The following is the second part of a text about death as a harm. It is highly recommended to read the former part first, but it is not necessary, as while this text functions as an essential elaboration of the former one, it can be read independently of the first part.

The Denial of Death and Terror Management Theory

People tend to deny their fear of death claiming that they don’t think about death often. However, death awareness influences fundamental aspects of everyone’s lives and it motivates many of everyone’s actions.

The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argues that death awareness motivates all of humans’ actions and is the main motivational force in everything everyone does.
In his most famous book The Denial of Death he argues that humans are seeking to overcome death through immortality projects – activities which provide a sense of meaning that help them transcend the death of their physical body. These immortality projects are “vital lies” which allow people to function day to day without the disabling awareness of their impending death.

Human culture according to Becker is a product of people trying to solve the problem of death awareness. He defines culture as constrictive believes about the nature of reality that are shared by people in groups in order to minimize the anxiety engendered by cosmological question such as who am I? Where did I come from? Where do I go? And of course when would I die?
Even the most primitive and technologically impoverished human societies, had sophisticated notions about the origin of the universe, and about what happens after death.
Humans use their cognitive capabilities such as thinking abstractedly and symbolically to solve their greatest fear which is their own mortality.
He writes:

“We can see that what people want in any epoch is a way of transcending their physical fate, they want to guarantee some kind of indefinite duration, and culture provides them with the necessary immortality symbols or ideologies; societies can be seen as structures of immortality power.” (Escape From Evil, p. 63)

All cultures offer some hope of immortality, either literally in the form of heavens, afterlife or reincarnation, or symbolically, through producing art, making a great fortune, making scientific discoveries, having children obviously, or any other way of producing the sense that people are part of something greater than themselves that will continue long after they die. People know they will not live forever but are comforted by the possibility that they “live on” symbolically through their work, the people they have known, and of course through their children.

Culture allows people to feel that they are significant contributors to a permanent world. It protects people from the fact that they are temporary, purposeless creatures who are permanently gone once they are dead. People’s belief systems help them manage the terror accompanied with the awareness of their inevitable death.

Truthfulness, empiricism, authenticity and validness are highly insignificant for that matter:

“And as far as means are concerned, we are all equally insignificant and impotent animals trying to coerce the universe, trying to make the world over to our own urges. The cultural lie merely continues and supports the lie of the Oedipal causa sui project; when it is exposed, we literally become impotent. From which we can conclude that man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.” (Escape From Evil, p. 122)

According to Becker human civilization is actually a coping strategy.

In the book Escape from Evil, Becker argues that death anxiety is the root cause of human evil.
Basically, the idea is that the beliefs and notions of each culture, by providing a shared conception of reality that protects its members from existential fears regarding their vulnerability and mortality, are so vital for the people belonging to it in terms of confronting death anxiety, that when encountering people with different beliefs and notions, people’s defense mechanisms against death are under a threat. If culture helps people deny their own death, then the very existence of other cultures is a threat to their psychological and emotional stability. Alternative conceptions of reality force people to question their own belief system and therefore their claims to immortality. Since the cultural group people belong to, lives on after their physical death, it symbolically overcomes people’s mortality, when the existence of people’s culture is threatened by another cultural group, it is actually their denial of death mechanism which is threatened, therefore people are highly motivated to maintain their cultural worldview and defeat alternative ones. So the desire to kill whom who belongs to a different belief system is derived from the threat of death, not necessarily in the immediate physical sense but more in the psychological one, it threatens the validity of the denial of death.

Becker argues that in seeking to avoid the evil of death, man is “responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.” (Escape From Evil, p. 5)

Aspects of Ernest Becker’s theoretical formulations have been verified by hundreds of studies conducted by social and evolutionary psychologists who developed Becker’s ideas into the Terror Management Theory. Basically, the theory is that humans’ evolutionary drive for self-preservation and their awareness of the certainty and unpredictability of death means they must constantly deal with an internal conflict which results in mental terror. That terror is managed by cultural beliefs of meaning and purpose aiming to subdue the inevitable biological reality.
These researchers have empirically studied the effect of death awareness on human attitudes and behavior. For example, they reminded some people of their mortality by asking them to write about their feeling regarding their own death, or by filling out a death anxiety questionnaire, some watched car accidents, some were brought to the lab through a cemetery, and some were flashed with the word death in a millisecond time so they weren’t aware of it. The results were that people in the control group, who were reminded of unpleasant events but not fatal ones, didn’t show any special relation to people of their group, but people who were reminded of their mortality showed signs of more supportiveness to their own group.  In other words, after subjects were subliminally confronted with reminders of death they more strongly endorsed the worldview of their own ethnic group or nation, while at the same time, they denigrated members of other groups whose worldviews differed from their own.

In another study, judges who were exposed to the word “death” before ruling, administered far more punitive sentences than judges in the control group who were not reminded of their own mortality. Meaning, being reminded of death caused judges to be stricter with people who break the codes of society.
Similar studies show that people who were subliminally reminded of their own mortality tended to be more judgmental of people of other cultures and more tolerant of people from their own culture.

The mere exposure to the word “death” also affected political choices. For example, two post 9/11 studies found that subjects in the high death awareness group favored a candidate who they perceived as a savior or demagogue and who insisted on an aggressive agenda toward their enemies over one who urged a more diplomatic path.

