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Freeze the Body, Force the Mind: the Ritualization of Thanatophobia in Everyday Life
I stand, you sit. I speak, you listen. I could also sing. In fact, my seventh-grade daughter, Kaiyuh, sings in her school choir. My wife and I attended a choir concert in which 6th, 7th and 8th grade vocalists and musicians performed on stage for about two hours. We sat in the audience and listened. The vocalists stood, like I am now, and performed. Part of their performance required using their voices in unusual ways. They had to exert physical force to hit high and low notes out of the range of ordinary speech. They also had to exert mental force to remember timing and pitch through several different songs. As I watched my daughter and her classmates perform, I also noticed that the back of the stage was walled in by acoustical panels that bent toward the audience at the top. The entire setting was focused on human activity. There was no room and no call for any other species or its activities to be present. The entire event was anthropocentric.
Having noted the anthropocentrism, I then began to look more closely at the bodies. They all dressed in the same way. They wore white shirts or blouses, black pants or skirts and black shoes. The girls had little make-up and their hair was pulled back and tied tightly in buns or ponytails behind their heads. Their dress clearly signaled that the attention of the viewers and the performers should not be on bodies but on sounds, words and their meanings. The singers were physically standardized units of vocal production. The vocalists all stood in approximately the same way. Their bodies were straight, their shoulders were down and slightly forward and their heads were slightly down and forward. This physical position maximized the openness of the chest to the strenuous inhalations and exhalations of breath necessary to sing loudly and clearly. Indeed, apart from chests and jaws, the bodies were quite still, almost frozen in place. There was no foot tapping, no swinging or swaying, and no dancing. The bodies were frozen and the voices were forced.
Images of black church choirs appeared brightly before my mind’s eye. I saw in the church choirs how the bodies swayed and stamped the rhythms as the voices rose higher and stronger to Jesus and God. But in the church there were also those who sat and listened and those who stood and performed. Where, I asked myself, had this come from—this gesture that simultaneously freezes and forces? How have we come to freeze the body and force the mind?
An illustrative answer to this question appears in the history of Western music from the Gregorian chant to the symphony orchestra and the rock concert. Why did Western music begin in such a quiet mode and develop into such loudness? Of course we can thank the technology of sound amplification for some of the change. Gregorian chanters did not have Dolby or Bose. They did not have electricity to power microphones, speakers and amplifiers. But the difference in volume seems to signify more than the presence or absence of technological assistance. It also signifies the presence and absence of God.
During the Middle Ages, religion centered around two physical structures—the church or cathedral and the monastery. Both buildings were places in which people could communicate with God. God was not far away and could be reached by whispered prayer, prayers spoken in ordinary volume and by the subdued chants of singers. As European humanity opened its mind and loosened its tongue, God began to move farther away. By the 17th century, after the revolutionary work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, God was a decreasing necessity in the physical universe. He had become added value because he had moved further away from human reach. In 1687, Newton’s Principia showed that the human mind can decode the structure of nature into manipulable symbols that allow precise prediction of physical events. As the human mind ascended, God’s mind retreated. It seems natural and logical to follow this trend through the development of physical science and empirical philosophy until, in the 18th century, musicians felt compelled to cry out to God with the loud voices of symphonic music.
By our own time, we hear many different kinds of extremely loud music. Why must it be so loud? Because the ear of the signified is so far away. As the Baroque composers cried out to a distant and receding God, so do the popular singers cry out to a distant love. What really is the difference in acoustical structure between the lyrics—Love me, Jesus, love me, and Love me, honey, love me? The distance between the one who wants love and the one who can give love is so great that tremendous volume is necessary to cross the space between them.
Crying out for the love of God in Christianity, however, has more serious implications than the wailings of pop stars. The religious person in search of their God seeks not only love but also the ultimate assurance that he or she will survive death and enjoy eternal life as an immaterial soul. This search for assurance is a search for divine insurance against the uncertainty of human life. The religious person seeks certainty about the meaningfulness of birth and the survival of individuality after death. The religious person seeks security.
