Who wants to talk about the climate emergency? Who is excited to talk about the climate emergency? A show of hands? Maybe if I was at a Green Party meeting I might get an enthusiastic response, but I’ve found in general most people would rather not talk about it.
I think we all exist in one of two groups about climate: we must take action, or we don’t need to do anything about it. I would guess that most of us, but not all of us, are members of the We Must Take Action group.
But what does it mean to be part of this group? Are we all actually taking action, and if so, what does this action look like? And if most of us agree We Must Take Action, why don’t we want to talk about it?
As you can see, when it comes to individual decisions we each can make when it comes to taking action to reduce our CO2 footprint, having one fewer child is the most significant step we can take, by some distance. The next most significant step is going car-free.
I personally think about this graphic at least once a week. I am still not sure if that is too much, about the right amount, or not enough. What I find particularly jarring is the disconnect being part of the We Must Take Action and the top five steps: Have one fewer child than you are planning to, go car-free, fly less, buy green energy, and eat a plant-based diet. After all, ask yourself this question: when was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with someone about these top five steps?
What it makes you realise is, while most of us might be part of We Must Take Action, there seems to be much less agreement about What & How we must take the aforementioned action. What one starts to conclude is that what actually really matters is how many members of the We Must Take Action group choose to actually take action. And if you think about this long enough you start to wonder: is it really a majority of us that belong to the We Must Take Action group? Because if we are not doing the most effective steps then what is the point?
You may, at this point, be wanting to say to me: “But Dave, 70% of emissions come from 100 corporations.” True, but I’ve never understood this argument. One, shouldn’t we be trying to reduce emissions everywhere we can? And two, aren’t we the ones ultimately buying from these corporations? It’s not like these corporations are just making stuff for the fun of it.
Back in 2022, enthused by what I thought was critical climate information that was easy to communicate, I made my own Top 5 graphic for the top five steps. But I found it wasn’t a huge engagement driver, in fact the only place where people engaged with it in any serious capacity was on Mastodon (“the fediverse”) but even there a lot of the comments I got amounted to “what do you want from me!” It was strange, it was like at best what I was sharing was an inconvenience but at worst actively offensive. Weren’t we all in this together as part of Team Must Take Action?
In my own life I’ve tried my best to take the top five steps. My partner and I are vegetarians, we buy green energy, and we haven’t been on a plane in over a decade. But we haven’t gone car-free yet, and most importantly we’ve decided to have both the children we were planning to have. I have no good excuse for this. My partner and I simply decided what we wanted was more important than the increase to greenhouse gases it would cause. This is a hard thing for me to acknowledge.
But maybe this offers a clue to why many of us might agree in theory that We Must Take Action but actually when it comes to the hard work of taking the most important steps we are unwilling to change our lifestyles. We would rather not talk about it, or be reminded about it, because our selfish hearts are at war with our rational minds.
Recently I read a post that was talking about how some of the things we will need to do this century to adapt to sea level rises will include getting better at growing our own food, and setting up our homes to handle regular energy blackouts. The difference between this future that is coming and a present where we prioritise buying LED lightbulbs can feel dizzying. My question is not how can we motivate people to take action about the climate emergency, but how to get people to take the right action? Let me know in the comments 👍⬇️
(above) Joy Division, photographed by Kevin Cummins on Epping Walk Bridge in Manchester, 1979
“What feeling do you have when you wake up in the morning, when your feet touch the floor? Or before that when you’re lying there, thinking about your feet hitting the floor? What feeling do you have, what does that feel like for you?” – The Rover (2014)
A long time ago I watched a Grand Designs episode where the man who was building a house said that he woke up each morning thinking “Still alive! I get to do this living thing for another day.” I think about him often. I envy his comfort with his mortality and his openness to living or dying. I do not have that – I have fear of death.
Perhaps more specifically I have fear of no longer existing any more. While dying in my sleep somewhat appeals as a less scary way to go, more scary for me is the thought of my life ending in the blink of an eye. No waking up. No reflection. No existing. No more Dave.
As I’ve talked aboutbefore, perhaps being an ex-Christian makes it harder for me to face no longer existing. As a Christian you anticipate living forever, when you give that up suddenly you have to reckon with your mortality and what, in comparison to forever, feels like a very short life. I am in awe of how people just go on with their daily lives knowing death awaits them. I’ve asked a lot of people how they do it and the answer seems to be mostly distraction; ignore the feeling and eventually it goes away.
In his book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, philosopher Martin Hägglund posits our lives are meaningful, precious, and interesting precisely because they are limited. I have to be honest and say that this perspective does not bring me relief or consolation. I would rather have immortality with the option to die if I want to than the burden of mortality with no options.
