Odysseus in America (28 page)

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.

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, narcissism, 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, but 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.