Archetypes, Stereotypes, and the Absence of Knowledge

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All knowledge is ultimately self-referential, imbued with only such meaning as we choose to give it.

The archetype is a difficult idea to grasp within Jungian psychology. Archetypes are thought to exist within our psyche, being innately derived. Jung suggested that their existence is due to our connection with the collective unconscious, a broad sharing of the unconscious mind across humanity and across the aeons. While this can have spiritual overtones – and to Jung it likely did – it can also be interpreted using a less spiritual framework. Archetypes can be considered as a set of psychological memes passed down socioculturally through the generations, perhaps reinforced genetically by some basic similarities between all humans in terms of how our brains are neuroanatomically formed.

Archetypes include our Self – the person we both are and aim to be; the Shadow – those traits that lie hidden within ourselves, and often from ourselves; and the Anima/Animus – the part of our psyche that allows us to understand and communicate with the opposite sex. It’s also perhaps possible to consider our Persona – the person we project to others – as a form of archetype, although I consider it a simpler more superficial entity than the others mentioned.

When these archetypes come into contact with the world, a number of consistent mythic symbols are created to understand them. They have been referred to as symbols, motifs or archetypes-as-such. I like to think of them as Stereotypes. Stereotyping is often thought of as a bad thing these days, but in truth, the Stereotype has an important beneficial function. They are widely-held, over-simplified views but that also makes them very useful as a short-cut to understanding the world. Stereotypical forms of archetypes include the mythological motifs of the hero, the wise old man, the earth mother, and so on.

As we perceive the world around us, we do not process every situation as being fresh data. Consider: colours are not real; colour is a perception, or construct, based on the wavelength of photons hitting our retinas. Similarly, what we think of other people are also not actually real people; they are constructs based on the data we receive from those entities. We each possess a personalised understanding of who other people are, and what they mean. There is no objective reference yardstick by which to measure them. We interpret their existence both consciously through reason, and unconsciously through archetypes and stereotypes.

A careful reader might now suggest that if conscious thought and reason can allow interpretation, then this potentially provides a scientific approach to understanding. This is only true if reason itself is independent of archetypal influence. As our rules of reason are human constructs, we cannot be entirely certain that this is so. Munchhausen’s Trilemma (also known as Agrippa’s Trilemma) suggests that any line of reasoning can eventually be boiled down to one of three arguments: circular, regressive and axiomatic. Circular arguments depend on the theory and proof supporting each other, regressive arguments become a never-ending series of proofs, and axiomatic arguments are based on an assumption of correctness.

This is a difficult proposal to accept, but consider a child asking why the sky is blue. You could argue that the sky is blue because we have defined the colour we perceive it to be as blue: a circular argument that ends the debate but does not fundamentally answer the question. You could humour the child by discussing wavelengths of photons and the energy they carry, the effect that energy has on the retina, transduction mechanisms, post-processing of the transducted stimuli into perceptions, psychological constructs of perception, the concept of a construct, the meaning of a concept, and so on, without ever really getting to a final irrefutable proof. This regressive approach allows for a vast expansion of knowledge, but at some point you have to limit your field of study, or be trapped in a never-ending sequence of “but why?”s. Finally, the poor parent of our inquisitive child may simply snap, and say “it just is”: a mere axiomatic assertion of truth.

You can choose to accept any one of the three horns of trilemma and still carry out much productive work, but that does not answer the trilemma’s problem.

Jung’s archetypes and the stereotypes that result from them could be conceived of as humanity’s practical solution to the trilemma. They give us a framework for understanding ourselves, each other, and the ideas and concepts we create, without us ending up in a never-ending morass of “unknowability”. Of course, archetypal theory is in itself just as trapped by the dilemma as is any other idea (and indeed, is the trilemma itself, if you want to give yourself a headache). But it does allow us to think about who we are in a practical way, and consider who we might become.

Buddhists have the concept of sunyata or “emptiness”, which seems to my limited understanding of the term to be a similar concept. It suggests a middle way between the nihilism and anomie of nothing being provably real and the illogicallity of considering what we think of as real being necessarily true. It hints at a way of finding meaning in the emptiness by embracing it and finding oneself in that void. Jung might call that individuation, the ultimate manifestation of one’s potential self.

All knowledge is ultimately self-referential, imbued with only such meaning as we choose to give it. And what a wonderful opportunity and privilege of our humanity that is.

