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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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23. Robert J. Lifton

Robert Jay Lifton holds the Foundation Fund for Research in Psychiatry professorship at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He has been particularly concerned with the relationship between individual psychology and historical change.
Professor Lifton was born in New York in 1926. He was for a number of years associated with the Harvard University Center for East Asian Studies. He spent seven years in the Far East.
Among other publications, he has written Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China (1961), Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1968), History and Human Survival (1970), Death in Life, The Survivors of Hiroshima (1968), and Boundaries, Random House (New York, 1970).

In your book, Boundaries, already in the very first lines, you speak of ‘limitless destruction.’

 

The problem is I think that destruction is more limitless than creation or growth. There aren't limits to destruction. That's one of the first points I make in Boundaries and in my other work - namely, our quantum jump and our capacity for destruction in itself creates a new historical situation. So there are no limits to destruction.

We will have to talk about this on two levels. One is the actual physical capacity of the weaponry that we make, and that, I think, is virtually limitless. I mean, we have now the capacity to pretty much destroy all life on earth that we know; and one does not have to make some sort of absolute prediction about whether in the next nuclear war, if there is to be one, all of life will be eradicated, annihilated, or most of life will be. That used to be a parlor game in the late fifties and early sixties. The fact is we have the physical capacity for total destruction.

What I wrote about in Boundaries and what I've been most concerned about is the psychic state that accompanies the capacity or the way in

which that new capacity affects our psychological lives. Here I would say we live on two levels. One is an apocalyptic level, and although there is a great deal of criticism among some groups about the apocalyptic thinking that goes on nowadays, my position is that one requires what I call an apocalyptic imagination to grasp the actualities of our time. One must live with an apocalyptic imagination because that's the true nature of our possibilities for destruction.

On the other hand, we have a day-to-day necessity of muddling through, of keeping things going, and of maintaining some sort of equilibrium in the world. One hopes for peace or to achieve peace. That requires day-to-day judgment of a nonapocalyptic character. There are these two levels of response to the capacity for total destruction.

 

How does this swinging between these two levels affect young people?

 

I think the very young people are very much involved in this. It is very hard to ascribe the behavior of the young to any one factor. My own feeling is - I have also written about what I call the Protean Style, the whole situation of psycho-historical dislocation.

 

Protean man.1

 

I think that the situation of the young and much of their behavior and their aspirations is stranded on this new set of historical forces. One very important force is one we've just been talking about: the capacity for total destruction. But along with that is - and this is what I emphasize very much - the breakdown of traditional symbolic structures which has been going on. It did not begin in the last ten or twenty years or even since World War II, but began perhaps sometime during the eighteenth century or before the breakdown of traditional cultures and has reached an intensity now which has been further accelerated by the holocaust of World War II. This is a second level of the breakdown of symbolic forms around which life has been organized so that life had a wholistic and integrated structure within a given culture. I am speaking of structures of religion, of government, of the life cycle, of marriage, of education, of all the major activities in life.

These are no longer ordained by a set of cultural symbols. Not that they were as precisely ordained as we sometimes think in premodern cultures, but nowadays there is a radical collapse of the viability of these symbols. The symbolic structures are still there. We still live in families.

Many of us go to the churches or synagogues. We vote or don't vote and have relationships to our government. But my point is we don't inwardly believe in our relationship to all these things, our capacity to really be grabbed by them internally has diminished, so that we live with a kind of residuum which is no longer vital, which no longer has vitality. That being so, the combination of that breakdown of vital symbols and this new capacity for total destruction or for annihilation of man and his history by means of his technology gives great importance to this mass-media revolution.

There are three elements, the mass media revolution is important because it spreads images rapidly, totally and almost instantaneously - images of possibility, whether they are psychological possibilities of how one should live or whether they are images about material objects that interest or tempt one, or images of other cultures - we now have the possibility of any image being available to anyone at any moment. That really is another radical shift in our psychic life.

Those three elements, to get back to your question, very much affect the way that young people behave. To me there is a great logic in radical experiments by the young, even if they at times seem destructive or overshoot themselves, even if they fail to act. Even if they fail to achieve immediate solutions, which of course are impossible to achieve. Still there is a logic behind these experiments, given those elements in our situation.

 

Do you feel Jean-Paul Sartre2 is somewhat an example of this protean man?

 

I used him as an example of Protean Style because he is a tremendously important modern figure in the twentieth century. He is important on many levels, but I used something of his life, and his work. His autobiography Words3 is an example of Protean Style. In his case, he has achieved a very creative equilibrium between continuity and protean experimentation. He has maintained an impressive continuity as an experimental writer. He stresses in his writing the absence of a fixed ego, a fixed consciousness, and rather sees consciousness or ego as a kind of flow or flux. In that sense the very content of his psychology is radically protean. In his own life, his various experiments and his responses to various groups and to the young he has shown many protean inclinations. Of course, being protean is never absolute. One always holds to certain more fixed or stable positions. That in a way permits

one to be protean. In his case he had certain fairly fixed political positions and then has made protean experimentations, while holding to those political positions; but even these have altered in recent years. I see him in his life and in his works as exemplifying in many ways a Protean Style.

