I’ve converted my existential anxieties into an intellectual exercise
Una Meistere
An interview with American social psychologist Sheldon Solomon
Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist, a philosopher and a professor of psychology at Skidmore College in Upstate New York. He has spent forty years studying the ways that the existential fear of death, as well as the denial of death, impacts the formation of human cultures and conflicts and how death anxiety influences our attitudes and behaviour. He also studies how the realisation of our own mortality connects with the idea of consciousness and why, quoting Seneca, most of our “existence is not life, but merely time”.
Together with his colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, Solomon is a co-founder of terror management theory, a social and evolutionary psychology theory conceptually based on American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s claim that “people strive for meaningful and significant lives largely to manage the fear of death”. The trio’s book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015) can be considered a continuation of Becker’s ideas and a platform for further research.
Becker died much too young, at the age of forty-nine, just a few months before his best-known work, The Denial of Death (1973), won a Pulitzer Prize. He had spent his entire academic career searching for an answer to one of humankind’s most fundamental questions: What makes people act the way they do? He concluded that “human activity is driven largely by unconscious efforts to deny and transcend death”. That is to say, one of our all-time greatest motivators is the notion that we humans are unique in our awareness that we will someday die. According to Becker, this realisation leads to paralysing fear, and it is also at the same time the hidden motive behind almost everything we do.
“The awareness that we humans will die has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours in almost every domain of human life – whether we are conscious of it or not,” write Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski in The Worm at the Core.
Solomon’s research on death and its intersection with human behaviour has earned support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Ernest Becker Foundation and was featured in the award-winning documentary Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality.
“Basically, what we’ve been doing for forty years is experiments to investigate the effects of conscious and non-conscious thoughts about death on all aspects of human affairs. At the risk of sounding overly polemic, I don’t think that we can make any progress right now effectively by addressing most of the immediate concerns that are impinging upon the planet and us as primary residents of it, and I don’t think we can understand what’s happening without considering the role of death and anxiety and all of these related matters. That’s not to say that they will explain everything, but if we don’t think about them, I don’t think we’ll understand anything, to put it crudely,” said Solomon during our conversation.
There was recently a great exhibition by Christian Boltanski on view in Paris. Like all of Boltanski’s shows, it was very existential. He worked on it during the Covid pandemic and came up with a very interesting thought: “A very horrible yet interesting thing has occurred since Covid appeared, which is that death is no longer hidden. We used to completely deny death, but nowadays, because of this disease, we talk about death as something that is around us and present.” Do you agree? Is there a possibility that Covid could help us come to terms with death, thus giving additional meaning to our lives as well as helping us to understand the world we live in?
Great question. At the risk of sounding glib, if I or any of us could answer that question, it would be potentially transformative. There have been wars and depressions throughout history, there have also been pandemics, but not in a world where we know what’s happening in real time, you know, 24/7. Like it or not, the very real or imagined threat of death is impinging on all of us. Frankly, I think this is just undeniable, and then the question is: to what effect? I would submit, based on our work and on your fine query, that these kinds of existential moments present us with a psychological fork in the road. This is not to say that we are aware of it, but take Heidegger, for example.
To be honest, I avoided reading Heidegger for a long time, because he was a Nazi. But Nazis are people, too. And I find some of his ideas very helpful in this regard, because in Being and Time he wrote, “In anxiety (Angst), the everyday world slips away and my home becomes uncanny (unheimlich) and strange to me.” So, when we experience angst, or anxiety – this perverse sense of disease in which we feel this uncanniness, the feeling that, wow, I just don’t feel at home – Heidegger said that, whether we’re aware of it or not, this is the inevitable reaction when we become to varying degrees explicitly aware of the inevitability of our own demise. According to Heidegger, one way that we can respond to this is what he called a flight, or fleeing (Flucht), from death – unbeknownst to ourselves, we just literally cower in the wake of existential anxieties to the point where we desperately embrace our culturally constructed conception of reality and our role in it. We essentially become culturally constructed “meat puppets” that are not anxious; but for Heidegger, and he borrowed this term from Kierkegaard, we’re not anxious because we’re “tranquillised by the trivial”.
That could mean that you’re very passively sitting at home downing some alcohol, watching TV or out shopping. Or, as Heidegger says, you can also be tranquillised by the trivial in a very agitated and frenetic sense: you can become devoted to your religion, or you can become passionately devoted to a charismatic political leader, or to your favourite sports team or hobby. But Heidegger’s point is that this is an unfortunate reaction to existential concerns. You might think, well, those people aren’t bothering anybody, but Heidegger noted (and later in life he became interested in environmental problems and wrote about technology) that these kinds of people, in their desperate effort to avoid a confrontation with the reality of the human condition, they want to turn nature into, as he called it, an infinite standing reserve. I love that phrase, but I didn’t understand it until a professor at Oxford in England translated it for me when he said that most of us want nature to be like a 24-hour convenience store. And that’s simply because we are not, psychologically speaking, able in that state to accept the reality of the human condition, which is that we’re finite and fallible.
