The legend of Horace—victorious, furious, criminal, and purified—served as myth at the annual ceremony which marked the end of the military season, in which the warriors of primitive Rome passed over from the domain of Mars [the Roman god of war] unleashed to that of “Mars qui praeest paci” [Mars who is in charge of peace] thus … thereby desacralizing themselves, and also cleansing themselves for their acts of violence in battle which, if not “involuntary,” were at least necessary.8
One of my patients, a Vietnam vet, was greeted by his father, who was torpedoed in the World War II Merchant Marine, with a $50 bill on his return from Vietnam and the words, “Here. Get drunk. Get laid. And I want you at the union hall on Monday morning.” That is not purification after battle.
Over the years, I have said to my patients (who are almost entirely Roman Catholic because of the demography of the local veteran population), “If the Church’s ideas on sin, penitence, forgiveness of sin, and redemption are about anything, they’re about the real stuff. What the Church offers is about cruelty, violence, murder—not just the sins you confessed in parochial school.” My clinical team has encouraged many of the veterans we work with to avail themselves of the sacrament of penance. When a veteran does not already know a priest he trusts to hear his confession, we have suggested priests who understand enough about combat neither to deny that he has anything to feel guilty about nor to recoil in revulsion and send him away without the sacrament. We also recommend service to others and the doing (not simply passive consumption) of the arts as ways of living with guilt.
Have we learned nothing about the importance of judging separately a war and the people who fight it? Yes, the Nuremberg Principles on war crimes are crucial. But do we condemn the inexperienced young Navy lieutenant Bob Kerrey for not refusing an order because it could lead him into the illegal act of killing unarmed women and children if the mission failed in some specific way, but not if it went off as conceived?9
While it is true that rapid social changes took place while many Vietnam veterans were in the military and away in Vietnam, I have pointed out repeatedly that this gulf between veteran and civilian is generic, and was experienced by returning combat veterans of prior wars. It is historically typical for returning American war veterans throughout our history to be ignored by the communities they returned to, rather than to be celebrated and cherished by them.10 The experience of the World War II veterans—the fathers of the Vietnam veterans—is the historical anomaly. Toward the end of World War II, politicians with fresh memories of the Bonus Army of World War I veterans worried about so many returning soldiers looking for jobs. Willard Waller, the World War I veteran whom I have quoted so many times in this book, did his best to see that they were worried, warning of the social and political nitroglycerine that millions of returning veterans could present to civilian society. Congress appropriated unprecedented benefits.
Farmers from the Revolutionary War returned to find banks foreclosing their farms because the money the government gave them was no good. These first American veterans encountered a Platonic/Stoic/Puritan view that yes, what they had done in the Continental Army was virtuous, but virtue itself is sufficient to well-being11—so why are they asking for money? Implicit in this philosophic position is the reasoning that if the veteran does not have well-being, his virtue is somehow defective. Therefore, logically, misery and disability must be his own fault, his own deficiency of virtue, and therefore unworthy of compassion.
Sound familiar?
Only in the period after the War of 1812 did the nation awaken to its duty toward the veterans of the War of Independence. In his 1999 book, Suffering Soldiers, historian John Resch examined wealth and number of children for all the men of a single New Hampshire town from 1792 to 1823. He found that on the average, those who never served, or who joined the short-service militia, held their own economically, and had stable economic success and that the reproductive success of the two groups was similar. However, during the same period, the long-service Continental Army veterans got poorer. On average, the long-service veterans had started out the beginning of the period 11 percent poorer than the militia vets or never-served, but ended up a startling 66 percent poorer than the other groups thirty years later.12 The number of living children in the household, which in that era was strongly influenced by the quality of year-round nutrition, and thus dependent on wealth, shows an average of 6.5 children for Continental Army veterans, 7.5 for militia veterans, and 9.4 for those who never served.
Civil War veterans had trouble finding employment and were accused of being drug addicts. Our word “hobo” supposedly comes from homeless Civil War veterans—called “hoe boys”—who roamed the lanes of rural America with hoes on their shoulders, looking for work. World War I Bonus Army veterans marched on Washington in 1932, the summer before FDR’s election, and camped on the Mall. They demanded that they be paid the bonus that Congress had voted them in 1924. President Hoover had them driven out with tanks and bayonets and their camp burned. Korean War veterans were accused of being too weak to win. In that era of McCarthyism, repatriated POWs were suspected of Communist sympathies from brainwashing.
With increasing polarization over the Vietnam War, veterans returned home to protesters who accused them of being torturers, perpetrators of atrocities, and baby killers. For every returning veteran who encountered this personally, there were many more who saw scenes selected for their dramatic and/or outrageous qualities in the TV news or heard nth-hand stories. The media presented a barrage of images portraying the Vietnam veteran as crazy, drug-addicted, and violent. For many veterans who had joined up because they thought it was their duty as citizens, who had grown up on John Wayne and Audie Murphy, rejection by the community was infuriating. And then in their fathers’ VFW and Legion posts, some were greeted with derision even more devastating than taunts by war protesters: “We won our war. What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
Those Vietnam-era civilians inclined to show honor to returning veterans ran afoul of deep divisions over the wisdom of making this war at all (e.g., if Chinese expansionism was the threat, wouldn’t Ho and the Viet Minh be our natural allies?), and over the justice of how it was prosecuted (e.g., “free fire zones”), making it appear that honoring the veterans endorsed both. From the hawks on the political right to the doves on the political left, the nation as a whole lost sight of the fundamental importance of social esteem in rebuilding the capacity for social trust within a person who has come home from war. Social esteem is embodied no less in private gestures of respect than in public rituals of honor and recognition. Vietnam veterans often received neither.
