Dwight Macdonald, We Miss You, Part 1 of 14
February 14, 2009
I have been leafing through the journalism of Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) for the past few months and have an ever-growing affection for the main. Highlights of the Macdonald ouevre are The Root is Man (1946) and “The Responsibility of Peoples” (1945), I suppose, but, like Orwell, Macdonald is to be treasured for the little things. In fact, Macdonald is quite like Orwell: lucid, caring, curious, and above all sane. Orwell wrote for Macdonald’s journal, politics, but then again so did Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Bataille, McLuhan, Hofstadter, and C. Wright Mills (those were the days!).
Anyway, I have just now looked at Macdonald’s essay “On the Psychology of Killing” (1944). Macdonald discusses the increase of reports of neuropsychiatric disorders among servicemen. It seems that WWII was not only maiming bodies, but it was destroying minds (sound familiar?). Macdonald, however, thinks this is “cheering news”:
I should be concerned if the N. P. rate failed to increase sharply within the armed forces. Is it unreasonable to speculate that, blocked from political expression, outraged human nature seeks out this back door, so to speak, of protest? . . . May we not assume that a good proportion of them were simply too sane to fit into this lunatic pattern of total war?
I wonder if Macdonald’s words could be of any solace to the many people who suffer from PTSD. Whatever its virtues, there is indeed something insane about war–to be affected by is not an indication that you are weak, but that you are still human.
Corrigendum: Orwell did not write for Macdonald’s journal politics; he wrote the wartime “London Letter” column for Partisan Review, where Macdonald was an editor. Nevertheless, they corresponded frequently and enthusiastically, with Macdonald declaring Orwell to be “my kind of guy.”
True enough, but these things are all relative. An Israeli I know told a therapist here in the US about the bomb raid drills and suicide bomber attacks that typified her childhood; the therapist’s response was essentially to diagnose all of Israeli society with PTSD.
No, no, the point is precisely that these things are not relative. There is a level of moral trauma up which we hope humans will not put [sic]. I agree with the therapist here: all Israelis probably do have PTSD. The fact that it is universal makes it no less pathological. But Macdonald’s argument, which I unfairly truncated, had less to do with the trauma of enduring fire than with the trauma of killing others. Israelis presumably know something about that as well.
Ron Ron, why must we always disagree? Is our crossing swords to be the sole point of this blog? What about Jacob? Who killed Moses Mendelssohn? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?