And it’s not only environmental perturbations. Heidegger didn’t write about this, but his student Hannah Arendt wrote about how these kind of people gave us Hitler. And that also applies to Donald Trump, who I believe is the most dangerous person on the planet for the same reason that Hitler posed a challenge. The point is that the flight from death yields culturally constructed meat puppets tranquillised by the trivial, and I would submit that a lot of the difficulties that we now have are the result of malignant manifestations of this kind of repressed death anxiety.
But the good news is… because let’s focus on the alternative, and this gets back to Nietzsche’s point when he said, you know, that sometimes we have to be reduced to psychic rubble in order for there to be a productive transformation. More than a century ago, Nietzsche announced that God is dead. He wasn’t being cynical; he just said that the Judeo-Christian worldview that had sustained people in a relatively unified fashion for thousands of years was no longer compelling or convincing to enough people to serve as a durable means to acquire a sense of meaning and value. And as he then said, if you’ll pardon my profanity, the shit’s gonna hit the fan. It’s gonna take centuries for things to sort themselves out. And in the meanwhile, it’s going to get rather agitated, which is, of course, exactly what we’re finding.
The flight from death yields culturally constructed meat puppets tranquillised by the trivial, and I would submit that a lot of the difficulties that we now have are the result of malignant manifestations of this kind of repressed death anxiety.
So back to Heidegger and the good news. He said, OK, we’ve become more or less aware of the inevitability of our death, but instead of fleeing from that (here Heidegger was again relying on Kierkegaard), he said that anxiety has this dual function wherein we’re repelled by it, but it actually serves as a calling. And I like Heidegger’s use of language – he said that anxiety sometimes summons us to find our real selves. You don’t need to be aware that this is happening, but it can happen quite suddenly. Or it can take a while. Heidegger called it a moment of vision (Augenblick, literally a “glance of the eye” – Ed.). He just said, OK, I realised by virtue of angst that my culturally constructed belief system is, in a sense, a lie. It’s a necessary lie, as Ernest Becker put it, but it’s a human construct rather than an absolute representation of reality. So, what Heidegger psychodynamically proposed is that anxiety literally sandblasts away our cultural conception of the world and our identity in the context of that conception. Leaving us momentarily void of a way of acquiring meaning and value. At such a moment we’re no one and no place doing nothing.
Well, you can tumble into the existential abyss. But you can also respond to this situation by coming to terms with death not as something that will happen at some vaguely unspecified future moment, but instead you accept the reality that, for example, a comet could come through the window in five seconds and completely smoke you. Or you could walk outside and get hit by a car, or be killed by a pandemic. In other words, I accept that my own death is always imminent. And I accept what’s called existential guilt – the idea that I have to make choices despite the fact that some of them are limited by virtue of the reality that I got put in this world in a time and a place not of my own choosing.
I was born in New York as a male 70 or so years ago. But I could have been born, for example, as a goat herder in Mongolia, or in the third century, or as a goat. So, I realise that in many senses I’m an arbitrary cultural and historical artefact and that some of my choices are limited by those confines. But I accept that I still have to choose, or suffer, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke called it, “the guilt of unlived life”. I love that phrase.
So Heidegger says, if you can come to terms with death, accept your existential guilt, then even if it’s not obvious – and here he goes very Buddhist, because the Buddha said that “enlightenment is quite ordinary” – Heidegger says, well, you’re going to come back into the world and it may not look or feel that much different. But he argues that you’ve been radically transformed and that this will be reflected in your relations with other people and other things. He calls it “anticipatory resoluteness”. And I love that. “Anticipatory” is like you’re looking forward, and that’s good. And being “resolute” means to be admirably determined. So Heidegger is like, well, when that happens, life phenomenologically feels like an ongoing adventure perfused with “unshakable joy”.
Heidegger was not naive. He didn’t say that this eliminates anxiety or suffering. In fact, quite the contrary, in order to be completely open to experience, you’re going to have to accept that the emotional weather vane goes radically in lots of different directions.
Now, finally, back to your great question about whether Covid could be a messenger for good. My cautiously optimistic response is yes. Although on my side of the planet, many Americans have become more like Nazis in response to the pandemic, and that’s very scary. But there’s another pile of humans in America and in other places who have become much more ecumenical and much broader in their thinking.
The United States, which was founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves, is a structurally racist and fundamentally white country. It took the murder of George Floyd – the man who died when a police officer kneeled on his neck for eight minutes – well, that really did something. But I don’t think it would have if we hadn’t been in the middle of a pandemic. Without the pandemic, I think it would have been like, well, that was bad… and then three days later it would have been on to the next murder of an unarmed person of colour by law enforcement personnel. Perhaps the pandemic will be the impetus for addressing these long-standing racial issues in our country.
