Odysseus in America (44 page)

According to pattern:
Odysseus' hope that the expected pattern of his domestic life—symbolized by the immovable olive tree bed—was terrifyingly shaken by Penelope's test of his identity. Many Vietnam veterans were deeply shaken by the economic changes that made it impossible for them to own their homes and provide for their families in the way their World War II fathers had.

Part of each other's future:
Vietnam combat veterans sometimes came to feel that the country had discarded them, that they were not the nation's honored elite as they had been led to expect. They rarely felt that their fellow citizens looked them in the eye and said, “We are part of each other's future.” Odysseus got to Ithaca, had to pretend to be someone else, killed a lot of his fellow citizens, and then had to leave again, with only a ghost's promise of any future there at all.

Comfort:
Home is where you
can
sleep, where you can soothe and comfort yourself and find things familiar and in place, where you find peace when you want it. Vietnam combat veterans with complex PTSD still find no rest, no restorative sleep. Odysseus' first nights in his own home were troubled, uncomfortable, endangered.

I forecast that trauma studies will be as influential in the other fields of knowledge as psychoanalysis was fifty and a hundred years ago. For me, this is an annoying parallel, because I am no great friend of Freudianism. However, the field of trauma studies is the only new thing emerging from psychiatry since psychoanalysis that is likely to have as sweeping an effect in philosophy, literary and other arts criticism, history, political science (including especially democratic theory), economic development studies, anthropology, sociology (including especially criminology), education, organizational studies, government, military science, human evolutionary biology, and on and on.

One of the pervasive philosophic-cultural questions that pops up in many disciplines is whether there is such a thing as “human nature” or whether everything that matters to and about humans is historically and culturally constructed, and thus can only be understood and judged relative to the local time and place that created these people. University of Texas classicist Professor Erwin Cook, one of several who generously agreed to review the manuscript of this book for “howlers”—flubs by an amateur classicist that make the pros howl with laughter—did me the honor of going beyond finding howlers and gave forthright, vigorous criticism as he might to a colleague. He commented that I took an ahistorical and universalizing approach to Homer's epics, contrasting it to historical and cultural research. Because of my gratitude toward and respect for this scholar, I want to address this question of a universal “human nature” head-on.

Let us look at the ethical and value systems of human culture in the same way that we look at language: to use language is a human universal. Language is no less a biological trait than our breathing—but the vocabulary and syntax are culturally constructed through historical social practice. In this book I have asked readers to adopt a modern definition of the juicy Homeric word
thumos
as the human universal trait of commitment to people, groups, ideals, and ambitions, and of emotional upheaval when these are threatened. Like the sentences we speak, the content of
thumos
is historically and culturally constructed. If I use Homer's word in this effort, it is not because I believe that the ancient Greeks were present at the Creation, but because Homer and his admirers, such as Aristotle, were profoundly interested in
thumos,
and we can still learn from what they said about it. They were the inventors of some political concepts and practices that we still inhabit today.

I am a physician by trade and my Ph.D. is in one of the laboratory neurosciences, so you may suspect me of being a physical reductionist—someone who believes that only the material body is “real.” You might expect me to believe that anything psychological, social, and cultural is just an imaginary will-o'-the-wisp, a shadow on the wall, or a shining bubble on the stream. Not so! This big, expensive
¹⁰
brain of ours
coevolved
with mind, society, and culture. We are just one being—physical, psychological, social, cultural at every instant. These are not reducible to one another, none is “real” with the others mere shadowy epiphenomena. Nor do they represent a ladder of value or importance. Culture is not “above” the mind; the body is not more “real” than society. Like the hummingbird's beak and the deep-throated blossom, they evolved at the same time
through interaction with each other. At best, the distinctions among brain, mind, society, and culture are throwaways—temporary guides to perception and communication, temporary artifacts of the philosophical, institutional, and methodological history of the West.
¹¹

