cell913blog.com #73

There are moments when, as a Canadian, non-American, that I have to confront some of the most challenging insights of mentor The American, James Hillman.

One such moment arose yesterday, while sitting in the cafeteria of a local hospital, I read this line from Hillman’s essay, ‘Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars’ from Mythic Figures, Spring Publications, 2021, p.128:

We may be a violent people but not a warlike people—and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself.

Why then, this presumptuous Canadian is prompted to ask, has the world witnessed an American history and litany of ‘wars’ to counter the infections of illicit drug consumption, addiction, importation and gangs, along with the tidal wave of weapons and law enforcement initiatives that have morphed what is essentially a social-health-medical-psychological-sociological-political issue? And why, from the evidence available through the public media outlets, have those ‘wars’ almost universally and without exception, failed? Is this paradox, seeming irreconcilable conundrum, as a psychic model, similar to, analogous to, or perhaps even identical to the problem each human being faces, when attempting to reconcile his/her/our ‘dark side’ with our ‘better angels’ as the vernacular would put it?

When political issues, even political campaigns, are imagined, rhetorically debated, strategically planned and tactically executed as “wars” between combatants, political parties which, as exemplified in the recent national elections, have adopted a ‘zero-sum’ approach to their conduct, then war is no longer something merely hated. And war, as incarnated in political campaigns, is no longer the honourable, decent, respectful and honest debate stage that seems to evoke Mars. While there are aesthetically and creatively presented moments of campaign ads and epithets that will live longer than the campaigns in which they have been launched, and there are moments when specific speeches, interviews, editorials, PSA’s (Public Service Announcements) video clips that elevate the spirit of voters and the soul of the nation, there is a foreboding, and a kind of apocalyptic and existential threat to the nation,  and many argue to the survival of democracy itself, as embodied in the American history, law, government and even the books of poetry.

Hillman argues that the American ‘blindness’ to war exemplifies the ‘blindness’ of Mars. Our so-called doublespeak about armaments as ‘peacekeepers’ reflects truly how we think. War is bad, exterminate war and keep peace violently: punitive expeditions, pre-emptive strikes, send in the Marines. More firepower means surer peace. We enact the blind god’s blindness. (Mars Caecus, as the Romans called him and Mars insanus, furibundus, omnipotens) like Grant’s and Lee’s men in the Wilderness, like the bombing of Dresden, overkill as a way to end war…..If in the arms is the god, then arms control requires at least partly, if not ultimately, a religious approach. The statement by the Catholic Bishops is a harbinger of that recognition. We worry about nuclear accident, but what we call accident is the autonomy of the inhuman. Arms as instruments of death, are sacred objects that remind mortals that are we are not athnetos, immortal.

Before we open the relationship between the martial and the nuclear mind-set, or perspective, we need to pause to put this ‘sacred’ notion of arms, instruments of death reminding us that we are not immortal. From a psychological and theological perspective, one can argue that to consider arms as instruments of death and thereby sacred, appears to many as a blatant rationalization, a reconciliation of the theological/sacred to the ‘symbols’ of killing. And this perception, attitude, and conviction may well embody the Achilles Heel of Christianity….And there is a profound psychological, as well as political, ethical, moral and sociological risk in this apparently widely-held perception that war itself can be symbolized, carried in metaphor as a ‘sacred’ act. An extension of this perception would be to consider the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which the Americans dubbed “Little Boy” (how ironic is that?) as a sacred symbol. To put an end to war, as the argument and justification of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tends to be put, itself seems specious today. From waging peace.org, the website of “Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, in a piece entitled ‘Were the Atomic Bombs Necessary?’ by David Kreiger, July 30, 2012, we read:

The US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, even without the use of the atomic bombs, without the Soviet Union entering the war and without an Allied invasion of Japan, the war would have ended before December 31, 1945 and, in al likelihood, before November 1 1945. Prior to the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US was destroying Japanese cities at will with conventional bombs. The Japanese were offering virtually no resistance. The US dropped atomic bombs on a nation that had been largely defeated and some of whose leaders were seeking terms of surrender….Most high ranking Allied  military leaders were appalled by the use of the atomic bombs. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Europe, recognized that Japan was ready to surrender and said, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” General Hap Arnold, commander of the US Army Corps pointed out, “Atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, put it this way: ‘The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated an ready to surrender. In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians of the Dark Ages. Wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. What Truman has described as ‘the greatest thing in history’ was actually, according to his own military leaders, an act of unparalleled cowardice, the mass annihilation of men, women and children. The use of the atomic bombs was the culmination of an air war fought against civilians in Germany and Japan, an air war that showed increasing contempt for the lives of civilians and for the laws of war.

Not only was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary. To consider the bomb a ‘sacred’ thing is a contemptuous miscarriage of not only ethics and truth, but of any theology worthy of the name. And clearly, such a premise is unthinkable, untenable and specious. And that just might be one of the entrapments in which the American psyche, the anima mundi, has been, and continues to be, ‘caught’. While there is a moral aspect to all perceptions, there are limits to the application of mythological figures, voices, gods and goddesses to real events, circumstances and dramas, whether they are personal or political. Hillman’s desire to peer at personal psychic trauma from a ‘wider’ and more metaphoric, poetic lens, with his proposed intervention through the imagination, of these figures in whose patterns we walk, has the significant release from instant, reductionistic, situational and highly constrained morality. That aspect of archetypal psychology seems both relevant and releasing, especially in a binary, black-white, either-or literal perception, belief and language. A question of whether such an application of the mythic figures, even with their alleged blindness, is warranted in the much more epic, geo-political, historic and even meta-historic domain of what are now ‘global wars of existential proportion’ remains open.

