No Ivory Tower: Lifton and His Legacy

Review of Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (eds.). Genocide, War, and Human Survival. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1996. ISBN 0847682277, 343 pages, paperback, $22.95.

Review of Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (eds.). Trauma and Self. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1996. ISBN 0847682293, 303 pages, paperback, $22.95.

Hiroshima and nuclear war. Genocide and the Holocaust. Mass death and human survival. Perhaps no psychohistorian has examined more closely the darkness that all too often has embraced humanity in the twentieth century than Robert Jay Lifton. Yet despite this focus on the dark side of humanity, or perhaps because of it, Lifton has found hope in the resiliency of the human self (The Protean Self [1993]). The above collections constitute a Festschrift of sorts in honor of Lifton and his influence. Both volumes have been expertly edited by Charles Strozier and Michael Flynn, Co-Director and Associate Director of Programs, respectively, for the Center on Violence and Human Survival, founded and directed by Lifton himself. The collections best honor Lifton by furthering the work of his Center through their interdisciplinary explorations of 20th-century mass violence as well as through their clarion call for nonviolence in this all too brutal world.

Both volumes reflect areas of research in which Lifton has made profound contributions to psychohistory. The U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as Lifton has shown, had far reaching psychological consequences, not only for the hibakusha or survivors (Death in Life [1968]), but for all humans who thereafter faced the reality of mass annihilation (Indefensible Weapons [1982]). A number of essays follow Lifton’s lead by analyzing the psychic effect of Hiroshima on U.S. citizens. Martin J. Sherwin’s “Hiroshima and the Politics of History” demonstrates how the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum was as much a battle over the “politics of nuclearism” as it was on how memory and history are represented. Paul Boyer’s “Hiroshima: The First Response,” shows how the initial fear of a possible nuclear apocalypse was transformed, via Lifton’s concept of psychic numbing — a response to extreme trauma — into a form of pop culture denial (“atomic sales,” “atomic cocktails,” and the nuclear utopia of the Atomic Energy Commission). Michael Flynn, in “Hiroshima and the Silence of Poetry,” further elucidates the effects of psychic numbing on U.S. culture. Flynn reflects on why the two most significant events of the 20th century, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, resulted in such different literary outputs. While the Holocaust generated an outpouring of significant poetic and literary works, U.S. poets were relatively silent concerning Hiroshima. He concludes that while the Holocaust was recognized as an “evil” crime perpetrated by “evil” men, most Americans conceived of Hiroshima as a regrettable but necessary event perpetrated against an equally evil fascist Japan. Flynn notes that while Japanese fascists certainly committed horrible war crimes, this fact itself was used to obviate American guilt for the nuclear horror committed against innocent Japanese civilians.

Lifton’s seminal works on the Holocaust

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(The Nazi Doctors [1986]), genocide (The Genocidal Mentality [1990]), and other incidences of mass death (Home from the War [1973]), have inspired many essays in both volumes. Erik Markusen, in “Genocide and Warfare,” notes that the twentieth century, with some 60 to 120 million war deaths, has been humanity’s most “murderous.” Following Lifton, he notes that most of these deaths were perpetrated by individuals regarded as psychologically normal, and that genocide has been related to modern warfare. He further argues that the various forms of “governmental mass killing” are closely related, and that modern total wars create the psychosocial conditions that make genocide possible. The increasing tendency throughout the century to deliberately target non-combatants is a crucial fact that must be acknowledged.

George Mosse’s fascinating “Manliness and the Great War” clearly elucidates the connection between socially constructed concepts of masculinity, nationalism, and military exploits. He demonstrates how the perception of “true masculinity” became increasingly tied to putting one’s “manliness” in service of nationalist ideals, usually in war. Manliness, expressed in the brutality of war, became an instrument for personal and national salvation. During the Gulf War many Iraqi soldiers, devastatingly bombed from planes that they could neither see nor engage, complained of the lack of manliness of the UN policy of engagement. This is particularly interesting in reflection of John M. Broughton’s brilliant and unsettling contribution, “U.S. Over Iraq: High Technology and Low Culture in the Gulf Conflict.” Broughton describes how U.S. technological superiority led to an altered spatiality, not only in physical engagement via high altitude bombers, smart bombs, and so forth, but also in the moral rhetoric which utilized vertically polarized, high/low and up/down, expressions. This vertical iconography acted as an ordering device which portrayed the technologically and “morally” superior U.S. high above the technologically and morally inferior “lowly” Iraqis. A military massacre which included some of the most heinous of modern weapons — fuel-air explosive bombs, cluster bombs, napalm, and liquid phosphorus — is thereby transformed into a stunning victory of a technologically and morally superior U.S. culture.

Such incidences of mass death have come to characterize this all too bloody century. Yet despite this fact, Lifton has found an avenue of hope. Erik Erikson, Lifton’s mentor, friend, and sometime rival, proposed the concept of pseudospeciation to explain how humans, a single species, invent spurious notions such as race that divide themselves into artificial groups, a separation that occasionally leads to genocidal attempts to annihilate the Other. Lifton expanded on this notion, and argued for the conscious development of a “species consciousness.” This mentality includes an awareness of our “species self,” a keen sense of our shared humanity, a deep understanding that the survival of self and Other are inherently linked. Building on this notion, a number of essays examine those who perpetrate mass violence, their victims, and those who, out of an inherent sense of their species self, attempt to rescue victims. Eva Fogelman, in “Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers in the Face of Genocide and Its Aftermath,” contrasts the actions of a silent majority who did nothing in the face of genocide with those who risked everything to help their fellow humans. She argues that the “rescuer’s self” is Lifton’s “species self,” made up of individuals whose motivation for saving came from their “inner core,” something they were compelled to do. Rescuers are a heterogeneous lot, though most share a family background where love, nurturance, tolerance of difference, and caring for others — one could perhaps say caring for the “Other” — were instilled from childhood on. Hillel Levine, in In Pursuit of Sugihara: The Banality of Good, describes his quest to find out why one rescuer of Jews in Lithuania in 1940, Japanese diplomat Sugihara, did so. He finds Sugihara to be not so much a heroic figure of epic proportions as a rather ordinary fellow — with an ordinariness that is perhaps what is most crucial. For while it is, as Lifton has demonstrated, generally ordinary people who perpetrate crimes against humanity, it is also generally ordinary people who oppose such crimes. It is an ordinariness that we all share, and from which we all can learn. One need not be a hero to perform acts of heroism.

Finally, if there is one overriding theme running throughout these works it is Lifton’s insistence that professionals, whether artists, physicians, or scholars, have the moral responsibility to stand up against acts of inhumanity. Lifton’s studies of Nazi doctors and nuclear scientists involved in the making of the bomb convinced him that professionals must refuse to participate in projects whose only end can be crimes against humanity. Drawing from this

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conviction, as well as his own developing species self, Lifton has been a lifelong protestor, be it of nuclearism, Vietnam, or the Gulf War. This emphasis on moral responsibility is found repeatedly in both volumes. While there is no underestimating the continuing importance of Lifton’s many innovations in self psychology and psychohistorical investigation, it is this insistence that scholarship and professional activity be used for the betterment of humanity that will be Lifton’s greatest legacy. Venture forth from thy ivory tower — you never know, perhaps someone will listen.

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