Themis
(Homer's word for the social code of “what's right”) has many language-like properties. The subjective experience of being “fluent” in a moral code is that it seems natural, inevitable, necessary, and good. The subjective experience of ethical
un
intelligibility is moral indignation,
nemesis,
aversion, and hatred—“strong evaluation.” Detection of cheaters, slackers, liars, and spies is deeply embedded in our cognitive and emotional machinery
¹²

So when I say that it is our animal nature to be social—to live in relation to moral codes and to social dispositions of value and power—I am saying nothing different from Aristotle's famous line that the human is
politikon zōon,
the animal of the community (
Politics
I.1.9, 1253a). He was speaking as a zoologist.

Two momentous human universals flow from our large, language-capable brain. The first is so obvious you may laugh out loud:
Children are born at a very young age.
¹³
Before you go, “Yes, and what color was Washington's white horse?” and dismiss this as an empty tautology, stop to consider the prolonged helplessness and absolute life-and-death dependency that human babies have compared to other species. Many plains animals are up and moving with the herd within minutes of being freed of the placenta.

Every
human being has had the experience of powerlessness, and of his or her absolute dependence on beings much larger and more powerful. This is universal and momentous. When these powers are benign and nurturing the baby gets through it. The adult equivalent of the benign caregivers of infancy is the encompassing deployments of social power in accordance with “what's right,” the adult's cloak of security. Any objective situation in adulthood, which reproduces the absolute helplessness and powerlessness of the infant, can cause psychological injury especially if intentionally inflicted by other people in violation of “what's right.” Severe trauma in adulthood can damage
thumos
in the absence of any weakness in the genes or childhood abuse or neglect.
¹⁴

The second Great Obvious Truth is:
The death rate is 100 percent of all live births.
We are mortal, and because of our large, language-using brains, we know it and we talk about it. These two facts about human existence, helplessness in infancy and awareness of mortality, are human universals that span all cultures and historical eras. We are truly one species
in every sense that matters. Together these form a basis for universalizing quests in philosophy and the arts. Psychologizing, universalizing approaches to great art have merit side by side with historical, anthropological, stylistic, and linguistic investigations of the particularity of such works. The particular and the universal are like breathing in and breathing out. We can only reach the universal through the particular; and the intelligibility of the particular depends upon the universal.

The Vietnam veterans that I have worked with were treated shabbily by both the political right—who scorned them as “losers,” lacking the war-winning sterner stuff of the World War II generation—and by the political left, who held them responsible for everything vile or wrongheaded that led us into the war, was done during the war, or came out of the war. The New Abolitionism that I advocate will undoubtedly annoy both the traditional political left, because of my respect for the military profession, and annoy the traditional political right, because of my hostility to war itself and a practical call for its abolition.

Aristotle's formula, that a
philos
is “another myself,” is the key to most socially organized human violence. In the modern world, the state has acquired the quality of a
philos.
Except in our slums, we no longer fight to the death for recognition as individuals, but nations continue violently to compel deference, violently demand acknowledgment.

Economic historian and social philosopher Francis Fukuyama, formerly at the American defense think tank RAND, has seriously raised the question of whether the spread of liberal republics that extend equal citizen recognition can bring Hegel's historical dynamism of war to an end—the “end of history,” or in the words of the tide of Kant's famous essay, “To Perpetual Peace.”
¹⁵
At stake here is whether equal citizen honor and the over-lapping intermediate attachments that we speak of as “civil society” (or in the Catholic Church's jargon, the “principle of subsidiarity”) can bring an end to giant
thumos.
Does equal citizen honor and the civil web of plural attachments create a new human psyche, a new human altogether who no longer hungers for domination, who no longer schemes and labors for the triumphal moment when he can see fear in the eyes of his enemy and witness his annihilation? These ideological and social-structural dimensions are staples of democratic theory. Trauma studies can contribute the insight that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse trample the psychic “middle” so essential to the democratic process. The trampled soul may be so
broken as to be unable to imagine a future and unable to struggle for it; or the trampled soul may be so bloated with vengeance and the determination never again to be helpless that nothing short of domination is tolerable. In the last two hundred years the sewer and the railroad have magnificently hobbled two of the Horsemen: plague and famine.