 And, Hillman’s notion that religion and psychology are both about the human soul, and over-lap each other in many ways, like the Venn diagram, warrants serious, thoughtful, reflective and imaginative consideration, religion is NOT exclusively a psychological matter. Nor is psychology an exclusively religious matter. Verbal parsing, for the purposes of differentiating, nevertheless, has merit. So too does the serious examination of the intersection of religion and war.

The question of ‘being a ‘violent people but not a warlike people’ warrants some further digging. We know that two premises that are mutually exclusive and contradictory are both equally feasible simultaneously. Nevertheless, in a ‘literal, empirical’ world of culture, language and perceptions, in which we are taught, inculcated into and come to believe that separation of opposites, if at first for differentiation, nevertheless can entrap our perceptions, attitudes and our psyche into a veritable vice. And that vice tends to react instantaneously, impulsively and spontaneously in an act of judging one to the exclusion of the other. In public discourse, for example, one would be thought and regarded as a fool for positing that being violent but not warlike was reasonable, defensible, logical and ethically sustainable. How can ‘violent and warlike,’ even if attributed to the blindness of a mythical god of war, be separated on the street, in the halls of power, and/or in the psyche of human beings? Is it not likely that many would and do generate a link, whether causal or correlative, between violence and war? Gun violence, as enacted daily in mass killings, seems to a ‘generalist’ eye, one that pulsates somewhat feverishly at the instigation, whether in art/drama/domestic violence or on the battlefield, inextricably linked, however speciously, contemptuously and metaphysically, to the motive to go to war.

And yet, the very blindness to war, to the very notion that lies at the heart of the American anima mundi, epitomizes the blindness we each have to the darkness of each and every one of our passionate motivations, convictions, beliefs and conscious ‘stridently held’ dogmas. From a psychological perspective, we each live in that zone of the’muddle’ or ‘the middle’ in the vortex that is created by the tension between our ‘passion’ as a positive impulse, force, motivation and commitment and our ‘innocence, ignorance (unknowing), blindness, unconsciousness’ implicit in the negative impulse, force, power, influence and ‘hold’ in which that blindness ‘grabs us’ like the figures of our dreams, fantasies, myths, legends, gods and goddesses.

In the Hillman essay referred to previously, (Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars), Hillman warns us:

I believe we can never speak sensible of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This special state must be ritualistically entered. We must be ‘inducted,’ and ‘war must be ‘declared’- as one is declared insane, declared married or bankrupt….To know war we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart. (p. 121)

For this scribe, it is as if I have been, in this space, arguing, pushing back, rejecting Hillman’s method, perspective and thesis, by advocating for a typical, innocent, detached, (Canadian), disengaged view of war and violence, and a perspective that is characterized by the proverbial denial, refusal to open to the depth, the force and the deeper psychic influence of the seemingly inescapable hatred of war and violence. Is that denial,  resistance, avoidance, ‘innocent,’ blindness’ the same blindness that I have been unconscious of in most, if not all, of the other areas in my life?

In another of his writings, Emotion found in A Blue Fire, edited by Thomas Moore, Hillman writes:

(E)motion, no matter how bizarre, must be taken in awful earnest before diagnosing it abortive..This refusal to meet the challenge of emotion, this mauvais foi of consciousness if fundamental to our ‘age of anxiety.’ It is characteristic of—even instrumental in—what has been called ‘the contemporary failure of nerve.’ We do not face emotion in honesty and live it consciously. Instead emotion hangs as a negative background shadowing our age with anxiety and erupting in violence. …Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them…Problems sustain us—maybe that’s why they don’t go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless too. There is a secret love hiding in each problem…We are betrayed in the very same close relationships where primal trust is possible. We can be truly betrayed only where we truly trust-by brothers, lovers, wives, husbands not be enemies, not by strangers. The greater the love and loyalty, the involvement and commitment, the greater the betrayal. Trust has in it the seed of betrayal; the serpent was in the garden from the beginning…Trust and the possibility of betrayal come into the world at the same moment. Wherever there us trust in a union, the risk of betrayal becomes a real possibility. And betrayal, as a continual possibility to be lived with, belongs to trust just as doubt belongs to a living faith. (James Hillman, A Blue Fire, pps.274-5-7-8)

Essentially, in a parallel way, my hatred, contempt, and disgust of and for war and violence have had the impact of keeping me separate from, detached from, and willing to avoid any engagement in conflict, violence, and war. Only yesterday, while biking with our three-year-old Portuguese Water Dog, Tasha, she was visciously attacked by a large angry and uncontrolled dog from behind. Tasha and I reacted instantly in fear and  panic, only to be followed by angry words directed to the owner of the attack dog, a sheepish retreat by his owner and the needed assistance of strangers to keep Tasha out of the path of oncoming cars and trucks. Violence erupted in an instant; and my aversion, innocence, unpreparedness and historic aversion to any form of violence, including any I might have inflicted unconsciously, unknowingly, even in the betrayal of others, exaggerated my state of panic.

Becoming familiar with my own blindness, analogously, seems to evoke blindness to the power of violence, war and betrayal.

Troublesome, no doubt; somewhat freeing and releasing too!