The Modern-Day Monk

It is not surprising that several guests at Friday’s Royal Wedding were anonymously quoted as “feeling jaded” yesterday. Anticipation of great events is commonly followed by a drained numbness, even if the event meets elevated expectations. Life thus passes by as a series of interspersed highs and, if not lows, mediocre neutrals. Is this the sum total of the human experience?

Man has historically found three ways to neutralise this nihilistic perspective: fame, religion and propagation.

Fame, with its associated glamour, can be fleeting or it can last a lifetime. Occasionally it outlasts its originating source and is considered worthy – or notorious – enough to be important to historical and cultural record. Whether transient or semi-permanent, its nourishment to the famous person is thin when weighed against the permanence of death. It can sustain the mind in the short-term, but is ultimately lacking.

To combat this failure of Temporal Power to assuage anomie, religion developed to offer believers escape from death, whether through reincarnation or heaven. Such Spiritual Might remains a comfort to many, channelling and guiding human emotion into soothingly predictable paths. Like Temporal Power, it offers individuals a larger sense of self that is part of a grander existence than Hobbes’ description of Man’s life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

But for many, meaningful fame is impossible (the Warhol-esque 15 minutes of reality TV or social networking hardly counts) and religious faith escapes them, or is actively shunned. Frequently, their final refuge is propagation and it is a rare parent indeed that does not think of their children as the best thing they ever did.

Creating the next generation is certainly a valuable role; I would not want to see the human species wiped out! But does it truly offer a solution to the impermanence of man? I suggest not; the real essence of even the best of parents is lost from collective memory within at most four generations. As long as the parent does not think too deeply about this inevitable historical dissipation, Familial Legacy can substitute for either Temporal Power or Spiritual Might and stave off despair at the prospect of death.

What if none of the above are to the liking of the individual, if all are thought to fail the essential test of overcoming fear of death and giving life meaning, what then?

Enter the Modern-Day Monk.

The archetype of the man who seeks spiritual enlightenment through disengagement from the world is an ancient one. We see echoes of his presence in all the major world religions, mythologies and philosophies. Traditionally, the Monk has sought physical separation from the world; either to wander alone or in the company of select fellow travellers on a similar journey. He has used asceticism as a tool to aid enlightenment. Asceticism encourages the abandonment of sensual pleasure and material wealth, deeming these to be distractions from personal growth.

The Modern-Day Monk follows a different path to individuation. It is not physical abandonment of the world that is important, but intellectual detachment. This detachment from the value systems of others (the Temporal, Spiritual and Familial spheres) nonetheless permits material and emotional engagement with the world. He is able to weigh up and measure situations and people rapidly, allowing only positive effects through to his inner self. He comes across to others as tolerant and moderate, as he has no need to be otherwise. He enjoys the world, but does not let the world rule his inner heart. And in the face of new challenges, he has an inner core of willpower – a clear sense of self – to neutralise against torment.

The more philosophically (or religiously) minded will have already identified the characteristics outlined in the preceding four sentence as the Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude respectively. The virtues are named Cardinal for being the hinge (L. cardo) upon which rests the door of life. It is not the door to a physical retreat from the world as the first step to an afterlife. It is a system to support and enhance our human desire to be part of the world, while not being ruled by it.

The Modern-Day Monk lives well, as well as wisely.

Suicide in Japan

Japan has an unusually difficult to interpret culture, at least to Western eyes. Its centuries of self-imposed isolation from the world under the Sakoku foreign policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Edo period lent it a unique degree of insularity.

That this policy was only terminated under the duress of gunboat diplomacy when Commodore Perry sailed his “black ships” into Yokohoma Bay perhaps explains the sense of anxious inferiority that drove the country into the imperialism and breakneck economic development of the Meiji Restoration, and the militarism and nationalism underpinning the run-up to WWII.

The contrast between its remarkable rebound in the post-war years and the prolonged deflationary spiral of economic stagnation since the bursting of its property bubble in 1991 also tends to perplex outsiders.

I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of months working and studying in Japan many years ago, but cannot say I was able to do more than barely scratch the surface of this complex culture. Gaijin are always treated politely, respectfully, and with generous hospitality, but one was often not entirely certain of underlying attitude, and even sometimes definitely aware of the use of a carefully-applied mask of civility in order to maintain a sense of separation.

