Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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      Asked whether Serb refugees should be interviewed about possible atrocities, Belgrade shoppers yesterday gave blank responses. The refugees fled because the Kosovan Liberation Army was a gang of murderous terrorists, not because they had done something to provoke retribution, many said. As for the refugees, they deny any wrongdoing against their Kosovan Albanian neighbours. Questioned about the March 26 massacre at Suva Reka in which men, women and children were shot at close range, Serb refugees from the town claimed that not a hair had been touched on a single head.

      Reports of mass executions, grenades tossed at children, trucks ferrying bodies, were a fantasy. ‘Not one Albanian has been killed, not one,’ said Bravko Petkovic, 32, who worked in Balkan Tyre factory.

      A crowd of young men, arms folded, said it was inconceivable that they or any other Serbs could have killed their neighbours. ‘Do we look like murderers? Come on, we’re family men,’ said Vesko Mladevovic. ‘We got on very well with the Albanians, even though they were kidnapping and shooting us.’³⁷

      Primitive pride can also keep us alive when the conditions of our life are at their most dire. Instead of giving up and dying we stay active and, even without conscious thought, we carry out those actions which can ensure our survival. That is how people torn from their homes and robbed of everything they hold dear manage to go on living day by day.

      As the many millions of people who live in great poverty show, it is possible to survive on very little. The trick seems to be to keep our expectations in line with what’s on offer. ‘What’s on offer’ is not just a matter of physical survival. It is also a matter of what’s on offer that will maintain our sense of identity/our life story. It is easier to survive on very little if you live in a community where you have a place and where the other members of the community treat you with respect. Poverty is much harder to bear when you are utterly alone.

      Does your environment allow you to be yourself and do other people see you as you see yourself? Whenever your answer to that question is ‘No’ primitive pride comes to the rescue. It might perform a reconstruing of your life story, perhaps, ‘Even though other people spurn me, God loves me and will reward me for my virtue,’ or it might say, ‘If I cannot live my life as I am I shall die my death as I am.’ Where primitive pride is concerned, the meaning structure must survive even if that means letting the body die.

      Primitive pride, like all the mechanisms which keep us functioning, will at some time come to an end because no living thing lives for ever. In the face of overwhelming disease, injury or simply old age, the mechanisms which keep us breathing and thinking close down. They come to an end and we die. Sometimes primitive pride closes down first, and with that a reasonably healthy body dies. This is a common phenomenon in hospitals dealing with an ageing population. A patient whose physical condition could have supported many months of life simply, as it is usually described, ‘loses the will to live’, and dies. As we get old some parts of our meaning structure change and adapt to the inevitability of death. We might not want to die this very minute or even next month or next year, but the inevitability of death brings some unexpected comforts. Whenever I read about the extreme changes of climate predicted for the middle of the next century I think, ‘Well, I don’t have to worry about that.’ ‘Losing the will to live’ might be the meaning structure becoming one simple idea: ‘It’s time to go.’

      This is not what happens to those people who find that the terrible disaster they have suffered completely confounds their expectations of what life was about. If they cannot construct another set of meanings, if primitive pride cannot overcome such an assault on their meaning structure, they cannot survive. Nearly fifty years after the Second World War the psychologist Aaron Hass interviewed some of the survivors of the concentration camps.

      Jack Diamond was forced to watch as his brother was hanged in Auschwitz. He told me what it was like to be a teenager in that universe. ‘In the camps you became an adult overnight … I was like a general planning for a war … not to be noticed … The intellectuals were the first to die … They thought about it all. How could humanity do this? Who wants to live in a world like this?… I just put my head down and didn’t ask the larger questions. I think it was easier being an adolescent, because I wasn’t mature enough to ask the larger questions. My father, he died spiritually before he died physically. He kept asking, ‘Where is God? How is this possible?’ I got frightened, I got scared, but I wasn’t internally destroyed. So many adults lost their will to survive … Sometimes I created an invisible wall shutting out what was happening … as if it wasn’t happening. My father did see everything that was going on around and it destroyed him.’³⁸

      Losing the will to live, that is, primitive pride closing down, results in death. Suicide is unnecessary. In fact, suicide is primitive pride asserting itself. Whenever we contemplate, and perhaps carry out our suicide, it is primitive pride deciding that there is a conflict between the body’s need for survival and the meaning structure’s need for survival. In such a conflict the body has to go. It has to be killed.

      The actress Kathryn Hunter, in an interview with Lyn Gardner, spoke of this. ‘When she was twenty-one and in her final year at RADA, locked in an unhappy relationship from which she could see no escape, and in a trough of depression so deep that “I could hardly be bothered to kill myself”, Hunter leapt from a window.’ She didn’t die, but her injuries left her with long-term difficulties, the overcoming of which made her reputation as a fine actress all the greater. She said of her suicide attempt, ‘“The fall was just something that happened. A long time ago. A stupidity. The action of a child who discovered that things were not as she wished.”’³⁹

      Primitive pride demands that reality conform to its wishes. Through time and experience we might gain the wisdom to know that reality is indifferent to our wishes and that this is not to be deplored but seen as something that makes life interesting. If we could make everything predictable how dull life would be.

      Most of us, as children, develop that set of ideas which is commonly called a conscience, and out of that set of ideas comes a pride of which we are always conscious. This is moral pride which, like primitive pride, endeavours to protect the integrity of the meaning structure, but which, unlike primitive pride, takes some account of what is actually going on. Moral pride is concerned with avoiding shame and guilt which always threaten the meaning structure, and with maintaining the ideas we have about how we ought to live our lives. Whenever we say, ‘My conscience will not allow me to do this,’ moral pride is operating.

      However, despite the fact that moral pride does take some account of what is going on, we can still set ourselves some rules which will lead us into danger. If we insist that our beliefs about the purpose of life and the nature of death – that is, our religious and philosophical beliefs – are absolute truths then our meaning structure is threatened every time we meet someone who holds beliefs different from ours. If we take pride in the way we are unchanging in all our beliefs and opinions, a significant discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is will sooner or later appear and threaten our meaning structure.

      Refusing to change our views is always a sign of weakness. To be able to let our views evolve along with our experience, to be able to reflect upon events and consciously choose a wise interpretation, to be able to say, ‘Yes, I was wrong,’ or, ‘I used to think such and such but now I think so and so,’ we need to feel that, even as we modify our views, our sense of identity has a basic strength which is able to withstand the assaults made upon it by unexpected events and by other people. It is a tensile strength which flexes but does not break. This strength comes with overcoming our fear of the world and of other people. If we see the world as a frightening place and most other people as enemies we never feel strong because we see the world СКАЧАТЬ