Chapter 4: Culture As Armor | Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind
In Chapter 4 of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, I turn to one of Ernest Becker’s central ideas: culture functions as a kind of psychological armor against the knowledge of our mortality.
We know that we will die, but we cannot live every moment fully conscious of that fact. Culture gives us ways to manage this contradiction. Religion, family, work, art, achievement, nationality, morality, and the values we attach to our lives help create a world that feels meaningful, ordered, and enduring.
This chapter begins to explore how these cultural systems protect us from death anxiety but also what happens when the beliefs that give our lives meaning are challenged by other people, other cultures, or other ways of seeing the world.
If the earlier chapters of Glass Bones ask how human beings became conscious of mortality, Chapter 4 asks the next question: What did we build to protect ourselves from knowing it?
This is where Becker’s ideas begin to open into the larger psychological and cultural questions that run throughout the rest of the book.
Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind
Chapter 4: Culture As Armor
