THE TANDEM PROJECT
UNITED NATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS,
FREEDOM OF RELIGION OR BELIEF
BECKER – ESCAPE FROM EVIL
Issue: Presenting a Perspective on the Root Causes of Human
Evil Relating to Religion or Belief
For: United Nations, Governments, Religions or Beliefs,
Academia, NGOs, Media, Civil Society
Review: Ernest Becker (1924-1974) won the
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for “The Denial of Death”. In
his book, “Escape From Evil,” published
posthumously, Becker proposes that the natural and inevitable urge to deny
mortality and achieve a heroic self-image is the root causes of human
evil. Becker was a teacher of anthropology, sociology and contemporary
psychological thought at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. The
Tandem Project presents multi-disciplinary perspectives on the
underlying causes of conflict and religion or belief from diverse disciplines
and cultures. This includes a synthesis of thoughts from theist, non-theist,
atheist, traditional, spiritual, indigenous, religious, non-religious,
philosophical, anthropological, psychological, biological, political,
sociological, humanities and bio-ethics; to further understand the need and
how to strengthen human rights standards on freedom of religion or belief.
Becker’s Escape From Evil provides a new
dimension on the underlying causes of conflict and freedom of religion or
belief. The paragraphs selected from Becker’s book are a synthesis of his
thoughts, presented for reflection and dialogue.
Extracts: Extracts are presented under the Eight Articles of
the 1981 U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. Examples of
Extracts are presented prior to an Issues Statement
for each Tandem Project Review.
Objective: Build understanding and support for
Article 18, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights –Everyone
shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion - and the
1981 UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. Encourage the United Nations,
Governments, Religions or Beliefs, Academia, NGOs, Media and Civil Society to
use these international human rights standards as essential for long-term solutions to conflicts based on religion or
belief.
Challenge: In 1968 the United Nations deferred work on an
International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Religious
Intolerance, because of its apparent complexity and sensitivity. In the
twenty-first century, a dramatic increase of intolerance and discrimination on
grounds of religion or belief is motivating a worldwide search to find
solutions to these problems. This is a challenge calling for enhanced dialogue
by States and others; including consideration of an International Convention on
Freedom of Religion or Belief for protection of and accountability by all
religions or beliefs. The tensions in today’s world inspire a question such as:
Response: Is it the appropriate moment to
reinitiate the drafting of a legally binding international convention on
freedom of religion or belief? Law making of this nature requires a minimum
consensus and an environment that appeals to reason rather than emotions. At
the same time we are on a learning curve as the various dimensions of the
Declaration are being explored. Many academics have produced voluminous books
on these questions but more ground has to be prepared before setting up of a UN
working group on drafting a convention. In my opinion, we should not try to
rush the elaboration of a Convention on Freedom of Religion or Belief,
especially not in times of high tensions and unpreparedness. - UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Asma
Jahangir,
Extract Examples: Extracts are presented under the Eight Articles of
the 1981 U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief.
4. 1 All States shall take
effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of
religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights
and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social
and cultural life.
4.1.4: Social; 4.1.5: Cultural Life
Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil: A Division of
Macmillan Publishing, 1975. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) won the Pulitzer Prize
for General Nonfiction for “The Denial of Death.” He was a distinguished social theorist and a
popular teacher of anthropology, sociology, and social psychology.
Additional paragraphs are found at the end of this
document:
Extracts:
My previous writings did not take sufficient
account of truly vicious human behavior. This is a dilemma that I have been
caught in, along with many others who have been trying to keep alive the
Enlightenment tradition of a science of man: how to reflect the empirical data
on man, the data that show what a horribly destructive creature he has been
throughout his history, and yet still have a science that is not manipulative
or cynical. If man is as bad as he seems, then either we have to behaviorally
coerce him into the good life or else we have to abandon the hope of a science
of man entirely. This is how the alternatives have appeared. Obviously it is an
enormous problem: to show that man is truly
evil-causing in much of his motivation, and yet to move beyond this to the
possibilities of sane, renewing action, some kind of third alternative beyond
bureaucratic science and despair. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil - Preface.
Both religion and psychoanalysis show man his
basic creatureliness and attempt to pull the scales of his sublimations from
his eyes. Both religion and psychoanalysis have discovered the same source of
illusion: the fear of death which cripples life. Also religion has the same
difficult mission as Freud: to overcome the fear of self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to the
person how his self-esteem was built: on the powers of others in order to deny
his own creatureliness and death. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil; Chapter Ten – Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? -
Page 163.
