Sightings in the LRB for 26 September 2019

Continuing with some periodic notes and musings on things discovered in the always delightful London Review of Books, I spy the following of interest.

First up, amidst the endless Brexit discussions, it is easy to forget that the roots of some of the "thinking" (or, rather, emoting) that led to the narrow victory for Leavers in 2016 go back a half-century and more. We are reminded of this in Ferdinand Mount's fascinating review essay of Paul Corthorn's new book, Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain (Oxford UP, 2019).

Mount's essay contains some acute commentary on modern nationalisms, and avers to a relatively old book which I have long profited from reading: Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism. Mount notes, rightly, that "nationalist rhetoric is so saturated with false consciousness" that none of it can be trusted. All nationalisms have "rubbish heaps of false memories and embroidered legends."

This, of course, puts me in mind of Vamik Volkan, whom I have often cited on here over the years, and found useful in trying to understand, e.g., Orthodox narratives of the Fourth Crusade. Volkan talks about "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory," and these concepts are as useful in looking at nationalist histories as at some ecclesial-national ones. Volkan has written many books about nationalism and its bloodlines, and about conflicts between ethno-nationalist groups in Israel-Palestine, the Balkans, Turkey-Cyprus, and elsewhere.

Back to Mount's essay for a moment. He goes on to argue that we need not be especially concerned with the "sentimental content" of nationalist mythologies. The real problem is their "iron framework: the insistence that the nation is the supreme fact, the one in which every citizen finds, and ought to find, his or her greatest fulfillment and which therefore demands all our loyalties." It is striking how many people nowadays are coming to this realization, questioning at long last the pious certainty many have that the state is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, than which no higher authority exists or could exist. Recent converts to questioning the idolization of the state are welcome aboard, but the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre got there first in an essay published some thirty years ago now.

Say it with me again, dear friends, in MacIntyre's acid and unforgettable words:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf … it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.

When the state refuses to realize it is just like the telephone company, and instead inflates itself all out of proportion and begins demanding one's highest allegiance, then we are on the verge of fascism. A new book from Michigan State Press sounds very timely indeed: (New) Fascism, by Nidesh Lawtoo.

Michigan State is the publisher of a some works by and about René Girard, whose work clearly figures in Lawtoo's book, as the publisher tells us:

Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo furthers his previous diagnostic of crowd behavior, identification, and mimetic contagion to account for the growing shadow cast by authoritarian leaders who rely on new media to take possession of the digital age. Donald Trump is considered here as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Girard, through Nietzsche, Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, among others—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction. 

While on the topic of Girard, I failed some time ago to give you my thoughts on Cynthia Haven's lovely biography of him, which I read on the plane to Romania in January. I should write up a long review, but in the meantime let me simply say that it was a very enjoyable and edifying read and you will not regret picking it up.

In other matters, I spy an ad for a new book from Bloomsbury, Sex and the Failed Absolute by (you guessed it) Slavoj Žižek. If not always edifying, he is almost invariably amusing in some measure, provocative in many others, and rarely boring.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.

In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.

Forgetful Remembrance of Ireland's Troubles

Back in 2016 I began exploring several new works treating the theme of forgetting as an unexplored category for how we treat controversial, divisive pasts, particularly between Eastern and Western Christians. I continue to read in the area for an article I'm working on.

Two weeks ago, on a tiny lake in northern Indiana while my kids spent the day swimming and playing, I sat on the deck and began reading a very dense but fascinating new work by Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018), 736pp. If you have any interest in Irish history, or the history of religio-political conflict, of British imperialism, and of historiography, this book will give you depth and detail in abundance. It is the very impressive fruit of serious and wide-ranging research into all kinds of out-of-the-way places and sources.

Being no expert in Irish history, I will not essay comments on the book's treatment of it. Let me, rather, note that the book's introduction alone is worth the price and effort of slogging through the whole thing. The author has given a wonderful summary of a large body of literature in memory studies, cognitive psychology and neurology, and historiography. Much of this he picks up again in his concluding chapter, "Rites of Oblivion."