The primary fear to be assuaged by religious security is the fear of death. The fear of death is fod—f-o-d. Fod sounds and is spelled like the English words “nod” and “cod.” But “fod” is spelled with an “f.” From here on, the fear of death is fod. Fod seems to be part of the body’s autonomic physiological system. It is like the body’s reaction to food poisoning. You do not have to tell your body to vomit. Throwing up bad food is not the result of a conscious calculation. It is a physiological reaction to something that threatens the body. Fod is also like the reaction of the immune system to the presence of pathogens. You do not have to tell the specialized cells to form and attack the intruder. They form and attack as a reaction of the system in defense of its own life. In this sense, fod is natural, normal, raw and elemental. It signifies the desire of life to maintain itself indefinitely.
But indefinitely is not eternally. The idea that a living thing can transcend, in whole or in part, the mortal boundaries of its livingness to persist in some different state forever is an addition. This addition reflects an idea of surplus that overcomes, in its eternal form, all kinds of natural lack or deficiency. This addition also provides the transcendent justification for the myriad rituals of everyday life in and by which we dampen fear, amplify hope and attempt to secure immortal existence or eternal life. Religion, however, has not been the only effort to provide such security.
In the history of humanity, there have been four efforts to provide humans with security about the unknown before birth and the unknown after death. These four are myth, philosophy, religion and science. When I map these four across linear time, I see a rhythm. It begins in the hunting and gathering period that preceded agriculture in human life. Agriculture brought new security and satisfaction. The displacements of nomadism and of famine were significantly decreased by the reliability of cultivated crops and domesticated animals. Then, in about 1000 BC, travel, trade and communication between different groups of people brought very different worldviews into contact and collision. Insecurity and dissatisfaction increased as traditional worldviews had to reckon with their own non-universality. Philosophy appeared, as did all of the monotheisms, during the next 1500 years, which includes the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. In this context, security about life after death increased for many people due to their adherence to monotheistic religious practices and doctrines that reestablished universality on a ground that freely mixed rationalism with mystery. That world of security, called the Dark Ages in the West, unraveled with new thinking, contact, discoveries and inventions that led to the period of insecurity in which we all now live, the modern age with its emendation in post-modernism.
A long wave of security and insecurity undulates through changes in human socioeconomic systems. These systems deploy many forces that have brought, ritualization of fod—thanatophobia—in everyday life. This oscillation begins with the development of the human species as a biological organism and ends with the end of the same species. The logic and rhythm of the wave forces are ours to deal with and to understand. However, short of a massive, dramatic change in our biological structure, we will always be somewhere in, on and within the long wave oscillation of security and insecurity.
Like looking through a hall of mirrors, we can see through four thousand years of human civilization. We can recode all of it as aimed at one thing—securing human life, existence and reproduction. All of it has aimed at one goal—understanding where we come from and where we’re going. All of it has functioned with binary logic that has ended up in the same conundrum: a unity in which there is no principle of differentiation. Binary logic, or, the logic of identity and contradiction, assumes difference for its functioning. Without difference, the logic of identity and contradiction dissolves into incoherence. The assumption of logic echoes the assumption of physics: without positive and negative charges, there would be no matter or energy. Yet, like logic, physics cannot explain the origin of charge, that is, the origin of difference in the fundamental structure of the physical universe. In fact, none of the major mental structures of the last four thousand years can explain the origin of difference. Binary logic has reached its ultimate limit in myth, philosophy, religion and science. Something new must come for human beings to move on from where we have arrived after four thousand years of trying to understand ourselves and nature with binary logic.
To approach the new, we need to be able to free ourselves from the old. Toward this end, I would like to suggest a thought experiment. It has several steps:
Empty language of traditional reference and meaning
Empty language of regional reference and meaning
Empty language of local reference and meaning
Empty language of familial reference and meaning
Humans continue to live
But language does not secure thought or perception
Humans continue to act, produce and consume
But language does not cohere relationships
Consequences:
1. Written language appears as more secure and more reliable.
2. Spoken language appears as art, entertainment and manipulation
3. Boundary problems multiply in all areas of human verbal activity
Consequences of the consequences:
1. Individuals and groups increasingly diverge from traditional norms.
2. Divergence includes attempts to regain past security as well as attempts to discover new forms of security. For example, religious traditionalism thrives alongside scientific inquiry, philosophical speculation, and artistic and social experimentation.
