The human carnage of World War One had a strong effect on Freud and moved his thinking from sexual matters to the need to understand aggressiveness and the compulsion for destruction. This led him to what smacks of a political, even Utopian, position.
"I adopt the standpoint ... that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization." He went on to define civilization as "a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind."
On a pop cultural level, I recall about ten years ago cultural critics talking about a trend in which violence was overtaking sexuality as the new taboo in pop culture and pornography. One might apply Freud and see this as an example of the culture shifting its balance from Eros to Thanatos. As for ISIS's exploitation of western pop culture and cinema, New York Times reporter Anne Barnard quotes a man working in an opera house in Damascus, Syria: "It's like action movies." She writes that the man compared ISIS's intentionally provocative, real-life violent cinema to the taboo-pushing fictional work of Quentin Tarantino, calling it a macabre effort "to win the prestige of horror." The point of Barnard's article is that this high production value cinematic violence has trumped the slaughter of 200,000 Syrians with crude bombs. In the west, we're now so numbed to that kind of violence we no longer even register it.
Literature is, of course, replete with this dichotomy. One of the most famous Latin American works is titled Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Written in 1845 by an Argentine, Domingo Sarmiento, the book is nominally about a famous caudillo named Facunda who used violence and terror to accumulate and hold power. Civilization, in this case, was life as Sarmiento saw it in Europe. He, thus, saw Argentine life as a struggle between civilization and barbarism.
"Facundo is a type of primitive barbarism," he wrote. "Incapable of commanding noble admiration, he delighted in exciting fear; and this pleasure was exclusive and dominant with him to the arranging [of] all his actions so as to produce terror in those around him."
In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, war correspondent Chris Hedges devotes a chapter on Eros and Thanatos. He cites Freud and talks about the attraction of war among soldiers and war correspondents. He describes how war "destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill." He tells of a doomed photographer friend who could not stay away from the war in El Salvador. Shooting stories in Miami was boring. Drawn back to the Salvador war, "he was frightening to behold, a walking corpse." He eventually met his fate and was killed.
Hedges sees this sort of compulsion also working on a national, cultural level. "The question is whether America now courts death. We no longer seem chastened by war as we were in the years after the Vietnam War." It's a real question: Is there a part of our cultural selves that surreptitiously compels us toward death and away from life?
We might ask, is the blockbuster film American Sniper -- about Chris Kyle's life and his capacity for efficient killing as a military sniper -- a case of cult worship? Kyle's wife told Sean Hannity, "Maybe it was always to be that he was going to die the way he lived." Is it out of line to ask whether the reverence for someone like Chris Kyle amounts to a cult? In this case, a death cult focused on discipline, training and competence? Can the Second Amendment worship of guns and the too-easy reliance of a culture on the shock and awe power of the world's most lethal mechanized military fairly be described as a death cult?
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