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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Plumbing the Depths of Terror, November 15, 2002
In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2002), Tom Pyszcynski, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg.Many have observed that America will never be the same in the wake of the terrorist attacks on US soil on the morning of September 11, 2001. The sudden impact of the explosions, captured in vivid detail and replayed over and over again on television, fundamentally altered the illusion of invulnerability that Americans had enjoyed since World War II. Beginning almost immediately a host of Middle Eastern analysts and academics of all stripes supplied an endless stream of hypotheses concerning "why they hate us" and the general nature of terrorism, all in a well-meaning effort to come to terms with a national tragedy. But to plumb the depths of terrorism one must look beyond the sound bites, beyond the narrow focus on Middle Eastern politics, beyond popular opinion concerning the supposed differences between Islamic and Judaeo-Christian cultures. This is one of the chief accomplishments of In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror. Its authors have succeeded in recasting the psychology of terror against a general theory of human nature. Working in the tradition of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, they trace the roots of terrorism to the troubling yet inescapable reality of human mortality. Becker long ago proposed that there exists at all times a latent fear of death that threatens to upend societal equilibrium. To shield ourselves from the ever-present threat of death anxiety, we seek to bolster our self-esteem through group loyalty. Hence competing worldviews threaten us at a very deep level. Becker's prolific publications were hailed by many as brilliant and garnered him a Pulitzer Prize (for his 1973 classic, The Denial of Death). But he was unable to gain widespread acceptance within the academy. His interdisciplinary methodology ran contrary to the emerging trend toward specialization. And there was the recurring criticism that his bold and far-reaching ideas, while intriguing, were ultimately untestable. Like many pioneering visionaries, Becker's death was followed by a period of neglect and dormancy. That changed with the appearance of three social psychologists (Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenberg) who possessed the ingenuity to do what others said could not be done: put Becker's ideas to the test. Their results demonstrate conclusively that Becker's ideas are not only theoretically compelling, they are empirically verifiable. Years prior to the devastating events of 9/11, they were testing and developing what came to be called "terror management theory." Fine tuning Becker's ideas, they discovered, among other things, a clear and testable relationship between the awareness of mortality and hostility toward those who appear to subscribe to a different worldview. More specifically, they found people who were asked to consider their mortality would be more favorably predisposed to people who shared their basic world view, and conversely, more negatively predisposed toward outsiders of one kind or another. These findings fit both the surge in patriotic hoopla and the hostility toward foreigners in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. While acknowledging that "terrorism results from the interaction of a wide range of social, political, ideological, and psychological forces," the authors set out to "illuminate the psychological aspects of the problem" (p. 187). The result is a veritable calculus of depth psychology that identifies the factors inclining groups toward violence. Drawing from their cumulative research efforts (spanning over 150 empirical studies) the authors provide a concise overview of their research (Chapters 1-3), then proceed to apply their findings to the social and cultural milieu of post 9/11 America (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 is devoted to the application of terror management theory to Islamic extremists, while Chapters 8 & 9 point to the way out of the cycle of violence. Acknowledging the enormity of the issues and the gravity of the current socio-political state of affairs, the authors suggest that hope resides in new, more inclusive worldviews that are neither too rigid nor too diffuse. Much has been written concerning Becker's allegedly bleak view of human nature and his seemingly macabre fascinations with humanity's destructiveness. But those familiar with his writings can attest to his great compassion for the human condition and the reverence for the "life force" that sustained his long descent into the night. "In ways that are yet unknown to us, this spirit will continue giving birth to its own possibilities" (Becker, Angel in Armor, p. 118). In the Wake of 9/11 adds another important chapter to the story Becker so urgently wanted to tell.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Living history!, September 13, 2002
Written with a rare combination of wise hesitation and committed passion, this book has so much to commend it is difficult to know where to start. In short summary, this book presents a well-argued 'take' on current political terrorism, as well as public reaction to that terrorism, from the perspective of Terror Management Theory (TMT). TMT is an increasingly important area of social psychology that was originated explicitly as an attempt to subject Ernest Becker's main ideas to empirical testing. The robustness of the theory is now causing many heads to turn that 20 years ago quickly passed over Becker's ideas as 'speculative philosophizing,' unworthy of serious attention from social scientists. One of the great values of this book is that they have taken all of this two decades' worth of research and boiled it down to two concise chapters, in which they both lay out the research results itself in coherent format and discuss its significance in the context of Becker's wider theories and relating it to other current material in the social sciences. In subsequent chapters, as they lay out the psychology of terror, focusing both on the terrorist mentality itself, but even more so on the public reaction to the events of 9/11, the theory genuinely springs to life with cogent illustrations of each point from the very newspaper headlines we have all been recently reading ourselves. The feeling is that of reading 'lived history' in which the reader is also an intimate actor as well as an interpretive observer. This is easily the most riveting interpretive account of these events I have seen in the growing mass of 9/11 literature.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Brave Groundbreaking Research Design, April 29, 2008
As a "self-styled" student of Ernest Becker myself, I take a special interest in this brave book. I am writing a book myself on racism in America, and Becker's paradigm on the Science of Man and the social and existential psychology that it rests on (mostly death denial, mortality salience and death defiance), as well as the "American worldview," also will serve as the basis of my own theoretical platform. So, one cannot imagine how excited I was to see these brave men launch a first foray into the use of Becker's paradigm as part of a set of testable hypotheses.