This thought experiment synopsizes the change in human culture from the archaic periods in Europe and Asia to the appearance of axial religions, all of which posited an invisible, scarce reality as the ultimate source of human security, safety and happiness. The traditional ability of human beings to be satisfied with life in the natural world had disappeared to such an extent that only the idea of and belief in life in an eternal, unnatural world brought satisfaction. However, polytheism was unsatisfactory because it relied too heavily on connections of deities to the natural world. What the human spirit needed was a way to disconnect entirely from the world of nature. All of the axial religions and philosophies presented ideas of scarcity that were mutually exclusive and designed to secure individuals in conditions that were independent of natural time and space. Natural and social scarcities came to signify the scarcity of human satisfaction and security. Natural and social surpluses came to signify the abundance of satisfaction and security available in the unnatural, trans-social world of theological immortality.
Consequence of the consequences of the consequences:
Capitalism, driven, underwritten and protected by monotheistic theologies and religions, is the socioeconomic consequence. It is an economy of surplus and scarcity that regards the natural world as totally useless except for its potential to be transformed into products that promote some aspect of human security, pleasure, happiness, health or well-being. Capitalism is the application of the religions of scarcity to economics. On behalf of an idea of human security divorced from the natural world, such as life in a totally mechanized space station, capitalism is destroying life and the possibility of life on earth by destroying the basic life support systems of the biosphere, such as air, land and water.
A brief history of the ego illustrates the ancient fluctuation that preceded the appearance of monotheistic capitalism. Linguists specializing in the history of ancient Greek have speculated about the origin of the first person, singular, nominative pronoun, egwge, which became the Latin, ego, which in turn has become the English, ego. One possibility is that, based on its usages in the oldest written layers of ancient Greek, this word represented a gesture. The gesture can be imagined as follows. People in a group are speaking with one another. At some point, a part of the conversation includes one person exclusive of the others; for example, one person may have caught a fish on a day when no one else did. The word, egwge, accompanied a manual gesture that pointed toward the body of that one person who had caught the fish. In context, egwge singled out one body without disengaging that body from either the past group activity or the present conversation. In the ensuing years, the ancient Western ego passed through writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Heracleitos, Empedocles and Parmenides.
By the time of Plato, the Western ego was afloat in a sea of cultural differences that continually required some kind of self-affirmation, or, egocentered assertion, in order to gain and maintain security in social interaction. As the sea of cultural fluctuations became stormier and stormier over the next few centuries, more and more people sought refuge away from not only the traditional insecurities of natural processes, such as earthquakes, floods, droughts and famines, but also the increasingly confusing and disturbing social processes of cultural mixing. The axial religions and philosophies, featuring dualisms that universally contrasted a this world condition with a that, or, otherworld, condition, appeared and have flourished to this day.
Indeed, haven’t we been here before? By “we” I mean human consciousness. By “here” I mean in this phase of world-order. By “before” I mean a passage in the linearization of human experience known as history. We have, as naturally and repeatedly as the body produces antibodies, produced our own lenses through which to diminish fod. We have alternately, rhythmically, forcefully captured our need for security in mental lenses. First came myth with polytheism; then came philosophy with sophistry and the beginnings of natural science and mathematics; after those came religion with exclusive monotheisms that preached absolute dualisms; next came science with technology. Each lens has completely satisfied some people’s longing for secure answers to the questions of the origin and end of existence and especially of human existence. But each lens has become a layer of human consciousness. Now the layer of science and technology seems to be morphing into another layer of fundamentalist religiosity.
This morphing has thrown modernism and post-modernism into strong relief in contemporary intellectual life. We may easily understand modernism and post-modernism as oscillations in the long wave of security and insecurity. The seeds of both isms were sown at the beginning of the age of European exploration, when Europeans suddenly began showing up on the shores, on the lands and in the faces of people who had not known that Europeans even existed. This was the beginning of the decrease in transitions in global human life. The rise of the middle class, who made their money from their own efforts in trade and manufacturing, and without the ceremony, the mediations or the transitions of monarchy, aristocracy, nobility or papacy, further powered the decrease in transitions. Now, in 2006, generations of human beings have been raised on the visual media of photography, cinema and television in which scene changes require that the viewers make the transitions in their own minds.
Modernism reacted to the decrease in transitions by decrying fragmentation and inventing compensatory forms, such as the novel, in which the author could create an alternate reality that was whole, complete and smooth. However, more contemporary people have tried to join and accept fragmentation rather than beat or reject it. More and more humans travel from one physical location to another in such a short time that they move from one culture, language, religion and ecosystem with only flight time as transition. More and more humans watch visual media, such as television and movies, which decrease transitions in order to increase speed of delivery and quantity of content. Post-modernism makes the absence of transitions a virtue and an aspect of art and life. Both isms, modernism and post-modernism, express human beings trying to cope with changes in the basic structures of human existence upon which security and insecurity depend. Both isms are oscillations in the long wave of security and insecurity.