 

To get back to the third factor, the mass media and their influence. You spoke about the never-to-be-estimated damage of the spreading of half-knowledge.

 

I think it is happening all over. But let us get back to our general subject first, the approach of the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth. I heard Forrester4 give some of their presentation in considerable detail at a conference and felt it to be a mixture of truth and misleading claims. The notion of an eco-system of the whole world, having all elements interrelated, this to me is a very profound and important approach, which I think any notion of world processes has to take into account.

On the other hand, what seems to be often half a truth in the Club of Rome approach, as exemplified by Forrester, is the set of variables that are postulated. I'm more familiar in detail with his work on the city. He set forth a series of assumptions there, which really constituted the variables that have been read to the computer that are very dubious and didn't take into account many other elements and many trends. A lot of his assumptions happen to be those in the existing order of cities. The material presented by Forrester were assumptions of those of the comfortable middle class in the city, the upper middle class more or less.

This is a great danger in computer projects. I think that we need projections of the future. We have to think of the world as an ecosystem. But I also think there is a great technicist fallacy in assuming that by a kind of technological projection of what we take to be reliable variables we can have an accurate picture of the world future. I am skeptical.

 

Do you think this doomsday message, this shaking of people, is damaging or useful?

 

It's again this issue of a half-truth. What's good about it? I wish the world could have been shaken up in a more reliable way. It may be quite true that - and many others have said it in different ways - that we are in danger of using up our resources and moving forward a precarious balance of population and resources and so on, and that we're being pro-

miscuous and irresponsible. There is value in the fact that a fairly dramatic presentation may shake things up. But in the assumptions put forward about futurology and the nature of futurists I think there is a lot of misleading information. It is a kind of paradox, because this particular study emphasizes the danger of a false reliance on burgeoning technology and technological growth, because after all, technological growth requires all these resources and these are elements that are running low. On the other hand, the method used is technicist in that the mind imitates technology in trying to turn social science into a technicized machine-modeled discipline. There are paradoxes and contradictions that I think could be highly misleading. It is very hard to give positive or negative results in the end. Maybe they will be more positive than negative in provoking a good deal of thought and debate on this matter.

 

Do you think Professor Skinner5 has a valid argument that the environment shapes the individual rather than the other way round?

 

My way of thinking is radically opposed to Skinner. I listened to him carefully at a public meeting in New York a few months ago and then had occasion to debate some aspects of what he said. Putting it very simply, I think behavioral theory of the kind he develops can be fairly accurate for relatively limited and relatively simple actions. It seems to me totally inaccurate for more complex human interactions. The notion that one can program a world environment in order to create the desirable human psychological responses I think is totally wrong. One always has to have a sort of dialectic - one hopes a creative and a constructive dialectic - between planning, which we desperately need, thoughtful planning, always based on values and not based upon a notion of perfecting an environment that will create perfect beings. Beings will always be imperfect. Planning on the one hand and a kind of openness, an open world, an open system, call it what you will, with a great deal of unpredictability and a great deal of disorder. It is that sort of dialectic we need rather than a notion of a totally planned and controlled and behaviorally predicted environment.

 

Do you feel our scientists take entirely different, sometimes opposite, values and cultures - as, for instance, in Asia - sufficiently into account by making global studies and predictions?

 

That would be one example. The notion of total planning and

behavioral manipulations on a world scale is wrong, no matter which culture you are in. One does not even have to resort to the stress on cultural differences in order to find it conceptionally wrong. Skinner is no doubt humanitarian in his own personal life. But his approach lends itself to an authoritarian elite determining the plans for the rest of us in a way that in the end they are totally incapable of doing.

 

Could you explain your vision of a new history, which boils down actually to changing boundaries, to changing limits constantly. You write repeatedly of this total loose approach of an infinite effort.

 

Yes, I think you convey in a sense what I do try to suggest. I see history, or man's experience in history, as a kind of continuous process. The notion that a particular moment will achieve perfection to me seems absurd. We need utopian visions in order to create some sort of positive forces in historical change. But in speaking of a new history, one way of emphasizing that idea was to describe what I call symbolic motive immortality, or taking up certain ideas and suggestions put forth by many before me in philosophy and in psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis I refer particularly to the ideas of Otto Rank,6 who saw all of human history as an effort to maintain a continuous sense of the human self. It sounds perhaps like a rather mystical notion, but what I take this to mean is to see all of historical processes related to man's need for continuity, or what I call ‘symbolic immortality,’ to feel himself connected to what has gone on before and what's to go on afterwards, whether it be human groups, human ideas and so on. This can be done, as I said, biologically through families or through man's works - what he creates - or his influences, through a religious notion of spirituality or a conquest of death or, more literally, of life after death, through nature, or the idea that eternal nature will go on despite the mortal limitations of human life or limitations of mortality. Or, finally, through what I call ‘experience of transcendence,’ a psychic state of great intensity in which time and death disappear.

