Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  There’s a stampede for the ships, a mad rush that takes everyone by surprise. Apparently in the past, when Agamemnon had pulled this dumb trick, the troops had stood fast and said, “Hey, we’re here for the duration.” Agamemnon is surprised; the Greek officers are surprised—even the gods are surprised—when the army bolts for the ships.

  But should we be surprised? No, we should not be—because this is the predictable result of Agamemnon’s betrayals of “what’s right” the previous day with Achilles and with the priest.22 Motivation, loyalty, and perseverance go whooshing out of the troops like air from a balloon. In the modern world they desert psychologically, even if they can’t desert physically. This scene in Iliad 2, the stampede to the ships, carries one of the Iliad’ s most important lessons for military leaders. “Command climate” is not the weather report of atmospherics and mood; it is the observed trustworthiness of how power is employed. What Agamemnon did to Achilles was no private wrong. As I said before, everyone is watching the trustworthiness of those who wield power above them. If any dared to ask, Agamemnon would have said that what went between him and Achilles was none of their business. But when a military leader violates “what’s right” in the use of power, the injury afflicts everyone. Agamemnon caused Achilles’ desertion and the next day caused the stampede to the ships, the desertion of his whole army.

  When I speak of prevention of moral injury in military service, this Homeric episode is an example of what I want to prevent: betrayal of “what’s right” in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power. The consequences for those still on active duty range from a loss of motivation and enjoyment, resulting in attrition from the service at the next available moment, to passive obstructionism, goldbricking, and petty theft, to outright desertion, sabotage, fragging, or treason. In a war, the consequences are catastrophic.

  Agamemnon’s main motivational tools were shame, humiliation, and pitting one subordinate against another. He was weak, inconsistent, driven by self-gratification, and demonstrated egregiously bad judgment.

  Heaven help a military force of any size with this kind of leadership!

  Achilles stands out as a paragon of leadership, up to the point when Agamemnon’s disastrous misuse of power destroys him. Achilles was an almost perfectly good leader; Agamemnon was an almost perfectly bad leader. Odysseus was a mixture of extremely good and extremely bad military traits. Don’t laugh: Homer may have given us a basic message on military personnel management—“Put the right person in the right place. In the wrong place, he’ll do harm.”23 As a staff officer, strategist, independent intelligence operative, and solo fighter, Odysseus was brilliant. As a troop leader, he was a catastrophe. Homer’s great epics show him in full depth and perspective.

  22 Conclusion

  If you have read this far, you have found me an unashamed moralist. The reason for that is also plain: I regard the ethical use of power to be one key to prevention of psychological injury, particularly of complex PTSD and deformed thumos. Simply, ethics and justice are preventive psychiatry. But I trust that it’s also clear that I am not what scholar W. B. Stanford called a “moralistic enemy of poetry” seeking to censor the Odyssey or dismiss it as childish, because it is so marvelously entertaining.1 I reject the view that the arts are intrinsically harmless, benign, or irrelevant. While we no longer believe that the arts can command physical nature, as in mimetic magical dances commanding the weather or the herds, they are undoubtedly a commanding force of nature where human nature is concerned. No soldier ever threw himself on a grenade for the laws of thermodynamics or even the categorical imperative, but has done so for a story. I stand with Aristotle, and against his teacher, Plato, in seeing the arts as essential to the moral education of citizens, even when the subject of the art is as slippery as Odysseus.

  Epic heroes of the Homeric poems, Odysseus and Achilles, were both “men of pain,” suffering greatly, but also causing great pain and destruction to others.2 The ancient Greeks venerated them like gods, composing prayers to them, bringing offerings at their tombs and shrines, marking them as sacred, holy. One of the veterans quoted in Achilles in Vietnam described the memories that he wanted to—and feared to—narrate as “sacred stuff.”

  When we use the word “hero” today, we want it to mean only good and benign. In the same way we also want “holy” to mean only good and benign. The original meanings of both “hero” and “holy” included dark, destructive sides. Both hero and holy fascinate and rivet the attention, to be sure, but they are dangerous.3 They explode out of any container we hope to put them in, burst any chains of agreed rules and reciprocity we hope will bind them.

  Homeric heroes inflict trauma, but it is just as true to say that trauma creates heroes. Achilles suffered the one-two blows of Agamemnon’s betrayal and the death of his closest comrade, Patroclus, which together powered his epic rampage in the Iliad. Odysseus’ multiple traumas, starting in childhood, powered his epic rampage in the Odyssey. They both had a giant thumos. Whether giant thumos manifests as biē or as mētis, it is impossible to found civil society or for that matter a “well-regulated militia” on giant thumos.4 Very early in the development of democratic politics, giant thumos was recognized as a source of danger and disorder, a source of moves to tyrannize the entire populace.5 Equal citizen respect does not preclude vigorous competitive struggles among citizens in politics and economics, but does require that the struggle restrain biē and mē tis to create a trustworthy setting in which no one ends up a slave. Ever since its origin, democratic struggle has been scorned as unheroic, because it renounces the fight to the death and the making of slaves. The rowdy and contentious Funeral Games for Patroclus in Iliad 23, which are Achilles’ great step back into human society, might be taken as an early metaphor for the rowdy and messy, but ultimately safe, struggle of equal citizens. If either safety or struggle is lost, democratic process ceases.

