#ernest_becker

😎Has anyone read this book?

My Life as Teacher, Writer, and Artist: Part 2: Teaching

If you read my last post you got some general idea of my life trajectory in broad terms. In this post I want to pay special attention to how and why I became a college instructor with a couple of side trips on scholarship and the philosophy of teaching. Many of my colleagues teaching at the college level get their first taste of teaching in high school. Not me. I never intended to teach in high…

The price of a humanity that actually grows and changes is death. — Read on www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/04/how-dying-offers-us-chance-live-fullest-life

Interesting New Statesman article on a topic dear to my heart.

On my way to my Misogyny post: A Note

So, I’ve been reading tons in preparation for writing my post on the roots of misogyny. One thing I’ve done is re-read for the 20th time, I’m sure, Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil. I have also re-read his Denial of Death again. This time, I read them with a different eye. I was looking specifically for a direct mention of women, or rather of how a woman might experience the creation of…

The Azure window collapse and ‘social ills’: a view from a ‘right wing’ website.

This is an interesting article with many Beckerian twists and turns. The basic argument is: Don’t sweat it because you die, we all die, and that’s just the way it is. We don’t need to be sentimental about species extinction or environmental protection.

So, should we be concerned about death, animal suffering, species extinction, climate change, the disappearance of viable forests and any number…

Is A Fear Of Death At The Heart Of Capitalism? | The Leap

System Change on a Deadline

Source: Is A Fear Of Death At The Heart Of Capitalism? | The Leap

Shall we have veal for dinner, dear?

From a blog post on January 28th, 2014. The following two paragraphs in italics are a long quote from Ernest Becker’s 1975 book, Escape from Evil, which I used extensively when I was teaching college sociology courses. The language may be somewhat crass and shocking, but it gets the message across.

“Man is an animal…Whatever else he is, is built on this…The only certain thing we know about this…