Ultimately I can pontificate as much as I like but it’s not going to change the fact I am mortal and will not live to be 200 years old. Maybe better is to find what relief and consolation from death that I can find while I am still alive. I tell my therapist that my hope is if I get to live to be old enough, eventually I might be that kind of Very Old where you feel so very tired and start to think that you would like things to stop at some point. That is what I hope anyway, that one day instead of trying to find distraction I will actually welcome the end.
From the Five Books article it is clear Sheldon Solomon thinks Becker is an important stop on the road to understanding fear of death. I tried to read Escape From Evil first but because I had done so little reading on this topic I lacked the background to understand it easily, so reading Denial first seemed mandatory. Denial of Death comes first chronologically and is the one he completed before he died (his widow published Escape). Denial of Death I think lays the platform for Escape. Escape From Evil is the better, more concise book, but I think Denial is essential reading to get the most out of it.
In Denial of Death Becker makes his case for fear of death affecting all areas of our lives. He sees the major breakthrough in understanding this as being Freud’s, but, writing in the 1970s, he thought Otto Rank (a disciple of Freud) had built the most on Freud’s work on existentialism. Becker makes a compelling case but stops short in Denial of suggesting a way forward. You get the feeling he felt compelled to have a go, and Escape was probably going to be his attempt.
Denial of Death is over 50 years old now. The stuff in there about mental health feels very outdated. I don’t know where he was coming from about homosexuality & transvestism. The attempt to psychoanalyse Freud’s two known fainting spells feels too long. The summaries of Kierkegaard and Rank’s bodies of work are fascinating; as is his conclusion that those two thinkers thought that the cosmic heroism embedded in religion was the best treatment for the fear of death. Indeed, Becker goes as far as to say ‘The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism. Science, after all, is a credo that has attempted to absorb into itself and to deny the fear of life and death; and it is only one more competitor in the spectrum of roles for cosmic heroics.’
Combined together, Denial of Death & Escape From Evil are the most important books I have read in the last 10 years. They are still massively relevant today and our reckoning with their questions & challenges as a species is way overdue. Chapters 1 and 2 of Escape From Evil seemed to me to be mostly an attempt to provide the reader with some of the background he covered in Denial. Readers of Denial of Death can probably pick up from chapter 3 onwards. Becker takes as his starting point that fear of death shrouds & affects all our waking moments, and goes on to show how inequality, status, genocide, the accumulation of capital/possessions/power are all symptoms of our failure to ultimately reckon with death-terror. Reading the last chapter, Becker seems caught between humility and honesty. He says ‘No one mind can pose as an authority on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the intellectual to want to be taken seriously as a prophet, either in his fantasies or in his realities.’ But then on the same page he says ‘Yet I think that there is a solid minimum achievement’. Becker’s prescription? Progressive politics and a “science of society”. I was underwhelmed by this but I was probably expecting too much.
This great practical guide to getting comfortable with death was written by Rachel Menzies, who wrote a book about mortality awareness called Mortals with her father, Ross Menzies.
It’s a great article, but that doesn’t mean the advice in it is necessarily easy to follow! Here’s the link:
Bard is Google’s AI you can chat with. So likebefore, I asked it what the best relief from death anxiety is.
Some notes:
Unlike Bing AI, Bard doesn’t give a list of some of its sources.
At the moment Bard gives you a few “drafts” to choose from. I imagine if you are using it to create something, this makes it feel like more of a collaborator rather than a omniscient supercomputer. I chose draft three because I thought it was the best of the three: it was longer than draft one which was mostly a bullet point list, and it had a better summarising paragraph than draft two.
Interestingly, unlike Bing AI, Bard directly recommends reading about death, which is something ChatGPT did too. I think this is an important inclusion.
I feel like Bard’s summary paragraph almost understands the topic better. The summary paragraph in Bing AI’s answer made me feel like death anxiety was more of wellness issue, rather than acknowledging it as part of the human condition.
Three drafts is a bit of a cheat. Essentially Bard gets three attempts to get it most right.
Bard is a clever bit of marketing. A lot less clunky than “chat mode for Bing”.
Following on from ChatGPT being made available to the public in 2022, the same technology is now being offered commercially by Microsoft as Bing AI, or as it prefers to call itself:”chat mode for Bing”.
There are some differences to how this version answers the same question I asked previously: “What is the best relief from death anxiety?”. The first obvious difference is that this version communicates in the first person including using emojis. Microsoft are still trying different versions of the service including how personal or impersonal Bing AI should be. Possibly the first person approach works better in this context given a lot of people may be in a vulnerable place when searching for death anxiety answers.