If merely subliminally introducing the word “death” in an experiment can produce measurable changes in subjects’ attitudes and actions, one can only imagine the powerful effect of countless events in the real world that remind people of their mortality. People see death in the news and on the internet all the time, some witness horrible accidents on the streets, people often hear about the death of a family member, a friend, a neighbor or even a celebrity, all are mortality reminders that seriously affect people, despite that many of them have seemingly became accustomed to the visual images of tragedies as a result of daily exposure. These still have a profound influence on people’s unconscious minds and significantly alter their motivations and behaviors.

Becker doesn’t only argue that death anxiety is the root cause of human evil because anyone who thinks otherwise is a threat to the defense mechanisms one has against death, he also thinks that since people need some tangible and potentially controllable cause of their residual death anxiety, they identify or create “others” to serve this purpose. The “others” function as the source of all evil. Every bad thing happening to “us” is because of “them”. We are always right and good and they are always wrong and bad. People need an explanation for why life is not good and they don’t want to blame themselves, so not only that they falsely blame others, hadn’t there been “others”, people would invent them to serve the function of the source of all evil. Otherwise it is their own fault or just the way things are, and both notions are not desirable.

If Ernest Becker is right, then people are not expected at some point to forsake war, hate, xenophobia, racism, or religions, as they are all powerful antidotes against death anxiety, especially religions. Studies have found that death anxiety tends to be lower among people who regularly participate in religious activities. For example, a study conducted among people who regularly attend church, asking them to fill out “Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale”, and “Death Anxiety Scale”, found an inverse relationship between intrinsic religious motivation and death anxiety. So if Becker is right and if as this study suggests – the more religious people are the less anxious they are about death, religion would remain attractive to many people, and these are very bad news for antinatalism.

I am not sure that death awareness is the center and the cause of each element in human life, but I do agree that it plays some part in most if not all of them. I think that there are other motives that also play roles in human culture, but death awareness resulted in death anxiety which leads humans to try and protect themselves by mechanisms of denial of death exemplified by various culture elements, is surly one of the main ones.

According to Becker, people are not only bothered with the end of their lives, but to a great deal, with the insignificance of their lives. People need to believe that as individuals they serve a valuable and significant role in a meaningful universe. He writes in his book Escape from Evil: “Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning.” (p. 4)

And in The Denial of Death: “The real world is simply too terrible to admit, it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.” (p. 61)
According to Becker, humans deny that death is the final destiny for them, by striving to achieve a life that is significant. If one’s legacy lives on, then death is not one’s final destiny.
And the easiest way for people to delude themselves that their legacy lives on after their death, is by creating new people. Not everyone can make their life meaningful in the cultural sense but almost everyone can delude themselves that their lives are meaningful by creating new people.

Even if you don’t agree with every part of Becker’s theory, procreation surly is at least partly a result of death anxiety. Procreation provides people with an illusion of immortality and an illusion of meaning in a meaningless world.

Children are a manifestation of people’s false effort to live beyond their bodies. They reflect the hope that a part of them would live on through their offspring as well as through the memories of them held by their children. That’s at least one of the reasons people are so eager to procreate. Their death anxiety is soothed to some extent by believing that they live on through their children, and their children’s children.
Research around the world confirms that reminders of death increase the desire for children in the service of symbolically transcending death. German participants who wrote the first sentence that came to mind while thinking about their own death subsequently reported a greater desire to have children, and to have them sooner, than participants who were asked to write about being in pain. After being primed with death thoughts, Chinese participants were more resistant to the nation’s one-child-per-family policy, and American participants indicated that they were more likely to name future offspring after themselves.

Unfortunately, as horrible as death anxiety is on the personal and on the social level, it doesn’t cause people not to procreate but the other way around. Death anxiety creates, if to borrow one of Benatar’s metaphors, a procreation Ponzi scheme, as each generation deals with it by creating new people who are bound to deal with it as well, and are most likely to do so by creating new people and so on and so forth.

So the effect of death anxiety is actually triple:
1) It causes people to fear their own and others’ death
2) It causes people to engage in pointless and usually harmful projects (nationalism, religions, cults, hate groups, gaining power, fame and wealth and etc.) in order to cope with the awareness of their own inevitable deaths
3) And it causes people to develop defense mechanisms against it, which one of the main ones is creating more people, who would also fear their own and others’ death, and would also develop defense mechanisms to deal with their death anxiety which one of the main mechanisms would be creating more people and so on and so forth.

Creating new people functions as filling up the void of meaningfulness, as well as a symbol of people’s continuousness. One of the grimmest evidences of that, and of the death anxiety theory, is that catastrophes, on the national level as well as on the personal level, instead of making people reassess life, usually result in a baby boom.

So there is no point telling people that catastrophes are around the corner or that life is meaningless or that their children would necessarily die. Life is so ironic and humanity is so hopeless that the most rational arguments against procreation might be a two-edged sword.
And that’s one of the reasons why it is not rational arguments that we need…

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press

Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York: Free Press

Becker, E. (1971). The birth and death of meaning (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press

Feldman, F. Some puzzles about the evil of death in Life, Death and Meaning (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2004)

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S. (2015) The worm at the core: on the role of death in life.

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Jeroen Vaes, Paul G. Bain & Brock Bastian (2014): Embracing Humanity in the Face of Death: Why Do Existential Concerns Moderate Ingroup Humanization?, The Journal of Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2014.953027

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McGregor, R. and Sullivan-Bissett, E. 2012: “Better No Longer To Be: The Harm of Continued Existence” The South African Journal of Philosophy

Nagel, T. (1970) Death Noûs, Vol. 4, No. 1 pp. 73-80

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