The complexity and insularity of their culture means that social norms within Japan can vary quite significantly from the rest of the world, and these norms are more likely to be maintained despite changing times. A striking example is the Japanese attitude to suicide. The esteem in which ritual suicide (seppuku) was held as an honourable solution to otherwise an unbearable situation is certainly not unique to Japanese culture. Similar deliberate ending of life to restore societal balance can be found in a number of cultures:  the falling on swords of classical Rome, and the Jauhur and Sati of Mughal India spring instantly to mind, and there are isolated individual examples in many other societies too. Still, the cultural background to suicide in Japan perhaps goes some way to explaining its persistently high rate.

Japan, by the most conservative estimate, has about 26 suicides per 100,000 population. The USA has 11, and the UK just 9. And with the impact of the 2008 financial crisis only adding to the longer-term economic malaise, the cost of those suicides on economic stability is climbing too, with estimates of 2.7 trillion yen (well over £20 billion) of lost output and costs due to suicide last year. Some of the associated costs are poignant in the extreme, and the spectre of a downward spiral of economic contraction and climbing suicide rates is an even more tragic thought than the deflationary spiral they’ve been trapped in for so long. The government is now trying to reduce the rate, but cultural attitudes are notoriously hard to shift.

The illustration is a cropped portion of Tatsumi Shimura’s Hanafubuki (Falling Cherry Blossom). The transient but beautiful cherry blossom season is metaphorically associated in Japan with the ephemeral nature of life itself. During the war, cherry blossoms were painted on kamikaze suicide mission planes; pilots sometimes even took cherry tree branches into the cockpit.

Sakura festivals are still held to celebrate the onset of the annual cherry blossom season, and I was fortunate enough to be able to time my own visit to Japan to coincide with the season. The TV news tracks the progress of the season as it gradually moves northwards through the country, and my itinerary let me celebrate the onset of the season twice, some weeks apart, in disparate parts of the country. Life and cherry blossom are indeed ephemeral but that’s no reason not to arrange them to your liking while you can.

What are you worth?

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How do we define value? What makes one thing more valuable than another? And does that logic apply to human beings?

These questions hinge on a deeper question about reality. If reality is just a sum of human constructs – an agreed consensus framework – then value itself must also be subjective and ultimately a question of mutual consent. If reality is objectively true – if it exists independent of human perception – then it should be possible to use the framework of that higher reality to determine what is valuable and what is not.

Fundamentally, this is an unanswerable question, so I prefer to short-circuit it. There may or may not be a higher reality, but because I am human all I can know about reality is limited by my own perceptions, and the same is true for each living being on this planet. Therefore, even if there is a higher truth, humans have no objective way of assessing whether they recognise it correctly, so it is better and more practical for all concerned to be operate within the lower, subjective, consensus model of reality.

In this model, each of us brings to the table a unique perspective on the world. Reality is the net sum of all those perspective, weighted by our relative abilities to influence other people’s perspectives. The value of something is determined by the sum total of the world’s opinion on its value. This is a very circular proposition, as if something has traditionally been highly valued, it will tend to remain so. If it has traditionally been valued lowly, it would take a paradigm shift (e.g. a revolution) for its higher value to be recognised by a critical mass of humanity.

Thus, gold is valuable because it has been traditionally used as a valuable material. Proxy reasons include its relative durability, its scarcity, and its difficulty of extraction, but the same is true of any number of different commodities, metal or otherwise. Gold is pre-eminent in the human psyche as a marker of value because it has culturally cemented its position over millenia of use.

Over more recent centuries, certain currencies like the US Dollar, the Japanese Yen, and the British Pound Sterling have also been highly valued as so-called “reserve currencies“, held in relative esteem over others not because of the intrinsic worth of the paper – or electrons – underlying their value, but because of faith in those countries’ ability to repay their debts consistently. Whether they all hold their positions into the future remains to be seen, given Moody’s downbeat assessment of the USA’s credit-worthiness and the general concerns over sovereign debt levels.

But ultimately, whether these currencies retain their value or not will be down to the same reason why gold retains its value or not: faith in the mutually agreed consensus on reality and the worth of objects within it. It sometimes scares people to think of our entire financial system being built upon pure faith, but it should not be a frightening proposition once you consider that our entire reality is also built upon pure faith in much the same way. Of course, some have gone insane pondering that latter issue…

If the mutual consent of a large enough group of people can determine value, that means that ideas, and not just commodities and currencies, can be differentially valued. One aspect of this is politics. Over the long-term, countries get the governments the majority of their populations want. That applies just as much to tyrannies as to democracies; it’s merely the way that governments change that varies. Democracies are more sensitive to changes in large-scale public opinion, but it really is only a matter of degree.