I personally liked how Bing AI didn’t include religion in its answer. But it also didn’t include spirituality and maybe that’s an oversight? I suppose a risk for a commercial venture is they don’t want to end up recommending people do things on the risky end of the spirituality spectrum which might make them legally responsible?
I appreciated how Bing AI encouraged me to ‘meditate on death or practice mindfulness to accept the reality of death’. But I felt its answer was actually weaker for not including ChatGPT’s point of ‘educating oneself about death and the natural process of dying, in order to alleviate some of the fear and uncertainty associated with it’. Here, and this may be the legal side of things again influencing the answer, Bing AI directs people towards professionals as opposed to self-education.
It’s interesting to anticipate the near-future where a certain level of response or medical health advice will be handled by chat bots. I think I’m ok with it as long as the public & private sectors are mandated by law to let you know you’re chatting with a program as opposed to a real person.
Here’s Bing AI’s answer in full…
Question: What is the best relief from death anxiety?
Answer:
Some possible ways to overcome your fear of death are¹⁴⁶:
Exercise regularly to reduce stress and improve your physical and mental health.
Meditate on death or practice mindfulness to accept the reality of death and appreciate the present moment.
Talk to a therapist, a counselor, a friend or a support group about your feelings and thoughts about death.
Change your habits that may trigger your anxiety, such as watching too much news, avoiding social interactions or dwelling on negative thoughts.
Learn to spot when you are getting anxious and use relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation or visualization.
Try exposure therapy with the help of a professional, where you gradually face your fears in a safe and controlled environment.
Seek professional support if your anxiety interferes with your daily functioning or causes you significant distress.
I hope this helps. Remember that you are not alone in this and there is always hope for healing.🙏
2005. Carlos David Navarrete and Daniel M.T. Fessler – ‘Normative Bias and Adaptive Challenges: A Relational Approach to Coalitional Psychology and a Critique of Terror Management Theory’, Evolutionary Psychology, 2005. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/147470490500300121.
2006. Lee A. Kirkpatrick & Carlos David Navarrette – ‘Reports of My Death Anxiety Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: A Critique of Terror Management Theory from an Evolutionary Perspective’, Psychological Enquiry, 2006. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10478400701366969.
2008. Wissink et al. – ‘Replication of “Terror management and adults’ attachment to their parents: The safe haven remains” by CR Cox, J Arndt, T Pyszczynski, J Greenberg, A Abdollahi, S Solomon’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008. https://osf.io/5tbxf/.
2011. Zachary P. Hohman, Michael A. Hogg – ‘Fear and uncertainty in the face of death: The role of life after death in group identification’, European Journal of Social Psychology, June 2011. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.818.
2014. Lambert et al. – ‘Toward a greater understanding of the emotional dynamics of the mortality salience manipulation: revisiting the “affect-free” claim of terror management research’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 2014. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24749817/.
2019. Bjørn Sætrevik & Hallgeir Sjåstad – ‘Mortality salience effects fail to replicate in traditional and novel measures’, May 2019. https://psyarxiv.com/dkg53.
2019. Klein et al. – ‘Many Labs 4: Failure to Replicate Mortality Salience Effect With and Without Original Author Involvement’, December 2019. https://psyarxiv.com/vef2c.
BONUS
And just for completeness really, here are a couple of the early foundational TMT studies:
If I’ve missed any obvious academic criticism up to 2022, or any obvious foundational TMT studies, please let me know, and I will make sure to add them.
Source: Graphic generated using the free version of the Stable Diffusion latent text-to-image diffusion model (https://stablediffusionweb.com/)
When I deconverted from Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity in 2017, one of the things I found hardest was reckoning with the fact I was no longer going to live forever. That might sound crazy, but I had been raised to believe that I would. In the autumn of 2017 I became the worst person to talk to at a party because all I wanted to talk about was the fact we were all going to die one day.
Then I read Sheldon Solomon’s interview with Sophie Roell on fivebooks.com. In the interview Solomon contends that Ernest Becker achieved an important development to our understanding of fear of death. Becker was an American anthropologist who died in 1974 and wrote the books The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil. Solomon says that Becker’s ideas about the fear of death being a massive unconscious influence on us was one of the main inspirations for him choosing to study death anxiety. Solomon and his co-authors Tom Pyszczynski and Jeff Greenberg have gone on to see if they can empirically prove Becker’s theories, calling their ideas Terror Management Theory (TMT). They have also written a book about TMT called The Worm at the Core.