  Democracy is deeply related to the healing and prevention of trauma. Healing requires voice. The circle of communalization of trauma, which is essential to the healing of trauma, is much aided by the arts. Sometimes these are highly cultivated arts, as in the Homeric poems or Athenian tragedies, but human groups engage in the arts in many other ways when grappling with trauma. This book and Achilles in Vietnam are about the arts, especially the narrative arts, as social responses to trauma.

  Prevention of trauma lies squarely in the realm of justice, ethics, and recognition of one another’s humanness, recognition that we are in this together and part of one another’s future. As such, prevention is intrinsic to the goals of our own polity and of any future world polity based on democracy.

  THE CIRCLE OF COMMUNALIZATION OF TRAUMA

  Judith Herman eloquently pointed out in Trauma and Recovery6 that the trauma survivor must be permitted and empowered to voice his or her experience; the listener(s) must be allowed to listen, believe, and remember; the listener(s) must be allowed to repeat what they have heard to others. Each of these steps is forbidden in a tyranny, whether it is a public, official tyranny, like the “Republic” of Iraq, or private tyrannies like those created by domestic batterers, incest perpetrators, or on prison tiers. When trauma survivors hear that enough of the truth of their experience has been understood, remembered, and retold with enough fidelity to carry some of this truth—no one who did not experience their trauma can ever grasp all of the truth—then the circle of communalization is complete.7

  The arts can and usually do play vital roles at each one of these steps. Often the artist is the trauma survivor himself or herself—but this is not essential. The Muses can implant the truth of experience in the imagination of artists who have never “been there,” so long as the artist is able to listen to trauma survivors. Professional artists are not required for this. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the arts in creating the supportive social movements that permit trauma to have voice and the voice to be heard, believed, remembered, and respoken.

  While I have
couched this in terms of the verbal, narrative arts of poetry, narrative history, narrative fiction, theater, and film, I trust the reader has already understood that this applies equally to the visual arts and the arts of music and movement. Often with trauma survivors themselves, the non-verbal arts are the door that is most readily opened.8 Creating art has far greater potential for healing trauma than consuming art as a reader, listener, or viewer—as valuable as these are. I believe that a trauma survivor gets more out of composing and performing his own poem, which may not be a masterpiece, than he would hearing Homer himself perform his masterpiece.

  Part of the genius of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington—the Wall—is that it invites both active doing and passive viewing. Walking down the gentle slope next to the panels is an act of entering the sacred space. Many people leave letters and poems. As fine as the many books on the Wall are, they are very different from physically entering its precinct, making rubbings, watching the Three Fighting Men statuary group gaze at the Wall with their stunned look.

  PURIFICATION AFTER BATTLE

  I have appealed for renovation in our military institutions to protect service members from psychological and moral injury. In addition to political demands for such renovation, the American citizenry has other work to do. As a society we have found ourselves unable to offer purification to those who do the terrible acts of war on our behalf. I believe this is something to be done jointly by people from all our religions, from the arts, from the mental health professions, and from the ranks of combat veterans—not from the government. What I have in mind is a communal ritual with religious force9 that recognizes that everyone who has shed blood, no matter how blamelessly, is in need of purification. Those who have done something blameworthy require additional purification and penance, if their religious tradition provides for it. The community as a whole, which sent these young people to train in the profession of arms and to use those arms, is no less in need of purification. Such rituals must be communal with the returning veterans, not something done to or for them before they return to civilian life. This new cultural creation also must stay free of the taint of sectarian, political, and ideological partisanship, which would willingly kidnap such a ritual. All modern soldiers go into battle under constraint—they have enough to carry without being blamed or credited with the political decision to fight that battle.

  I do not know how the creation of a new and widely accepted cultural practice can be accomplished, but I do know that we need it.

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO “BE HOME”?

  What have we learned from Vietnam veterans and from Odysseus about being home? So much resonates in the one syllable, “home,” that we should not be surprised if unpacking the idea makes quite a heap. Reach into the heap and pull something out, and you discover it’s tangled with almost everything else.

  Safety: Neither Odysseus nor the Vietnam combat veterans with complex PTSD found safety in the place that was supposed to be their home. In Ithaca, Odysseus was literally surrounded by young men who would kill him if they were given the chance. Danger was what PTSD veterans expected The expectation of harm was itself a result of their psychological injuries, but subjective or objective, it wasn’t home.

  Acceptance: Can Odysseus or the veterans say who they are without fear? Vietnam veterans experienced everything, from others feeling awkward to outright abuse.

  Value and respect: Odysseus was told, “Get away from my table” by one of the suitors (in Odysseus’ own home!). An airline stewardess moved one of my patients, in uniform, because the person in the next seat didn’t want to sit beside “the likes of him.” Returning infantrymen found their hard-won skills without value and they were pigeonholed as “unskilled labor.” What value will this veteran’s contribution have? Odysseus returned disguised as a beggar, whose social value was seen as a net negative.

  Knowing one’s way: Odysseus spent ten years completely lost, metaphorically speaking. When he finally returned to Ithaca, he couldn’t recognize the place at first. Through a combination of the changes that had taken place in themselves and taken place in American society during their years of military service, many Vietnam veterans could not “get around” socially and economically.

  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.

  TRAUMA STUDIES AND OTHER FIELDS OF KNOWLEDGE

  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, expensive10 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 machinery12

  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.