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

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      It was not until the 1960s, spurred by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, that education about the Holocaust was perceived as desirable by Israeli society. (It took until 1979 for the Holocaust to be introduced as a compulsory subject in Israeli school curricula.) During the Eichmann proceedings, the witnesses whose Holocaust experiences had been silenced for the preceding fifteen years were now asked to render precise account and encouraged to disclose the most horrifying details. Suddenly, the country’s leaders realized that this newly acquired consciousness of a common destiny was an invaluable asset in consolidating a national identity and promoting Israel’s case abroad.

      The primary intent of the Eichmann trial was not punishment. If that were the case, he could have simply been liquidated on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires, where he was abducted by the Mossad. Instead, Ben-Gurion’s objectives were twofold: (1) to remind the world that the Holocaust obligated support of the State of Israel; and (2) to impress the lessons of the Holocaust, particularly upon the younger generation of Israelis. What was the most fundamental lesson of the Holocaust from Ben-Gurion’s perspective? That Israel was the only country which could guarantee the security of the Jews …

      Events six years later accelerated the humbling process as immediately before the Six Days War in 1967, Israelis felt that they were in the ghetto under siege. They felt alone and isolated and spoke of the necessity ‘to prevent another Holocaust’. An identification with the Jews who had been annihilated two decades previously was now possible.⁴⁴

      Perhaps, having at last been given the kind of attention they needed, some of the Holocaust survivors started to experience the opposite fear, that attention by others may be so intense that it threatens to take us over. I once overheard a woman talking about the way her family had tried to press her into an arranged marriage. Women relatives who had made arranged marriages assured her that she would have no difficulty with such a marriage. It was, they said, just a matter of adjusting. She exclaimed, ‘Just adjust! That would be to die!’

      This fear of being taken over, robbed of our will, comes from our childhood, when the adults around us pressed their ideas on us, often with considerable force. We knew that if we accepted all their ideas and relinquished our own we would be annihilated. We would no longer be a person in our own right. We could not explain why but we knew that it was imperative that we had secrets and never became totally obedient.

      In our fantasies these adults became figures of power whose only aim was to take us over and force us to do their bidding. We loved stories where the small hero or heroine, through cleverness, courage and daring, defeats the powerful enemy. Then we discovered that the adults around us also feared some inscrutable, powerful enemy. It might be the devil, or witches, or a force of evil, or spirits which could turn a man into a zombie. We might be told how Nazism or Communism took people over and turned them into automatons. During the Korean War of the fifties the term ‘brainwashing’ was created, as if brains could be washed clean of thoughts and new thoughts implanted. Stories about aliens from outer space abounded. Television was seen to threaten to take us over, and then computers and the Internet were expected to pose the same threat. Meanwhile popular series like Star Trek and The X-Files told stories about people who fall into the hands of some alien power and cease to be themselves. The central factor in all these scenarios is that the person cannot comprehend and relate to the thought processes of some alien power and consequently loses the power to think for himself. Survivors might have been released by the alien power, but more often have to work out the alien power’s secret before they can escape.

      The fear of being taken over by an alien power is one of the disadvantages of possessing consciousness. Being conscious might allow us to create a much wider range of meanings and to be more flexible in our techniques for maintaining the coherence of our meaning structure, but it also means that we know just how alone we are. Moreover, we have some awareness that our sense of self is not a solid thing but a fragile structure entirely dependent on the accuracy of its representations of reality for its stability and permanence. This awareness of the fragility of our meaning structure reveals itself in the words we use when we feel that our meaning structure or that of someone else is in danger of collapsing. We say, ‘Get a grip on yourself,’ or, ‘Pull yourself together,’ or ‘I’m falling apart.’

      As life evolved on this planet there were many forms and functions of forms which evolved and then disappeared. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists argue that those forms and functions which persist did so because they were useful. The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey suggested that we developed consciousness in order to work out what other people were thinking, and so be able to predict what they were going to do. Consciousness allows us to know what we are thinking, and so we can use our own experiences to guess what is going on in other people’s heads. But it is always a guess. We can never be sure. Consciousness is always private.

      Susan Greenfield argues that consciousness in a baby comes on slowly like a dimmer switch on a light being turned on. However, the process of consciousness lighting up is also the process of being involved with other people.

      Babies are born being interested in faces, human voices and what people do. The psychologist Dr D. Premack argues from his research that a baby is born with what he calls two ‘innately specified causal predicates’, one which allows the perception of ‘non-self-propelled objects’ (something has to happens to an object for it to move) and one which allows the perception of ‘self-propelled motion of biological beings’ (humans and animals choosing to move). Babies find the movements of human beings much more interesting than the movements of objects.⁴⁵ They would rather be propped up in their basket watching Mum get dinner than be lying in their cot looking at a mobile.

      The ability to distinguish people from objects quickly develops into the ability to project on to objects and on to animals the characteristics of humans. For young children toys become people, and these people can comfort and support the child. They become immensely important when adults around the child fail to do so.

      I watched a television programme about dolls in which one woman, Catherine, now sixty-four years old, talked about her doll Sailor Boy. She had been born into a family which did not want her. She was the youngest and her siblings all rejected her. Her mother was a distant figure and her father an authoritarian whom she feared. She was looked after by nannies and servants. The only person she could talk to was Sailor Boy. He understood her feelings. One evening she had Sailor Boy close to her while she was being given supper in the kitchen. The room was hot from the range oven and she wasn’t feeling well. Her father came into the room, and in her sudden fear she vomited over Sailor Boy. Her father, a fastidious man, immediately ordered the nanny to put Sailor Boy in the fire. The nanny took the poker, lifted the lid above the fire and thrust Sailor Boy in. He blazed up and was gone. As she told her story Catherine showed that she was still mourning Sailor Boy, but she finished her story by saying that some time later she was able to get another Sailor Boy and she has him with her to this day.

      Toys and pets can listen and appear to understand, but, alas, they cannot talk. We can imagine them talking, but, because what they say is what we have imagined, they cannot surprise us as real people do. We can imagine our toys and pets saying things which support, comfort and confirm us, but only other human beings can show that our wish to be supported, comforted and confirmed has been fulfilled in reality and not just in fantasy.

      Language is a social activity. Indeed, according to the psychologist Robin Dunbar, we evolved language because we wanted to gossip.⁴⁶

      When we evolved language we were already communicating in the way animals СКАЧАТЬ