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The Ernest Becker Reader, edited by Daniel Liechty. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005. 248 pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0-295-98470-8.
"What is the meaning of life? What is worth striving fors? What may man hope for?" With these questions we are thrown back to the heady days of the '60s and back to their author, Ernest Becker, a now largely forgotten social anthropologist of immense vision and encyclopedic knowledge. Becker's goal was nothing less than to construct a "unified science of man(kind)," an "anthropodicy" as he called it, an inter-disciplinary theory of evil.
Becker begins with an unassailable fact: Human being is that being for whom being (and not being) is the penultimate concern. As a species we are unique in our awareness of careening toward nothingness. But this knowledge is unbearable. Therefore, we set about trying to "escape from evil" and "denying our death" by undertaking "heroic" tasks such as explorations, monument-buildings, missions, and crusades. These allow us to symbolically transcend our petty existences by imbuing them with cosmic significance. The most compelling myths and rituals involve armed struggles against putative carriers of evil, human embodiments of death,...