. I am a hunter, and while hunting one day with religious friends, I asked if the antelope we were about to kill would go to heaven. The answer I got was yes, as would ants, bees, and all living creatures. I wondered if the antelope might take offense to our efforts to end his life when that fellow finally joined him. While such a view seems absurd to me, the truth of such things is unknown. Antelope have no comprehension of death. Likewise, they have no real idea of life, but they do have a powerful urge to sustain it.

To most civilized societies, the place and time of one’s death remains unknown. And it is programmed within the general, human consciousness to not ponder such an eventuality. Yet, to some, the religious implications of death are so manifestly welcome that they embrace it. To wit: terrorist suicide bombers. Britain’s MI5 has intelligence information that Islamic surgeons trained in England have migrated to some Middle Eastern countries and are now implanting bombs in women’s breasts.

On the flip side of the coin, an American soldier goes into battle with the thought that there is at least some small chance that he will survive. The unlucky fellow beside him will meet his fate, but not him. Yet we all know that our day will come. We are not immortal, at least not terrestrially so. We do not know when or how, but we do know that our day will come.

“This is man’s paradox” writes Becker: His body is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to the fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out in nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

As Pascal states “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” To which Becker explains “ Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness – agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.”

I am familiar with death, as are we all. As a soldier I saw it. There was also a time in my life when I worked on a terminal ward of a military hospital. All who resided there knew that death was upon them, and that it lay only days or weeks ahead. All were young. Observing their response to it was undeniably tortuous. If, rather when, they pondered their demise, I would frequently have to inject thorazine to calm them. And why? Because to the human mind, the idea of death is one of such finality that it cannot be dealt with rationally. Life’s “vital lie” was at an end for them. The repression and denial of death could no longer sustain them.

While animals do not consider the idea of death from a standpoint of ratiocination, they do have a strong survival instinct. As a hunter, I have observed their reactions to the threat of death hundreds of times. Their will to live is extraordinary.

There is an amusing saying that you should not take life too seriously since you will never get out of it alive anyway. And yet people continue to struggle with concepts, dreams, and the determination to further goals they perceive as either beneficial to themselves, to their children, or to society as a whole.

The world is filled with such people and their activist movements, all mundane to their individual existence it would seem. Throughout history such ambitions have been examined and individuals have risen to power or prominence because of it. Yet the great equalizer is death. Hitler or Mother Teresa is no worse or better than I in the final analysis.

Is it then true that we should not struggle for a cause in the midst of knowing our own demise? If you knew you had only 30 days to live, what would be your response? Let me pose this question: Let us assume that you believe the direction that Obama, his corrupt administration, and his activist, communist czars are taking this country would affect not only you but all your progeny in an extremely detrimental way. What would be your response? Would you find it more important to spend “quality” time with your loved ones and get your affairs in order, or to make an even more gallant attempt at stopping the outrageous actions of a Marxist regime in the making that would affect your offspring for the remainder of their lives?

The Elasticity of Nouns. The Plasticity of Death.

Such words as communism, terrorism, fascism, et al are elastic. That is, they expand or contract within the ideology of their own definition and the individual defining them. They seem to have a memory of their own state of equilibrium in social engineering and gravitate to that constant state. Yet death is anything but elastic. It is indeed plastic. Once that state of life is altered by death, it will not return to its normal state. Thus, we often ponder apples against oranges in our effort to understand our position and worth in the universe.

Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death, points to how humans repress the idea of death. It seems to me that he is stating another case of denial, a frequent and impotent social aspect of most Americans. Yet it is the very definition of America that has given men and women the courage to face death.

We speak of the death of an American in his struggle to defend it. But we seldom speak of the death of America itself. Some would say that America is elastic and that it will return to its normal state of cultural and traditional values, and, further, that the conservative Tea Party movement, made loud enough, is the current method by which that will be accomplished. Some say no, that the America they knew and grew up in has become plastic, and that our once great culture is beyond changing, manipulating, or saving. It has no memory.

Can we extrapolate or correlate the repression of one’s own death to the repression by Americans of its death as well? Or is it a matter of one’s own outlook? The ultra-left embraces the current efforts to change American values. But can we, in all consciousness, continue to call our nation America or fly the stars and stripes over a land that is headed for the grave? Do we revolutionize consciousness?

I was astonished and surprised when my 4 year old granddaughter began to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the dinner table recently. She recited it perfectly.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".

It is noteworthy to understand the origins of some of those words. The word republic, for example, underscores the government the founders invoked. The words under God, insisted on by Eisenhower during the cold war, gives the nation a stated religious character, and the words liberty and justice for all seems self evident. Yet, today, all these words are under attack. My four year old granddaughter has no understanding of either that or the powerful implications of the words she recites, nor does she understand death. It strikes me that neither do many Americans. But it most certainly does to those activists interested in the death of America.

Like the animals I have hunted, where is that extraordinary will of America to live? Is it apathy, complacency, laziness, or an abject tolerance to their surroundings no matter its heated advances toward destruction? No, Americans will continue with their comfortable lives until their bellies are empty. They will continue their denial, their repression of their own deaths, until it is upon them. And then we will see the sleeping giant awaken. The injection of thorazine will not calm their panic nor their will to survive. Will it be too damned late?

Is Becker’s and Pascal’s madness theme that of American citizens, that they have a project immortality that keeps them in denial about the death of their own country? And when will their “vital lie” about the decay of America be cast aside and they rise up to rescue it? Again, not until their bellies are empty.