The book breaks new and important ground between the heavy emphasis found in much of Western culture since at least 1945 on social remembering (of, e.g., the Holocaust), and the more recent, and still developing, awareness of the importance of forgetting both as an important phenomenon in its own right, but also as part and parcel of how human remembering works. Its use of the category of "social forgetting" shows how, in situations of longstanding and complex conflict such as that of Northern Ireland, politically mandated forgetting of, say, "The Troubles" does not always or even usually result in total obliteration of any and all memories of those events. Instead, what one finds is that officially or publicly "forgotten" events may not be discussed openly by those in power, but unofficially, in, say, families, or cultural societies or historical associations, they may be kept alive in varying forms. Thus socially and politically one may pretend to "forget" while, sotto voce as it were, one does not. The relationship between these two phenomena has not been well studied, and so, as the author says in his preface, that is what he seeks to do: "Studies of cultural and social memory have too often made sweeping claims that have not been fully substantiated. It is therefore necessary to lay out the nuts and bolts of remembrance in order to closely examine the mechanics of how social forgetting actually works" (xvii). Thus his book is situated somewhere between les lieux d'oubli and les lieux de mémoire.

The irony of any requests or still more demands--especially those enforced by the power of the state--for forgetting is, of course, that it makes remembering more likely. But curiously, Beiner notes, "the request to disregard does not" have the same effect. As he puts it, reviewing a number of recent studies, including those of juries in courtrooms, a "conscious effort to forget produces an altered form of memory, and this 'forgetful memory' needs to be better understood" (18).

Forgetting of all kinds, Beiner notes, is still given short shrift in many places, and it is often badly understood, too. Later in the book Beiner distinguishes, based on what he has observed in Ulster historiography since 1798, different kinds of forgetting: troubled forgetting, partial forgetting, nonconformist remembering that forgets differently from others around it, and a kind of "restored forgetting" brought to bear once the prevailing politics shifts again and something that was for a time officially remembered must now be suppressed in the interests of, say, an "amnesty" after a long period of political violence and a fragile social peace that feels victims must "forgive and forget." These and other types of forgetting are similar to what Mary Douglas (in an essay in Shifting Contexts) called "selective remembering, misremembering, and disremembering."

Many people assume that forgetting is bad, remembering good, and there is a straightforward connection between them. But in some ways, at least as far as human memory is concerned, remembering is the problem or, better, the aberration: we spend most of our time forgetting most things. Think, e.g., just over the last 12 hours of your life: can you give an hour-by-hour, or even more minute-by-minute recounting of everything you saw, thought, smelled, heard, and did? Would not most of us recollect only in broad outline: "Well, I was in a meeting this morning until 11:30, and then I had lunch, and then I did some paperwork at my desk for a couple hours, took tea about 3pm, and knocked off around 5 to drive home?" In other words, we forget much more of the details of a given day than we remember, and this is not only normal but necessary for if we remembered every detail out memory would soon approach saturation and exhaustion.

If attempts to enforce forgetting are problematic, so too are those demanding remembrance of an event, for it is becoming clear in the literature that "constructions of memory are not uniform and cannot be simply imposed from above and passively adopted by subservient communities" (23). Practices of social forgetting are similarly complex and incompletely successful. They may and often do come at some cost: "Practices of disremembering bury secrets" (30), with all the well-known psychic sequelae that follow from keeping traumatic secrets.

This is perhaps especially clear in the partition of states, the formation of new states, or civil war between factions within a state (see, e.g., the el pacto del olvido decreed in the 1977 Amnesty Law after Franco left office in Spain). Much of that violence is forcibly buried, resulting in disremembering in the very peculiar ways we see--what Vamik Volkan, to whom I have so often returned, calls narratives of "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory." Here ostensibly (or even genuinely) traumatic pasts get traduced for present felt purposes. Much of these dynamics and developments are still only just now being understood, and so as Beiner comes to the end of his very long and dense book, he notes that "the history of these dynamics of generating, repressing, and regenerating social forgetting has been mostly missed by conventional historiography."

There is much in Forgetful Remembrance that needs to be brought to bear on Christian ideas of forgetting, especially of major conflicts in ecclesial history--e.g., the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, or the Union of Brest, or the pseudo-sobor of 1946. It is clear that exhortations to remember such events as these have left Christians unable to move towards that "healing of memories" so often called for by the late Pope John Paul II. But it is equally clear that simply calling for all such events to be forgotten will not work either. Instead, I think we need to explore that "thin line between an inner duty to remember and a right to be outwardly forgotten" which Beiner calls "social forgetting," for it "offers another way to approach this dilemma" by seeing that "the desire for willful forgetting produces rites of oblivion, which are in effect forms of unofficial remembrance that are discreetly performed alongside social memory in defiance of state prohibitions and social taboos" (626).

Against Collective Memory

I'm finishing revisions to a lecture I gave just over a year ago now at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota on salutary oubliance, that is on the uses of forgetting as a deliberate means of advancing Christian unity in certain cases, including the absurdly stalled Byzantine-Oriental Orthodox dialogue.