As a trained scientist (Mathematician and Operations Research Analyst) and quantitative behavioral scientist (advance degrees in International Relations Theory and Political Science), I read this book with great enthusiasm. In many ways, it looks very much like my own Phd thesis: It develops (or appropriates) a suitable theoretical framework (TMT), forms various hypotheses (about death defiance, mortality salience, the American worldview and how 911 disturbed the American reality and conscience), collects appropriate data (reactions of victims to the 911 experience), and then proceeds to try to test those hypotheses using the most suitable tools available (subjects of psychometric and social psychological experimental test designs, etc.). This is all to the good.
If the reader allows the authors to get away with this smoothly developed tableau, there is very little to complain about here. However, since I too am going through the same exercise, I have a few questions to raise: of the same sort that have plagued my own research.
For instance, how can the authors so causally speak of the "American worldview," (which, in the background, does most of the heavy lifting), and is the most pivotal of all concepts in their research design), as if it is a "given" without first properly delineating its content and tracing out its outlines? It certainly is not enough to assert that: "national identity is a large component of most people's worldview." This is the beginning, not the end of an analysis of worldview.
In these authors design, the "American worldview," remains essentially a black box, indeed an unopened (possibly cocked and loaded) black (pandora's) box! I believe that if they unlock this box, rather than presume to know and thus able to intuit its contents, they will discover the all kinds of things will come tumbling out:
The "American Worldview" as a psychological construct is a house of horrors that cannot be intuited or taken casually for granted. Once opened, they will discover, as I did, that it is a fantastically complex, not just multidimensional, but more importantly, a multilayered psychological construct, that never quite stops unraveling. At the very bottom (not at the top) of this multilayer psychological chain is of course death denial. And as one ascends the chain of sublimated complexity, one discovers, not just death defiance and mortality salience, but also many other things that are equally as "weighty" as death defiance and mortality salience: things such as an almost existential dependence on and a preference for a "barely transparent racist ideology," a very localized and parochial set of contradictory moral rules, a specter of sex and violence at every turn; dependence on strange and contradictory religious concepts and beliefs, and on an avowedly white male "hero system" all couched in a social hierarchy that often contradicts the much revered notions of freedom, independence, and democracy, just to name a few. These go well beyond just national identity.
And while it is true that these all inevitably do connect in one way or another back to death defiance, mortality salience, and thus ultimately back to death denial, the connections are never straightforward or linear ones. They are invariably very circuitous and tenuous connections, and there exists, equally plausible alternative explanations for each of them. And most of all, there is very little that can be assumed about the construct of "an American worldview" itself, or about the connections to it as the variables upon which it depends, proceed up the psychological chain. Nor indeed is there very much that can be assumed about the way these disparate elements and their respective connections are to be properly "weighted" in the larger overarching concept called "the American worldview."
Because so much of the authors design depends on how the "American Worldview" is conceptualized, this is not a casual matter at all. It is not a matter that can be easily ignored or simply glossed over as simply, a matter of "national identity." If the assumption is that it does not matter how the "American Worldview" is conceptualized, since all roads inevitably lead directly back to a deeply sublimated death denial anyway. Then that is no longer just an assumption, but amounts to a grand global meta-hypothesis that is larger than, and indeed engulfs the whole research design itself. Such a large meta-hypothesis cannot be allowed to enter the research through the backdoor, but must be wrestled with, up front. And at the very least somehow be acknowledged and defended, if not proven out right.
I of course have not finished the book, but hope that this is the only major concern. For bravery alone the book merits five stars.
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