It took the murder of George Floyd – the man who died when a police officer kneeled on his neck for eight minutes – well, that really did something. But I don’t think it would have if we hadn’t been in the middle of a pandemic.
Moreover, the United States is the only technologically able country in the world that doesn’t have universal health care. And yet, maybe we’re about to be leaning in that direction, because enough people are beginning to be concerned about others besides themselves. And now if we can just keep extending that…
You know, in the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr. stated that we’re all connected, the world is small, we’re all part of this “single garment of destiny”. And part of what I hope might happen is for that notion to be taken seriously.
None of the major problems that humanity must presently confront: the coming environmental apocalypse, political and economic instability, future pandemics-- can be effectively addressed without really close cooperation between all the nation states. This is in no way to propose that all of the countries on Earth have to dispense with their customs and traditions in order to become American. Too many are doing so already, but that’s quite the opposite of what we need. We need every culture to, on the one hand, remain as they are – proud of their traditions that have emerged over, in many cases, thousands of years of existence in a particular geographical location. We need that wisdom. What I’m proposing is a collaboration of individuals and the cultures that they represent. And in no way do I mean a conglomeration or homogenisation – that would be just as bad as if we all just stuck to our own devices.
In the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr. stated that we’re all connected, the world is small, we’re all part of this “single garment of destiny”. And part of what I hope might happen is for that notion to be taken seriously.
What is the role of the education system in regard to how we deal with the terror of death? In a way, doesn’t the current Western education system contribute to our fear of death? We’re used to putting death aside; we don’t talk about it in schools.
Yes, I agree entirely. In large part, Western culture is fundamentally death-denying. It’s taboo to openly talk about death with children. A lot of folks in North America have never seen a dead person. When you get old, you have to move to Florida, so we don’t have to look at you. We spend more money on cosmetics to look young than we do on social welfare programmes. And it’s also reflected in the way we educate children.
In large part, Western culture is fundamentally death-denying. It’s taboo to openly talk about death with children.
One of the things we wrote about in our book comes from a British child psychologist, Sylvia Anthony, who did a lot of work in the 1950s and 60s in which she interviewed children and their parents. What she found is that if you ask parents whether their children are concerned about death, when the kids are pretty young – let’s say ages two to eight – most of them say no, my kids are more concerned about their spelling test at school. But if you ask the children, they’re like, “I don’t care how I did on a stupid task.” They’re aware of and concerned about existential issues long before we as parents realise.
I do agree with you that education is a crucial issue to any wholesale alteration in psychic and cultural conditions that are conducive to self-improvement and social progress. Where I’m less able to weigh in, not being a clinician, is speaking confidently about how this can all be done. I’m pretty sure you can’t go into a class of five-year-olds and just say, “You’re gonna die, get over it.” But there must be ways to do it, and this is where the talented clinicians and educators come in. In any case, I do think more needs to be done along these lines.
I teach at the university level, at Skidmore College. The students there are 17, 18, 19 years old, and I see that they’re so traumatised by social isolation related to the pandemic. And yes, when I tie that to death anxiety, some of them had their eyes opened, as if this was a shocking mystery that they’d never thought about. But I don’t mean that as a pejorative indictment of the youth. Some of them later wrote to me and said they were really glad that I connected the pandemic and being alone all the time with this idea of being dead; it made them feel more comfortable to realise that lurking behind what appeared to be concrete concerns are these really huge existential concerns that all of us share.
This morning, when thinking about our conversation, I discussed the role of death in art with one of my artist friends. If we look back at art history, death is consciously or unconsciously always present in art. Could we say that artists are kind of like mediators who, through their work, remind us about death and provoke us to think about it? Maybe this is one of the reasons why art is so powerful?
I would agree with that completely. You know, art came long before talking. I think it was in the 1940s that Henry Miller, an American novelist I’m fond of, said, “Art is a stepping stone to reality”. He was like, look at history, and anytime there’s a good idea, artists had it first and then maybe a philosopher stumbled on it. And then, a couple thousand years later a psychologist thinks of it. And because they’re ignorant of anything that happened before the turn of the century, they consider the idea original.
Be that as it may, it’s not only that art is at the vanguard; it’s always been about the concrete manifestations of the ultimate human concerns. I like Susanne Katherina Langer, an American philosopher who described the objectification of subjectivity. She said that, basically, as an artist, you have feelings, and that those feelings are everything that you are capable of apprehending whether you’re conscious of it or not. So, her view of feeling is quite expansive. And she’s quick to point out that art is not like having a tantrum; if it was, then a baby would be an artist. Instead, it’s the sublime capacity to express a feeling in a particular medium, and when another person partakes of it, it’s potentially evocative of that feeling, but it’s also a way for the artist to learn about herself.