Myth, philosophy, religion and science have all tried to give absolutely reliable meaning to human thought and language and, through thought and language, to human life. As the security, stability and reliability of the referents of language have varied, so has the meaningfulness of human life. The more security there has been the more meaning, the less security the less meaning and the greater search for meaning.
In this process, philosophy has made the fatal assumption that meaning is ultimately comprehensible by language. Language is a function of only part of the brain. The brain is one small organ in a much larger body. How could the expression of one part of one organ comprehend the meaning of the entire organism? Impossible. Just as only a small part of the physical universe is accessible to the brain through vision, so only a small part of the semantic universe is comprehensible to the brain through language.
Is a personal conclusion from this reflection possible? I think it is. First, I note what I do not conclude. I do not conclude, as have so many monotheistic religions, that the ultimate goal of human life should be to leave life entirely. If the experience of the void shows that god and the devil are one, that all saviors are one, that all religions mask the same reality, that all experiences, states and conditions are transient, transitory and without enduring substance or consequence, that is, to put it briefly in Buddhist terms, that nirvana and samsara are one, then what possible difference can it make whether I am alive, dead or in any other condition?
In other words—there are always other words, aren’t there? There are always other words because human beings are so diverse and the human mind is so productive. But other words are, after all, only words. So, other words are not my conclusion. No, all of the teachings of the monotheistic religions, the philosophies, the myths and the sciences are a more recent wisdom. There is an older wisdom. It is accessible through language but it is not language. It is silently signified by the entire enterprise of semiotics that endeavors to articulate the significations of our experience.
In this connection, I remember a video of a dancing African tribe. The dancing was taking place on a wide, flat, red dirt plaza in the middle of the village. The villagers, men and women, girls and boys, were dressed in bright red cloths that wrapped, turned and furled around their shining, coffee and chocolate colored bodies. Everyone danced in a huge circle. Everyone had a part in the song; some dancers played instruments that they carried; other participants stood close to the outside of the circle, playing instruments and singing and swaying their bodies. The only observer was the person taking the video. Otherwise, there were no observers. No observers! Everyone danced, sang or played an instrument. There was no stage, performance or separation of human activity from nature. The earth was beneath their feet and the sky was above their heads. There was nothing to signify a distant subject or an observed object. There was no dualism. The sounds, gestures and motions of the dance were as natural as wind in trees or water over rocks or animals running across the plains.
For the analytical subject, this dance signifies the ancient wisdom. It is the participation of the human body in a cosmos whose dimensions are continually opening and closing in, through and around us. But that which is continually opening and closing in, through and around us, continually makes a difference in how we think and feel about the world. What, then, is the nature of this difference that participation not only makes but also inscribes in every aspect of our conscious experience?
If all theology is correct, that everything began in one god that was absolutely pure, single and the same as itself…if astrophysics is correct that the entire universe began in a singularity that was pure and altogether of the same kind of energy…if Buddhism is correct that ultimately there is only the void of which nothing can be predicated…if mysticism is correct that all is one and one is all…THEN, I am still faced with the same unanswered questions. What is difference? What is the origin of difference?
I understand that the human mind can be stilled to quiescence that can be intensified through stages of samadhi to the point at which there is no experiencer, experiencing and experienced. But that is only the human mind. What about electrons and protons? Where does charge come from? Can electrons and protons be stilled to quiescence so that there is no difference in charge? If so, would not that be the end of all matter?
This reflection carries our thought to the end of the combined logic of the last four thousand years of human civilization. Each dimension of that combined logic, whether it is myth, philosophy, religion, science or mysticism, leads to the same limit. There is no way, using any branch of that logic, to account for the existence of difference. Every branch of traditional human logic leads to a unity that is prior to any difference. There is no principle of differentiation, no power of being or making difference, either inside or outside that unity. Therefore, no branch of traditional human logic can account for the existence of difference.
The entire teeter-totter of civilization balances on one axis: security and insecurity. But, this is an axis of feeling, not of need. People feel insecure even when their physical needs are satisfied. The 9/11 attack on the US made a nation of people most of whom have no problem satisfying their physical needs feel extremely insecure. Traditionally, invasion or the threat of invasion is a major source of human insecurity. Connected to this human threat is the threat that has persisted from myths of evil demons to images of hostile extraterrestrial beings or invasion from outside the human realm. This type of extra-human invasion also appears as the evil principle of many religions, such as Satan in Christianity.
