THE ENGINE OF CIVILIZATION

IN the 1990s, a group of American psychologists found that briefly reminding
people of their own mortality had remarkable effects on their political and
religious views. For example, they asked a group of Christian students to give
their impressions of the personalities of two people. In all relevant respects,
these two people were very similar—except one was a fellow Christian and the
other Jewish. Under normal circumstances, participants rated them fairly
equally. But if the students were first reminded of their mortality (e.g., by being
asked to fill in a personality test that included questions about their attitude to
their own death), then they were much more positive about their fellow
Christian and more negative about the Jew.

These psychologists were testing the hypothesis that we have developed our
cultural worldviews in order to protect ourselves from the fear of death. They
reasoned that if this was true, then when reminded of their own mortality,
people would cling more fiercely to the core beliefs of their worldview and
would be more negative about those who threatened those beliefs. And this is
exactly what their experiments found.

In another study, American students were asked to assess how “likeable and
knowledgeable” they found the authors of two essays, one of which was
positive about the U.S. political system and the other critical. The students
were invariably more positive about the pro-American writer and more
negative about the critic—but this e􀀯ect was hugely exaggerated after they had
been reminded of their mortality. According to the authors of the study, this
shows that it is not only religion to which we cling all the more tightly in the
face of death—even the sense of belonging to a nation can provide us with
existential comfort.
These researchers, now professors—Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and
Tom Pyszczynski—were inspired as graduate students by reading Sigmund
Freud and an American anthropologist called Ernest Becker. They were
convinced by the idea that civilization provided psychological protection
against the fear of oblivion and have since conducted more than four hundred
experiments like those described above in order to test it. Their conclusion is
that cultural worldviews, including our religions, national myths and values,
“are humanly created beliefs about the nature of reality shared by groups of
people that serve (at least in part) to manage the terror engendered by the
uniquely human awareness of death.”

What they call Terror Management Theory of the development of human
culture now has a wide and increasing following. It concerns our response to
the realization that we must die—in our terms, the first part of the Mortality
Paradox. Its supporters believe that this realization is potentially devastating:
we must live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen to
us one day surely will. Extinction—the ultimate trauma, a personal apocalypse,
the end of our individual universe—seems inevitable. If people were fully
mindful of this inescapable catastrophe, then, according to the proponents of
Terror Management Theory, they would be “twitching blobs of biological
protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond
to the demands of their immediate surroundings.”

They therefore hypothesized that we have created cultural institutions,
philosophies and religions that protect us from this terror by denying or at least
distracting us from the finality of death—and this is just what their experiments
have borne out. These death-denying institutions and religions vary enormously
across time and space, from the polytheism of ancient Babylon to the
consumerism of the contemporary West. But they all provide some account of
why it is that we don’t really need to worry about dying, from the claim that
we are really spirits who will live on in another realm to the belief that with
enough vitamins and jogging we can outrun the Reaper.