Reasons to Build a Birdhouse, Among Other Things

There is an argument made by Ernest Becker in his unsettlingly lucid book The Denial of Death (1973) that has never stopped gnawing at the edges of modern self-understanding. Man’s greatest cruelties, he says, do not arise from his baser animal instincts, but from the earnestness of his attempt to transcend them — from the unbearable tension between his mortal flesh and his immortal imagination, from the struggle to superimpose the symbolic world onto the physical one. Man, Becker wrote, is “a god who shits”: a being forever caught between the extremes of divinity and decay. Between the body’s rot and the mind’s grandeur lies all of history’s blood and folly.

The typical modern explanation for evil (greed, lust, power, rage, etc.) is too tidy. Becker’s diagnosis cuts deeper. In his view, it more often springs from aspiration: from man’s refusal to be merely what he is. The desire to live forever, if not biologically then symbolically, leads men and nations alike to mythologize themselves, to fashion illusions of permanence. When those illusions are threatened, they respond with fury, because what is at stake is not pride but ontological survival.

Consider Nazi Germany. The Third Reich was not merely a political movement but a metaphysical one. A cult of purity promising transcendence through annihilation. The Jew became the symbol of everything that reminded man of his vulnerability and imperfection: fleshly, frail, mortal. In eradicating him, the Nazi sought to eradicate the part of himself that could decay. It was a mad project of purification. The Holocaust, in this sense, was not animal savagery but the catastrophic expression of the human wish to be more than animal.

But even outside such extremity, Becker’s framework reveals the psychological scaffolding of modern life. The United States, for instance, still carries the myth of its postwar divinity: the belief that it was not merely powerful, but chosen. America’s restlessness on the global stage — its military obsessions, its interventions and moral crusades, its endless rhetoric of “greatness” — stems not from appetite but from anxiety. It cannot bear the humiliation of ordinariness. Nations, like individuals, construct their immortality projects and when those projects begin to crumble, they grasp all the more fiercely at the myth.

This anxiety is not confined to geopolitics. It lives in each of us. The parent who pushes a child to “achieve more,” the artist who fears obscurity, the employee who defines himself by his designation, all are engaged in their own symbolic projects. They build small monuments against oblivion. In an age of digital performance, the phenomenon has only grown more feverish: our timelines and curated identities are not records of life but proofs against vanishing. We post, we archive, we announce not merely to be seen, but to assert that we are not yet gone. The fear that one’s existence will leave no mark is, in Becker’s sense, the deepest of all human terrors.

And yet, Becker’s insight, grim as it sounds, is not nihilistic. It is, rather, a form of compassion sharpened by irony. If evil springs from our terror of death, then to confront that terror truthfully may be the only “rational” act left. To admit the finitude of life, without fleeing into ideology, nationalism, or self-worship, is to live more fully within it. In other words, sanity lies not in denial but in reconciliation. But here too, Becker is equivocal, for he quotes Pascal, who said, “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

If man could make peace with his own vanishing, history might grow merciful. He would no longer need to kill, conquer, or postulate eternity to reassure himself that he exists. The wars of identity and ideology, of race, nation, creed, would lose their glamour, because the fear that feeds them would lose its bite. Until then, humanity remains what it has always been: a creature standing upright in defiance of dust, forever inventing symbols to outlast its bones. We have built empires and extermination camps for the same reason we build shrines and love poems — because we cannot bear to die completely. Becker’s cruel mercy was to remind us that we will, and that it is all right.

And yet, the older I grow, the more I sense in myself the same urge Becker described: not to deny death, but to preserve what death so easily erases. I have no empires to defend, nor ideology to uphold, but the modest world of those who came before me: my middle-class parents and grandparents, who left behind habits of care, thrift, and decency. Their legacies were ordinary, yet their shoes feel impossibly large. Perhaps this urge to protect their memory is the first stirring of another — the wish to build my own small continuity against time. Maybe this is how it begins, this confrontation with mortality.

My grandmother used to feed the sparrows broken rice every morning. She would stand in the courtyard, scattering grain with a rhythm that had remained unchanged over decades. She would smile and say they always remembered to come. In the years since, the sparrows have thinned from the northern cities; people say they are vanishing. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps it is only that we have stopped waiting for them. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that their disappearance is somehow my fault, though it probably isn’t.

Now, when I see a few of them in my yard, small and brown against the white wall, I feel a kind of easing. They come for the rice I scatter in a shallow dish, and they stay to nest in the birdhouse my husband built from leftover wood. It is not much, a small house nailed to an old neem tree. On blissful October afternoons, I get glimpses of a future: my husband building more birdhouses, my son’s laughter as he hands him the nails, my daughter’s palms cupping the grain. 

I will watch, and someday, when I am gone, I hope the birds will still keep coming.

“If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil that men have wreaked upon themselves and upon their world since the beginnings of time right up until tomorrow, it would be not in terms of man’s animal heredity, his instincts and his evolution: it would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes, as he tries to deny his true condition.”
- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.