Why might it be that reminders of threats posed by the climate crisis leave us less motivated to act, rather than more? Or that reminders of our mortality leads some people to become more intolerant towards illegal immigrants?

Central to all human desire is our awareness that we will one day die, and our bodies will decompose. Human cultures are shaped by the pressure of living in this certainty: they have been created to shore up our sense of self-worth in the face of our impending return to the dust from which we came. This was the conclusion reached by Ernest Becker, and laid out in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. And it is one that has since been elaborated and even experimentally tested by social psychologists. 

The inevitability of death, and the threat that this poses to our sense of self, is inescapable. What is not inescapable – what is up for negotiation – are the ways in which we choose, collectively, to manage this awareness. 

There is no one strategy, and different cultures manage this existential anxiety in different ways. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time:

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” 

In our book Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity, Tim Kasser and I highlighted two different cultural strategies to help manage fear of death. Both operate by presenting routes to manage existential anxiety, by activating valued parts of a person’s identity and reaffirming cultural beliefs about their self-worth. 

In a culture in which financial status and material possessions are valorised, pursuing these things offers the prospect of establishing a heightened sense of self-worth when confronted, unconsciously, with an awareness of our finitude. In our book, we reviewed some of the empirical evidence that fear of death leads many people living in such cultures to orient towards self-enhancing, materialistic values – with all the damaging personal, social and environmental consequences of prioritising these values. (At Common Cause Foundation, we have explored these consequences at length over many years.)

But our cultures also encourage us to locate our sense of identity and self-worth in our in-group memberships. For this reason, it seems, existential threat tends to promote in-group bias and out-group prejudice, leading to “generalised prejudice”. (We discussed evidence for this perspective in the same book).

Anticipating the social psychological evidence for such effects, James Baldwin located the impetus for racism – the oppression of the other – in this drive to deny mortality. But out-group prejudice may be directed to other species, as well as other groups of humans. 

In managing fear of death, we may strive to construct and maintain the belief that we are in some way different from the rest of nature: that we (perhaps, as just one example, because we are ‘made in the image of God’) are in some way separate from other life. In his remarkable book Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital, James Rowe writes: 

“[Our] disdain for animal nature, and our dependence upon it, spurs fantastical efforts to dominate our bodies, one another, and the more-than-human world in attempts to offset felt servility with felt dominance” (Rowe, p.9). 

This may lead to indifference about the suffering of other species – whether domestic animals raised to be eaten or persecuted wild animals. But it may also lead to antipathy toward nature itself. Sander Koole and Agnes Van den Berg have found that while many humans find nature and wilderness to be a source of awe and inspiration, people also often associate nature and wilderness with fear and terror. Indeed, Koole and Van den Berg found that participants in their studies were significantly more likely to report that they thought about death when they were in wild nature than when they were in either cultivated nature (meadows or grain fields) or the city. Reminders of death, compared to a neutral topic, were also found by these researchers to cause subjects to view cultivated, humanised nature as more beautiful and to rate wild, untamed nature as less beautiful. It seems, then, that thoughts of death lead many individuals to become more appreciative of a safe, tamed landscape (where humans have had extensive influence on the environment) and to become more negative towards wilderness. 

This, perhaps, points to the relationship between two different but conjoined aspects of European colonialism: the drive to oppress indigenous people, and the drive to terraform their lands. 

The historian William Cronin documents changes in the New England landscape in the years following the arrival of European colonisers. In Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, he writes: “For Enlightenment thinkers… the shape of the landscape was a visible confirmation of the state of human society. Both underwent an evolutionary development from savagery to civilisation.”

The failure of mainstream European cultures to metabolise fear of death in a humane and compassionate way may be the overriding driver of the interconnected social and environmental challenges that we confront. We can plan the sociopolitical structure of more humane and sustainable post-Capitalist societies, but any utopian future will flounder until we learn to better metabolise fear of death. 

In broadbrush terms, the implications are clear. 

James Baldwin: 

“It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

And James Rowe: 

“Those of us who are inheritors of European worldviews need to develop new relationships to finitude. We need cultural resources to metabolize embodied death fear and transform existential resentment into a deep affirmation of earthly life.” 

But while it’s clear that there are helpful person-centred responses (mindfulness practices, for example), it’s far less clear how these scale and how they might be best supported through structural change. 

Working with Soumyajit Bhar (BMU University, New Delhi) Common Cause Foundation has been helping to convene initial conversations to begin to respond to that question. If you’d like to know more, or participate in those conversations, do drop us a line (info@commoncausefoundation.org).

Header image by Ahmed Adly on Unsplash