The Ernest Becker Reader by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Ethical Society (1968)*

AT TIMES THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SEEMS a truly Biblical epoch, in which passionate visions sprang up on a hostile soil, and there was nothing to do but wait. The great difference is that the nineteenth-century soil was not arid; the great wheels of industrial plenty had begun their relentless grind. For the first time in history, grand Utopian visions were being obtrusively accompanied by the proper means for their realization.

Fortunately, nature does not grant the wishes of men who want to see the promised land.… Today we have so lost the Faustian promise that we are even afraid to fulfill it. What will happen, we lament, when the wage-work day is abolished, when the automated factories grind out their plenty, and distribute it to all, when annual salaries are guaranteed, regardless of work—what will man do with his leisure; how will he keep from running wild?

The question betrays the whole failure of our time: the failure of the science of man to put forth an agreed, synthetic theory of human nature; the failure of society to see beyond the kind of monster that it has created with its commercial-industrial madness. Of course social welfare dampens public interest in a society in which there is no public interest, no agreed purpose. Why should the individual design larger, self-transcending social ends when the society as a whole frowns on it? Each person is bent on his own security, his own future; as a result, there is no social future, no future for men in common.

All of this is commonplace enough, but it explains why mass man is so impotent. He lacks a basic human dimension—control over the future; in a word, he has no ‘social ego.’ … What happens when the society lacks an ego? The very same thing that happens when the individual has very weak control over his destiny: he fetishizes. He begins to look for control in narrow areas, areas that have nothing really basic to do with his problems. And society does the same: if it cannot handle the principal problem of adaptation by intelligently harnessing the future to its purposes, it tries to exercise firm control over areas where it does have power.… Today we are witnessing our society trying to gain some kind of control over the national life and some kind of meaningful national design by forging what we might call a military social ego. This kind of adaptation is old enough and it has often been necessary for the survival of free communities—e.g., at the time of the Greeks. But the question that is critical today is whether a military social ego any longer represents an intelligent adaptation to the problems of morality in the modern world. We know that this kind of ego defeats dictatorships and today our best scientists are warning us that it will defeat commercial-industrial democracy.

Our fetish social ego and our ‘futuristic living’ are all of a piece: they represent a pious wish that everything will turn out well if we feverishly and uncritically play the game of our society.

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