Shadow





Note: This is a long article. So if you have no interest in it for that
reason please skip it. Hoyt focuses on causes of aggression, including
biological and also on archtypes. According to her the "Shadow" is the
most dangerous. I find her thesis interesting but I don't think it will
stop wars. She mentions the genetic universal.coding in the DNA of the
human species makes certain instincts and patterns of thinking
universal. These are tied to the archtypes which are defined as the
phylogenetic blueprint that mediate the common behavioral and thought
characteristics of mankind. Hoyt doesn't mention possible genetic
engineering to eliminate the threat of the species destroying itself
because it is so remote and by profession she is a counselor.

E.O. Wilson in his genes to culture theory postulates genes as the
causative agent for the primitive arts and my inference the archtypes
although I have not seen Wilson critique Jung's archtypes by using his
gene to culture theory. The one thing for sure is if genetic
engineering of humans was done and aggression was modified so it no
longer posed a threat to the species as well as other applications, in
the "long term" the archtypes, the phenotypical blueprint that mediates
the common behavioral and thought characteristics of mankind would be
profoundly altered. Which leaves me to the question what would replace
it. And to that I haven't a clue.

Hoyt writes, "He [Jung] also showed that they [archtypes] produce
recurring symbols and themes in the dreams, art and religions of men
despite vast cultural and time differences. These archetypes carry a
numinous, compelling energy that gives them tremendous vitality and the
power to draw out response and action from individuals and societies.
Yes but I would add something here. Due the the advances in science and
technology I think the archtypes are rather sick. They still exist and
must because because they are the phylogenetic blueprint that mediates
the common behavioral and thought characteristic of mankind. They will
continue to be applied to both science and technology. But the
enviornment the archtypes were cultivated in was vastly different from
the environment today. I'm not dismissing the biological nature of the
archtypes but there was an environmental component. And despite the
unchanging essence of the archtypes over the thousands of years I would
argue the current scientific and technological environment serves to
fragment and/or warp them.

Michael Ragland





The Archetypal Roots Of War
Understanding the patterns in our minds
may lead to an end to war
by Virginia Hoyte
One of the articles in The Foundations Of Peace (IC#4)
Autumn 1983, Page 4
Copyright (c)1983, 1997 by Context Institute


TO STOP WAR, we must find its root causes. If "Wars are first made in
the minds of men," as the UNESCO Charter asserts, then we must look in
the psyches of humankind for ways to eradicate warfare. The need to
eradicate warfare at this time in history is all too obvious. Even so,
the chances of eliminating violence between nations may not seem very
great. (The last few years have seen a recession-plagued, needy world
spending upwards of $600 billion every 12 months on armaments!) Yet the
unthinkable horror of the alternative, nuclear holocaust, compels us to
go for the long shot. We must find other ways of solving human
differences and animosities short of war.

I believe that beating the odds will include one essential condition: A
significant number of human beings need to understand the patterning of
their own minds that throughout history has led them to war. Such
patterns are slowly being comprehended and acknowledged. Only when this
awareness spreads, and there begin to be changes in the way groups see
and treat outsiders, can we truly hope and plan for the miracle of
miracles: an end to war.

Genetic universal.coding in the DNA of the human species makes certain
instincts and patterns of thinking universal. Evidence from the newer
fields of ethology and sociobiology, examining as they do patterns of
behavior in different species of animal and diverse human societies,
corroborates this idea, as do the abundant data already on hand from
mythology and psychiatry. C.G. Jung's theory of the Archetypes
parallels and confirms the newer discoveries in these other sciences,
and was the seminal basis for much of their comprehensive framework.
Archetypes, as Jung defined them, are the phylogenetic blueprint that
mediate the common behavioral and thought characteristics of mankind.
Years ahead of his time, Jung saw and named the principal "primordial
images" which are deeply imprinted into the human psyche, much as a
computer is programed. He had the vision to realize that these
archetypes are not dependent on culture, race or time, but call forth
certain common personal and social behaviors the world over. He also
showed that they produce recurring symbols and themes in the dreams,
art and religions of men despite vast cultural and time differences.
These archetypes carry a numinous, compelling energy that gives them
tremendous vitality and the power to draw out response and action from
individuals and societies.

Given a growing awareness of the a priori patterns that shape much of
mankind's thoughts and actions, which of these persistently lead to
warfare between human groups? What can be done to counteract them or
give them other expressions? The most significant of the patterns
relating to recurring war as I see them are these archetypes:
Amity-Enmity between in and out groups, the Enemy, Aggression,
Territorialism, Heirarchism, the Religious Quest for Meaning, the Need
for Initiation Rites, and what Jung has called, "The Shadow", and
intimately bound up with it, Projection.