One of the things I like about Freud’s ideas about art is that art is a projection. It’s an external projection of an internal state of which the artist is as unaware as are the people who appreciate it. And it’s through art that we’re able to render our ultimate concerns in a tangible form that, as Langer puts it, is just way beyond the scope of what can be accomplished in discursive language. That is to say, although she was a philosopher and loved words, even at their best, words can only capture a subset of the totality of human experiences. It’s art that gets us beyond that.
One of the things I like about Freud’s ideas about art is that art is a projection. It’s an external projection of an internal state of which the artist is as unaware as are the people who appreciate it.
The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, for his part, said “I think we fly to Beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature”. Otto Rank, who was one of Freud’s disciples, wrote a book called Art and Artist and framed the artistic enterprise, broadly defined, as having a lot to do with an urge to immortalise ourselves and our work. Rank’s point – and I don’t think he was being cynical – was that some people manage death and anxiety by becoming Nazis. Other people manage death and anxiety by following other forms of culturally constructed meat puppethood. Others become artists.
Ernest Becker said most people spend their lives drinking and shopping, which is the same thing. Other people manage death anxiety by engaging in what I call morbid dependency, when you rely on your significant other to satisfy all of your existential needs, and that’s doomed to fail. So for Rank, art at its best is the ultimate way to manage existential concerns. That’s better for everybody, because his argument is that, as you know, artists aren’t lacking in self-confidence, and there’s always a tendency to become narcissistically self-absorbed with regard to your art. But I have not run into any artist who doesn’t also have at least a whiff of a social conscience.
When you make art, I believe that the hope is that folks will appreciate it in a way that then inspires and impels them to become, in Heidegger’s terms, more of one’s own self. At the risk of again sounding somewhat naive, art is an absolutely essential element of the human experience. And when we in the United States try to marginalise it, whenever we don’t have enough money, the first thing we do in education is we cut art and we cut physical education, which in the United States is often done outside. So we basically lobotomise and psychically amputate our children by divesting them early on of art, music and nature; we’re more devoted to ensuring that they become rather docile and passive meat puppets, or in other words, blind. It may sound like Karl Marx for a bit, but that’s the only way to sustain a market economy. You know, Marx was a crappy economist, but he was a great psychologist; he understood that capitalism requires increasing consumption. For that to happen, you need people to buy stuff that they don’t need or want. You have to convince them that they’re inferior forms of life without that stuff. And that creates an unfortunate dialectic.
Marx was a crappy economist, but he was a great psychologist; he understood that capitalism requires increasing consumption. For that to happen, you need people to buy stuff that they don’t need or want.
Socrates defined the task of philosophy as “learning to die”. Many shamanic traditions and also Eastern philosophies speak about the necessity to die consciously – in other words, taking your consciousness with you in your next journey. Is this the highest art, the highest task of life? At the beginning of your book you quote Ernest Becker, who, while lying in the hospital a few days before his death, said: “This is a test of everything I’ve written about death. And I’ve got a chance to show how one dies, […] how one accepts his death.” Do you agree with him?
Perhaps not surprisingly, having worked in this tradition for a large chunk of my life, yes, I do agree. In one of his notebooks, Albert Camus scribbled: “Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.” As you mentioned, and I do think this is important, there’s been this idea for thousands of years across cultures, in religion, in philosophy, in art, that getting the most out of life requires a really explicit acceptance of the fact that our lives will inevitably end. Yeah, I do find that compelling, and I do see a lot of our difficulties, both personal and interpersonal, as the result of our wholesale inability and disinclination to do that. It’s kind of corny, but Abraham Lincoln – one of my favourite presidents, the only Republican I’ve ever voted for – said, “It’s not the years in your life that count; it’s the life in your years.”
I do think that one of the things a capital-based society has done to us is it has deformed us from creatures who used to measure ourselves by what we do to creatures who now measure ourselves solely by what we have. It’s an unfortunate reconfiguration of priorities.
But to get back to some of the good things that might happen because of the pandemic, well, one good thing I see among young adults in the United States is that they’re much less concerned with their jobs and careers than they’ve been taught that they’re supposed to be. So, in our world it’s like, if you live in New York and you get out of college and there’s a job in Oklahoma, you should take the job, because your job is to keep progressing on this inexorable road to economic prosperity. But today’s youth are saying, “Fuck that.” They’re like, “No, I live here, this is my community. And you know what? Yeah, I graduated from the university, I studied philosophy, but I work in a tavern and I’m brewing beer, and I can become an excellent craftsman.” Or perhaps they’re more concerned about becoming an accomplished musician than about how many dollars are in their retirement account.
I do think that one of the things a capital-based society has done to us is it has deformed us from creatures who used to measure ourselves by what we do to creatures who now measure ourselves solely by what we have. It’s an unfortunate reconfiguration of priorities.
