Hero systems

Hero systems January 20, 2014

Richard Beck (The Slavery of Death) quotes some impressive passages from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. They’reworthy of re-quoting.

“This is what society is and always has been: asymbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customsand rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthlyheroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call cultural relativity is thus really the relativity of hero-systeins the world over. But eachcultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each systemcuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: fromthe ‘high’ heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the ‘low’heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain,everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guidinga family through hunger and disease” (Becker, 4-5).

This hero system is what confers value on the individuals who are members of the society:

“It doesnt matter whether the cultural hero-system is franklymagical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized.It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimateusefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feelingby carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice thatreflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper,a family that spans three generations. The hope and beliefis that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worthand meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, thatman and his products count” (Becker 4-5).

In the ancient world, the hero systems are overtly efforts to transcend death. Becker thinks that death-denial is at the heart of every hero system, and thus of every culture: “heroism is first and foremost a reflex ofthe terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; wegive such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves usdeeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave weourselves would be” (11-12). Or, as Becker puts it in Escape from Evil, “Cultures are fundamentally and basically styles of death avoidance” (125).

Our cultures, and the personal identities we draw from them, are founded on what Becker calls a “vital lie”: we can’t face up to the truth of our mortality, cannot be honest about reality. It’s dishonest, but it is only this dishonesty that enables us to have the courage to be. And part of this lie is the pretense that we can stand alone, that we are autonomous. In fact, our lives betray our essential dependence:

“We dont want to admit that we do not stand alone, thatwe always rely on something that transcends us, some system ofideas and powers in which we are embedded and which supportus. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a godor openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life,I that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorantof himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. Allof us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorantof what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we havefashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was amaster analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich inour day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted,but that he really drew his ‘courage to be’ from a god, a string ofsexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and thefetish of money and the size of a bank balance” (55-6).


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