Creative swan songs

Does Terror Management Theory (TMT) push creativity to a head in later life. I recently ran across an article that suggests exactly this in Adult Personality Development: Volume 2: Applications, by Lawrence S. Wrightsman, Mar 15, 1994. Here's the relevant excerpt:

Creativity can undergo a resurgence in the later years of life, and especially in life's last years (Simonton, 1990, p. 630). Sometimes during the late 60s and 70s an increase in output appears (Simonton, 1988). This secondary peak In output may be a manifestation of an Eriksonian final-stage contemplation of death and review of one's life accomplishments. Does any empirical evidence exist for the existence of such a "swan song" phenomenon? Simonton (1989) examined 1,919 compositions by 172 classical music composers, assessed each of numerous aesthetic qualities, and determined how many years before the composers' death the piece was composed. A clear pattern emerged: As the composers approached their final years, when death was raising a fist to knock on the door, they began to produce compositions that are more brief, that have simpler and more restrained melodic lines, and yet that score high in aesthetic significance according to musicologists and that eventually become popular mainstays of the classical repertoire. It is as if when the composers see the end approaching fast on the horizon, warning that their last artistic temperaments dwell among their current works in progress, they put their utmost into every creation, yielding truly noteworthy products. (Simonton, 1990, p. 630).

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Culture as a collective fabrication facilitating our quest for immortality

I often wonder how people are capable of simply going about their business, chatting about last night’s sporting event, working on crossword puzzles or thinking about buying a new car, despite the fact that they will be dead someday, maybe even someday soon. And for those with children, their children will also be dead a few decades later. How can we possibly live with those dreaded thoughts hanging over us? In fact, every person now living will likely be dead in 150 years. How can we engage in mundane things like gossiping, consuming, traveling and amusing ourselves when every person on the planet is facing annihilation? How do we put death out of our minds so easily? Ernest Becker would suggest that I have it all backwards. According to Becker, people intensely amuse and distract themselves, and immerse themselves in culture, because they are anxious about death. They are not necessarily consciously aware of their impending deaths, but they feel it deeply, and their minds grind and sputter on this topic, under the surface, unconsciously. We do the best we can to deal with this terrifying thought that we will all be dead, and the best we can think of doing is to distract ourselves with the many bright and shiny bigger-than-us, bigger-than-life things offered by culture. We put these things on a pedestal and then we cling to them as if they were life preservers. We embellish our cultural treasures with accolades recognizing their “eternal” significance. “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Babe Ruth, stamp collections, being a trivia pursuit star, triathlons, Michelangelo’s David. And for some of us, Jesus Christ loves us and He will let us live with him forever in heaven. According to Becker, these cultural mainstays are important for keeping us steady, even while death (and the threat of death) lurks around every corner. I recently had the opportunity to watch the highly acclaimed low-budget 90-minute 2005 documentary titled "Flight from Death: the Quest for Immortality,” produced by Patrick Shen and Greg Bennick. The film is based on the works of Ernest Becker’s “terror management theory,” (TMT) on which I’ve written several times (see here and here). Even though I was well acquainted with the works of Becker prior to viewing this video, I found the film to be transformative, in that it offers a schematic of underlying “hydraulics” that help us to understand many things that otherwise seem so puzzling about culture. I’d highly recommend “Flight from Death” whether or not you sometimes find it stunning that you live on a planet where mobile intestinal tracks scurry about, drive buses and even serve you meals at your local restaurant. Here’s the trailer. Even though I was already familiar with Becker’s theory and many of the experiments substantiating Becker’s theory, I found the film illuminating. “Flight From Death” includes well-chosen imagery and music to accompany the interviews with thoughtful and eccentric people from a wide variety of backgrounds (including psychologist Sheldon Soloman and writer Sam Keen, among others). [More . . . ]

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Exploring reasonable doubts by listening to “Reasonable Doubts” podcasts

If you are interested in hearing well-considered podcasts putting religious claims under the microscope, here's a good source: Reasonable Doubts. The site is a labor of love by the following three individuals:

JEREMY BEAHAN is an Adjunct Professor teaching classes on: Philosophy, World Religions, Biblical Literature, Aesthetics, and Critical Thinking through FSU. LUKE GALEN is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Grand Valley State University. He teaches classes on: the Psychology of Religion, Controversial Issues in Psychology, and Human Sexuality. DAVID FLETCHER is the founder and former chair of CFI Aquinas College. He is an English and Speech teacher as well as an adjunct professor of Mythology.
What distinguishes this site from many other skeptic/freethinker sites is that the authors offer dozens of carefully-reasoned podcasts putting specific religious claims under the microscope. There is no ranting or bloviating here; the tone is academic and the presentations are clear. Listeners will come away with thorough understandings of the topics addressed:
What distinguishes us from many other skeptical podcasts is our special focus on counter-apologetics. We provide detailed counter-points to the fallacious logic and blatant misinformation used by religious apologists when attempting to discredit skepticism and provide rational arguments for their dogmas. We also defend the sufficiency of reason, science and naturalistic philosophies to provide a satisfactory and morally compelling understanding of the cosmos, human nature, art and culture.
For example, in the podcast titled "Which Jesus?" (a presentation originally given at CFI), Jeremy Beahan discusses the many contradictions within the Gospel narratives. The lecture includes a powerpoint (see a sample slide below, setting out difference in the Christmas narrative): I also listened to a second podcast discussing Ernest Becker's work, leading to the modern theory of "terror management theory" (TMT) (this is a topic that fascinates me). Becker's general idea is that we are electric meat with large brains that can project into the future by generating "what if" hypotheticals. This makes us self-aware, but also tends to create a mind-body dualism riddled with anxiety--we deeply worry about death. Because we face our inexorable deaths, a paradox is created: we put lots of energy into denying death. We spin elaborate defenses through our symbolic systems (religion, capitalism, political). Becker argues that these defense symbols constitute buffers to our self-esteem, and we can only read self-esteem through our interactions with others. We latch onto group-based symbolic ideologies such as religions that offer simple steps to fend off death in order to enhance our self-esteem. All of our cultural strivings are to achieve a "heroic" feeling (even by serving a powerful Being, or by joining into warmongering) and a system of ready-made ethics for being a "hero" and "transcending death." Cultural striving = immortality striving. I was here and I mattered. But any threat to these immortality strivings threaten believers. Therefore, being presented with a contrary world view (e.g., atheism) is inevitably threatening to our self-esteem and our mortality. Converting others to one's own world view is a way to enhance one's own world view. If one can't convert others they still might be able to convince others to downplay their differences in public ((or even destroying others). About 20 years ago, many social scientists began testing these theories, with notable success (Judges reminded of their deaths set prostitution bond of $455; control judges--not reminded of their deaths--set bonds of $50). Reminders of death profoundly affect our behavior (e.g., 9/11 was a profound reminder of our impending deaths that dramatically kicked up our embrace of religion and patriotism--it urged people of all political persuasions to embrace others like themselves and to embrace more simplistic beliefs than before). Some of these experiments are described in this excellent lecture (I also described some of them in my previous posts on "Terror Management Theory). Beahan highly recommended viewing a documentary exploring Becker's ideas: "Flight From Death." Here is the menu of podcasts currently offered by Reasonable Doubts. I highly recommend a visit.

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Creative denial of mortality as an evolutionary adaptation?

The August 6, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers) includes a fascinating letter by Ajit Varki, a Professor of Medicine and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at the University of California San Diego, La Jolla. Varki begins his letter by recognizing some of the unique features of human animals, such as theory of mind, "which enables inter-subjectivity." These impressive human cognitive abilities might have been positively selected by evolution "because of their benefits to interpersonal communication, cooperative reading, language and other critical human activities." Varki then describes his conversations with a geneticist named Danny Brower (now deceased), who was fascinated with the question of why theory of mind emerged only recently, despite millions of years of apparent opportunity. Brower offered Varki a tantalizing explanation for this delay:

[Brower] explained that with the full self-awareness and inter-subjectivity would also come awareness of death and mortality. Thus, far from being useful, the resulting overwhelming fear would be a dead end evolutionary barrier, curbing activities and cognitive functions necessary for survival and reproductive fitness. . . . in his view, the only way these properties could become positively selected was if they emerged simultaneously with neural mechanisms for denying mortality.
In other words, self-awareness is a double-edged sword that tends to kill off (through terror-induced paralysis) those who become too readily self-aware. Therefore, self-awareness evolved together with denial of death--Brower was suggesting that those who became too clearly self-aware would become incapacitated by something of which chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants remain blissfully ignorant: the fact that they will inevitably die. Image by Puroticorico at Flickr Varki suggests that Brower's idea would not only add to ongoing discussions of the origins of human uniqueness, but it could shed light on many puzzling aspects of human psychology and culture:
[I]t could also steer discussions of other uniquely human "universals," such as the ability to hold false beliefs, existential context, theories of afterlife, religiosity, severity of grieving, importance of death rituals, risk-taking behavior, panic attacks, suicide and martyrdom.
Perhaps we are simply incapable of viewing life "objectively," in that evolution has rigged us up with equipment that protects us by deluding us. It seems, then, that the co-evolution of delusion and awareness (if this is the case) dovetails quite well with Terror Management Theory (TMT), which I summarized in a post entitled "We are gods with anuses: another look at “terror management theory”:

The problem is that the evolution of our powerful ability to be conscious made us aware that we are mortal beings and that all of us are heading toward inevitable death. The “solution” is also offered by our highly developed cognitive abilities: we have developed the ability to wall off our cognitively toxic fear of death by “objectifying” our existences and living idealized lives free from fear of death.

Brower and Varki thus suggest that the ability of humans to be extraordinarily aware and curious is too dangerous to be dispensed by evolution in its pure form. Too much knowledge can might be too dangerous. To safely allow the continuation of the species, human awareness might need to be deluded and distorted in ways that account for some of the most baffling "cultural" aspects of what it means to be human. Image by Latvian at Flickr (creative commons) This approach sounds promising to me, though it also raises many other questions, such as this one: Why are some of us apparently immune from these delusions? Why are some of us much more able to disbelieve claims of gods and afterlives?

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Creationists blather their way through Darwin Day

If you visit Ken Ham's creationist site, you'll see an article titled, "Did humans really evolve from ape-like creatures?" Here's a key concern raised in this article:

Perhaps the most bitter pill to swallow for any Christian who attempts to “make peace” with Darwin is the presumed ape ancestry of man.

It's difficult to believe the ignorance displayed by this sentence. Why can't creationists understand that not only did humans evolve from other ape-like creatures (the scientific evidence is abundant and irrefutable), but that humans are apes. Check the features listed here:

The similarities can be seen throughout our bodies. For instance, humans and the African apes all lack external tails and have hands with a thumb that is sufficiently separate from the other fingers to allow them to be opposable for precision grips. Humans are also sexually dimorphic--males are 5-10% larger on average and have greater upper body muscular development. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, we are omnivorous. We kill other animals for food in addition to eating a wide variety of plants. Internally, our bodies are even more similar to the great apes. We have essentially the same arrangement of internal organs and bones. We share several important blood types. We also get many of the same diseases.

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