War or Peace? We
Cannot Survive With Real-Politik*
International
Psychohistorical Association, Fordham University, June
9, 2011. |
Arno Gruen
How can we
clarify the issues surrounding war and peace, violence
and nonviolence, when our view is obscured by the
assumption—also promoted by a portion of the scientific
establishment—that human evolution advanced solely by
means of struggle and competition, that the survival of
one species depends on the defeat of another one? We
believe in our rational point of view because we are
able to push aside our feelings, which we consider to be
irrational. Feelings have become a threat for us and
must be repressed; therefore, we judge a way of thinking
to be realistic if it has been freed of empathy and the
capability to share pain, to understand suffering, and
to feel a connection with all forms of life. How did
this come about?
What is reality if we are
constrained from birth to see the world not as we
experience it ourselves but as others tell us it is?
Before and directly after birth our perceptions are
shaped by empathy, not by cognitive intellectual
processes. Our early empathic perceptions are direct and
immediate, uninfluenced by society’s expectations, and
for that reason are true to reality. But from the very
first day of life, the way we ought to see the world is
communicated to us by others, along with the message
that our own perceptions have no validity (6,7). Thus,
our cognitive perception, based on the expectations of
those who raise us, never develops without distortion.
This is especially true if these expectations are not in
accord with a child’s needs but rather meet with the
parents’ need for self-esteem.
We live in
cultures that are characterized by competition and
insecurity and that make it difficult for people to
develop the self-esteem that comes from a sense of one’s
inner worth, which can evolve only if people learn to
accept and share their suffering, pain, and adversity.
This is what enables an inner strength to
emerge—informed by an attitude of equanimity in spite of
insecurity and of self-confidence in spite of
helplessness. Only such a development forms a person’s
genuine substance. In cultures that mistake strength for
invulnerability, this kind of development is hardly
possible because suffering, pain, and helplessness are
stigmatized as weakness (6,11,12). This is why parents
need their child in order to maintain a self-image of
competence and self-assurance without self-doubt. In a
culture in which one is constantly faced with the threat
of failure, children are needed to enable their parents
to maintain a fictitious sense of worth, with the result
that parents do not see their children as they are but
only in relation to themselves. In spite of their love
and hopes for their children, they do not see what their
children are really like but view them only in terms of
providing approbation of the parental role. The child
becomes the means to the end of sustaining the pose of
mother and father as authority figures who are decisive
and assured in their relationship with their child.
What are children to do who experience weakness,
helplessness, pain, and rage? Apathetic and exhausted,
they will, with time, submit to the expectations of
their parents. But their submission distorts reality,
and thus a rational solution later in life to crucial
problems such as the question of war and peace is made
impossible, for if we have learned from an early age to
experience the parental pose of strength and
self-assurance as reality, then “realistic” behavior is
not based on reality at all but on our need to cling to
this pose as a remedy for our fears and insecurity (9,
13).
And so a change takes place in our emotional
life. Feelings no longer emerge from our own
empathically motivated perceptions but are now
determined by our need for a sense of invulnerability in
order to avoid supposed threats that stem from the
terror children experience because their inner self is
not given recognition. Only if they fulfill the
expectations of their parents, only if they can maintain
the emotional contact with their parents that is
necessary for survival, do they receive approbation. And
because parents themselves were shaped by a culture that
scorns pain and suffering as forms of weakness, a
culture that bases survival on getting the better of
others, vulnerability is therefore seen as a threat to
one’s self-esteem. To prevent this from happening we
learn to focus our feelings either on acquiring power
ourselves or on identifying with those who have power.
This means that our feelings—in the larger political
realm as well—are no longer influenced by empathic
perceptions but by concepts having to do with power,
competition, and the need to put down others. As a
result, realism then means merely security attained by
means of power, positions of power, and actions that
assure them. If this mechanism no longer works, war and
violence are the only remaining solutions to problems
(7, 9, 10).
