The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, and Death: The end of self-improvement, by Joan Tollifson

Authors Ernest Becker and Joan Tollifson. Reviews by Neil Morgan

According to William Hazlitt in his 1827 essay ‘On the feeling of immortality of youth’, ‘No young man believes he shall ever die.  Death, old age, are words without a meaning, a dream, a fiction, with which we have nothing to do.’

I know what Hazlitt means. As a young man, I certainly used to feel that way, but no longer (I am sixty-six; are those numbers real?). For this reason, Ernest Becker and Joan Tollifson drew me to reading these books with their intriguing titles. I recommend them both.

‘It is ironic how the lie we need in order to live (i.e. avoiding death) dooms us to a life that is never really ours’, says Ernest Becker, who himself died at fifty, just before his book won the prestigious 1974 Pulitzer Prize.

Death, for Becker, was the ultimate taboo, a topic that nobody really wanted to face or talk about, and really, really not to think about. Back in 1678 François de La Rochefoucauld wrote that there were two things that people could not look at, at least fully: the Sun, and their own deaths. Becker underlines this with an exclamation mark. This is like the joke about the eighty-year-old man and his wife. The husband says to the wife, very reasonably, ‘When one of us dies, and we have to sell this house, I am moving to Brighton’. Such is the psychological strength behind denial.

Recently, Covid has brought us up short, and made us face our own vulnerability and attitude to end-of-life issues. Assisted dying, a proposal to allow those in intolerable pain to end their lives, was considered at Meeting for Sufferings in April, and there has been correspondence on it in these pages. But whatever we feel about that controversial issue, one thing is for sure: life is not forever. It is transient – but that makes it more precious. Sigmund Freud wrote about it in a brilliant article ‘On transience.’ ‘What is painful can also be true,’ he says, and just because a thing is transient, that doesn’t reduce its value. Life, in fact, has ‘scarcity value’.

Is what drives us a life force, or a fear of death? Becker comes down heavily on the side of the latter, and his whole book is a persuasive argument for that, from all sorts of sources. There is a Zen Buddhist story about how we are driven by things we do not have control of, or understand. A man is riding a horse, which is galloping very quickly. Another man, standing by the roadside calls out ‘Where are you going?’ and the man on the horse yells back ‘Don’t ask me. Ask the horse!’ Becker, I think, sees the runaway horse, in charge of us, as the fear of death.

His argument is that everyone, all the time, is confronting and somehow dealing with the existentialist terror of death, either subconsciously or unconsciously. We use various mechanisms – denial, turning a blind eye, or repression, locking it away – to deal with our fear, and anxiety. It cannot be evaded, however; it impresses itself on us, over time (rather like the haunting story ‘In the Penal colony’, by Franz Kafka, which describes the last use of an execution device that carves a condemned prisoner’s sentence onto his skin before letting him die. As the plot unfolds, the reader learns more and more about the machine, including its origin and original justification).

Becker’s book is a deep and insightful read. It demystifies our aspirations, and our ways of behaving. It strips us of ‘the emperor’s clothes’. It is very difficult to reconcile our noble ambitions with our naked, aging, fragile animal bodies. We will ‘bite the dust’ like an animal or an insect, truth be told.

Becker talks about life as a project to forget about death, to erase the information. Or, if we cannot forget, then an attempt to obliterate mortality. Writing books, having children, driving fast cars, accumulating big houses, prestige, or money… these for Becker are illusionary, frightened projects to promote one’s immortality. A whistling in the dark. Religion, for Becker, also provides a comfortable bastion against reality. We gain access to an immortal parent, in a super special heaven, where we can remain children and never grow up – but also, and here’s the real payoff, never die.

The second book, by Joan Tollifson is a lighter, encouraging message about embracing, or at least accepting, the idea of death. She comes from a broadly Buddhist tradition. Now is all we have. We need to take back our ‘immortal, heavenly, projections’. There are links here to Don Cupitt’s later writings. Cupitt says in The Last Philosophy (1995): ‘Recognising as we must that this life is the last life we’re ever having to live, these bodies are the last bodies we will ever have, and this world is the last world we’ll ever know [then we realise that] where we are, is the “ultimate reality”. This life has no Beyond: it is final, and it is just fine… we are no longer in transition: we are there… We should not experience our own transience as distressing; we should be easy, going.’

Cupitt and Tollifson are singing from the same songsheet here. It is as if the reality of death and its acceptance – taking it into oneself – allow both of them to drop the supernatural, as deadweight. My own position is a different one, but I can see where they are coming from.

The very title of Tollifson’s book, ‘The end of self improvement’, serves as a bracing bucket of reality-water over the head of those she sees as trapped in illusion. 

‘This book’, she writes, introducing her theme, ‘is definitely not a seven-step guidebook to perpetual bliss or to never get old. It is rather an invitation to let everything fall apart, as it does anyway, and as it must for anything new to emerge. This falling apart is a waking up from the obsessive concern with self-improvement and self-preservation, and a release from the fear of disintegration, imperfection, and death.’

For Tollifson mortality is the ultimate – and helpful – reminder that our fairy fantasies of life – that ‘everyday, in every way, we are becoming better and better’ – are utterly absurd. We are simply not going that way. Quite the reverse. We are all approaching death at the rate of one second per second. 

Tollifson’s book celebrates ‘the great stripping process of aging, and dying’, which she describes as allowing her a spiritual awakening. There are very moving sections in the book on the death of her mother, the death of her friends, and her own treatment for cancer, involving mutilating surgery. (Fortunately the treatment has been successful, and Tollifson is well at this point.)

She concludes: ‘When the future disappears (in the horizon of death) we are brought home to the immediacy that we may have avoided all our lives’, and ends: ‘If you want to (really) be here now, forget flowers and sunrises, and contemplate death.’ I am not sure she is right. Rather what we need to do is to remember both, and hold them in our minds, together, simultaneously.

Something Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, writes in Looking in the Distance resonates with me. He quotes ‘the old Castilian romantic’, Miguel de Unamuno: ‘Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it will be an unjust fate’.

I agree with Holloway. I think Becker and Tollifson do as well.

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