If commodities, currencies and ideas can be valued in this way, it is not a significant stretch to realise that humans can also be compared, both as individuals and as groups. Some readers will be appalled by this, and point out that this line of thinking led to atrocities like the Holocaust and similar episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They are right, of course. But the process of considering one person as more valuable than another still happens. For instance, on a small scale, family members and mutual friends generally value each others’ happiness higher than they do a stranger’s. If all humans were equally worthy in their eyes, this would not happen.

What then is the counterweight to prevent genocide?

Merely that a large mass of humanity also consensually agrees that despite our implicit measuring of value of one person versus another, we also choose as a population to limit the impact of that value judgement on smaller groups in society. This is a paper-thin protection against abuse, but all our societies can ultimately do.

On a less dramatic, but perhaps even more meaningful, scale, these relative valuations of one human’s life against another underpin the field of cost-utility analysis, which is increasingly used by governments, agencies and companies worldwide, to determine how best to spend money in order to maximise value. It’s all about getting the biggest bang for your buck for the most people for the greatest amount of time… and if you think about that carefully, you’ll realise that will always persistently work to the advantage of some groups relative to others. For instance, in healthcare, such QALY assessments will consistently benefit younger people relative to the elderly.

So, value is both mutable and dependent on mutual consent. Reality is as thin and fragile as a pane of glass, and it is only because we add our panes together that a viable edifice can be constructed. Our societies implictly use this model of value to determine the relative worth of ideas, objects, people and even money itself. And they will only value us as individuals or groups if we can convince a sufficient mass of others that we are indeed worthwhile.

If that sounds too tiring a task, the only alternative is limiting contact with society to necessity and protecting one’s isolated position by accumulating sufficient quantities of things that society already finds valuable.

The themes of this post are explored further in the next two entries:

• Risk and Reward
• Wandering the Desert

The Higher Path

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Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions. The patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture.

But for the one who has deliberately undertaken the difficult and dangerous journey beyond the village compound, these interests too are to be regarded as based on error.

With these words in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the two types of journey most humans travel on through their lives, and the different ways they can react to therapy.

One group – the majority – seek out only a return to a shared delusion of normality: “the last projected fantasies of primitive physical will to live like other human beings; the will to live according to normal motives of desire and hostility, in a delusory ambient of phenomenal causes, ends and means”. This is nothing more than procrastination, but many people are not ready for something more, and at least it allows them to function within society.

Another group seek something higher. The subconscious conflict they feel between a yearning for life/flesh and a wish for death/peace is such that before they can return to the normal world, they must walk a different path. Many religions attempt to find a solution by theorising that the mortal life is fundamentally flawed (“sinful”), only to be redeemed after death; or that a true understanding of life can only come about through leaving behind physical limitations and accepting a transcendental unity (Buddhism). Clearly, these can be interpreted as two sides of the same coin.

Can this sense of tranquillity with existence be achieved during life itself? Again, I find myself returning to Epicurus for an answer:

• We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics
• The tranquil man is not troublesome to himself or to another
• There is also a limit to frugality. The man unable to consider this suffers a similar end as the man who indulges in excess
• The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom

All are taken from the Vatican Sayings, but I have taken the liberty of re-ordering them to make this point: the more the noble soul involves himself in the affairs of those trapped in unhappy states, the unhappier he will become. That does not mean he looks down on others, but simply recognises he operates differently. By limiting his exposure to the necessary minimum for his needs, he will be as free as possible.

And from freedom, comes tranquillity, or true happiness.

The Happiness Equation

The Ancients worshipped a varied pantheon with a myriad of priests. In a creditable effort to simplify matters, people decided that a more streamlined arrangement was needed. After a temporary flirtation with a Trinity, the modern world setted on dualism, it being easier to practise as it has one fewer deity to remember. The twin gods of Money and Time have fought for the souls of men ever since.

Money has the High Priests of the Square Mile and the Central Banks, worshipping in cathedrals dedicated to either Keynes or Hayek (there being something of a sectarian schism between those two tribes), whilst Time has New Age Gurus, the Remnant of the Older Religions and the ever-thriving self-help and positive psychology industry fighting in its corner. Management Consultants merrily straddle the netherworld betwixt the two religions, drawing on elements of each mythology to subtly further their vampiric aim of feeding off the life energy of everyone else…

Both religions offer the prospect of happiness. Put simply: the more money you have, the more of a shield you have from the viccissitudes of life and the more power you have to acquire things that please you; and the more time you have, the more opportunity you have to enjoy your purchases and to be with those whose company you appreciate. Both approaches therefore essentially worship the same god behind the curtains: Control.

