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CounterPunch
March 21,
2003
War, Community and
the Terrors of Childhood
On the Current
Experience of Terror
By RICHARD LICHTMAN
He who is laughing has not yet heard
the terrible news.
Bertolt Brecht
Robert Jensen has written an
important piece on confronting our fears in the process of
building a movement. I wish to build on his view and endorse
his claim that it is a profound error to avoid looking starkly
into the face of what he rightly calls, "free-floating terror."
The experiences of anxiety, terror, guilt
and rage are not rationally chosen and cannot be eliminated by
rational fiat. Denial, as Mr. Jensen notes, may permit one to
"hold back," but it cannot build trust and political
community because in refusing the experience of one's self and
the other, it eliminates what is most compelling in one's immediate
experience. And, since the people whose needs we are attempting
to recognize and gratify are likely to be experiencing the same
terror we are attempting to deny, the strategy amounts to making
ourselves into strong subjects aiding weak "objects."
This approach comes to elevating ourselves above the vulnerabilities
of ordinary life, a position that gives us a sense of superiority
but loses connection with those humans, much like ourselves,
who lack the luxury of our "empowerment."
Yeats wrote in a brilliant poem, "Crazy
Jane Talks to the Bishop," that
nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
Nor can our strength come by denying
the fissures we have endured, the wounds and scars of our human
existence. Mr. Jensen notes how difficult it is to pin down the
object of our terror, the forces that will be unleashed. He comes
closer when he notes that this fear he feels is not
just the unchecked power of the United
States but that Bush and his advisers seem to think they understand
their own power and can control it.....The Bush administration
wants us to be afraid, but remain quiet about it.
Of course unspoken, unacknowledged fear
is debilitating. It harbors the sense of one's own unique inadequacy,
one's failure to be heroic, one's degradation. And so, as Mr.
Jensen notes, it is a vital first step to agree to one's vulnerability.
But it is also crucial that one understand the grounds of one's
feeling of terror and this is where traditional therapy tends
to a fatal mystification. For its general tendency is to personalize
and privatize our emotional experiences, be they fear of annihilation,
or of the destruction of others, or of loss of purpose or of
a bewilderment that resides in the core of our being. None of
these experiences, however, occur beyond the social and political
realms we are attempting to transform. Consider the American
ideals of equality, justice, benevolence, fraternity and freedom.
It is not merely that they are difficult to achieve and that
the actual structure of power in our country negates them. It
is that in moments such as the one we presently confront, they
seem, as they temporarily are, divorced from all power to govern
and direct social events.
So, we are left in a universe devoid
of all moral direction. The simplest verities, such that we should
not kill thousands and hundreds of thousands of people for the
sake of an expansion of wealth in the hands of those who have
no moral claim to its possession or any human awareness of its
significance - this simple truth is not only suspended, but demolished.
In such a world how can we live? If this is the ultimate contour
of the universe, how can we move with any sense that our motion
is more than random, violent and inhuman? Despite the moral platitudes
of the proto-fascists in power, their action is an embodiment
of Hobbsian violence, the war of each against all. It is not
merely that we are afraid of being destroyed by the other; in
such a world we no longer recognize the sense of that humanity
by which we identify ourselves. In short, we experience our own
dissolution. Rampant immorality, swimming in a sea of pervasive
dishonesty and self-serving mendacity, is a recipe for terror.
When it is experienced as inexorable, it has become nightmare.
But even this does not take us far enough.
The experience of helplessness in the face of overwhelming, brutal,
arbitrary, insensitive power is not a new experience. We have
known it before; it is the common ground of childhood, when parents
are completely beyond our influence and act, more or less often
depending on one's fortune, in ways that terrify, abuse, overwhelm
and immobilize us. As children we lack the power to defend ourselves,
speak for ourselves, define ourselves. The adult world has always
the power to crush us, and this is a sense we carry with us into
the "adult" world, however little we are called upon
to confront it in ordinary circumstances. But, of course, these
circumstances are not ordinary.
One more caution. These traumas of early
childhood which continue to reside in our core and continue to
wreak their silent havoc are not inherent in human existence,
a universal characteristic that must be borne. They too derive
in large measure from the social world in which we find ourselves,
they are the personal embodiments of the malignancies of power
which we ingest with the relationships that "sustain"
and define us. In traditional therapy the world begins with the
individual who then "projects" his or her experience
upon external conditions. In the view I am putting forward the
individual begins in a world that is simultaneously his or her
social world as suffered in an individual form. When we experience
terror, dissolution, arbitrary power and blatant irrationality
in the world, it is not our projection. These conditions are
real, objective, actual facts as real as any facticity. And when
we respond to them we are not confronting the objects of our
projection, but the parallel structures of our earlier, politically
ingested, social existence.
In other words, this world of international,
immoral horror reverberates to the personal, irrational horror
we ingested with childhood. We do not abhor arbitrary power simply
because we experienced it, hated it, and divested ourselves of
it by relocating it beyond us. Rather, we know when we come in
contact with this power that we have met it before, and we understand
it because we were made to assimilate it, and we know its contour
and its power. But of course we knew it first when we were tiny
and helpless; now we know it in the supportive presence of others
like ourselves, who, if our movement is sound, will treat us
with the respect and fellowship that makes our accumulating strength
more and more possible, and the terrors of childhood, less immediate
and threatening. That is, in a growing democratic movement, one
gains the opportunity to be "reparented," and begins
to move beyond the helplessness of infancy toward a more humane
presence in the world. Grief and rage will still abide, but they
are less likely to vanquish and immobilize us
Dr. Richard Lichtman is a philosopher who specializes in the relationship
between the social and psychological dimensions of human life.
His approach is broadly interdisciplinary: he has taught in departments
of philosophy (University of California, Berkeley), humanities
(San Francisco State University), sociology (University of California,
Santa Cruz) and psychology (The Wright Institute, California
School of Professional Psychology, etc.) and is currently a faculty
member of the Council on Educational Development (CED) program
at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books also
indicate the range of his interests: Essays
in Critical Social Theory covers a broad range of topics
in economic, social, and political theory, while The
Production of Desire is a detailed analysis of the works
of Marx and Freud.
He can be reached at The Wright Institute,
2728 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA. 94704 or via email at: rlichtman@counterpunch.org.
Yesterday's
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Jo Wilding
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Shane Claiborne
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