Of course, if you like staying alive, you need to eat and that requires money. But there’s a big literature in psychology that suggests that if you have enough to eat and a place to live, more stuff won’t make you happier. But more experiences – that does make you happier.
When I was a kid, we were taught that the best things in life are for free. And again, while that’s obviously true, we’ve forgotten it. Or at least a lot of us have. You know, I’m a professor and I’m supposed to think thoughts and write books. And I measure myself in terms of how successful I am in that regard, and I’m very proud of the work I do. But I need to constantly remind myself that that’s not intrinsically more important than anything else.
There’s a big literature in psychology that suggests that if you have enough to eat and a place to live, more stuff won’t make you happier. But more experiences – that does make you happier.
We had neighbours who were elderly folks, and I would go shovel the snow off their driveway. But I sometimes had to remind myself that, no, helping them is more important than whether I write an article today. Or when it’s a beautiful day and I take my dog for a walk in the woods, every once in a while I’ll be like, geez, I gotta finish this really fast so I can go back and write another paragraph. But then I’m like, no, wait a minute, you moron, when you’re five minutes away from the end of your life, are you going to wish that you were able to have another hour in your office? Or do you wish that you could walk around the block again with your dog? And I sincerely hope I’ll go for the dog rather than the paragraph.
Recently I had a conversation with Colombian-born anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, and he said that what we need today is to go back to this direct contact with everything. We have to rescue animism. Otherwise we’ve got a very serious problem.
Yes, I agree completely.
But do you think it’s still possible, or are we already too far from it? On the one hand, the pandemic has supposedly made us feel closer to nature, but on the other hand, how genuine are these feelings? Are we truly starting to feel this connection?
I think it’s the same psychological fork in the road I referred to earlier. I do believe that for some folks this is going to be a very refreshing reminder of that which is most important in life. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you’ve been able to sleep in a house, and you’ve had breakfast, and you get a face full of fresh air on a nice day… My hope is that this will become increasingly uplifting and inspiring for more and more people. On the other hand – referring to Marshall McLuhan back in the last century, who talked about how shifting technology alters psychodynamic conditions – my fear is that there’s another real danger, and that is that more and more people will get to the point where nothing in their lives counts unless it’s mediated by a screen.
When I was in Italy a year ago, or whenever before the pandemic, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I’ve always been mortified when I see people, tourists, walking around but not looking at anything; instead, they’re looking at their phones to look at things. So many people in the United States now have something like a broomstick to which they attach their phones so that they can take pictures of themselves as they look. And then nothing counts until it’s on your Instagram or whatever they use these days. I find that alarming when you’re more concerned about your Facebook friends than your real friends. And when you can’t put your phone down when you’re in the Sistine Chapel to partake of it directly. Or when you’re not satisfied with an experience until someone else “likes” it on Facebook. That’s going in the other direction, and I would argue that it’s a death anxiety-fuelled flight from death and nature.
My fear is that there’s another real danger, and that is that more and more people will get to the point where nothing in their lives counts unless it’s mediated by a screen.
You mentioned screens. Interestingly, if you look at the GoogLeNet-produced version of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, it looks like an image from a psychedelic trip. It seems that artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of mimicking the brain closely enough. But I like what you said in an interview with Lex Fridman, that the challenge with AI would be to programme a fear of death into it… Could you elaborate on this a little bit?
I’ve been involved with a project that’s still in the works, but some very talented writers have been working on it. They’re interested in ethics and what kind of ethical system might be best for humankind. They’re exploring that notion in a science-fiction setting, set about thirty years in the future, in which artificial intelligence is way beyond where we are now – ambulatory embodied artificial entities that are exponentially smarter than human beings. When I was approached by the folks doing this project, they were concerned about two questions. First, is it necessary for an artificial intelligence to be embodied in order for it to be ethical? And second, is it also necessary for an artificial entity to be embodied and finite, and where is its finitude? I found these to be very fascinating and interrelated questions.
The ethical system that the people working on this project want to promote is inspired by the Italian philosopher Sylvia Benso, who lives and works in the United States. She wrote a book called The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics, which is based on a juxtaposition of Heidegger and the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It’s a very radical position, because basically what Benso says is, look, Heidegger has the highest regard for things, but he’s not really all that relational; Heidegger has things but no love. Levinas, on the other hand, has plenty of love, but he doesn’t have a high regard for things. What Benso wants us to do is to take Levinas’ relational demands about creating an ethical space where we encounter the other, and she wants us to extend that not only to all living things but to all things, and she calls this tenderness. And again, she’s not a fool; she’s not saying that your daughter deserves the same amount of attention as a mosquito, or a pebble or a pencil. But what she is saying – and I believe this to be quite compelling – is let’s think about what a world would be like if we were to extend Levinas’ ethical system beyond the scope of human relations. And let’s see how far we can go and what this would look like.