The most fundamental thing people seek is a sense of control over their lives: a sense of choice, and of decisions freely made from a position of insight.

Money and Time are just proxy measures of this inner sense of calm. Like any proxy measure, the degree of linkage can vary. I’ve blogged before that the relationship of Money to Happiness is sigmoidal, with a significant “flat” part in the graph where only small incremental increases in happiness occur between solid (but modest) incomes and truly astronomical ones. I’ve also disccussed how being more efficient can lead to more free time, but the question still arises of what to actually do with that free time in order to be happy.

Money and Time are necessary but not sufficient conditions for a sense of control over one’s destiny. Some achieve this by paradoxically ceding all control to another entity: a God, a Political Party, a Cause. Despite my tongue-in-cheek commentary in the first couple of paragraphs, absolute faith in an extraneous entity remains a potent way of reaching a sense of destiny, and so, inner peace.

However, those of us whose personality and natural inclination veers away from the prospect of giving up our individuality to a larger body, this is cannot be a solution. Religion, Politics, and Causes offer happiness only if you can give of yourself fully to them so your own individual existence no longer matters, and only the wider project does. A cult member is blissfully happy in their belief system, but a chink of doubt quickly leads to collapse of the edifice.

For the rest of us, we have to look within to create our own sense of destiny and meaning, and so achieve happiness. Money and Time form the solid foundations, Insight provides the labour, and Control creates the conduit to Happiness.

Mistress Fate vs Lady Luck

There is an eternal battle fought out across the entire gamut of human experience from quantum physics and abstruse philosophy right through to our daily lives.

The two players in this game compete under many guises: Destiny and Chance, Causality and Spontaneity, Order and Chaos, Linearity and Turbulence, Mistress Fate and Lady Luck. But the rules of the game are always the same: are we governed by a pre-destined pattern or are our lives merely a cumulation of dice rolls.

While most of us will hold an intellectual opinion on this, even if we haven’t thought about it much before, it’s interesting to observe just how quickly our preconceptions collapse in the face of adversity. I’ve seen atheists turn to fervent prayer in times of psychological crisis, and the zealously pious lose their faith. Pain – mental or physical – challenges our assumptions about the world, including the role of chance.

Most of us normally operate under a fundamental attribution error in our worldview: we tend to view others’ misfortune as deserved and our own as bad luck. Or conversely, we assume our success is down to hard work and that of others as the equivalent of a  fortunate lottery win. This has a corrosive effect on both our ability to read situations accurately and on our ability to understand ourselves. In short, it diminishes our insight. And poor insight causes us to make poor decisions, limiting our scope for happiness.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus has an elegant solution to the problem:

Some things happen by necessity, others as the result of chance. Other things are subject to our control.

… Necessity is not accountable to anyone [and] chance is unstable, but what lies in our control is subject to no master. It naturally follows then that blame or praise attend our decisions.

Understanding that chance is neither a god… nor an unstable cause of all things, the wise man does not think that either good or evil is furnished by chance to humankind for the purpose of living a happy life, but that the opportunity for great good or evil are bestowed by it. He thinks that it is preferable to remain prudent and suffer ill fortune, than it is to enjoy good luck while acting foolishly.

It is better in human actions that the sound decision fail than that the rash decision turn out well due to luck.

- Epicurus, on Prudence, from the Letter to Menoeceus.

Epicurus’ solution to the never-ending war between Mistress Fate and Lady Luck is thus deliciously simple: Ignore it.

If we cannot alter destiny and we cannot affect chance, then there isn’t any point worrying about which is true. All we can do is take decisions with as much information and insight as we can muster, to be prudent in our choices, and to accept the consequences with equanimity as they were the best decisions we could make at the time.

Think, but don’t stress.

Data, data, everywhere

Today saw the publication of more scientific evidence supporting my position on the topic of weight loss that I discussed a while ago.

It is interesting to see how the culture of evidence-based medicine has led to an explosion of data and associated studies, which often proves little more than what is already self-evident. This is especially so for audit-based study rather than fresh research, but the problem of inefficiency and unnecessary duplication of work applies to both fields. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely appreciate it when a good scientific study verifies the benefit (or otherwise!) of an intervention. But the sheer obsession with evidence that now exists is indicative of a broader cultural malaise resulting in a society focused on data rather than people, and it is not unique to medical practice.