A self that develops under these
circumstances is not centered on the question of who one
is but what one is. Who one is has to do with constantly
confronting oneself and, as a result, with taking
responsibility for one’s actions, for one’s own being.
It has to do with recognizing one’s own pain and the
pain of others, with perceiving one’s own boundaries and
those of the other person. In the case of the question
of what one is, on the other hand, it is not a matter of
one’s authentic self but of how one thinks one has to
appear in order to gain status and power over others
(6). This is the way people become, as Kierkegaard (15)
so convincingly put it, completely in thrall to their
need to be recognized for their achievements. Thus, they
do not live their own lives but rather lives that
revolve around correct appearance. And “correct” here
means complying with current concepts of normality.
In this process people begin to falsify their lives
by seeking escape in abstract ideas that endow life with
false premises, for these ideas are cut off from the
empathic needs that make us human and also from the
feelings of guilt and shame that arise from this kind of
dissociation. This process encourages a cognitive kind
of thinking that is cut off from empathic roots. Here
lie the sources of the myths and symbols intended to
shield us from insecurity and vulnerability. Thus, over
millennia conflict, war, competition, and the
accumulation of property and riches were the only valid
“realities” of our world, and belief in heroism and the
myths surrounding it—superhuman strength, insensitivity
to pain, invulnerability—predominated. Reality is so
transformed as a result that we often no longer
recognize ourselves as human beings but merely as
abstractions that have internalized these myths as
symbols of their own being.
Human evolution
cannot be correctly understood if we take it for granted
that conflict and competition are the forces behind
human development. Peter Kropotkin (16) already pointed
this out in 1917; Stanley Diamond (4), Theodore C.
Schneirla (22), Irven Devore (3), Melvin J. Konner (3),
Ashley Montagu (19, 20), and recently Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
(14), among many others, have demonstrated that
cooperation and empathy are the determining factors in
our evolution and that the survival of one species does
not depend on the destruction of another. A false
interpretation of Darwin’s theory of the survival of the
fittest provides the basis for this misunderstanding. In
Darwin’s view of survival, “fittest” is not equated with
“best” (22). The organism best suited for surviving
nuclear war is the cockroach. It would inherit our
planet! “From a biological point of view, love is a
determining factor in our evolution,” according to
anthropologist Ashley Montagu (20). He adds, “We can
safely assume that none of the early human populations
would have survived if love and cooperation had not
played a decisive role in their continuing existence.”
Schneirla, who studied the approach-and-withdrawal
behavior of many species that underlies
peaceful-nonaggressive or defensive-aggressive behavior,
showed that these mechanisms already exist at birth. Low
stimulus intensities as produced by loving maternal
behavior create approach reactions; high intensities of
stimuli, as evoked by maternal rejection or punishment,
lead to muscle contractions and to withdrawal and
aggressive defensiveness (23, 24). In addition,
continuous effects of low stimulus intensities form the
metabolic system of an individual and thus influence his
or her later level of excitation. This in turn leads to
basic traits such as readiness for aggressive or
cooperative interpersonal behavior.
With the
rise of the so-called great civilizations, there
developed structures of conquest and subjugation of the
defeated peoples. We must assume that this always
occurred when a lack of loving care created the
emotional need to dominate others in order to compensate
for the resulting insecurity. Such situations early in
life led to conditions that generally have a disturbing
influence on patterns of maternal care-giving and thus
bring about the separation of growing humans from their
potential for empathy, initiating a form of development
that emphasized obedience. Obedience became the
instrument by which the developing structures of
domination and accumulated wealth assured their position
by making identification with those in power the psychic
“salvation” from the suffering and powerlessness of the
oppressed. This identification, which leads to what the
Finnish psychoanalyst Marrti Siirala (25) described as
the “delusional possession of reality,” characterizes
the “adapted” individual and shows how adaptation often
expresses obedience. Obedience to authority thus became
the ideal for entire societies. How deeply rooted this
phenomenon was can be demonstrated by the paradoxical
fact that rebellions initiated in the name of freedom
ended by taking on authoritarian power themselves. The
outcome of this millennia-long development was described
by Proust in the twentieth century as an impossible form
of reality: “How can we have the courage to wish to
live, how can we make the slightest move to preserve
ourselves from death, in a world where love is evoked by
a lie and consists solely in the need to have our
sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us
suffer?”
