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| Abu Ghraib haunts my woods, lives in my dreams CC by Jean Stimmell |
Our current national discussion on gun violence in the U.S.
prompted me to reread an essay[1] by
Carl Jung written at the end of World War II, predicting that our modern age of
science and rationality would spawn a cascading increase in societal violence –
not a benevolent new order of peace and sanity as envisioned by leading social
scientists.
Rather than our new Age of Reason eliminating “the
fantastic, mythological world of the Middle Ages,” Jung argues that it simply switched
place from outside in Nature to inside our psyches. Rather than nature spirits
like fairies, witches, devas, demons and the rest “that terrify and tease
mankind: man himself has taken over the role without knowing it and does the
devilish work of destruction with far more effective tools than the spirits
did.”
Or said another way: “We have lost our superstitious fear of
evil spirits and things that go bump in the night, but instead, are seized with
terror [by] people who, possessed by demons, perpetrate the frightful deed of
darkness.” The New Town school massacre
of twenty, first-grade children is but the latest example.
Writing in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II and Hitler’s
reign, Jung says such atrocities are characteristic of the new dark age we
find ourselves living in. He calls such violence “psychic epidemics” and notes
that it is only when we have completely internalized Nature’s demons that, “the
age of total blood baths, total demonization, and total dehumanization could
begin:”
“Even the torture chamber – that staggering achievement of
modern times! – has been reintroduced into Europe…Finally, the invention of
human slaughter houses – compared with
which the Roman circuses of 2,000 years ago were but a piffling prelude – is a
scarcely surpassable achievement of the neo-German spirit.”
Looking at the scope and intensity of increasing psychic
epidemics since WW II can only serve to confirm Jung’s prediction. By way of
example, let’s look at the racketing up of violence starting with the horrific
911 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, rapidly followed by our
equally horrific response of waging two misbegotten wars resulting in tens of
thousands of innocent civilians dead. Extraordinary rendition. Secret torture
centers set up around the world including Abu Ghraib. And continuing assassinations
around the world, even of Americans, by our drone attacks.
Many intellectuals, such as Henry A. Giroux[2],
are baffled by this explosion of violence that “appears to lack any rational organization.” What is startling, he adds, “is
that the logic of war and violence have become addictive, a socially
constructed need that we simply cannot get away from.”
Jung
position, of course, is the opposite: that this violence is caused precisely
because our modern age suffers from too much rational organization, causing us
to suppress our evolutionary psychological history still imprinted within us,
stretching all the way back to our animal past. And even more grievous, we have
lost respect and understanding for the most mysterious and miraculous part of
our collective unconscious: Nature Herself.
Despite
certain postmodernist claims, we are not solely a “socially constructed self”
fashioned from a blank slate: As Charlene Spretnak [3] says, some things are
“really real:” the innate wisdom of our bodies, our sense of place, and
Nature Herself. We can only deny the “really real” at our own peril.
xxx
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