I, at least, find this to be a very interesting and potentially productive line of inquiry.
Returning to the mystery of death. There’s the notion that DMT levels in the brain increase during the dying process. Rick Strassman wrote about this already in 1991. A recent study by the University of Michigan (2019) measured a 600% increase in DMT levels within thirty minutes following cardiac arrest. Is there a biochemical correlation to the so-called near-death experience, and if yes, will we ever be able to understand the mystery of death at a scientific level? And do we need to?
Again, to be silly, I’ll let you know (laughs)! But I’m familiar with that work, and I believe it to be coherent and intriguing. There’s just too much clinical evidence from near-death experiences suggesting some kind of psychodynamic ramp up on the threshold of death that has an integrative and synthetic and celebratory component that reminds me very much of my use of hallucinogens in the Woodstock days.
Speaking of hallucinogens, there are unending discussions about the realms we’re transported to and the entities we meet. Are they real or not? Does it really matter if the realms we’re transported to during the ayahuasca, LSD or other drug experiences are real or fictional? Does it change the footprint of the experience for us, or the effect of it? Why are we so obsessed with this notion of the one, legitimate “reality”?
Again, it’s an artefact of the Western tradition. Although, in his book The Denial of Death, when Ernest Becker describes Kierkegaard’s account of how one becomes an authentic individual, he just says, well, you’ll know if you’ve truly come to terms with your mortality, because you’ll be humble and you’ll be open to a multi-dimensional reality. So basically, in the West, without just saying we’re going to go back to the so-called good old days, we should notice that there are thousands of years of religious traditions in a variety of cultures in which these very potent psychoactive substances have been deployed with demonstrably positive outcomes. In fact, there’s great clinical work going on now in the United States in which psilocybin has been producing dramatic effects on anxiety and depression in terminally ill people. But we knew this already from the 1950s, from the books of Stanislav Grof on the realms of the unconscious and his psycholytic LSD therapy, and it was very clear that it can be very potent. But once again, it goes in both directions. Grof was adamant that hallucinogens don’t change your life; they amplify it. So if you’re on the cusp of an existential abyss, then a hallucinogen can nudge you into it. If you’re on the cusp of constructive transformation, then the hallucinogenic experience could nudge you in that direction. I do believe that this is important, and I think those substances can be very useful.
There’s great clinical work going on now in the United States in which psilocybin has been producing dramatic effects on anxiety and depression in terminally ill people.
Aldous Huxley wrote the book The Doors of Perception in the 1950s, and in the 1960s he was saying that some day kids would be taking hallucinogens in grade school. And maybe that’s true, and when it happens, they’ll probably also be talking more freely about death. Again, I’m not advocating for anything so much as realising that we may have lots of tools at our disposal to foster the experience of a variety of different ways of viewing the world. I do like the point you made earlier about just being receptive to the possibility that things are not the way they appear to be.
Aldous Huxley wrote the book The Doors of Perception in the 1950s, and in the 1960s he was saying that some day kids would be taking hallucinogens in grade school. And maybe that’s true, and when it happens, they’ll probably also be talking more freely about death.
Many trials are going on in different parts of the world, but in the meantime, how open are current psychotherapy circles to the integration of psychedelic therapy in their practice? As far as I know, at least here in Latvia, not everyone in traditional psychotherapy circles is open to it. There’s still quite a bit of resistance.
Well, what I tell my therapist colleagues is fine, keep talking… but ten years from now in therapy there’ll be talking – which is necessary and important – but there’ll also be singing and dancing, and hallucinogens and meditation and yoga. Because I do think that the road to psychological and social well-being really requires a radical expansion of what we view to be therapeutic and how we go about engaging people in the context of a therapeutic relationship.
What I tell my therapist colleagues is fine, keep talking… but ten years from now in therapy there’ll be talking – which is necessary and important – but there’ll also be singing and dancing, and hallucinogens and meditation and yoga.
Another thing that the pandemic and its consequences have definitely stimulated is that many people are turning to spirituality, and using a variety of instruments to do so: meditation, various mindfulness practices, yoga, etc.
Yes, as long as it doesn’t just become another disembodied distraction. Because, you know, psychobabble uses the terms “embodied wisdom” or “embodied cognition”. But it’s also true that we’ve all been the victims of the Cartesian tradition that looks at the separation of the body and the soul, which is an artefact of yesteryear and a reflection of death denial. So if we start by accepting the fact that we’re ensconced in a physical carcass and inextricably connected to it, then yes, I think meditation and related practices provide a substrate to enhance the range of concerns that are appropriately viewed as therapy.
Over the past forty years that you’ve spent studying how death anxiety influences our attitudes and behaviour and how one lives well with death, have you also found your own way of dealing with these existential questions in your own life? Because devoting four decades to things like this is quite exceptional.