To stabilize a republic, it may indeed be necessary to have a critical mass and right mix of people with middling
isothumos—
for whom equal citizen honor is not only good enough, but loved and celebrated. Probably societies do not have to rid themselves entirely of individuals with giant
thumos
in order to end war. There are excesses of
thumos
that may be tolerable in some individuals, but to which a
nation
must not extend even its little finger. A boring lawfulness in the conduct of nations is the best that can be hoped for; and if this lawfulness reliably allows free development of individuals, then it is very good indeed.

Historian of ancient societies Hans van Wees, in his study
Status Warriors,
¹⁶
has connected the violence of the
Iliad
to the ways its “heroic” culture constructed the emblems and evidence of honor. Iliadic culture persistently measured honor in the quantity of deference by others. Because deference, and thus honor, could be compelled through violence and the threat of violence, we see much more violence in that setting than in a culture where the evidence of honor is, for example, a financial net worth of $10 million, or lineal descent from King Edward III, neither of which can be compelled by violence. In sixteenth-century Brescia in Italy, numerous deaths resulted from duels over who deferred to whom in the town's narrow alleys. Many of the deaths among poor teenagers in American slums today appear to be similarly based on deference as the only currency of honor. They have reasons to think that equal citizen honor is a lie and a sham, and have been stripped bare of the warming garments of civil society.
¹⁷

People who are personally modest, self-controlled, and forgiving—apparently without a shred of giant
thumos—
may act like bloodthirsty lunatics when they believe that their national honor has been debased, or their religious group insulted. It works the other way, too. People who daily suffer the oppressions and humiliations of poverty and disprized social identities may become euphoric when “their” athletic team or nation has done something glorious. A magazine cover photo
¹⁸
shows a crowd of sariclad young Indian women demonstrating with a banner crudely lettered “WE PROUD ON OUR NUCLEAR TEST—what makes my blood run cold is the transported look of ecstasy on their faces. Nationalism and xenophobia
are the most seductive music of the demonic, full of uplift and power.

We are rightfully suspicious of statements of the form: “It's human nature to do this … It's just the way it is.” So with reluctance and trepidation I shall make such a statement: “High-stakes threat of destruction to
thumos—
to attachments, ideals, ambitions—triggers killing rage against the human source of this threat. It's in our species nature.”

So does that mean that war—which is state-practiced violence against another state—is an inevitable, permanent, irremovable feature of human life? No … It may mean that
evil
can never be eradicated; it may mean that it is not possible to eliminate individual human violence—but war, a state activity, is like chattel slavery—this we can end.

In our ancestral environment, where the human brain evolved to its present size and structure, the maximum size of a society was probably no more than 150 souls. They probably warred with one another, perhaps in the way chimpanzee bands make war.
¹⁹
Within these Paleolithic bands we may reasonably conjecture that there was some sort of internal peace, as there is in chimpanzee bands. It was in this setting that modern
Homo sapiens
evolved. If any societal practice of peace and war can be said to be biologically “natural” for the human animal, it is probably that this small community shared food within itself and violently defended its own against all others. But then whatever evolved in the brain that permitted human attachment to societies of five thousand, permitting internal peace in such a large group—this is the same brain capacity that permits societies of 5 million or 500 million to have internal peace. The tiny population of Iceland is unimaginably large compared to the ancestral bands in which our modern brain evolved. So when we think about ending war, we must conclude with William of Ockham in the fourteenth century, “What is—is possible!” The human brain presents no fundamental barrier to a world without war. From the biological point of view of 150-person ancestral bands in which the modern human brain evolved, “perpetual peace” has already happened!