The idea of Satan places human beings between the possibility of evil and eternal suffering and good and eternal bliss. This placement not only promotes insecurity, it also promotes constant dissatisfaction with oneself and others. One never knows, in the terms of monotheistic religious doctrines, how god is going to go—for the person or against them. One never knows which act, large or small, might tip the balance toward an eternity baking in hell or an eternity basking in heaven. One never outgrows or overcomes fod.
This insecurity of fod can also be seen as an engine of another characteristic of Western European, North American and increasingly global fundamentalist consciousness: speed. If the devil pursues you from behind, and the last judgment looms ahead, then one way to end the anxiety that surrounds the insecurity of not knowing future eternal fate is to speed up the process and get the apocalypse and the last judgment over and done with. The impatience with moral lapses that is historically embedded in all kinds of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and the certainty with which apocalyptic groups have regularly foretold the certain end of the world together exemplify this distortion of time around psychological conditions of insecurity that are driven by religious beliefs. The movement away from drugs like opium and peyote, which take people through long and sometimes very slow illusory passages, toward drugs like crack cocaine and methamphetamine also coincides with this attempt to compress natural time into religiously based chronology.
Question: What’s the rush?
Answer: Eternal life.
The entire project of Western intellectuality has been the attempt to tie the human mind to permanence. There are the immortal gods and goddesses who have always lived on Mt. Olympus. There is the first principle—water, air, love, flux, the one, the atom—which has always existed and from which everything has come. There is the one god, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, who is eternal and from which everything has and always will come. There are the modern philosophers, from Descartes to Kant, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Sartres and Derrida, trying to find the seat and source of certainty, and the subject that can judge truth and falsity, certainty and uncertainty, good and evil and meaningfulness and meaninglessness. Of course the philosophers do not agree. The only truth they have found is the conflict among their divergent points of view. There also is the unified field theory of the physical sciences that, including the Big Bang, explains the permanent structure of the physical universe and of all forms of matter and energy in it including human beings. The entire project of Eastern intellectuality has been similar. There are the immortal gods and goddesses; there is nirvana; there is moksha; there is satori; there is the endless and all-creative yin and yang.
Everywhere that human beings have looked up from the moment of providing food, water and shelter, there have arisen thinkers who have tried to tie the human mind to permanence. Why? To relieve insecurity. The long wave of security and insecurity is the logic and rhythm of forces. The logic and rhythm are in the forces. There is no place to stand, no place to ride, other than in and on the wave. Security signifies identity with permanence. Insecurity signifies difference from permanence. The struggle to achieve permanence is the struggle to eliminate difference. But no struggle can exist without difference; all struggle assumes, needs and requires the existence of difference. Difference persists in the struggle for permanence as well as in the search for meaning. If difference persists then is not difference the permanence we seek? If difference surrounds every dry ground of unity like oceans, lakes or rivers surround islands, then isn’t difference the permanence we seek? If so, then we may see birth as the falling away and death as the uniting, birth as the moment of difference and death as the moment of identity, life as the locus of insecurity and death as the focus of security.
In conclusion, there is no necessary conclusion to this reflection. We have not followed a deduction from premises. We have not pursued an hypothesis through experimentation. Nor have we engaged in symbolic interpretation guided by idealistic or moralistic principles. Rather, this verbal process has participated in the power of semiotics to look through, to make transparent, the everyday life of human beings. Such looking through ends only as a phase when the transparentizing attention turns elsewhere.
Freeze the body, force the mind. Freezing the body signifies fear of the body, fear that it is going to die, fear of its mortality. Forcing the mind, through voice, emotion and mental exertion, signifies the hope that a human being can leave the body, leave nature, and reach an immortal state. These fears and hopes have been thoroughly ritualized in human social practices. They represent, all together, an enormous effort to give human beings final release from thanatophobia, from fod. This effort naturally raises a certain type of question:
If death is so terrifying, why do we keep having children?
If birth is so natural and beautiful, why isn’t death also so natural and beautiful?
If birth is to be treasured and sought, why is not death to be treasured and sought?
Is there any difference in beauty between a sunrise and a sunset?
Thank you
About the Author
Filed under: Britains Deetail