Perhaps at the risk of, again, sounding a little silly, I’ve been doing this work with my colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski since we went to graduate school together. And over the years, what we’ve noted is that we’re proud of this work and we think of it as a contribution to science that, hopefully, will be viewed as something substantial and significant. Of course, that’s not for us to judge. But what I do know, for better or worse, is that this activity has been our way of denying death. Like, here we are for the past forty years doing experiments and writing these studies, and I talk about these things and I’m poignantly and painfully aware that in so doing I’ve converted my existential anxieties into an intellectual exercise (laughs). By doing this work, I’ve dodged my own more direct confrontations with the inevitability of my demise.
Right now, to offset that – what I’d like to think I’ve done, and I don’t know if I’ve been all that successfully – I just try as often as I can to step back and ask myself why am I doing what I’m doing? Am I a culturally constructed meat puppet, unbeknownst to myself? Am I writing a book because I want somebody to read it and maybe profit from it? Or do I want to sell a lot of books and make a lot of money and have people say, oh, this is an important book? And then I’m like, well, what’s important to me?
We have two children, and they’re in their early thirties. I remember myself thirty-something years ago, and I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, kids would be fine. But I’m fine with dogs.” And my wife said, “Okay, well, I’d like to have some.” I found having kids to be a remarkable opportunity to engage in an ongoing struggle with my existential anxieties in a way that might end better for everybody if maybe the concern for being a good parent was more important than being a famous psychologist.
I like music a lot, but I’m terrible at it. For forty years I’ve been playing the same three chords on the guitar very badly, and sometimes I thought, wow, this is terrifying, how could I possibly be so devoid of talent? But then I thought, well, yeah, but what does it matter? Why do I have to be the best at everything? Isn’t it sufficient to just enjoy something?
Now I’m on the cusp of senility, and I’m delighted to find that I’m less concerned about seeing my name in print than the possibility that the fruit trees we planted in our backyard may produce fruit for the next people who live there because the trees most likely won’t produce much while we are here.
So, to answer your question, I guess what I’ve tried to do is to diversify the range of activities that I derive a sense of meaning and value from and to not deny that, like all humans, I have an ego and wouldn’t mind being prosperous. But to get back to how you put it, life is complicated, reality has more than one dimension, and I should always be cautious that I haven’t fallen into the trap of mistaking my way for the only way and admit that things I might have been doing for particular reasons may turn out to not be the case. And I know that was long and convoluted, but that’s been my hope.
I found having kids to be a remarkable opportunity to engage in an ongoing struggle with my existential anxieties in a way that might end better for everybody if maybe the concern for being a good parent was more important than being a famous psychologist.
Do you think we humans will ever be able to understand what consciousness is? Do we need to understand it?
I don’t know. That’s another Nobel Prize-winning question. Steven Pinker at Harvard, who writes about these matters, has said that the question of consciousness is probably the most important question in psychological discourse. Why not broaden that to human discourse? As an abstraction, we’ll never completely understand.
Julian Jaynes, an American researcher in psychology who wrote a book titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in the 1970s, said that, like it or not, you can never be conscious of that which you’re not conscious of. And, therefore, consciousness is always underdetermined.
William James, who talked about consciousness in his first book, The Principles of Psychology in the 1890s, said the same thing, that consciousness is intentional, that you can only be conscious of something. And by definition, that means that, whatever you’re conscious of, the rest of the cosmos is there but you’re oblivious to it. Consequently, there’ll always be places where consciousness could head where it’s never been before. And this is a good thing.
Henry Miller talked about consciousness as the open stretch of realisation, and this should be grounds for great joy. No matter how much we learn about ourselves and the world around us, there’s always more to be determined, more to be pondered. And we should see that as inspiration rather than as a daunting challenge.
Is there another book you’d like to write, or perhaps one that you’ve already begun writing?
I’d like to write another book if I could do so without keeling over. I want to write a book called
Why Left and Right Are Both Beside the Point. I want to write about why in politics right now both liberal and conservative political philosophy are intellectually and morally bankrupt, because they’re both based on assumptions about human nature that are known to be factually incorrect. And, ironically, both the left and the right misunderstand human nature, because they’re borrowing ideas from John Locke (the English philosopher and physician [1632–1704] commonly known as “the father of liberalism” – Ed.) that are just wrong.
Locke was writing in the 1600s and had this idea of the “blank slate”; and liberals, whether they’re aware of it or not, as well as Marxists, are blank-slate people. They’re like, if you change the environmental conditions, you’ll change humans. Well, we’re not blank slates. There are genetically acquired attributes that incline us to behave in certain ways that render environmental alterations immune to being effective in the ways that we would like them to be.
