Question to Muslims about Ernest Becker's book "The Denial of Death"

[mr1001nights]

I wonder what your opinion is of Ernest Becker and a psychological theory started after him called "Terror Management Theory" (TMT). It basically says that when humans developed their bigger brain, they also developed a greater sense of self; and with that greater awareness of self came a greater awareness of the END of self (death). This elicited a great deal of anxiety. Since death represents finitude and insignificance (we fear at some level that we're no more significant than a decomposing lizard or a potato) humans had to counter this anxiety by acquiring significance and symbolic immortality in life. The main vehicle was culture, which lives on beyond your physical death and so, by contributing to it and living by its standards, provides symbolic immortality. Culture (today mostly secular culture) is considered by TMT basically a quasi arbitrary set of activities that allows people to feel significant--to acquire (the myth of) EARTHLY significance and become "an individual of value in a world of meaning"--above other animals. It is an endless survey of immortality strategies. I could, say, devise some meaningless activity, like counting blades of grass. If it got popular, a particular culture could have people competing to count faster, doing it in teams, for 5 minutes, an hour etc. Very soon you would have people giving each other trophies, gaining self-esteem from it, fantasizing about their legacy etc. Religion, on the other hand, provides the individual with COSMIC significance, which is what people really need, as earthly significance doesn't do a good enough job at suppressing our unconscious fear of death. Hunter-gatherer societies, according to Becker, did this the best way, by devising various animistic myths (everything, including humans, had spirits, ancestor souls etc), as well as a sense of predictability in an uncertain world (e.g. we had a storm because the gods were angry, we had a good hunt because the tree god felt generous, we saw shooting stars because we paid tribute to the spirit of the river etc). In other words, a "spiritual control" of the world. As humans got away from nature and switched to civilization, the control became more material, more human-centric and less religious/spiritual, and so the types of immortality strategies became more related to things like money, status, technology, art, "progress" etc. Religions, especially the more devoted ones like Islam are, from this perspective, an attempt to address that inner yearning for cosmic significance that we so lack in our culture.