Here Proust recognized something of
fundamental significance, namely, the longing in our
obedience-oriented cultures to be saved by those who
have caused our suffering, together with the inability
to recognize them as responsible for this suffering.
Being forced to be obedient while growing up leads to
the inability to perceive our own empathic potential
because of our anxiety and fear, which must not be
acknowledged, since fear and uncertainty are labeled as
weakness. Although we are driven by our fear, it must be
denied and repressed. Here we can see the vicious circle
of our development, which is influenced by a culture
that causes parents to experience their infants’
aliveness and high spirits as disturbing or even
threatening. As they get older, these children will soon
be filled with anxiety and worry and will learn at an
early age that their original, authentic self imperils
their relationship with their parents and for this
reason is bad. As a result, their innermost nature turns
into something strange and foreign. And it is this
alienated part of one’s self that must be fought against
from now on.
The accompanying anxieties grow
stronger in times of existential stress—caused, for
example, by unemployment, loss of status and personal
importance, insecurity inherent in a society based on
competition that humiliates and isolates people. These
ever-present anxieties are held in check in economic
good times owing to the fact that then people feel they
are part of society. Nowadays people feel secure in
their identity, thanks to all the possibilities offered
by a consumer society. Possessing things gives them a
sense of well-being and thus a kind of identity and the
feeling of belonging. But as soon as possessions and
consumption are threatened, this false identity breaks
down and the ever-menacing anxieties again come to the
fore.
Sadly, the chase after possessions leads
to increased egotism, which prevents or destroys any
attachment to societal values. It leads to moral failure
because, as Nobel-Prize-winning dramatist Eugene O’Neill
aptly described it in assaying the relationship of the
United States to its dependencies, “. . . [The] main
idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your
own soul by the possession of something outside it,
thereby losing your own soul and the things outside of
it too” (5). What remains are hatred and the need to
find enemies against whom the hatred can be directed.
This process was advanced by the victory of the
capitalist system over the communist one, a victory that
unfortunately rejected the ideas of equality and
fairness and destroyed these concepts as a political
possibility. Of course, the rich and financially
successful have always been accorded more credibility
than those who are poor, but this is the case more than
ever today. During the Cold War economic megalomania and
the irresponsibility inherent in an exaggerated profit
motive were reined in, but at present a financial elite
with an overweening sense of its own importance has
created a worldwide situation in which the gap between
rich and poor grows greater by the day.
If
democratic governments do not succeed in dealing
successfully with the dangerous situation created by
this inequality, the ever-present hatred will
increasingly express itself as violence. And those who
hate themselves the most but are not permitted to
recognize their oppressors will seek solutions that are
far removed from reality. This opens the way for
political leaders who conjure up images of an enemy that
give legitimacy to this hatred and who take advantage of
it for their own purposes of amassing power.
The
enemy we are looking for in order to free ourselves of
our hatred we find in the stranger, the Other, who
reminds us of ourselves because he is similar to the way
we originally were. By punishing him we can hold our
head high, at the same time banning anxiety and fear
from our consciousness. And the leaders, who in their
megalomania incite war and conquest, achieve success
because our societies produce people who allow
themselves to be enslaved in order to escape their
terror (17). In Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes
Elektra (21) Orin, a soldier in the American Civil War,
tells about the enemies he has killed on the
battlefield, realizing the identity between himself and
the hated Other, described above: “It was like murdering
the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant
murdering the same man over and over, and that in the
end I would discover the man was myself!”