In doing so, I am returning to works I discovered and noted on here a couple of years ago now, including those of David Rieff (whose fascinating book I discussed in three parts) and Bradford Vivian, one of the earliest authors to raise the question of why we insist on so much remembering when forgetting might be more useful.

We in the East have, as I argued here, far too much history--more than we can bear--on any number of topics, including the Council of Chalcedon, the Crusades, the Council of Florence, and the Union of Brest. The refusal to let go of some of these bogus historical narratives and grievances blocks the way towards any kind of reconciliation and unity--which is the whole point of hanging on to such pathologies in the first place, making them, in the very apt phrase of Vamik Volkan, a "chosen trauma."

Vivian has a new book out, and it is one I think Eastern Christians should pay attention before we continue, too glibly, to mouth that most tiresome of clichés about being condemned to repeat the past if we do not remember and bear witness to its horrors: Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford UP, 2017), 248pp.

About Vivian's book we are told:

Commonplace Witnessing examines how citizens, politicians, and civic institutions have adopted idioms of witnessing in recent decades to serve a variety of social, political, and moral ends. The book encourages us to continue expanding and diversifying our normative assumptions about which historical subjects bear witness and how they do so. Commonplace Witnessing presupposes that witnessing in modern public culture is a broad and inclusive rhetorical act; that many different types of historical subjects now think and speak of themselves as witnesses; and that the rhetoric of witnessing can be mundane, formulaic, or popular instead of rare and refined. This study builds upon previous literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and theological studies of its subject matter in order to analyze witnessing, instead, as a commonplace form of communication and as a prevalent mode of influence regarding the putative realities and lessons of historical injustice or tragedy. It thus weighs both the uses and disadvantages of witnessing as an ordinary feature of modern public life.

The Makings of Psychohistory

Though it is sometimes controversial in some places, and in lesser qualified hands can be cheapened and abused, I am convinced that, broadly understood, a psychoanalytic approach to history can yield rich and important insights otherwise inaccessible to us. I have myself attempted such an approach in a variety of places over the past few years, and am in fact finishing an article analyzing ISIS propaganda using Freudian and contemporary psychoanalytic thought, including that of people previously noted on here--especially Charles Strozier and Vamik Volkan. I'm also firmly convinced that psychoanalytic categories are useful in understanding much of the mindset of the Russian Orthodox Church today, and other Eastern Christian groups and issues. When, as so many churchmen have talked for forty years now, about the "healing of memories" among Christians, we and they are invoking insights about trauma first tentatively grasped by Freud in the aftermath of the Great War, and since then very considerably deepened by many clinicians.

For many reasons, then, I am looking forward to reading this new book published in April by Routledge: The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors by Paul H Elovitz (2018),152pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

The Making of Psychohistory is the first volume dedicated to the history of psychohistory, an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences. Dr. Paul Elovitz, a participant since the early days of the organized field, recounts the origins and development of this interdisciplinary area of study, as well as the contributions of influential individuals working within the intersection of historical and psychological thinking and methodologies. This is an essential, thorough reflection on the rich and varied scholarship within psychohistory’s subfields of applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, and psychobiography.

We are also given the table of contents:

1. Introduction

2. My Exuberant Journey

3. The Early History of Psychohistory

4. Resistance and Perseverance

5. Comparing the Early Freudian and Psychohistorical Movements

6. A Psychohistorian’s Approach to Childhood and Childrearing

7. Prominent Psychohistorians Lifton, deMause, and Volkan

8. Outstanding Psychohistorians Gay, Loewenberg, and Binion

9. My Journey as a Psychohistorical Teacher

10. My Role in Creating and Nurturing Postgraduate Psychohistorical Education

11. The Dilemmas of a Presidential Psychohistorian

12. Finding My Voice with Halpern, deMause, Ullman

13. Builders of Psychohistory

14. Concluding Thoughts; Appendices A. Featured Scholar Interviews, B. Memorials

What's Behind the ISIS Mindset?

As I've noted previously, I am engaged in a project of examining ISIS propaganda and its uses and abuses of "memories" of "the Crusades." As I've been engaged in this, I came across the work of the historian and psychoanalyst Charles Strozier, editor of this recent collection, The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History (Oxford UP, 2010), 296pp., which contains a number of essays of note.

I began with an essay by Farhad Khosrokhavar, a French scholar whose work has focused especially on Iranian and other contemporary Islamic contexts. His essay in the present work, "The Psychology of the Global Jihadists" is especially useful, not least for showing profound differences between Christians and Muslims on the questions of "fundamentalism" and its relationship to violence.

