R.J. Lifton and Howard Zinn: Resisting Transcendent Histories

             My understanding of the relationship and paradoxes of Knowledge power comes largely from my own search for understanding and meaning in the world. This search led me into art and poetry and, for a time, religion. I sought out and experienced many religions. I am on the other side of this search now, and do not believe religion is a viable answer to the problems of our times. [1] But having critiqued Descartes, Newton Darwin, Marx and Foucault in the above chapters, it might be of benefit to the reader here to consider two writers. Robert Lifton and Howard Zinn, who have dealt with issues of knowledge and power and with whom I am in sympathy.[2]

             Robert J. Lifton wrote an extraordinary series of books that have analyzed ideological systems of belief and practice ranging from Chinese Communism of the 1950's, to the atrocities in Hiroshima,  the Nazi Prison camps and the victims of the Vietnam war and to religious cults. He defines may of the psychological, social and intellectual factors that create and sustain dangerous organizations. He uses the phrase " ideological totalism"  which he defines as a 'meeting ground between people and ideas". Groups, states, disciplines or individuals become totalistic when they  employ ideologies that are

most sweeping in their content and most ambitious- or messianic- in their claims, whether religious, political or scientific. And where totalism exists a religion, a political movement or even a scientific organization becomes little more than an exclusive cult"... [3]" Behind ideological totalism lies the ever present quest for the omnipotent guide- for the supernatural force, political party, philosophical  ideas, or precise  science that will bring ultimate solidarity to all men and eliminate the terror of death and nothingness".[4]                

            He defines the characteristics of destructive states and organizations in a series of six defining characteristics.  Two of them, which I won't dwell on here, are the cult of confession and the loading of language. Among the rest are what he calls "melieu control", which involves not only the control of the environment generally, but specifically over human communication: whatever a person "sees, and hears, reads and writes, experiences and expresses".[5] Lifton uses the example of victims of Chinese thought reform in the 1950's but a more pertinent example in the present would be the system of communication and media control set up in the United states, described by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent. Herman and Chomsky propose a model of how propaganda control in the U.S. operates. They conclude that the capitalist system of mind control is more subtle, but not less total than that used in Communist totalistic states.  The key to the success of the capitalist propaganda system is that those who practice it, the media, government and university elites are convinced that they are not selling propaganda, but reflecting the truth. The U.S. system, Herman and Chomsky maintain, functions through a number of "filters". First, there are the owners of the media- such as corporations like General Electric and Westinghouse, both large scale nuclear contractors; Second there are the advertisers, who control the media in view of profits, and third, the "intellectuals", who serve to sustain and justify the free market system. [6]

            Another aspect of totalism that Lifton defines is "mystical manipulation", which  simply means the control of individuals by an overarching mystique of "higher purpose" or "higher truths" to which the entire society is supposed to give assent, or to be punished if conformity and compliance are betrayed. In the U.S. this form of manipulation appears in the expected conformity to 'patriotic values', Big Business and the state. What "is good for business is good for America" one of the Robber Barons said. Murdering off the Native Americans, preserving ghettos or dumping toxic waste near them, or setting up sharecropping or convict lease labor were all good for business, as were the Korean, Vietnam or Iraq wars. Building nuclear weapons was a windfall for business. The higher truth of the 'free market' allows almost infinite forms of exploitation. I have discussed many examples of the uses of mystic manipulation throughout this book.

            "Sacred Science" is the next characteristic. It is the "prohibition against questioning the basic assumptions" of a belief system involving an "ultimate science" or an "ultimate moral vision" and that questioning these ultimates is "immoral, irreverent and unscientific". Related to this is the characteristic of "Doctrine over Person", where abstract ideas are put over and above human rights or lives. "rather than modify the myth in accord with experience, the will to orthodoxy requires that men be modified  to reaffirm the myth".[7] The causes of the extermination of the Native Americans, slavery, Nagasaki or Vietnam are almost never faced and the myth of American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and moral purpose persists against all evidence to the contrary.

            The next characteristic of totalist systems is perhaps the most chilling: the "dispensing of existence". This quality is at the root of racism, classism and the supremacy that systems of knowledge/power accord themselves. It involves the belief that those outside a given system of belief and practice are of lesser reality or substance than those who act within the system and so can be exploited or dispensed with without moral responsibility. The "other" is of lesser human worth and thus has no or restricted access to full human rights. The U.S. assumption of the right to exploit anyone outside U.S. borders, as if the Bill of Rights only applied in the U.S. and only to elite members of corporations is analogous to the Catholic Dogma of "Extra Ecclessium Nullus Salus"; 'there is no salvation outside the church', as if beyond U.S. borders all are damned to poverty and exploitation. Institutions, such as slavery, the Nazi Camps, the Invasion of the Americas or the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima depended on promulgating this belief in "them versus us". Only America is righteous and good; others must either join our way or suffer the consequences.

            Lifton's work on destructive organizations, cults and states form the basis of inquires into destructive organizations of many kinds. His analysis has been further developed by Steven Hassan, Madeleine Tobais and others to demonstrate that destructive organizations, be they states, corporations, cults or individuals follow certain traceable patterns and act in important respects, as the religions did of old. The patterns of destruction found in cults can be also found in much larger social organizations. There is no reason to exclude these findings from historical  inquiry.

            Madeleine Tobais's work on cults and interpersonal forms of coercion and mind control are also important to this inquiry. Her psychological profile of cult leaders is a very useful tool for assessing the dynamics of power  both in history and in areas of everyday life. She enumerates the characteristics of men and the rare woman who use power to manipulate, exploit trust and in many cases, destroy those who put their faith in them.     

