Civilization and Its Dream of Contentment: Reflections on the Unity of Humankind

Abstract

In this posthumous publication, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl argues that a microcosm/macrocosm trend exists within human and social development. Since the First World War, society has been reeling from accumulative trauma that has many of the characteristics of individual accumulative trauma. Yet, there has been an international movement to heal and achieve coherence within enormous diversity in the name of the child since the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child.

Notes

¹ The Greeks would not have spoken of an analogy in the rhetorical sense: The sameness of microcosmic and macrocosmic processes and patterns was a fact to be represented in a theory, a kind of language picture (in the sense that a Chinese character or ideogram is a language picture).

²The European who most clearly grasped the implications for the unity of humankind of the pre-WWII preparatory period was Karl Jaspers, trained as a psychiatric neurologist, in his post-WWII The Origin and Goal of History (1949). But Jaspers had also been courageously prescient in his 1931 book, The Spiritual Situation of Our Time, which won him the enmity of the Nazis, who later scheduled Jaspers and his Jewish wife for deportation to Auschwitz on the day the American Army entered Heidelberg.

³Naturalists had warned of the destructive effects of human technologies since the 18th century, but Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, was epoch-making for taking the warning into the realm of genetics and for considering how nature can be not just cultivated or shaped by humans, but genetically altered.

⁴The Cold War was incipient when the Soviets rejected the Declaration for its refusal to support absolute state sovereignty and to guarantee not just political, but social, economic. and cultural rights. The first argument was a regressive, nationalistic one designed to prevent interference with Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe; the second a progressive, universalistic one. Ironically, over time it was American governments that refused regressively to sign declarations and conventions and accords that they viewed as infringements on state sovereignty. Thus did American governments imitate the worst in Soviet opposition to the unity of humankind, which is what assertion of absolute sovereignty implies.

⁵The worst distortion of the analogy appeared in the 19th century, when it was used to identify White Europeans as the most evolved and mature of people and societies, in contrast to the dark-skinned primitives—that is, it served race-thinking and imperialism. One of the most powerful counters to this distortion appeared right after WWII in the anthropological studies of Claude Levi-Strauss, who was so respectful of la pensée sauvage and so sensitive to the corruptions of colonialism.

⁶A fascinating entry into this literature has been made this year by Rebecca Solnit, whose A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Diaster (2009), describes communities built up or reconstituted after natural disasters, like the San Francisco earthquake and Hurricane Katrina, by ordinary people acting together and helping each other in extraordinary ways. In effect, this is a study of the immediate reassertion of human “polis-dweller” nature, the triumph of sociability; but it is not a study of what happens over time to such resilient communities, when the traumatization settles in and the traumatized must sustain their communities or their socially created protective shields. Veterans with PTSD will often describe how they functioned superhumanly during and immediately after a traumatizing event and then crashed when they had to return home and live a normal life. Making a revolution sustainable similarly involves translating it and its initial violence into a phase of consolidation and constitution making.

⁷This generalization should be qualified with acknowledgement of the psychoanalytic literature on the Holocaust as a social trauma for the Jewish people, which includes some contributions on the children of Holocaust survivors, although it does not include much on the painful topic of identification with the aggressor in the survivor generation or among its children, or on the ways in which the Jews in the diaspora and in Israel were united with humankind in their trauma, as opposed to being distinguished by it, exceptional in it.

⁸The major exception to this generalization is the culture and personality school of psychoanalysis, led in the immediate post-War period by analysts and anthropologists at Columbia University (Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedickt, Margaret Mead, etc.), although the emphasis in this school was on how culture (chiefly child-rearing practices) shapes individuals, not on how individuals and cultures might be shaped by traumas. At the same time, the culture critic Richard Hofstader (1955) used “culture and personality” ideas to frame his extremely astute study of the “paranoid style in American politics,” a delineation of individual paranoids and the paranoid groups they dominated during the rise to prominence of the Right in the anti-Communist 1950s and during Barry Goldwater's leadership of the Republican Party.

⁹In his 1931 essay, “Libidinal Types,” Freud sketched his three character types—hysterical, obsessional, and narcissistic—and noted defense mechanisms characteristic of each. He also noted that they seldom appear in pure form. Most people are mixtures, for example, narcissistic–obsessional—a combination in which grandiosity and moralistic rule-boundedness are the salient character traits.

¹⁰America's postwar destiny has been deeply influenced by the fact that the Second War (in the broad cluster-trauma meaning I previously suggested) was not fought on American soil—with the extremely consequential exception of the off-shore Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 that precipitated America's entry into the War. How crucial our territorial inviolability has been to our defense against trauma was immediately obvious when Pearl Harbor was invoked after 9/11, across the political spectrum but especially by those who wanted to use the terrorist attack as a causus belli for making war on Iraq, a nation that was said—falsely—to have nuclear weapons ready to use, and to be totalitarian and to be led by a Hitler.

¹¹Both President Johnson and President Nixon and their advisors were committed to preserving the image of invincible America even after they realized that the war could not be won: American credibility was said to be at stake. They assumed (in their worst-possible-case thinking) that a defeat in one location, Vietnam, would necessarily pave the way to other defeats in other spheres of interest around the world.

¹²The Freudian text that most influenced the anti-Vietnam War student movement was Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955).

¹³The Convention is organized to present the child's rights as “the 3 Ps”: rights to provision, to protection, and to participation—the last being the most radical, for it denies that children are owned by their parents and under unqualified parental authority, and it affirms that children have “evolving capacities” (Article 5) that eventually fit them to actively engage in decision-making in matters effecting them (an empowerment, in effect, for citizenship). UNICEF has developed a detailed analysis of programs that promote these 3 Ps, and all the signatories to the Convention submit to UNICEF biannual reports on their progress in the agreed upon directions. That the United States does not hold itself to these standards and measurements is one of the key policy reasons why the condition of American children has deteriorated so drastically since the early 1970s, when a Comprehensive Child Development Act was vetoed by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War.

¹⁴I think that the fact that the so-called Golden Rule has been formulated within every known religious tradition is a universal acknowledgment of the power of identification with the aggressor (or, as I prefer to say, the traumatizer) and acknowledgment of the healing power of confronting and defusing trauma (which may, but need not, entail foregiveness). But the Golden Rule has appeared in two different forms—one more therapeutic than the other. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” is typical of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions where an elite of believers (or nonsinners) is said to be able to do rewarding deeds, and thus be rewarded by being distinguished from the rest of humankind by God's ultimate Judgment. They are “the chosen.” By contrast, consider the restraining rule offered by Confucius: “Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself,” which presumes that humankind's peaceful unity will come if humans restrain themselves. In the Confucian form, which is quite psychoanalytic, you must think what would harm you if it were done to you—you must imagine yourself being traumatized or remember your traumatization and on the basis of your empathic insight not become a traumatizer, identified with your traumatizer.

¹⁵The popular poet William Ross Wallace published the famous poem entitled with this line in 1865, as America began its healing—still in course—from the Civil War.