News & Events
Department of Social Science Hosts Talk on Psychological Roots of Terrorism
In December 2003, Professor Sheldon Solomon made a riveting presentation on his research on the psychological roots of terrorism at the invitation of City Tech's Department of Social Science. Solomon teaches psychology at Skidmore College in upstate New York and has written extensively on the psychological reasons for intercultural conflict. The Solomon presentation was suggested by Professor Julie Tison.
"Solomon's talk was based on the book he co-authored, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, written at the request of the American Psychological Association," according to Social Science Professor Costas Panayotakis, who provided detailed background for this story. "In an especially engaging manner," says Panayotakis, "Solomon outlined the theoretical premises of his analysis, with special reference to the late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker's pioneering works in this area, Escape from Evil and The Denial of Death, which won a Pulitzer Prize."
Solomon began his presentation by noting that the events of September 11 were neither as unprecedented nor as unique as we may be inclined to believe, for human history is filled with the type of violent intercultural conflict that Becker's thinking (a synthesis of Darwin's insights and the existential philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard) helps to explain.
One of the distinctive characteristics of human beings, Solomon went on to note, is the awareness that we are going to die, an awareness (in both Kierkegaard and Becker's view) that invests human existence with an irreducible anxiety. Becker argued that human beings try to neutralize this anxiety through culture -- in other words, through collectively shared sets of beliefs that help people come to terms with and symbolically transcend their own mortality. Thus, most religions extend to the faithful, in one way or another, the promise of eternal life (immortality). Individual human beings also overcome the sense of insignificance that can result from an awareness of the inevitability of their own demise through participation in and contribution to a culture that will outlive them.
The encounter of cultural difference is deeply
disconcerting, Solomon's research confirms, because it makes relative
and implicitly challenges the tenets of a given people's death-denying
beliefs. In such a situation it is tempting for them to reaffirm
the validity of their own beliefs by downgrading and even destroying
those of another culture.
The sobering implication of this state of affairs is that intercultural
conflicts are likely to persist even in the absence of economic,
political or social motivations that might contribute to such discord.
Solomon concluded his remarks by raising the question of how peaceful
coexistence among cultures could be reconciled with the darker psychological
impulses that existential anxiety about death seems to generate.
The answer to this question is all the more urgent in a period of
human history which, according to Harvard's John M. Olin Institute
for Strategic Studies director Samuel Huntington, is likely to be
characterized by an escalating "clash of civilizations."
The Solomon presentation -- which was well attended by students and faculty from the Department of Social Science and other academic areas -- was part of an ongoing series of distinguished speakers initiated last year with an earlier talk by Peter Parides on "atom diplomacy" during World War II. The goal of the series is to spotlight research in the broad field of social science and to enrich the City Tech educational experience through presentations by outstanding scholars and researchers from the College or other institutions. It is coordinated by the Department of Social Science's Presentations Committee and strongly supported by Dean Annette Schaefer of the School of Arts & Sciences.