What I found compelling about Becker’s writing, and TMT, was the idea that anxiety about fear of death was not benign. TMT holds that human beings knowing we are gong to die produces existential terror (Greenburg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986). The theory says people seek to counter this unconscious fear through symbolic immortality. This means things like, for example, living on after death through the things we achieve professionally, or by associating our identity with culture that will live on after we die.
I was intrigued and captivated. Becker’s theories made intuitive sense to me. And Solomon was saying that “[t]here are now upwards of 1000 of these studies [that have been] done“. I was afraid of dying and I was afraid of the nonexistence that came after. And I didn’t like the idea of being unconsciously controlled by fear of death. I was very interested that TMT held the promise of both understanding my death anxiety better and potentially finding more peace in the face of my future expiration.
One of the main ideas that has sprung out of TMT is the mortality salience (MS) hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that an outcome of feeling death anxiety is that people are more likely to defend their cultural worldviews. For example, if nationalism is one way a person is trying to achieve symbolic immortality (“I am part of this great nation which will live on after I die”), when encountering reminders of death the same person may be inclined to unconsciously increase their defence of their nationalism and also possibly disparage other countries/cultural worldviews.
There was something about the “underpinning of everything”-ness of TMT that was deeply attractive to me. It felt like the dark shadow of humanism; yes we had the gift of being alive, but not only did the end always lie in wait, there was this evidence that unconsciously fear of death troubled us more than we wanted to admit and was negatively affecting how we were living. I thought TMT could help me to live a better life less afraid of death so that I might die a better death.
At the same time though I was worried I was falling for TMT too hard, too quickly. Was I looking for a worldview that explained everything to replace my Fundamentalist Christianity? There were times when I felt like all I could see was mortality salience playing out in every aspect of our lives. I was worried I might have reclaimed myself from one ideology only to find myself giving it over to another.
“While some of the foundational studies on which TMT is based have failed to replicate, thereby drawing criticism within the field of psychology, the framework continues to resonate for many.”
I decided to look up critical reviews of The Worm at the Core on goodreads.com, the book review website, secretly hoping to find only positive reviews. One review said: ‘I felt the book suffered from too many claims and assertions that, while not being necessary for the integrity of the rather convincing underlying thesis, seem to be somewhat suspect or at least poorly grounded.’ Another review: ‘Too much of this premise is taking place behind the scenes, which is a risk you run in all social psychology experimentation, but that doesn’t mean your extrapolations qualify as proof.’ A person named B. Rule said that ‘[t]his book is really a restatement of Ernest Becker’s ideas, and the value-added, if you will, is that the team of authors have supposedly provided empirical support for his theories. Several of their experiments are described throughout the text. While several were interesting, there were many where I was highly dubious that the lines of causation were as clear as the authors proposed. They just didn’t seem very rigorously designed to eliminate other variables or preclude other interpretations’.
The critical reviews for The Denial of Death were no better. Someone called Tyler said that Becker’s claims to scientific proof were ‘pseudoscience’. Another review called Becker’s work ‘outdated psychobabble’ and ‘closer to medieval scholasticism’. A person called Gary Beauregard Bottomley summed up their review of Denial of Death this way:
‘I can highly recommend this book since it gives such an interesting window that psychoanalysis mistakenly provided to human understanding in 1973. It clearly gives a great peak [sic] into how psychiatry got off the rails. I would highly recommend reading “Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry” before attempting this pseudo-scientific book. “Shrinks” documents how psychiatry got so far off the rails and how it found itself by becoming a real science by including the empirical. This book, “Denial of Death”, marks the start of the beginning from which a new era for human understanding began to finally find itself and jettison junk like this book contains.’
Psychobabble and pseudoscience. I worried I had been too quick to sign on to TMT. And to make matters worse, I had started this very blog about fear of death. I groaned internally, how embarrassing.
Then I read this review of The Worm at the Core from 2020 by someone called Travis Rebello. Rebello talks about how they had once given a presentation about denial of death ideas including those of Terror Management Theory. Rebello said one of the professors had said the problem with TMT was “replicability”. Rebello then goes on to list examples of studies failing to replicate the results of experiments originally used to empirically support the validity of TMT.
I felt puzzled. What was going on here? How could ‘upwards of 1000’ studies be getting carried out on a theory that couldn’t even be replicated?
One study was particularly interesting. It was called Many Labs 4 (ML4), first published in 2019, and was specifically about trying to replicate an original TMT study from 1994 whose co-authors included the three authors behind Worm at the Core: Solomon, Greenburg, and Pyszczynski. Many Labs was so-called because of the participation of 17 labs around the world with 1578 participants, meaning a decent sample size to replicate or not replicate the original findings. Not only that, a group of half the labs involved with ML4 would have expert input from one of the original authors of the 1994 study (Tom Pyszczynski) in order to test whether the “secret sauce” of the original researchers had an outsized effect on results.