DAMAGE TO CHARACTER—INJURED THUMOS
Professor Amélie Rorty of Brandeis defines the Homeric word thumos as “the energy of spirited honor.”13 It is closely allied to the English word “character,” but adds some important extra dimensions. I want to put thumos back into current use, and am not alone in this. As Professor Francis Fukuyama, an economic historian has pointed out, modern democracies often fail to recognize honor and the desire for recognition as part of the universal and normal makeup of humans, noticing it only in its pathological and deformed states.14
According to the German Idealist philosopher Hegel, all human warfare originates in a fight to the death over honor, a fight for unconditional recognition and acknowledgment by an equal, which only one combatant can win. Hegel says that there are two ways to lose: death with honor, or the all-encompassing dishonor—the social death—of enslavement.15 Honor is a social phenomenon; its interior psychic mirror is thumos. Current psychiatric terminology calls thumos “narcissism.” “Narcissism” is simply a new word for an old concept: “thumos” from Homer; “thumoeides” from Plato; “pride or vainglory” from Hobbes; “amour-propre” from Rousseau; “desire for recognition (Anerkennung”) from Hegel; “narcissism”16 from psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who developed and modified Freud’s ideas. I much prefer Homer’s term thumos to the modern psychojargon, narc
issism, because of the ways the latter term has been pathologized and turned into a general-purpose blame word. These thinkers, over thousands of years from Homer to Kohut, have seen this feature of mental life as normal and universal, even if it can develop dangerous excesses, deficiencies, or deformities. I believe that thumos is a human universal that evolved out of war in our ancestral evolutionary past and still explodes in killing rage, when violated.17 Many cultural, legal, and social changes have removed these reactions from the individual realm, so we no longer teach our children that a man of honor must kill someone who makes a joke at his expense, or who steals food from his freezer, but such reactions are very much alive at the collective level.
The normal adult’s cloak of safety and guarantor of his or her narcissistic stability is the society’s image of “what’s right” and the implementation of “what’s right” by power holders, along with concrete social support of a face-to-face community to whom one is attached. Narcissism, allegedly the most “primitive” of psychological phenomena, is much entwined with the body, but it is just as deeply enmeshed in the social, moral, and political worlds.
The features of the normal adult world that control thumotic emotions and moods are attachments, ideals, and ambitions. Their good-enough realization in the world is the foundation of ordinary self-respect and of the sense of self-worth that we expect in the normal adult. Thumos, then, can be practically defined as
• The historically and socioculturally constructed content embodied in ideals, ambitions, and attachments.
• The intensity with which these are energized.
• The emotions aroused by cognitive appraisal of their condition (particularly improvement or deterioration) in the world.
Thumos is thus a container for the English word “character.” Character exists in dynamic relation to the ecology of social power, modeled and remodeled throughout life by how well or badly those who hold power fulfill the culture’s moral order. The shattering impact on character of mortal-stakes misuse of power was a major theme of my previous book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.
Aristotle’s explanation of thumos in the Politics (VII.6.1327b39ff.) surprises the modern mind. He starts by picking an argument with his teacher, Plato, over the character of the “Guardians” of the state:
For as to what [Plato] said … about the character that should belong to … Guardians—they should be affectionate to their friends but fierce toward strangers—it is [thumos] that causes affectionateness, for [thumos] is the capacity of the soul whereby we love. A sign of this is that [thumos] is more roused against associates and friends than against strangers, when it thinks itself slighted…. Moreover it is from this faculty that power to command and love of freedom are in all cases derived; for [thumos] is a commanding and indomitable element. But it is a mistake to describe the Guardians as cruel toward strangers; it is not right to be cruel towards anybody, and men of great-souled nature [megalopsukhoi] are not fierce, except against wrongdoers, and their anger is still fiercer against their companions if they think that these are wronging them … Hence the saying “For brothers’ wars are cruel.”
(VII.6.1327b39ff., Rackham, trans.)
This passage is remarkable for the way it draws together these apparently different threads: killing rage, love, the capacity to command, and feeling for freedom. This is exactly the kind of freight the concept of “character” should carry. It must have energy. It must be passionate. It must connect with other people and have an active commitment to right and wrong in the world, however right and wrong are locally constructed. Aristotle’s account focuses on people and social groups to whom we are attached, on philoi (plural of philos). He explains compactly: a philos is “another myself.” “The excellent person is related to his [philos] in the same way as he is related to himself, since a [philos] is another himself.”18 Obviously, there is the altruistic impulse of wishing the philos well, but there is also an element of narcissism here that I want to bring into the foreground and use in a positive way.
