Reflections on the Human Condition as We Face Death

When one reaches a certain age and the future does not roll out into a horizon that is way beyond our imagination to conceive but lurks around every corner like a large black cloud, surprising us in the morning when we wake up yet again and wonder if we actually will make it through the day (especially on those days when the organism alerts us from all its little nooks and crannies of its failing condition that the effort may not be worth it)—although another short while to finish some research project or make a visit to a friend or relative not seen for a number of years—can we say that this is an instinct or drive or simply inertia?

I choose not to discuss the kind of experiences mentioned by Inna Rozentsvit and Paul Elovitz. This is not just because I am a retired academic rather than a practicing or clinical psychologist or trained psychoanalyst. I was not even a professional historian. It is because their remarks strike me as specific to a modern American middle-class life over the past 50 years, or at least consist of people and events so very far out of my own experience that it is hard to imagine what the conditions referred to actually are. After more than half a century away from North America, understanding how people live, feel, see, and think about the world defies me, even as I try to follow the news assiduously; watching televised versions of reality or in the print media is not the same thing as being there in medias res (in the middle of things). Yet because I have lived in and visited for lengthy periods Israel, Europe, and New Zealand—and I accept that this perhaps disqualifies me from commenting on the land where I was born and the people among whom I was educated, which is now frankly a very foreign and virtually inconceivable country—I hope it does not prevent me from

Page 274

making general statements on the human condition based on what I do know and what I have previously written about in many books and articles.

As a psychohistorian, I have investigated the dynamics of childhood, small groups of people, and cultures that range from the archaic to the ancient through the folkloric and the religious. I have read intensively in medieval, 18^th century, and late 19^th century literature, finding not special insights or magical thinking, but ways of articulating experiences that defy our contemporary jargon-laden discourses, concepts that were formed prior to the catastrophic events of the 20^th century, and people who could be deeply and completely human in ways that are almost impossible to reproduce today in urban middle-class society. Almost, but not quite, because there are strategies of interpretation that make it possible: slow and careful reading as well as contextual immersion in related texts.

Though I have been studying the nature of terrorist mass murder and suicide for the last few years, it strikes me as something deliberately outside of the instinctive and the impulse-driven, a matter of long-term ideological conditioning. Blowing oneself up with an explosive belt in a crowded arena or enclosed restaurant, shooting hundreds from a stage with a high-powered rifle, or driving a heavy truck through a crowded beachfront of parents and children, defies the very notion of martyrdom for a noble cause. We are talking about unstable individuals, often from dysfunctional families, sometimes saturated from birth in ideologies of hatred and rage; not about normal, typical people. Designating them as sick minds, fanatical fundamentalists, dupes of calculating and cynical political movements, does not make it proper to classify them with mentally ill persons or criminals driven to violent acts by drug addiction, extreme poverty, or social anomie; the enormity of their crimes puts them into another kind of category.

Rather than discussing suicide, which is the consequence of mental illness (depression and deep despair), particularly among the young and otherwise healthy, I turn to old age: that place in life where each of us has to face up squarely to our mortality, the ravages of time, the failure of organic systems… the moment when time runs out. We are not whipped toward it by any natural taskmaster, but approach it slowly and inevitably as the consequence of living. We don’t leap out to embrace it before it is clearly in view, although for some people it hovers into view before the normal course of existence has had its turn to play itself out. Diseases af-

Page 275

flict, accidents injure, circumstances make it impossible to go on, and then we have to consider the quietus that awaits or the respite we can somehow grasp before it takes hold of us. Again, none of this strikes me as falling within the parameters of Freud’s “death instinct” or “drive.”

As with genes, what is passed on is not a specific content—a feeling, a thought, an instinct, a drive—but a set of potentialities that can be expressed under various historical circumstances. In other words, I don’t believe in biological (natural) or social determinism. But there are historical pressures that can overwhelm the instinct for life, ideological paradigms that set out ways and means for persons to complete their lives, and individual circumstances that make people choose suicide, assisted-dying, and heroic self-sacrifices, with or without violent and murderous actions.

Thus, unlike Eros, the sexual instinct, libido, and similar drives that mark out developmental stages in the growth of the ego in its often bumpy encounters with reality, both the internal pressures of id forces and external social constraints, Thanatos has no dynamic or ontological role to play. Other than assuming that eventually all organisms, barring catastrophic accident or disease, wear out and systems fail, more or less according to some pattern of closing down written into the genes, there seems no conscious or unconscious impulse to end it all.

On the other hand, there are much larger, even cosmic patterns in the formation of the universe and all its expansions of stars and dark matter that include collapses into black holes, counter-movements, and new explosive beginnings. At a more earthly level, life may have begun much earlier than anyone imagined, very soon after the planet began to cool and the seas formed, and then went through periods of flourishing and differentiation to prodigious waves of variation but then suffered momentous catastrophes of extinction and virtual lifelessness. As we discover increasingly complex patterns of relationships between life-forms, climatic shifts, and geographic forces over incredibly long periods of time (if time is the right word), we cannot deny that these interactive patterns provide the very matrix in which our own historical experiences and consciousness as a species play out its existence. Whether this may, from a certain perspective, include what Freud and his followers call a dynamic tension between Eros and Thanatos seems beyond my capacity to understand. However, I doubt any investigations will confirm either the directing hand of intelli-

Page 276

gent design or the severe restrictions of natural determinism.

Page 277