And so religion overcomes the specific problems of
fear-stricken animals, while at the same time showing them what empirical
reality really is. If we were not fear-stricken animals who repressed awareness
of ourselves and our world, then we would live in peace and unafraid of death,
trusting to the Creator God and celebrating His creation. The ideal of
religious sainthood, like that of psychoanalysis, is thus the opening up of
perception: this is where religion and science meet. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil; Chapter Ten – Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? -
Page 163
We can talk for a century about what causes human
aggression; we can try to find the springs in animal instincts, or we can try
to find them in bottled-up hatreds due to frustration or in some kind of
miscarried experiences of early years, of poor child handling and training. All
these would be true, but still trivial because men kill out of joy, in the
experience of expansive transcendence over evil. This poses an immense problem
for social theory, a problem that we have utterly failed to be clear about. If men
kill out of heroic joy, in what direction do we program improvements in human
nature? What are we going to improve if men work evil out of the impulse to
righteousness and goodness? - Ernest Becker, Chapter Ten
– Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? – Escape from Evil,
page 155
Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis
just the same old struggle over…immortality. If anyone doubts this, let him try
to explain in any other way the life-and-death viciousness of all ideological
disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of
self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the
only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a rage over fine
points of belief; if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be
fallible, your life becomes fallible. History, then, can be understood as the
succession of ideologies that console for death. Or, more momentously, all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of
the individual life. - Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil - Chapter Five –
The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power, page 64.
Men’s fears are buried deeply by repression, which
gives to everyday life its tranquil façade; only occasionally does the
desperation show through, and only for some people. It is repression, then,
that great discovery of psychoanalysis that explains how well men can hide
their basic motivations even from themselves. But men also live in a dimension
of care freeness, trust, hope, and joy which gives them buoyancy beyond that
which repression alone could give. This, as we saw with Rank, is achieved by
the symbolic engineering of culture, which everywhere serves men as an antidote
to terror by giving them a new and durable life beyond that of the body. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil; Chapter Seven – The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil – Page92
It is very important for students of man to be
clear about this: culture itself is sacred, since it is
the “religion” that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. For a
long time students of society liked to think in terms of “sacred” versus
“profane” aspects of social life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction
with this kind of simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no
basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of men. As
soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything
cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not
given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense “supernatural,” and all
systematizations of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise men above
nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more
than merely physical things count. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil; Introduction – The Human Condition: Between Appetite and Ingenuity - Page
4.
Persons have to keep from going mad by biting off
small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some
satisfaction from. This means that their noblest passions are played out in the
narrowest and most unreflective ways, and this is what undoes them. From this
point of view the main problem for human beings has to be expressed in the
following paradox; Men and women must have a fetish
in order to survive and to have ‘normal mental health.’ But this shrinkage of
vision that permits them to survive also at the same time prevents them from
having the overall understanding they need to plan for and control the effects
of their shrinkage of experience. A paradox this bitter sends a chill through
all reflective people. “Self-knowledge
is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to persons how their
self-esteem was built; on the powers of others in order to deny their own
death.” “Life imagines its own
significance and strains to justify its beliefs. It is as though the life force
itself needed illusion in order to further itself. Logically, then, the ideal
creativity for humans would strain toward the ‘grandest illusion. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil -Chapter Ten – Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? –
Page 153.
The Marxists have said, with Rousseau, that human
nature is a blank slate, neutral, even good; evil exists because of social
classes and the hate, envy, competition, degradation, and scapegoating that
stem from them; change society and man’s natural goodness will flower. Not so,
say the conservatives, and they point for proof at those revolutionary
societies which have abolished social class but which continue to express
personal and social evil; evil, then must be in the heart of the creature; the
best that social institutions can do is to keep it blunted; and social
institutions that already effectively do this without excessive repression and
within legal safeguards for individual rights – why such social institutions
should not be changed. So argue the conservatives. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil; Chapter Nine – Social Theory: The Merger of Marx and Freud – Page133.
This question has been the central one of the
science of man, and as such the knottiest in its whole career; thus it is
logical that it is the last problem to be solved. I myself have been coming
back to it again and again for a dozen years now, and each time I thought there
was a clear solution I later discovered that vital things had been left unsaid.
- Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil; Chapter Nine – Social Theory: The
Merger of Marx and Freud – Page133.
No wonder it has taken us so long to pull all the
fragmentary insights together, to join the views of both sides on the nature of
man. The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant
paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn’t make them
out: bad seemed to lead to good and good motives led to bad. The paradox is
that evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over
evil. The evil that troubles man most is his vulnerability; he seems
impotent to guarantee the absolute meaning of his life, its significance in the
cosmos. He assures a plenitude of evil, then, by trying to make closure on his
cosmic heroism. -
Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil; Chapter Nine –
Social Theory: The Merger of Marx and Freud - Page 135.
Finally, if we know that we ourselves hate because
of the same needs and urges to heroic victory over evil as those we hate, there
is perhaps no better way to begin to introduce milder justice into the affairs
of men. This is the great moral that Albert Camus drew from our demonic times,
when he expressed the moving hope that a day would come when each person would
proclaim in his own fashion the superiority of being wrong without killing
others than being right in the quiet of the charnel house. - Ernest Becker, Escape from
Evil; Chapter Nine – Social Theory: The Merger of Marx and Freud - Page 145.
Fortunately, no one mind can pose as an authority
on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the
intellectual to want to be taken seriously as a prophet, either in his
fantasies or in his realities. One of the last thoughts of the great William
James [Varieties of Religious Experience] was
that when all is said and done there is no advice to be given. And if a man of
Freud’s stature shrank back before prophecy, I surely am not going to peep any
note of it at all…thinkers who have understood human nature and could take in
the largest picture of history and tragedy have always shrunk back and shook
their heads. - Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil; Chapter Ten – Retrospect and
Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? - Page 169.
We have no way of knowing what gain will come out
of Freudian thought when it is finally assimilated in its tragic and true
meanings. Perhaps it will introduce just that minute measure of reason to
balance destruction. - Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil; Chapter Ten –
Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? – Page 170.
ISSUE STATEMENT: According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
on the Internet, “There is no consensus over whether or not either
goodness or evil are intrinsic to human nature. Many religious and
philosophical traditions claim that evil is an aberration that
results from the imperfect human condition (‘The Fall of Man’). Sometimes, evil
is attributed to the existence of free will and human agency. Some argue that
evil itself is ultimately based in ignorance of truth (i.e. human value,
sanctity, divinity). A variety of Enlightenment thinkers have alleged the opposite,
by suggesting that evil is learned as a consequence of tyrannical social
structures.”
There is little
disagreement however that one’s concept of human nature motivates one’s actions
in the real world. Mark C. Taylor, Williams College said; “The warning signs
are clear: unless we establish a genuine dialogue within and among all kinds of
belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism, the
conflicts of the future will probably be even more deadly.” How do we do this?
Article 19, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights proclaims
“Everyone shall have a right to hold opinions without interference” and
to express those opinions in public. The exercise of these rights, according to
Article 19, “carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may be
subject to certain restrictions only as provided by law and are necessary for
respect of the rights or reputations of others, or for the protection of
national security or of public order, or of public health or morals.” Genuine,
open dialogue within these parameters is essential for long-term
solutions to conflicts based on religion or belief.
“If it was defamation to say that one religion was
better than another, the result would be the religious prosecution of those who
embarked on intellectual analysis of religions or those who were within
their rights to say that their religion was superior.” - Ms.
The Tandem Project: a non-profit, non-governmental
organization established in 1986 to build understanding and respect for
diversity of religion or belief, and prevent discrimination in matters relating
to freedom of religion or belief. The organization has sponsored multiple
conferences, curricula, reference materials and programs on Article 18 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – Everyone shall have the
right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion - and 1981 United Nations
Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination
Based on Religion or Belief.
The Tandem Project initiative was launched in 1986 as
the result of a co-founder representing the World Federation of United Nations
Associations (WFUNA) at a 1984 United Nations Geneva Seminar, Encouragement of Understanding, Tolerance
and Respect in Matters Relating to Freedom of Religion or Belief,
called by the UN Secretariat on ways to implement the 1981 UN Declaration. In
1986, The Tandem Project held the first NGO International Conference on the
Declaration.
The Tandem Project:
Executive Director; Michael M. Roan, mroan@tandemproject.com.
The Tandem Project is a UN NGO in
Special Consultative Status with the
Economic and Social Council of
the United Nations