The Birth and Death of Meaning (Ernest Becker)
OVERVIEW
Ernest Becker’s book “The Birth and Death of Meaning” asks the question, “where does meaning come from?” The short answer is: meaning comes from culture – our lives feel most meaningful when we believe we are participating successfully in the cultural hero-system, and we measure the success of our performance through social affirmation. Culture prescribes the roles, how well we execute the roles creates feelings of meaning and self-worth, and we assess the success of our execution by way of positive social regard.
Of course, culture is artificial and meaning is therefore entirely fictional, but that’s not the short answer.
Here’s the long answer.
Where does our self-concept come from?
To discover any sort of meaning, self-worth, or self-value, one must first develop a self. Where does this self-awareness come from? Becker starts with our evolutionary history, arguing that group activities like hunting required keen perception and cooperation. If you’re my hunting partner, I need to predict your behaviour and you need to predict mine (notice this requires a concept of “I” and “you”). Back at home camp, anticipating behaviour was aided by the development of a symbolic social hierarchy – roles were assigned and social status became relevant. To reduce anxiety and be successful in the group, you needed to know what part you played and what was expected of that part. This, Becker argues, is where the self-concept was born. To predict your behaviour I must first recognize my own agency and then recognize you too have this agency – I need a self-concept, which I then use to anticipate your behaviour by projecting myself into your situation aided by my knowledge of your social roles and the expectations of those roles (we know this today as “theory of mind”). These social roles, rules, and customs are what culture is – the symbolic schema we created to predict behaviour, which then transforms into the symbolic schema that we derive meaning and self-worth from.
Symbolic vs. physical existence
We have our bodies, our physical selves, but we don’t identify with them as much as we do our inner selves, our symbolic selves. Consider the banker who loses billions of dollars of client money and falls into a deep depression. He has a physical body, but the most important part of him (by his own apparent evaluation) extends to numbers in a bank account… what they symbolize about him. The overgrown weeds on your front lawn aren’t just weeds, they say something about you as a person, as do your unruly children or your messy car.
Humans don’t live in a world of pure sensation, we live in a world of symbols, and we derive our sense of self and self-worth from this symbolic world. Our self-esteem grows from how well we believe we are inhabiting the roles and statuses of this fictional construction. To wonder whether you are valuable and whether your life is meaningful is to wonder where you fit into the cultural schema, how well you’re meeting the expectations, and whether others think your performance has been successful – as social creatures, we measure everything against the yardstick of positive social regard. The upshot of this is that our consciousness of self is a social construction. Symbolic self-representation is built from the outside in, which means our identities are, in essence, social products. We can’t divorce meaning from culture or ourselves from our symbolic worldviews any more than we can grow wings and fly.
This makes man an interesting animal indeed, the only species that “vitally depends on a symbolic constitution of his worth. Once this has been achieved the rest of the person’s entire life becomes animated by the artificial symbolism of self-worth; almost all his time is devoted to the protection, maintenance, and aggrandizement of the symbolic edifice of his self-esteem.”
Culture as a codified hero-system
When Becker says that man’s urge is to heroism, he’s not referring to the gladiators or warriors of old – he’s referring to man’s desire to be admired, to feel important. Culture is the vehicle – the codified hero-system – the means to become someone of importance (a “hero”). We earn our heroism, our self-esteem, by impressing our friends, by getting good grades, or by dressing well. As we reach adulthood, we earn it by performing well in the roles society offers: doctor, lawyer, professor, scientist – successful businessman, loving mother, stable father, dutiful friend, etc. We pride ourselves on being funny, artistic, generous, studious, ambitious, pious, or wise.
By being good at these roles, by inhabiting these prescribed identities, we derive our vital sense of self-worth. “Almost all of one’s inner life, when he is not absorbed in some active task, is a traffic in images of self-worth.” We nourish ourselves with a constant inner newsreel of self-esteem images and evaluations. We think fondly about the bonus we earned, the book we published, the praise we received, the prestigious college our children attend. We strive for heroic self-identity. We are all culture-heroes, trying to stand out. You could say that while the initial role of culture was to help early humans predict behaviour (and provide physical security), equally important was the role of culture in making enduring self-esteem possible. The cultural hero-system is how we convince ourselves that we are an object of primary value, and it provides the prescription for meaningful action.
Consequences of living in a contrived world
“First we discover who society says we are: then we build our identity on performance in that part. If we uphold our part in the performance, we are rewarded with social affirmation of our identity. It is hardly an exaggeration, then, to say that we are created in the performance.”
The social environment is the only way we derive and validate our identities. The question may be “Who am I?” but the real question is “How are others supposed to feel about me?” And the scaffolding for everything is the codified cultural hero-system.
What are the consequences of basing meaning and self-esteem on this artificial, fragile scaffolding? Aside from the obvious (which is that the whole thing could collapse at any moment), to maintain our self-worth, we must constantly perform up to societal expectations. We are inseparable from our roles, and so executing the roles well is vitally important. What then for the breadwinner who becomes disabled, the woman who grows old, the father who feels unfulfilled – anyone who doesn’t fit the mold or can’t play the part? Not living up to cultural expectations isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s an apocalypse of self-esteem and meaning. And when culture fails? When it no longer does its job to construct a “meaningful hero-system for its members”? Then depression, chaos, and anarchy reign.
Surely there is a redeeming final arch to this story…
Prepare to be disappointed because this is where Becker falls back on his trusty crutch, religion. He offers (albeit half-heartedly) that a religious worldview may be less prone to collapse – that if we traffic in the shadowy virtues of some invisible after-world, perhaps our self-esteem will be more immune to disintegration. My take-away from this prescription is that living in an illusion of your own creation is more stable than living in an illusion created by others. You’re better able to control your own fantasy than the cultural fiction you were born into. I don’t doubt the logic of this, but it’s still a cosmic cop-out.
Culture is arbitrary, contrived… fabricated. And if meaning is derived from our participation in the cultural hero-system, then meaning is fictional too. That doesn’t make meaning or culture superfluous – indeed, they are deadly serious – but it does make them artificial. Your sense of inner worth and importance, your self-esteem and self-assuredness, rests entirely on make-believe.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
No kidding – what do we do with this? “The Birth and Death of Meaning” answers the question “what is meaning and where does it come from?” but it doesn’t answer “what do I do with the answer to that question?” Consider this a for-your-information kind of book; it’s not going to tell you how to climb out of the existential pit you’ve been thrown into.
But, in a way, isn’t it better to know why you search for meaning, and how you come to discover it (even if it is a fantasy)? If meaning and culture are intertwined, then perhaps that’s permission to stop feeling guilty that your life isn’t “meaningful” enough. If your culture says life is fulfilled only with children, travel and adventure, or building something worthwhile, and you haven’t done any of those things… maybe there isn’t anything wrong with you, maybe your culture just doesn’t value the things that you do (and maybe, just maybe, the expectations are as unrealistic as they are arbitrary). Does it help knowing that? I think a little bit. It definitely helps if you pair it with the belief that our lives really aren’t that important and we’ll all soon be forgotten anyway.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Where meaning comes from.
Who should read this book? Those who want to know where meaning comes from with an “I don’t care where this takes me” sort of attitude.