            The next characteristic of thought reform, not mentioned above is "the demand for purity". I will be discussing the concept of "purity" in its religious, political and scientific applications, both in regard to Himmler and Oppenheimer, at some length in upcoming pages.

            Lifton writes that "my work in Hiroshima convinced me of the immorality of claiming professional neutrality in the face of ultimate forms of destruction".[8] A  common convention, which is probably fundamental to the university as a whole, is the idea that intellectual study must be "value free", neutral, impersonal and disinterested, not ethical. But this belief system is a "demand for purity".  The good are those who accept with unbiased allegiance the 'system' as it is, who do not question the essentially undemocratic hierarchies of our legal, academic, business and governmental institutions. It is precisely this belief in the intrinsic moral goodness of a neutral and balanced inquiry that is brought into question by the enormity of the "disinterested" scientific experiment of dropping a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 250,000-300,000 people, for no other reason than to see if it would work. An atrocity  of this magnitude brings into question the belief system of scientific neutrality and the belief in the supremacy of the intellect upon which it is based. There may be something more important and fundamental than knowledge conceived in scientific terms, and this something is probably a belief in democratic human rights; a basic element of which is the right not to be imposed upon by an uncongenial system of belief, whether this system of belief is Nazism, scientism, capitalism, or even relativistic antinomialism, or the belief that no beliefs can be imposed. No government or system of belief has the right to supersede the preservation of human rights.[9]           

          A similar passion for the ordinary individual in history can be found in the work of Howard Zinn. Questioning the role of objectivity has been central in Zinn's work. The major problem with the belief in 'objectivity' is that it pretends to eliminate the subject from observation. The elimination of the subject, or the pretension to do so, may result in generating beautiful systems of abstract religious or scientific explanations. But in the process of obtaining or attaining objective truth human subjects are often mercilessly eliminated in fact. In direct contrast to the transcendentalist attempt of Foucault, and to some extent Marx, to eliminate the "subject" and create and objective history, there is the warmly human and compassionate views of Howard Zinn. Zinn seeks, in a series of books that have been largely underestimated and maligned, to uphold the value of the human subject against the dominating power of  an "objective" knowledge that  undermines human rights and democracy while hiding behind the facade of  disinterested scholarship, science and the pose of neutrality. Refusing to hide his 'bias' behind the fraud of objective history, Zinn is openly biased toward equal rights and human rights, against racism, poverty, war, repression, alienation and imprisonment.

            Zinn states that in the writing of history the basic "values may well be subjective (derived from human needs) while the instruments must be objective (accurate)"[10]. In other words the historian has the duty to be accurate and responsible in his or her research, but present human rights and needs, values and concerns, and not an abstract, Platonic theory of truth  that merely sublimates elite values behind a patina of objectivity, should determine what one researches.  Zinn goes farther than Foucault or Marx in making a critique of knowledge/power relevant to present concerns. Zinn points out that "every description is in some way a prescription" [11]and that it matters what is described and by whom, in the service of what interest and motive. Is a given policy or practice helping end war, poverty, racism, environmental abuse, inequality or injustice, or promoting them? What are the consequences of a given way of thinking, does it help people and increase their likelihood of freedom ,rights and happiness or decrease them?

        This way of looking at reality avoids or restricts the tendency of elites to dictate and impose a system of knowledge and belief  and allows a means of putting everyone's human rights and justice before the claims of the reigning system of knowledge and belief and the rights of those who profit therefrom. Both in the academic, government and legal  institutions Zinn shows how "professionalization" and the ethic of "disinterestedness" depends upon an alienating search "for neutral principles" which "deny ideological purpose". This is true even in the legal world, where lawyers and judges, behind a facade of professional excellence and the pretension to the neutrality of justice,, regularly enforce racist statutes, or laws that put corporate rights over and above individuals and citizens rights. 51% of the U.S. prison population is black, whereas African Americans represent only 12% of the population, yet the justice system is regularly pictured as neutral and impartial, when it is obviously racist.

            Most systems of knowledge I have discussed in this book, assume or enshrine a will to power through the Intellect, Reason, Class Consciousness, objectivity or inquiry. The mental faculty and its symbols and expressions of 'truths' is assumed to stand above life, people, the world or the environment in a presumed state of transcendent superiority. Since this presumed superiority is not 'real' but merely convenient and useful to a given class or elite, this supremacy must be imposed by force, by systems of mind control, the manufacture of consent, promises of ultimate rewards and punishments, or financial rewards and punishments. These threats, bribes, promises and forces of control must be constantly reiterated through laws, bureaucracies, dogmas, or 'truths' in order that those who profit from the knowledge system will be able to preserve their advantages and their powers. The argument put forward by both religionists and scientists that neither religion or science "as such", i.e.-in themselves, or considered in their 'pure' form, are guilty of anything or in any way questionable or in need of accounting. This is an argument that does not correspond to the facts of history I have related in this book. There is no 'pure' knowledge Beyond the world: beyond human affairs or human suffering and experience, unaffected by living human beings. Nor does knowledge exist in some mental or symbolic hyperspace, cyberspace or heavenly world of archetypes to which only saints, gods, avataras, angels, scientists, mathematicians, artists or leaders of states, churches or empires have access. Knowledge is part of the world and part of us, like everything in the world is part of us, and confers no special rights beyond human rights which all possess; nor does knowledge grant license to kill, exploit or oppress.

            In any case, I have explained aspects of the perspectives of Lifton and Zinn which have been helpful to me in assessing the role of knowledge/power in the history of atrocities. In what follows I will try to trace a brief history of the notion of identity. What are human beings, what is their identity and do transcendent notions of identity hinder or help the cause of human rights?

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