The Lust to Annihilate

...Simply put: can one alter the core categories of a theory grounded in clinical evidence without providing clinical verification for one's proposed changes...

...Although his changes serve him well as he probes the failure of the Greeks to Work through Oedipal aggression, my caveat is one which vexes every scholar who embraces psychoanalysis as a powerful explanatory tool...

...Sagan contends that the Greek "love of killing" persisted past Homer and the heroic age and accounts in large part for the ultimate "failure" of Greek culture...

...Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung...

...Perhaps Sagan could make his case no other way, but the frequent, sometimes lengthy citations from the Iliad tend to break up the continuity of the text in the early chapters...

...There may be some among us who associate the term `imperialism,' even 'genocide' with Greek antiquity...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain ELI SAGAN is a sociologist with impressivee achievements in anthropology and psychoanalytic theory...

...It is his claim that culture is the collective product of human agency, all those actions of individuals that are always motivated by reasons rather than being random or fortuitous...

...the barbarism of the Roman arena was extirpated, the revolutionary doctrine that even slaves possess a soul and are loved by God was proclaimed...

...Those who question his arguments, and the conclusions drawn from his moral premises, have the responsibility to ask themselves: What, then, are my moral commitments...

...He assays which acts of aggression are considered legitimate, which illegitimate, and how ambivalence about aggression manifests itself inside the Homeric world...

...The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece...

...What most distinguishes Sagan's perspective is not so much that he puts his own values or 'biases' up front, as almost everybody claims to these days, but that his moral commitments are internal to the perspective he brings to bear on his material...

...Sagan is aware of the controversy surrounding his presumptions but he is sometimes a bit casual in making the case for his own approach...

...That failure, later highlighted in the "might makes right" ideology of Thucydides's 20 June 1980: 381 history, meant the reaffirmation of the view that "the power to dominate and kill men is the greatest proof of manliness . . . that man can achieve no greater goal than to die gloriously in battle and be honored by his fellow-killers when he is dead...

...That the Hebrew-Christian ideal has never been fully achieved should not lead, urges Sagan, to its cynical dismissal...

...Ancient Greece...

...Moral concerns are so thoroughly imbedded in his reflections that in evaluating his arguments one must confront his moral commitments...

...He would demolish a widespread and cherished mythic view of the past...

...Following his dissection of the genuine horror in the Homeric vision, Sagan turns to Greek tragedy as the most noble, sustained attempt to transcend the Homeric vision...

...Sagan builds his case beginning with a meticulous textual exegesis of the Iliad...

...Pericles's funeral oration, bravery unexcelled, culture of stunning achievement, heroes, statesmen, architects, sculptors, poets, tragedians, philosophers...

...For all the pity and terror evoked by the tragic playwrights, Sagan concludes (again amassing textual evidence) that no Greek tragedian was able "to give us one consistent, believable play that ends with a true reconciliation...

...Clearly, Sagan would...

...Pay attention to the associations that cluster around that powerful image...

...On this question, Sagan is scathing...

...I hope my distinction is clear...

...Athens: birthplace of democracy...

...I shall not answer this daunting question but note it as important and unexplored by Sagan...

...A culture which "cannot conceive of love as an ideal of human behavior, as Greek culture could not" is a society which cannot evolve the social forms to incorporate that ideal...

...This is a complex argument and a contested position...

...have it no other way...

...Cultural transformation, the real alteration in the moral instincts of the human species, is a process that requires thousands of years...

...Perhaps a few recall slavery, an institution taken-forgranted by most Greeks...

...So does everybody else...

...Bringing psychoanalysis to bear to illumine the topic of violence and aggression, Sagan approaches culture and history from its psychic end...

...The moral transformation of Western humanity was postponed until the fourth century A.D...

...If a scholar can effectively and lucidly probe the individual psyche of an epoch, through its most important, vital, representative figures and modes of expression, he will be able, first, to plausibly reconstruct individual motivations and, second, to assess why collective human agency took the forms it did and not others...

...We cannot implement what we have not conceived...

...Over-argument may be unavoidable...

...In seeking out the morally problematic, a scholar must "get inside" the culture to find expressions of "a profound and pervasive ambivalence about an institution...

...His previous book, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, offered a provocative treatment of a topic most of us prefer not to think about (deny, repress Sagan might say) which, as a result, has been underexamined in anthropological scholarship...

...Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set...

...He is further justified in erecting as one touchstone of his interpretation the way in which the culture in question either failed or succeeded in resolving those problems considered morally problematic...

...He repudiates the dodges, euphemisms, and niceties that enable contemporary academic scholars to evade moral choice, conflict, and debate...

...Does this make my stance one of ethical relativism...

...Although Sagan makes imaginative use of Freudian concepts and themes throughout the text, his placement of the Oedipus complex at the center of his theoretical reflections is problematic in one sense...

...The problem emerges with those alterations Sagan proposes in the description of the Oedipal dynamic...

...Commonweal: 382...

...Am I willing to accept the Greek lust to annihilate as legitimate 'for them' but not 'for us...

...It is not, to repeat, a matter of Sagan saying, with a knowing wink, "Sure, I have my biases...

...The reader is occasionally overwhelmed by all the proof of Sagan's thesis...

...Those readers who think Sagan "protests too much" are invited to turn to the Iliad, this time with eyes wide-awake to the fearful, sadistic blood lust there celebrated...

...Although The Lust to Annihilate lacks the fluidity, hence some of the readability, of Sagan's earlier work, it retains his commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship from a moral point of view...

...Say the words...

...when a "god of love" provided "what had been sorely lacking in pagan culture...

...This "lust to annihilate," though superseded historically in the dramatic moral transformations marking the shift from the pagan to the Christian world-view, stand today not Commonweal: 380 only, or simply, as an indictment of a past way of life but as a warning of what human beings may become should they fail to sublimate aggression into nonviolent, non-sadistic forms...

...But these irritants in the image have done little, it seems, to dull the luster of Hellas, to call into question all those lyrical celebrations which reached their apogee in Lord Byron's effusions...

...But one must appreciate his dilemma...

...If these expressions of ambivalence are widespread, the scholar is justified in presuming that he has uncovered a fundamental tension within the society...

...This is a bold book...

...In Sagan's hands, an exploration of cannibalism involved incisive reflections on the nexus between individual psychology, human aggression, the emergence of cultural forms, and the process of social transformation...

...Ideals serve as the catalyst to such change over time...

...This want of success is at one with the failure of Greek culture to develop the conception of a god of love who is capable of , forgiving us our sins...

...The conceptual wedge Sagan uses to open up the Greek past distinguishes "what is immoral in a society from what is morally problematic for that society" [emphasis mine] For example: a social institution may be immoral—slavery comes to mind as a paradigmatic case— yet not be morally problematic for the culture in which it exists, having been accepted by social participants as the "way things are, always have been, and must be...

...Sagan would call a halt to notions of heroism that require the destruction, maiming, exploitation, and oppression of others...

...certainly it is understandable...

...A troubling inheritance of the "isles of Greece," with implications for the future of humankind, is the Greek commitment "to sadistic violence, a love of killing...

...Let's just put our cards on the table and go about our work...

...Rather, Sagan insists on analyzing and describing through moral terms of discourse...

...If so, how would I defend the moral ground on which I stand before others in the present and the future...

...Sadly, Sagan would insist, Byron's lament is not quite as true as one might hope...