344
~.
ALVAREZ
that it becomes indifferent, impersonal, inevitable and, finally, without
meaning, the only way to survive, however briefly,
is
by shutting
oneself off utterly from every feeling, so that one becomes invulner–
able, not like an armored animal but like a stone.
. . . . [P]sychic closing-off can serve a highly adaptive funotion. It does
so partly through a process of denial
("If
I feel nothing, then death
is
not taking place") .... Further, it protects the survivor from a
sense of oomplete helplessness, from feeling himself totally inactivat–
ed by the force invading his environment. By closing himself off, he
resists being "acted upon" or altered .... We may thus say that the
survivor initially undergoes a radical but temporary diminution of
his sense of actuality in order to avoid losing this sense completely
and permanently; he undergoes a ,reversible form of symbolic death
in order
to
avoid a permanent physical or psychic death.
Dr. Lifton
is,
as it happens, describing the defense mechanisms
brought into play by the survivors of the Hiroshima atom bomb and
the Nazi concentration camps. But that awareness of a ubiquitous,
arbitrary death - which descends like a medieval plague on the just
and unjust alike, without warning or reason - is, I think, central to
our experience of the twentieth century. It began with the pointless
slaughters of the First World War, continued through Nazi and Stal–
inist extermination camps, through a Second World War which cul–
minated in two atomic explosions, and has survived with genocide
in
Tibet and Biafra, a senseless war in Vietnam, atomic testing which
poisons the atmosphere and the development of biological weapons
which kill haphazardly and more or less without control; it ends with
the possibility of the globe itself shadowed by nuclear weapons orbit–
ing in outer space.
It is important not to exaggerate; after all,
this
sense of disaster
is, for the moment, mercifully peripheral to the lives most of us
lead. To harp on it like Cassandra is as foolish, and ultimately as
boring, as to ignore it completely. Yet the fact remains that the con–
text in which our arts, morals and securities are created has changed
radically:
After Hiroshima we can envisage no war-linked chivalry, certainly
no glory. Indeed, we can see no relationship - not even a distinc–
tion - between victimizer and victim - only the sharing in species
annihilation. . . . In every age man faces a pervasive theme which
defies his engagement and yet must be engaged. In Freud's day it
was sexuality and moralism. Now it is unlimited technological viol–
ence and absurd death.
[-Dr. Lifton]