I took to Twitter to see if there was any commentary on the ML4 paper. It turned out in 2020 a paper called ‘A Word of Caution about Many Labs 4’ had been published which reanalysed the ML4 data and concluded the studies had not been well-conducted and, most importantly from my point of view, the conclusions of ML4 had been wrong: an effect had been found!
So where did things stand now? A successful TMT study from 1994 had been chosen to attempt to be replicated by a large modern study. ML4 couldn’t replicate the 1994 findings. But the authors of a reanalysis said that ML4’s own data showed findings of a ‘modest effect size’. Modest effect size didn’t sound like “dead in the water” but it also didn’t sound like a slam dunk either.
Still, I thought modest effect size was certainly different from the ‘neither group successfully replicated the effect’ that ML4 was concluding. I could see online that ML4 had been republished in November 2020 but when I compared the changes to the 2020 version to the 2019 version the conclusions were still the same: ’we observed little evidence that priming mortality salience increased worldview defence compared to a control condition’ (p. 30) and ‘with these protocols, in the context of these Labs and time in history, we find little support for this key finding of TMT’ (p. 30).
For a non-academic like myself, it was hard to know which conclusion from the data I should agree with.
‘[O]ur main results suggest that tests of the MS [Mortality Salience] hypothesis are generally underpowered in the literature’ (p. 23).
Translation: These TMT test results are not strong.
‘[W]e conclude there is evidential value in the overall literature, and there are non-zero effects underlying the studies on a whole.’ (p. 23)
Translation: But, there is something there.
‘The pattern of increasing power after the field began to take QRPs [Questionable Research Practices] seriously bodes well for TMT’ (p. 30)
Translation: No more cheating you guys.
‘Our findings are therefore more optimistic about the MS [mortality salience] hypothesis than failed replications pointing to a null effect.’ (p. 38)
Translation: E.g. ML4.
‘[T]he overall weak effects found in studies that test the MS hypothesis would seem to call into question early articulations of TMT as an organising principle that explains the origins of such foundational human characteristics as culture and self-esteem (see Greenburg et al. 1986; Solomon et al.,1991). If effect sizes can serve as a guide for interpreting the field’s conclusions about which psychological phenomena are most foundational, the evidence is mounting against these early claims that many behaviours emerged as a product of efforts to suppress death thoughts.’ (p. 41)
Translation. TMT may not be as complete an explanatory theory as Dave Underwood is hoping it is.
The study concludes:
‘It is worth noting that our p-curve analysis focuses on the MS hypothesis, derived from TMT, but is not itself a test of the overarching theory. For this reason, many phenomena may yet have an existential origin that are not adequately tested through the MS hypothesis.’ (p. .42)
‘While the recent publication of several failed replications of TMT studies may have led some to expect that our p-curve analysis of the TMT literature would result in an autopsy of the field, we have instead detected a clear pulse. The overall state of the field may not be as healthy as its most enthusiastic champions have suggested, but it is alive, and we hope future researchers design their studies with the results of this p-curve analysis in mind’. (p. 42-43)
When a layperson such as myself wanders into an area of academia he knows nothing about, I think it is easy to want to draw a line under things. I think this is especially true when, as in my case, someone is associating their identity and understanding of the world with a theory or area of research.
Can you have “hope” in a theory? Or is that too much like having “faith” in a theory?
The other day I watched a video about how we had Newton’s theory of gravity, then Einstein’s theory of relativity, and now we have Quantum Mechanics, each theory improving on the one that came before it. Is TMT pseudoscience? I don’t think so, but let the evidence fall where it will. Could TMT be superseded by a better theory one day? Yes. In fact, I hope it is. May the march of progress, and the scientific method, march ever forward.
And as for me? I am keen to continue thinking & writing about the fear of death. But I feel like I’ve learnt an important lesson about treating books about theories as sacred texts of quasi-belief systems. They are not the same, and thank Zeus for that.
‘To decide to change would entail accepting existential guilt‘
Change can often be good & powerful, but the existential guilt is often too powerful for all of us at different times in our lives. People can end up thinking “better to make no change and avoid having to deal with the truth.”
!['[T]he thicket of mind and flesh, the one on fire with the awareness of death, of your grave-bound life. [A]nd above all, the awareness of the crumbling, meaningless insubstantiality of life lived only by your own lights. [T]hat burden is what … relationship[s] [can help relieve]'
― @lazenby on Tumblr](https://oblivionwithbells.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/2023-02-15-lazenby-v2.png?w=1024)
Oblivion With Bells 