The way
children are raised encourages them not only to bond at
an early age with their tormentors but also to idealize
them. In this way the structures of domination and the
social norms represented by parents, school, and society
thoroughly penetrate the psyche of growing children,
becoming their determining mechanisms and thus forming
their psychic structure. These structures and mechanisms
imposed by society stand in the way of children
perceiving their own perceptions and needs.
Parents misuse their child to preserve their own sense
of adequacy and self-worth. Under these conditions,
attachment to the parents exists on two levels: on the
one hand, bonding takes place with the parents as they
really are in terms of the behavior the child has
experienced—their empathy, their meting out of
punishment, their exercise of authority; on the second
level, a bond is created with an idealized image of the
parents. In this case, children must limit their
perception of their parents to the image the parents
have of themselves, for children cannot simultaneously
integrate their actual perception of their parents and
the idealized image they have of them. For this reason,
knowledge of their parents’ true nature disappears from
consciousness. The result is a reversal of reality.
One of my patients, a fifty-year-old geologist,
talked about his father, who had volunteered to serve in
Hitler’s Wehrmacht (9). The father was not only
extremely authoritarian, he also beat his son for even
the slightest transgression. His mother, also subjected
to the father’s violence, never tried to protect her
son. Only once, when he was very young, did she
intervene because she thought the father was going to
beat the boy to death in his rage. As an adult, whenever
my patient heard a child crying, he became enraged
because he interpreted the crying as an attempt to make
demands on him. He was afraid that he would hurl a child
of his own against the wall in such a situation. Of
course, he didn’t want to do that and had decided not to
have children. This man did not want to pass on what had
been done to him; nevertheless, on an unconscious level
he was affected by his identification with his father.
His reaction to a crying child corresponded to that of
his father to him when he was little. His rage was the
rage of his father, whose hatred the son had
internalized as his own. In this manner his own being
turned into something foreign to him that had to be
punished in the external world. The pain he had
experienced in childhood became alien to him and was
then projected onto children who cried as he had once
cried. He was thus punishing in another person the
rejected part of himself.
This is how
identification with the parents’ self-image becomes the
sole reality. On an unconscious level the secret
knowledge of the parents’ true nature is the source of a
constant anxiety, which cannot be expressed. This
anxiety and inner terror lead to hatred of one’s own
being. Children protect themselves from their anxiety by
clinging to the parents’ pose as the only reality. This
process harbors a threat to a democratic society: If
children have internalized—that is, have become
imprinted with—the pose as reality, then as adults they
will regard this pose as the sole valid reality. They
will hope for release from their deeply concealed fears
by authority figures who display in an especially
convincing way the pose of strength, decisiveness,
self-confidence, and assurance. The hidden and
threatening fear of the truth felt by these adults
unleashes rage against everyone who dares to tell the
truth. The pose then shapes a reality that is
destructive of life.
What can save us from the
plight created by alienation from our own feelings?
“Paradoxically,” writes His Holiness the Dalai Lama (1),
“we can help ourselves only if we help the Other.” And:
“It is the cultivation of love and compassion, our
ability to enter into and to share another’s suffering,
that are the preconditions for the continued survival of
our species. . . . To understand the suffering of others
. . . means to possess true empathy . . . . The feeling
of community with all living creatures can be attained
only if we recognize that we are all basically united
and dependent on one another” (2).
This is why we
must ascribe crucial significance to the living
interaction between mother and child as a major factor
in human evolution and do everything possible to support
this process of bonding in its essential role in the
development of human consciousness. Our ancestors cannot
have been cut off from experiencing pain and suffering
as we in great part are today. To quote Ashley Montagu
once again: “If we . . . define love as caring behavior
that confers survival benefits, then love is a decisive
aspect of our evolution” (19, 20). Our urgent task is to
give full support to this human interaction. It is
empathy and cooperation—not profit, selfishness, and the
drive for ever more bigness—that will lead us toward a
more humane civilization than our present one.
