The Animal at Unease with Itself. Isaac M. Alderman
our behavior.[30] Terror management theory was developed to understand the many behaviors that are influenced by death anxiety and is demonstrably effective at explaining the impact of death anxiety on human behavior.[31] At its most basic, terror management theory suggests that humans distance themselves from death-related thoughts by the development of defensive cultural systems that allow humans to symbolically separate themselves from the rest of the animal world. Hundreds of experimental studies have demonstrated the relationship between thoughts of death and the perceived boundary between humans and other animals. To oversimplify: if one is reminded of death, one more forcefully negates human creatureliness by emphasizing the uniqueness of human beings; if one is reminded of the similarities between humans and other animals, death thoughts become more accessible. Lastly, if one is reminded of the superiority of humans over other animals, or of the impressiveness of human society, death anxiety recedes, and death thoughts are less accessible. In addition to the knowledge of our own mortality, another uniquely human trait, related yet most likely evolutionarily distinct, is the emotion of disgust. Although disgust originated as a mechanism to prevent eating or to force the ejection of certain foods, it evolved to include the rejection of ideas. As the emotion of disgust evolved, it diversified such that several types of disgust can now be said to govern different domains. Animal reminder disgust is the aspect of the emotion disgust which has appropriated the food ejection response and utilizes it as a way of rejecting ideas that remind humans of their animality. Animal reminder disgust is an essential corollary to terror management theory because it also impacts the cognitive acts involved in the processes of reading, writing, and storytelling.
My initial interest in applying the insights of cognitive science to reading and interpretation was from an interest in emotion, particularly that of disgust. Few would dispute that reading triggers emotions. Aside from it being scientifically demonstrated, it is part of our regular experience as readers of news, scholarship, poetry, and fiction.[32] Most of us have had the experience of crying, cringing, or laughing out loud while reading, and we might generally notice emotions like happiness or anger when we read. Disgust is also a powerful emotion that can also be elicited while reading. The passage that first brought my attention to the visceral experience of reading was an account of the Buddhist scholar Edward Conze. On his morning train, Conze opened the newspaper on August 7, 1945, to the headline that Hiroshima had been bombed. He wrote,
I have a very deep stomach, and normally cannot be sick. But on this occasion I vomited straight out the window. This was prophetic insight. For at that moment, human history had lost its meaning.[33]
I doubt that many of us have ever had such a powerful physical response to something we have read, but the simple fact that words on a page can induce vomiting is itself astonishing enough to lead one to keep this in mind when interpreting the biblical text. Moreover, the emotional response of disgust has cognitive effects that are more subtle but perhaps more significant than being physically ill. As literary theorist David Cave points out, the act of reading and writing by ancient storytellers utilizes the same brain architecture, cognitive processes, and emotional systems that we use today, for with only 6,000 years or so since the invention of writing, not enough time has passed for our brains to have evolved in any meaningful way with regard to reading and writing.[34] This neurobiological connectedness can be an aid to interpretation. That is, cognitive research not only tells us about ourselves, but about the working of the human brain, which includes the brains of the authors of scripture.
There has been surprisingly little done to integrate terror management theory into the study of religion. This oversight is surprising because
religion appears to be the paradigmatic means by which to manage our terror of death in which we can belong to something larger than ourselves that will live on past any individual believer, but also due to the promise of an immortal afterlife. . . . Recently, TMT theorists have also claimed that “religious worldviews provide a uniquely powerful form of existential security. Indeed, there may be no antidote to the human fear of death quite like religion.”[35]
A 2018 issue of the journal Religion, Brain, and Behavior, from which the above quote was taken, has attempted to draw attention to this oversight with an entire issue devoted to issues such as afterlife beliefs. The journal has published articles which demonstrate a correlation between death anxiety and religiosity, that beliefs increase with that anxiety, and that artificially increasing religious belief can increase death anxiety in the non-religious and decrease it in those who are already believers.[36] There is certainly still much more research to be done in these areas.
It is my view, and the goal of this project, to demonstrate the value of accounting for the role death anxiety might play when reading the Bible. By using the Jahwist’s narrative of creation and life in the garden, we can see that those elements which have been demonstrated to interact with death anxiety—such as animals, the emphasis of the animal-human boundary, and concern for body covering—are present in the narrative and should be taken into consideration. In Genesis 2–3, we see the author’s integration of the issues of life, knowledge of death, and the interaction of human beings with animals. The themes of the knowledge of mortality and human status vis-à-vis other animals are also found in other mythological literature, most notably Genesis 1 and Gilgamesh. However, the scholarly literature on the subject tends to treat these issues atomistically, isolating the inferiority of the animals, human mortality (or lack thereof), the acquisition of knowledge, and the need for clothing, treating these as separate concerns with their own significance and contribution to the narrative. However, the expanding field of cognitive science demonstrates that human death anxiety and human interaction with animals have deep cognitive connections, and many of the insights drawn from that field can contribute to a better understanding of these texts when one recognizes the integral relationship among these issues. By exploring terror management theory and animal reminder disgust, I hope to demonstrate that Genesis 2 and 3 are artfully crafted to deal with the stress of human awareness of its own creatureliness and mortality by creating a great gulf between humans and the rest of the animal world. Humans separate from the animals, and this separation is hardened as they move from being at ease with their nakedness to being, as Derrida puts it, “an animal that is at unease with itself.”[37]
The first chapter will examine the cognitive turn in the humanities and the emerging field of the Cognitive Science of Religion. In the last decade, cognitive science has begun to make its impact felt in biblical studies, having already made interdisciplinary inroads into other aspects of the humanities, such as literature studies. This process is necessarily interdisciplinary, with art and literature now being studied as a cognitive act, not just an aesthetic product. In addition to literature, cognitive insights have been applied to the study of religion and religious texts. The Cognitive Science of Religion is a discipline that attempts to understand religion and religious practice primarily through understanding the cognitive constraints that shape them. This approach is largely directed to examining the origins of religious thought, the transmission and perseverance of these ideas, and religious acts or rituals. I will note here two concepts, the Theory of Mind (mentalizing) and Agency Detection, which are important to the discussion of human embodiment and the intuitive dualism that impacts religion and religious texts. An increasing number of scholars and research programs are endeavoring to study the Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christian origins by focusing on the insights that have been brought to the study of rituals and the transmission of ideas from cognitive science. This opening chapter concludes by examining several of these approaches.
The second chapter then moves from the broad aspects of cognitive science of religion and the cognitive turn and looks at the specific area of terror management theory and the emotion of disgust in regard to animals. Building on Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973), Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski have concluded that death anxiety does indeed drive humans individually and corporately to seek transcendence. Even though I might die, I will indeed live forever symbolically (e.g., through patriotism), genetically (e.g., through descendants), or actually (e.g., through afterlife). Animal reminder disgust is specific to those things that remind humans of their animal origins and involves issues of purity and sanctity. While the origins of disgust in pathogen avoidance and food ejection are clearly related to death, the proponents of terror management theory