From this standpoint, new history is a major shift in the mode or modes of symbolic immortality. One could speak of a new history in the Darwinian shift in the nineteenth century from the religious mode to the more natural mode that Darwin,7 and others interested in the evolving idea of evolution, suggested concerning both the natural mode and the biological mode. We see a similar shift going on at present. What's quite clear to me is that old modes are being dishonored or questioned. I mean

by new modes of symbolic immortality, higher values around which we seek to immortalize ourselves in symbolic ways. New modes concern the replacement of that which is being dishonored or questioned, this is much less clear. So, we have the idea of holocaust.

 

What you call ‘nuclear holocaust’ - How does this doubtful concept of biological immortality affect young people?

 

The notion of nuclear holocaust is very strong in all adults. Not as an inevitable process, but as a possibility in our time. This idea has been holding in the human consciousness over the past three decades. The notion of continuity of symbolic immortality, living on in one's children, or living on in man's works, even the religious modes and the idea of living on in eternal nature may be questioned. We can destroy most of nature with our weaponry, most of our environment either with our weaponry or with our pollution, so in one phrase modes of symbolic immortality are virtually all threatened, not eliminated. They still exist for us, but they're under some basic doubts, psychologically speaking. That I think is one of the major reasons why we see this radical new interest in what I call ‘experiential transcendences’ in various forms of highs. This could mean in intense psychic experiences, whether through the so-called drug revolution or through some experiments in consciousness without drugs or even in political actions. The young seek high moments and high experience. In this sense much of what goes on in the young, in their experiments and in the kinds of experiments they resort to, has to do with a questioning of those modes of symbolic immortality via the ideas of holocaust which have taken hold in our consciousness.

 

Does this tend to numb the psyche? Does it take out feelings?

 

The loss of response is possible to this situation of threatened breakdown in human continuity. It is not just a threat of death. It's the threat of an unacceptable death. It's the threat of premature death. The premature death really means a sudden putting off of one's relationship to all those elements that might symbolize one's immortality. In this sense it is turning a lot of psychological ideas on the head by speaking this way, but in any case there can be many reactions possible.

Sometimes there are many creative responses to this, as we've seen in the experiments with various radical institutions as the experiments

of the young we've been talking about. Some of them are creative, some of them destructive, some of them in-between. But in other responses extreme numbing takes place, and I talk about that in my work. I'm trying to develop this in more systematized ways in more recent work, that I have not published yet. This desensitization, its origin, I think could be called a desymbolization or a loss of the symbolizing function or formative function, which is the essence of human living. In other words, numbing really occurs where you can no longer find some sort of meaningful fit or connection between self and world; where the gap, psychically speaking, becomes very great, often numbing is resorted to.

 

Perfecting nuclear power and weapons - could that be the in-between, or an effort to search for new limits, for new meanings?

 

The word limits may be confusing there and yet not entirely inappropriate either. I said there were many responses to this situation of what I am calling, to use a big phrase, ‘psychohistorical dislocation,’ the radical loss of viable relationship to symbols and symbolic forms. In all what we just discussed, holocaust plays a part. The most extreme response of a negative kind is what I call ‘nuclearism.’ That's an expression of this terrible ingenuity of man. He can actually worship the thing that threatens him with - renders the weapon a deity or God, the very agent of his potential destruction.

But of course that's not new, in a sense, because we've always seen our gods, in fact we've always recognized a god larger than the basis of the capacity to destroy. We turn around and worship the very thing we have created and attribute to it powers of creation as well, as we do to gods. The gods can both destroy and create and then we - with great fantasy, I think - build a deliberate system of safety, security, what I call ‘nuclearism,’ which involves great psychic dependency upon these weapons along with the deification. We expect them to do all kinds of things that they are simply incapable of doing.

This stems from a certain half-truth again, because to possess nuclear weapons is to hold a certain power in the world. Everybody seems to want them, although I think a number of countries happily have their second thoughts about the whole process. But on that half-truth is built a tremendous weapon - fantasy, in which one can build ‘security,’ the favorite word of the Pentagon in this country, with probably their equivalents abroad, in Russia, China, France, elsewhere. The disease is not limited to any one country in its potential for it.

The fantasy involves a notion of security and safety and even a kind of suggestion of realization or of some sort of transcendence via these weapons, because in some ways we are attached to, or connected with, these all-powerful entities. This is of course a very dangerous kind of dependency, to say the least, or, as I say in my work, it is a contemporary disease of power. It has to do with the effort to master and take hold of a situation that we feel has deteriorated or has left us helpless, to restore psychic boundaries or psychic forms of meaning.

The tendency towards ‘nuclearism’ may, e.g., make man want to worship the idea of nuclear power even for civilian uses. I wouldn't make a blanket statement against nuclear power; I am not really qualified to make firm statements from a standpoint of engineering and power supply and so on. But one does see in sum the embrace of whatever peacetime expressions of nuclear power can offer us, a kind of uncritical embrace and a struggle against recognizing the potential dangers of nuclear power even for allegedly peacetime uses. If you read, e.g., a book like Edward Teller's Legacy of Hiroshima8 (I use this as an example of the process - I am not trying to cast stones so much as exemplify the process), one sees an uncritical embrace of both the weapons and of the peacetime potential for nuclear power. This seems to me a rather impressive and dangerous example of ‘nuclearism.’


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