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Created: April 11, 2003
Latest Update: April 11, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Dichotomy Ignores Complexity

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

• We tend to see ourselves in the most forgiving light.

  I wanted these pieces up to show that the perspective, and the evidence that is considered makes all the difference in the conclusion. That's part of attitude change and persuasion theory. If we are only offered two opposites and must pick one, that leaves a lot unsaid in the interim. Because today's world is so shaped by multiple perspectives, we are often bound to discover that answers based on dichotomy, like right or wrong, good or bad, are insufficiently complex to be functioal within our lived experience.

  Check the dictionary meaning of dichotomy:

  Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

  In the exchange at the following link, the issue is raised that, depending on the structural context, you could accuse many of war crimes:

  Nuremburg Trials? Chomsky said . . . A bulletin board called Disinformation, maintained by the San Francisco Museum of Art

  Good response here. Although many political leaders the world over could conceivably be accused of "war crimes," the complexity of the situation warrants more that we go back to the indigenous peoples in the US and the way we harmed them by treaty violations and almost complete denial of the rights and culture of the Other.

  * * * * *

• "Just Following Orders"

  What was the most common defense at the Nuremburg Trials? "Just following orders." Read New Science Raises the Specter of a World Without Regret: The Guilt-Free Soldier by Erik Baard. January 22 - 28, 2003. The Village Voice. New York. Backup

  Holocaust Learning Center: War Crimes Trials. For an example of the "just doing my duty" defense link to Personal Interviews at left of photo halfway down right side of page. A separate screen will appear. Link to Rudolph Hoess by using the horzontal bar across the top of the screen. When you find Hoess, double click on the photo.

  "Joseph Maier [d]escribes Rudolph Hoess at Nuremberg [1992 interview]. (Full transcript follows biography)

  "Born Leipzig, Germany, 1911
  "Joseph emigrated to the United States in 1933 after finishing university in Leipzig. His parents and brother had left Germany earlier for the United States. Joseph attended Columbia University. From 1940 to 1943 he was assistant editor for a New York German-Jewish newspaper. In 1944, he worked in the American embassy in Britain as a propaganda analyst. He went to Nuremberg, Germany, as an interpreter in 1946. He analyzed materials and transcripts, and participated in many interrogations for the Nuremberg trials."
  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections

  Full transcript

  There was no emotion. It was what he called a hard duty. He took no pleasure from it. He derived no pleasure. I said, "Didn't you have fun doing that?" I wanted to test him and see whether he was a sadist. He was no sadist. He was perfectly normal. He was doing his duty. I really believe he was doing his duty. He was doing his...believed he was doing his duty. He considered that his duty, and he shut his eyes to the abnormality of this kind of thing he was doing to the, to the abyss, the incredible abyss to which human beings can descend in order to perform duties of that sort. To which performance I think a normal person would revolt. Rather die himself than do it himself. I always figured I'd rather commit suicide. I'd die fighting against the Nazis than do anything at their behest.
  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections (Color added for highlight.)

  * * * * *

• Post-Traumatic Stress Adaptation

  In the Wall Street Journal article on P. A1 of Friday, April 11, 2003: "For Some Marines, The Next Battlefield Is an Emotional One." by Michael M. Phillips. "Hoping to Fend Off Trauma, Marines Share War Horrors." Backup. Backup not available on site. See jeanne.

  Marine Cpl. James Lis, 21 years old, describes his reactions thus: Every time I close my eyes I see that guy's brains pop out of that guy's head," Cpl. Lis, from Shreveport, La., told his platoon mates Thursday, as they sat in a circle in the ruins of the Iraqi Oil Ministry's employee cafeteria. "That's a picture in my head that I will never be able to get rid of."

  " . . . "The touchy-feely stuff -- that's no joke," Second Lt. Isaac Moore told the platoon he commands in Lima Company of the First Marine Division, Seventh Regiment, Third Battalion. "If you keep picturing this guy and you shot him in the head, you've got to talk about that."

  . . .

  Michael Phillips reminds us that the disastrous return of Vietnam Vets has taught us that we need to deal up front and quickly with "the psychological aftershocks of having faced death and inflicted it. . . . [S] platoon by platoon, many Marines in Iraq are starting to hold informal group-therapy sessions -- "critical incident debriefings" in military parlance -- in which they share their feelings about what they've seen and what they've done."

  There are many ways psychologically to deal with these emotions. We could repress them, and wait for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or we could inure our young people to them with the denial training of loss of inhibition.

  Michael Phillips tells the story of what it actually felt like:

  "Cpl. Anthony Antista, 29, from Monrovia, Calif., initially celebrated after he shot dead two Iraqi paramilitary men in a corner of the building site. But the exhilaration instantly gave way to guilt, especially for having felt glad that he had taken lives. "Hey, I shot two people," he told his comrades immediately after the fight.

  The rest of the platoon brushed him off. He persisted: "I shot two people." They thought he was bragging. What he was really doing, he said, was trying to find someone who might understand how bad he felt.

  It's an issue that was still on his mind two days later. "I can't share my pain with you because you don't accept that I killed two guys," Cpl. Antista told his comrades. To emphasize his point, he removed the magazine from his rifle, emptied the round from the firing chamber and acted out the encounter. He showed how he raised his rifle and fired. Then he sat on the ground and demonstrated how the Iraqis slumped when the rounds hit them.

  "The life just flowed right out of them," he said in a pained voice. "They were like Jell-O."

  Phillips goes right on after this story to recount others. I couldn't. I just had to sit there for a while and drink in what that had to have felt like. Cpl. Antista is at this moment for me an Other, an Other that has experienced something so horrible, I have trouble imagining it. And if I am to understand him as an Other in this sense, when he comes home, wanders into my college classroom, and suddenly doesn't follow my expectations, I need to recall this story. To remember there is something in his apperceptive mass or his lifespace that makes my world look a little crazy to him sometimes. But when he comes into my class, he won't be Cpl. Antista. He'll be Susan, or Chandra, or Jesus, or Henry. I won't be able to tell he's an Other by looking, not by color, not by gender. And I'll have to remember not to judge so quickly, for there are things I cannot "know," for I was not there.

  I can't even imagine what there must be that I should try to feel about the two Iraqis who were killed. They could also have been my students. They could be brothers of my students. Don't I owe them at least the right to hear whatever validity claims they wanted to make? They're gone. They can't influence the next government; but their brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and mothers and fathers may discover voices to be heard. I hope we will remember to hear their voices in good faith everytime we see them slumped on the ground in the midst of Cpl. Antista's anguish.

  * * * * *

• Interdependence of agency and structural context

  As we face up somewhat more honestly to the interdependence of individual agency and structural context, we recognize that we are neither totally free to act as we wish, nor totally determined to perform as the overstimulating society has programmed us. Instead, we fall somewhere in between. "Just following orders" seems to allow little if any free willl. But the Nuremburg trials focussed on the issue that we are beginning to recognize that we don't "know" anyone, sometimes not even ourselves. We have a lifetime full of experiences in our apperceptive masses. That experience is interdependent with the degree of agency our environment affords us. No one knows what that mix will lead to.