Attachment implicates us in the acts and fate of a philos, influencing mood and emotion and touching our sense of our own value. When a philos does something magnificent, we feel pride; when he does something vicious, we feel shame. If I am depressed because my daughter is doing badly in school, it is not because I have made a utilitarian calculation of how this will affect her lifetime earnings and ability to support me in my old age. No, it will be because of my attachment to her, her quality as “another myself.” Threat to a philos arouses fear and rage, and the death or injury of a philos hurts and grieves us. The loving recognition and attachment by a philos sustains and nourishes.
Attachment to philoi inspires altruistic readiness to take risks and to resort to violence on their behalf against outsiders, both defensively and offensively. Betrayal of trust or a breach of “what’s right” among philoi can wreck thumos. At the least, it results in withdrawal of emotional commitment and energy. But it may also produce anger and violence within the group, either directed against those philoi responsible for the betrayal-breach, or in more extreme cases directed against all philoi, against the entire community.
In Achilles in Vietnam (pp. 40-41) I wrote the following about the philia that arises between combat comrades:
Modern American English makes soldiers’ love for special comrades into a problem, because the word “love” evokes sexual and romantic associations. But “friendship” seems too bland for the passion of care that arises between soldiers in combat. Achilles laments to his mother [the goddess Thetis] that his philos, his “greatest friend is gone” (18:89f). Much ink has been spilled over whether this word (and the abstract noun philia) and all its linguistic relatives should be translated under the rubric of “friend, friendship,” etc. or of “love, beloved,” etc. However, the difficulty of finding the right word reflects differences between ancient Greek and modern American culture that need to be made clear. “Philia includes many relationships that would not be classified as friendships. The love of mother and child is a paradigmatic case of philia; all close family relations, including the relation of husband and wife, are so characterized. Furthermore, our [word] ‘friendship’ can suggest a relationship that is weak in affect … as in the expression ‘just friends’…. [Phília] includes the very strongest affective relationships that human beings form … [including, but not limited to] relationships that have a passionate sexual component. For both these reasons, English ‘love’ seems more appropriately wide-ranging…. [The] emphasis of philia is less on intensely passionate longing than on … benefit, sharing, and mutuality….”19 Many individuals who experience friendship as one of the central goods in their lives find that their employers will not recognize philia between people whose relationship is not familial. Veterans have lost their jobs because they left work to aid another veteran, in circumstances where the same absence would have been “understandable” and charged against sick or vacation time—had the other been a spouse, parent, or child. The social relationship of steady, paid employment was virtually unknown in ancient Greece. This relationship has come to so dominate our modern consciousness that many people view friendship purely as a leisure activity, or a sweetener that with luck arises among co-workers, neighbors, or members of a voluntary association such as a church or club, but will be put aside if it gives rise to any conflicting claims at work. Many veterans have also alienated their spouses, because they would leave home to rescue fellow veterans. The ancient Greeks, perhaps because their societies were so highly militarized (every male citizen was also a soldier), simply assumed the centrality of philia.
The formula that philos is “another myself” is the key to most socially organized human violence. In the modern world, the nation-state has appropriated the status of philos, along with other groups such as armies, religions, and professions. Today, except in our deteriorated inner cities, we no longer fight to the death in the streets for recognition as individuals, bu
t nations continue to compel deference with violence, to demand acknowledgment with violence. If your philos is threatened or demeaned it arouses killing rage. Witness the primal rage of Americans after September 11, 2001.
As Aristotle pointed out in the passage above, thumos or narcissism is not exclusively an infantile or pathological phenomenon, but infuses essential elements in human flourishing. Narcissism is a part of the psychic economy of the healthy adult that is intimately bound up with the moral and social world that the adult inhabits.
The social conditions that cause complex PTSD—persistent human betrayal and rupture of community in mortal-stakes situations of captivity—destroy thumos, destroy normal narcissism, and undo character. Modern battle is a condition of captivity (even when it has been entered voluntarily), a fact that has escaped notice because the captives move about in the open carrying powerful weapons, and because the role of captor is cooperatively shared by the two enemy military organizations—which are presumed to cooperate in nothing.20 “Primitive” warfare, of which Iliadic warfare is an example, is and was voluntary—Achilles really could say, “I quit.” Modern combat is a condition of enslavement and torture. I am not demonizing the U.S. Armed Services when I say that. Modern war itself makes it so. Until we end the practice of war itself, this will continue.
What happens to normal adult narcissism—or thumos or character—when it is damaged? The list that follows is a spectrum of manifestations of injury to thumos. While they cannot all happen at the same time, we often see them succeeding each other over time in the same veteran, sometime cyclically.
• Demoralization (athumia), death to the world, apathy, ennui, and aboulia (no will), anhedonia (no pleasure),21 and in its most extreme form: literally fatal collapse of self-care, as in military “nostalgia” and concentration camp “Musselman.”22
Odysseus in America Page 20
