How awareness of our mortality may be a major driver of civilization
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climbing-mount-immortality&print=true
I particularly like the concept of "Terror
Management Theory - awareness of one's mortality focuses the mind to
create and produce to avoid the terror that comes from confronting the
mortality paradox that would otherwise, in the words of the theory's
proponents psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom
Pyszczynski, reduce people to 'twitching blobs of biological protoplasm
completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond to
the demands of their immediate surroundings.'"
This reminds me of the quote from Salmon Rushdie about us all having a God shaped hole inside us which we are constantly trying to fill, and that art, creation, suggests itself to us for this purpose : "I, too, possess the same God-shaped hole. Unable to accept the
unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with
literature"
When googling this, I found a follow up quote from Rushdie which is also worth repeating : "I used to say: "there is a God-shaped hole in me." For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important."
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