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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Science of Man as Anthropodicy,
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This review is from: The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man (Hardcover)
Introduction
Not enough has been, nor can enough ever be said about Ernest Becker. He simply is one of the most impressive and towering intellects and theoretical synthesizers of our (or any) time. Ever the Scientist; the Social Psychologist, post-Freudian Existentialist; the Sociologist; a world class Psychiatrist, an Anthropologist; and then, ever so reluctantly, the Philosopher. Here, with the most exquisite of intellectual talents on display and operating them in delicate balance across a dizzying array of disciplines, Becker, throwing theories around like so much intellectual confetti, leads us on another one of his many daring cerebral high wire acts. His intellectual gymnastics take us far away from our own intellectual comfort zones into the depths of the unsettled and unknown. In his search for a "super-ordinate Science of Man," Becker disturbs and even awakens the dead. In the same way as he did in his Pulitzer winning signature work "The Denial of Death," and in his less well known but no less impressive, "The Birth and Death of Meaning," and in a book that is very similar to this one, "Escape from Evil," as well as in his groundbreaking, "The Revolution in Psychiatry," Ernest Becker again takes no intellectual prisoners. He seeks to devour with unerring logic, philosophy, history, and with his own improved models of sociology and Freudian-based Existentialist psychology. Like Rachmaninov's "Fourth Piano Concerto," or John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," in the wake of this intellectual tornado, Becker leaves a scorched and prostrated earth: The mind is unhinged from our brain and the cells are permanently rearranged. The intellectual landscape is no longer recognizable; the mind is zapped, lobotomized, changed forever...The only precipitate is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Part I: The Science of Man as a Moral Problem The Story begins as all of Becker's analyses begin, with a deep and thorough excavation, rereading, re-analysis and synthesis of history. Becker turns over and re-plows the well-trod ground of what we know about man's social existence since the pre-Renaissance Middle-Ages. And what we know is that despite the fact that the Middle Ages operated pretty much as society still does today: manipulated by politicians in power, run by warlords and Feudal lords, and by special interest groups all using what they know about social science to demagogue and profit from, war, hate and fear, the Middle Ages nevertheless left man with a sense of wholeness and a sense of community built into the rigid hierarchical social structure, a sense of wholeness that can no longer be found in today's overly-commodified and overly-industrialized world. In Part I of this two part symphonic masterpiece, Becker raises, and then uses it to guide his enquiry, the same concerns that were raised at the end of the Dark Ages by Newton's "clockwork scientific revolution": the idea that maybe the seminal event guiding the Medieval worldview -- the bite from the apple in the garden of Eden -- was all wrong. Maybe man is not inherently evil? Maybe sin and evil are mere by-products of man's attempt to grapple with his own complex nature within the context of society? And in this regard, maybe it should be said that Newton's revolution came at exactly the wrong time, for it opened a can of worms that still reverberates today. It initiated a series of social revolutions, beginning with the French that re-opened for examination the thitherto hermitically sealed (mostly by the Catholic Church) idea of an uncritical God-centered and God-run physical and moral cosmology. After Newton, and as part of man's attempt to better get his hands around the problem of how to deal with his own morality, (and lack of immortality) there came in quick succession misreadings of Malthus, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and most of all Darwin -- all neatly packaged with promises of a new morality, a new "Science of Moral Man" -- with the stress this time being on the word "Science." These were lavish promises that all turned into ideological "cotton candy" and thus could not be redeemed, because they failed as a suitable replacement even for the old corrupt but profoundly orderly Medieval cosmology. But far worse, the "mechanized paradigm of scientific morality" that they represented, led to its own moral excesses and its own unique moral problems: in particular to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, racism, colonialism and most importantly to post-modern man's almost complete alienation from himself. Part II: The Science of Man as Anthropodicy In Part II of the book Becker attempts to square the existential circle by trying to determine exactly where "scientific moral man" went off the rails. More than anything else, what he discovers is that old cosmologies, when they die at all, always die hard. What happened is that the "new scientific moral order" was shaped by the same coalition of political and economic forces that "ran" the Middle Ages -- the Church, the Kingdom, and the modern reincarnation of the feudal lords, the industrial corporation. And as a result, they turned science into just another empty abstract vessel to continue Medieval greed, politics and control, by other more novel means. In short, the "New Moral World Order," was just the old "Medieval immoral order" in new "scientific bottles." It represented the same old "spoils system" invented by the descendants of the old feudal land-owning elites. The old morality, had simply been repackaged in the Trojan Horse of science. The very hopeful morality that had "ushered in" the French and American revolutions with its grandiose ideals of freedom and democracy had already been fatally compromised and contaminated before it got out of the starting gate. Thus, it became, like the new religion that it underwrote, just another moral fetish - a byproduct and close relative of the same old medieval immorality. Summary After demonstrating that morally we have only been treading water, coming full circle back to square one, Becker makes his final and most important point about how to develop a "Science of Man" (which he calls an Anthropodicy); about evil, and about its most prominent instrumentality and root cause, alienation: It is that man was put on this earth naked, without instincts; having to scrape, conjure and fashion his world from his own creation, meanings made from his own symbols. This ability is not only his sole basis of survival but is also the only tool that makes him human. In the end the ideal moral man is one who understands (as Becker's own life and books so aptly demonstrates) that life on earth can only be about being a free man in the sense of having the maximum freedom to create, that is with maximum individuality, and thus with the maximum ability to manifest that creativity in a larger community of meaning, which is itself evolving towards maximum meaning (what Becker refers to as Maximum community). As inelegant and tortuous as this answer may sound, it is difficult to disagree with Becker that "maximum individuality in maximum community" is the only "moral sense" that can be fashioned independently in this world. As a footnote, this book now makes clearer a comment ex-president Bill Clinton made in his book "My Life." His comment was in reference to how Becker's theories (in The Denial of Death) answered the question about the existence of god. Clinton drew what in the context of the Denial of Death seemed an eminently reasonable conclusion: that ultimately Becker believed in God. In light of the present analysis, however, it seems to me that the ex-President may have unintentionally stretched this point a bit by failing to make clear that Becker's reference to God, "as the strength of a cosmic force," is quite a different "man-made creation," than the equally "man-made creation" being worshipped in a private, personal, and often mean-spirited, selfish and egotistical way each Sunday morning by most of the normal "religious denominations." Becker's god was never intended to be a private servant of man or a night watchman over man's morals, but a force created by man and projected out into the universe; a force that would then continue to evolve with each new improvement in man's moral meanings. Another point that seems equally misrepresented but is cleared up in this book as well is Becker's notion of what it means to be mentally ill. By my reading of Becker, and following what I know about the works of one of his mentors, Thomas Szasz, it seems quite clear that Becker is only saying that there are two forms of neuroses, covering a spectrum from private to public, and that somehow we have come to understand only the private as constituting a sickness. I believe Becker would argue that, either both are sick, or it doesn't make sense to speak of neuroses as a sickness. Enough said. Ten stars
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