He begins with two factors in the psychology of jihadists: the desire for revenge against perceived (and sometimes actual) slights or attacks by the West; and a desire, equally Western in nature, to be a "star" or "celebrity." Undergirding both of these is a sense of resentment and loathing.

He further notes three other factors: internalized humiliation and an attempt to reverse this in a disproportionate manner; victimization; and "narcissistic recognition" through global media (141). I find it striking how he notices parallels between a totalized Islamic psychology of victimization at the hands of the West, and a totalized "othering" of Islam in the eyes of the West. We are closer, and more similar, than either wishes to admit.

This victimization is dangerous precisely in its absoluteness: "absolute victimization...legitimizes the use of absolute violence against 'godless' societies" that reject Islamic beliefs. If you have the slightest doubt about this, read the latest issue of the ISIS propaganda magazine, Dabiq. 

Victimization leads to jihad, understood in apocalyptic terms, says Khosrokhavar, and this apocalyptic worldview is also abundantly illustrated by picking up any issue of Dabiq. But this is an apocalypse of limited utility: the point of violence is to provoke an apocalyptic counter-violence from the West whose goal is not to inaugurate the end of the world, but to totally transform the West into an idealized vision of Islam: apocalypticism as instrumental, not eschatological, in other words.

The desire to overcome humiliating victimization leads to a "counterhumiliation [which] merges with a politics of death, and thanatos becomes the focal point. The reasons are as much psychological as instrumental" (146). Thus the jihadist searching for martyrdom is searching not just for a counter-humiliation of the West (by killing some of its citizens), but also for a narcissistic triumph over the West, which will guarantee their eternal celebrity by broadcasting their attacks far and wide and keeping their names alive after death. Here Khosrokhavar forces upon us a question I have asked before in the aftermath of ISIS attacks: should we not severely curtail coverage of them, and stop printing the names of the attackers if, as this author claims, "the world media are thus the magic ingredient of the jihadist self-image" (148). Martyrs achieve fame twice over: in Western media, and among fellow Muslims in the umma. 

Khosrokhavar ends with an interesting if often counter-intuitive argument: jijadists are quintessentially modern creatures of secularization. Had Islam not encountered secularization, with the latter's drive towards some kind of radical purity and purgation of all so-called sacred beliefs and practices, but instead remained within its traditional contexts, then such an Islam would not have been forced to adopt a counter-strategy of radical purity and purgation by jihad in which even most other Muslims (to say nothing of Eastern Christians, traditionally tolerated under Islamic dhimmi laws, as I have shown on here repeatedly) are found wanting, and thus also fit for extermination as insufficiently Islamic. Thus the jihadist response to secularization is an equally utopian vision rather than a desire or an effort to rebuild historical Islamic institutions and cultures.

This author's work on humiliation is supplemented by an earlier, shorter chapter co-authored by Bettina Muenster and David Lotto, "The Social Psychology of Humiliation and Revenge," in which they note the burgeoning research by psychoanalysts in the late 20th century. Humiliation forces one to feel helpless at the hands of unjust treatment meted out in public. These three factors lie behind the generation of narcissistic rage leading to revenge. It is possible, they conclude, for revenge to be averted with sincere apologies and a search for forgiveness, but this is by no means guaranteed.

Several authors in this collection draw attention to the work of Vamik Volkan, especially his 1998 book Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride To Ethnic Terrorism, which I have found fascinating even if it was written before the rise of ISIS. Volkan, now retired as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the University of Virginia, has, avant la lettre, provided a helpful way of understanding why ISIS has so constantly harped on the Crusades and uses this language incessantly in Dabiq. 

Volkan writes that "I use the term 'chosen trauma' to refer to an event that causes one large group to feel helpless and victimized by another group. A group does not really 'choose' to be victim­ized and subsequently lose self-esteem, but it does 'choose' to psychologize and mythologize—to dwell on—the event  For each generation, the description of the actual event is modified....Once a trauma becomes a chosen trauma, the historical truth about it does not really matter" (my emphasis).

I would apply this to the invocations of the Crusades. Volkan's notion of chose trauma is, to my mind, the best way to date of understanding what is going on by constantly referring to "the Crusades": a chosen trauma useful for buttressing group identity, and useful for creating a totalized mythology about the West and its "crusader armies" of our time.  In doing so, they make it abundantly plain that historical truth is irrelevant.

As I continue to read Volkan, I shall have more to say about his several books.