On the other hand, conservative political philosophy is based on Locke’s ideas about how, in a state of nature, there are no societies, just autonomous individuals pursuing their own interests. I’ll spare you the details, but that’s also one of the stupidest ideas in the history of social science… with all due respect to Locke, who was a giant and worked really hard to come up with a political philosophy that would justify giving us rights as individuals. But by starting with the assumption that we are by nature solitary individuals who only reluctantly join society in order to avoid a state of war, he used that to justify neoclassical economics in which everyone is not only entitled to but ought to be selfishly acquiring everything we can and that we’re all better off because of that. That’s also an idea for which there is absolutely no evidence.
My point would be that here we are right now, arguing about the left and the right. And my silly example is that it’s like people in America who drink light beer arguing about whether it tastes great or is less filling (in reference to a famous American advertising campaign for light beer – Ed.). Because it’s neither – light beer tastes like shit, and if you drink enough of it, you’ll gain a lot of weight. And so I feel like we’re having these vigorous debates right now between two monstrously deficient perspectives, and we’re all the worse off for it.
I’m working with some talented folks I met in a summer programme at Oxford; we’re going to try and write a book describing what kind of political structure might be the best for individuals and for societies based on a more contemporary understanding of human nature.
So I’m working with some talented folks I met in a summer programme at Oxford; we’re going to try and write a book describing what kind of political structure might be the best for individuals and for societies based on a more contemporary understanding of human nature. Because what we now know is that humans are uber-social, uber-cooperative, hyper-empathetic, hyper-sympathetic and hyper-concerned about just and equal outcomes, at least with regard to the folks we consider to be members of our tribe. And our point, therefore – and this is just common sense masquerading as psychology – is that the future of humanity will come down to the extent to which we are able to recognise that we’re all one big human family. And that has the virtue of being true, because all humans originated from one tiny band of creatures in a single neighbourhood in southeast Africa. We’re a genetically homogeneous species. Any two humans on Earth are more closely related than two monkeys sitting next to each other in Africa.
And so this is where science and Woodstock and religion come together. We’re all God’s children. The golden rule is to treat others as you would want them to treat you. So, I guess my point is that the next leap will evolve us into a different kind of human, one who is capable of overcoming our tribal affiliations and accepting the commonality of all human beings. But to get back to a point that I made earlier, this might not require that we relinquish our cultural, historical, religious, philosophical and artistic proclivities.
We’re a genetically homogeneous species. Any two humans on Earth are more closely related than two monkeys sitting next to each other in Africa.
And the last question: what would you answer to people who ask why we should not be afraid of death?
Well, I think we should be afraid. You know, the person who’s not afraid of death is likely already dead. If you can imagine an entity that’s devoid of anxiety, they’re at the bottom of the gene pool. My humorous example is that you’re like a baby whose parents are out having a drink and dinner, and they forget about you, but you’re hungry. If you have no anxiety, you’ll expire. On the other hand, if you scream and are extraordinarily anxious, they may hear you and attend to you. So some death anxiety is useful for staying alive. But to be riddled with death anxiety is equally problematic. I think the trick is to have sufficient apprehension, to be aware of the vagaries of one’s surroundings in the service of staying alive.
On the other hand, though – and I’m not saying I’m there yet – but this gets back to the lifelong challenge of accepting the reality not only of the human condition but of nature itself, which is that we have been given the gift of life. And, like every other thing that has ever existed, it is a finite life. So on what grounds do you have the appalling arrogance to insist that your fate is in any way different from that of any of the countless entities that have been similarly privileged with the gift of life?
I like the way the ancients put it. I can’t remember if it was Epicurus or Lucretius, but I love that the Epicureans were like, you know, no one’s worried about all of the millions of years that existed before you were born. So why are you so concerned about the millions of years after you’re dead? But I get it – that’s not of any comfort to most people, myself included.
I think it was Lucretius who recommended thinking of life as a giant and delicious meal. But if you just sat at the table and kept stuffing yourself like a glutton, well, that wouldn’t be satisfactory. Because usually a great meal isn’t great unless there comes a point where it ends. A point where you’re like, that was wonderful. Or what about a great movie? It’s only great when it gets to the end. And that’s Heidegger’s point, too, that your life isn’t complete until it’s over. It needs to be over in order for it to cohere, despite the fact that you won’t be there to appreciate that. I think that that’s the task each of us is confronted with.
And that’s Heidegger’s point, too, that your life isn’t complete until it’s over. It needs to be over in order for it to cohere, despite the fact that you won’t be there to appreciate that. I think that that’s the task each of us is confronted with.
I like Heidegger’s point – at least it jives well with my own subjective experience – that there are moments when I’m at my best existentially and I’m looking forward resolutely and life appears to be a journey with unshakable joy. And my gut tells me that when that happens, that’s when I’m most likely to be able to accept the fact that life will go on without me.
Thank you. I think that’s a great ending for our conversation.