We have a historically unparalleled ability to extract immense amounts of data from our daily lives. We are monitored, measured and tracked continuously. CCTV cameras, security access cards, withdrawing money from a bank, using a credit card, making telephone calls, using sat-nav, browsing the internet, even sitting quietly reading a book in a library… almost everything we do generates an electronic papertrail and all that data can be collated, processed and analysed. And much of it is.

Correlations inevitably emerge, hypotheses will be formed and theories are generated which can then draw significant and sometimes conflicting followings. In this situation evidence is more often used as a propaganda tool than a means to reveal truth. Every new bit of data is interpreted within pre-existing intellectual positions rather than being used to drive us towards deeper understanding and a better appreciation of an underlying truth.

Innovation – the ability to think outside conventional paradigms – is stifled rather than encouraged by this obsession with evidence and data. Protocol is followed at the expense of originality. The excessive amount of data and the studies that emerge results in analysis-paralysis and a tendency towards ineffective intellectual inertia.

The individual genius, unless of a fearsomely driven character, will become exasperated by the burden of needing to prove his position to the world and will withdraw from an active role in society in favour of protecting himself from it. Thus, in the longer term it is our culture that will suffer for this excessive reliance on “evidence”.

Success

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants.

Bob Dylan, Singer/Songwriter

read at the impossible cool.

Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows

Ambrose Bierce, Journalist & Fabulist

An interesting pair of quotes I came across today. True?

Death

“One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation.”

- Oscar Wilde

Death remains our fiercest taboo.

Uniquely on this planet, humans are able to anticipate their own death. A friend recently asked if we think enough about it, so I felt obliged to offer my own thoughts.

Death lurks in the darkest recesses of our collective psyche. The major world religions have all devised strategies for side-stepping death. According to the Jewish Talmud, the soul maintains a relationship with the body for a year after death. The righteous then gain entrance to Paradise (Gan Eden) and the wicked are cast into Geihinnom (transliterated to Greek as Gehenna). At the coming of Messiah, Orthodox Jews believe the soul will return to the dust and the body resurrected.

Christianity incorporated this belief in a life after death, refining notions of Heaven and Hell and the concept of a Judgement Day where the worth of souls is weighed and measured to determine whether one is doomed to burn in Hell or live forever at God’s side. Islam also claims a reward of life after death if one lives according to that religion’s values during life. Hinduism and Buddhism don’t go that far. Instead they recycle mortal life until Moksha or Nirvana is reached, at which time unity with the universe itself (another form of life everlasting) is achieved.

The totalitarian political ideologies of the 20th century – communism and fascism – attempted to override our fear of death by creating greater fear of the State. Both failed to frighten us enough, and so failed as ideologies themselves. The ideology that survived the 20th century – capitalism – instead uses Money, as the key secondary reinforcer, to substitute for religious salvation. By chasing money, we forget to chase life’s meaning, and instead can live in a drug-addled haze of false hope.

If religion and politics have both failed to solve the problem of death, perhaps we should turn to philosophy. The Ancients focused on what made for a just or a happy life, in the belief that this would assuage the eventual pain of death. Epicurus bravely tried to define death out of existence as it being merely “the deprivation of sensation” and so not to be feared. More recent thinkers have welcomed death as freeing us from the burden of life (Schopenhauer) or that death is as meaninglessness and non-existent as life (nihilism and its postmodern variants).

Psychology also attempts to help us accept death. Erik Erikson suggested that human existence has eight stages, the last of which is characterised by a conflict between feelings of integrity at a life well-lived and despair at its imminent end. Acceptance is brought about by the wisdom to acknowledge that on balance the positive was enough. It is a hopeful thought, that in the end we will be able to sigh, smile and breathe our last with contentment. I like the idea, but wonder if it is possible.

Humanity also still yearns for something more. Science Fiction is full of tales of DNA rejuvenation, human/computer interfaces and other fantastical devices for indefinitely prolonging life. Barely a month goes by without a feature in one of the glossy Sunday supplements of age-defying new medical therapies just over the horizon that will allow mankind to live forever. Craig Ventner recently hit the headlines when he created a synthetic cell, and one of the first questions journalists asked was whether it was a way to eternal life. The Grail Myth and its Elixir of Eternal Youth never quite disappears…

But for all these attempts to understand or evade Death, we can forget something more vital. We are a Death Cult. Our awareness of death has forced mankind to think, to adapt, to evolve, to strive to outwit the Reaper. It is the ultimate mother of invention. Our lives are seen through the prism of our mortality. Fear of death has built modern civilisation.