Reading-Sources:
(1) Dalai Lama. Der
buddhistische Weg zum Glück. Fischer: Frankfurt, 2004.
(2) __________. Ancient Wisdom, Modern World. Time
Warner: London 1999. (3) Devore, I., Konner, M. J.
“Infancy in Hunter-Gatherer Life: An Ethological
Perspective. ” In: White, M. F. (ed.). Ethology and
Psychiatry. Univertsity of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1974.
(4) In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of
Civilization. Transaction Books: New Brunswick, 1974.
(5) Gelb, B. and A. O’Neill. Harper & Row: New York,
1973. (6) Gruen, A.: The Betrayal of the Self. Grove
Press: New York, 1988. (Human Development Books:
Berkeley, 2007). (7) Gruen, A. :The Insanity of
Normality; Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness.
Grove Weidenfeld: New York, 1992 (Human Development
Books: Berkeley, 2007). (8) Gruen, A.: Der Verlust
des Mitgefühls. dtv: München, 1997. (9) Gruen, A.:
Der Fremde in Uns. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 2000.
(Received the Geschwister-Scholl Prize 2001.) (12)
Gruen, A.: “The Role of Empathy and Mother-Child
Attachment in Human History and the Development of
Consciousness: The Neanderthal’s Gestation” in: Jahrbuch
für Psychohistorische Forschung, 6, 2005. (13) Welt
ohne Kriege. Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart, 2006. (14) Hrdy,
S. B. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of
Mutual Understanding. Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, 2009. (15) Kierkegaard, S. Concluding
Unscientific Postcript to the Philosophical Fragment.
Ed. Walter Lowrie. Princeton University Press:
Princeton, 1941. (16) Kropotkin, P. M. Mutual Aid: A
Factor in Evolution. Knopf: New York, 1917. (17) La
Boétie, E. Freiwillige Knechtschaft (1550). Klemm/Oelschläger:
Münster, 1991; English: Slaves by Choice. Runnymeade:
Egham, 1988; originally: Discourse de la Servitude,
1550. (18) Milgram, S. Obedience to Authority.
Harper: New York, 1974. (19) Montagu, A. “The Origin
and Significance of Neonatal and Infant Maturity.”
Journal of the Am. Med. Association, 176, 1961. (20)
___________. GROWING YOUNG. McGraw-Hill: New York, 1981.
(21) O’Neill, E. Mourning Becomes Electra, in: Three
Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Vintage: New York, 1995.
(22) Schneirla, T. C. “Problems in the biopsychology of
social organizations.” J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychology 41,
385-422, 1946. (23) ____________. An evolutionary and
developmental theory of biphasic processeses underlying
approach and withdrawal. Nebraska Symposium on
Motivation. University of Nebraska Press: Nebraska,
1959. (24) _____________. Aspects of Stimulation and
Organization in Approach-Withdrawal Procesesses
underlying Vertebrate Behavioral Development. In:
Aronson, L.R. et al (eds.): Selected Writings of T. C.
Schneirla. Freeman: San Francisco, 1965. (25) Sirrala,
M.: From Transfer to Transference. Therapeia Foundation:
Helsinki, 1983. Marcel Proust’s citation on page 6 is
from the original French „À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu“,
Volume V, La Prisonnière, page 110, Gallimard: Paris,
1987. The english translation of „Remembrance of Things
Past“, vol. V, The Captive, page 63, Vintage Books: New
York, 1970, is not quite right, therefore altered to
make it conform to the original French.
*This is
an enlarged version of the acceptance speech for the
Finnish Loviisa Peace Prize 2010“.
Translated
from the German by Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum.
Prof. Dr. Arno Gruen, Rütistrasse 4, CH-8032 Züruch,
Switzerland.
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