Amity-Enmity Programming For obvious survival reasons - until the
present threat of nuclear holocaust - the human baby everywhere was/is
largely taught to trust its familiar group and to distrust strangers.
It seems only natural to help a child feel comfortable with the people
and customs he is used to from birth. Similarly, it would be natural to
teach him to view with suspicion or animosity those who speak a strange
language, wear different clothes, practice a weird religion, eat other
foods with other smells, have strange eyes or a different colored skin.
Who could know what these outsiders might do, or when they might become
dangerous? A paper by R.F. Murphy (1957) on, "Intergroup Hostility and
Social Cohesion," describes how the Mundrucus of Brazil traditionally
in their language structure, divide humankind into two groups,
themselves and the rest of the world. These others they derogatorily
describe as "pariwat." Pariwat are considered as subhuman, fair game,
and are spoken of in the same manner as animals. Can it be that the
Mundrucus only do a little more blatantly what most other social groups
actually feel towards most other outside people and tribes? It was
Herbert Spence, the 19th-century philosopher, who first pointed out in
modern Western thinking the totally opposing codes of ethics which were
generally held for insiders and for outsiders throughout the world.
Cooperation or amity was the rule for one's own group, he emphasized,
and definite enmity or hostility was reserved for others.

Man is not alone in making clear distinctions between friend and foe.
It seems that all social animals show different behaviors towards their
familiars and towards strangers of their species. They are prone to
treat the latter with deviousness and hostility if they perceive them
as potential enemies. Primates in particular seem to carry such an
imprint. Baboons, for example, are extremely loyal to the troop into
which they were born, but usually are hostile, often viciously so, to
baboons from other groups - even when in captivity it is to their
seeming advantage to become friendly.

The Enemy Archetype Dr. Anthony Stevens in his excellent book,
Archetypes, (1982), to which this article is greatly indebted, points
out the survival advantages (until the present era!), of posing
enemies:

"The sinister truth is that for communities to thrive, enemies are as
necessary as friends. External danger binds the group together, reduces
personal animosity, enhances mutual trust, promotes altruism and self
sacrifice. A society surrounded by enemies is unified and strong, a
society without enemies divided and lax."

Enemies the world over are categorized in the minds and propaganda of
their opposition in similar ways. They are stereotyped as being
treacherous, cruel, brutal, and frequently subhuman, to name only a few
of the vicious qualities generally applied to them. The other side, the
good side (our side of course) sees itself as embodying the opposite
qualities: justice, compassion, a righteous cause, trustworthiness,
being on the side of the Divine, and so on. This dehumanization serves
an important function. It enables each group to kill with little if any
remorse, and to frequently carry out savageries that would be
unimaginable in their own milieu.

It should also be noted with awe and humility that enemies have a
propensity to change amazingly frequently. Even in our sophisticated
era, the shift from Germans and "Japs" to the Russian Communist bloc as
our identified enemy seems to have been accomplished with hardly a
protest or cry of awareness.

The Natural Aggressions That aggression needs to be considered innate
does not bode well for fast solutions to the perennial warfare problem.
Yet the denial of what all major schools of depth psychology and the
findings of animal behaviorists abundantly document could lead us into
stop-gap superficial attempts at curbing war that would be bound to
fail in the long run. We must face the nature of humankind
realistically and accept that aggression is as innate an instinct as
hunger or sex.

Ethology, as Dr. Stevens points out, claims that aggression no less
than sexuality serves the survival of the species. The arguments he
summarizes are these:

It promotes defense.

It permits access to valued resources, (e.g. territory, food, water and
females).

It ensures good use of the available habitat by spreading the
population out as widely as possible.

It affords an effective means of settling disputes within groups.

It provides leadership - a factor that can prove critical for survival
in times of danger.

It promotes differential reproduction - i.e. the more aggressive and
dominant males are more likely to sire the next generation.

As with animals, could not many of the same arguments be applied to
mankind, and to the reasons why the Great Programmer saw fit to encode
aggression as a tool for a form of betterment for the human species? At
any rate, the near-universality of aggression (if not in the conscious,
then in the unconscious, or the "Shadow," that will be discussed
shortly) is an unquestionable factor to be considered in a serious
attempt to eradicate war. Where can these impulses have legitimate
vent?

Animal groups and human societies alike acknowledge that aggression is
a part of the make-up of their members, and they have evolved a wide
and diverse variety of rules and regulations for its sanctioned use.
Now with the advent of the nuclear era, we need a new set of rules.
These powerful energies, potentially destructive, but not necessarily
so, need to find positive channels. Primitive peoples seemed to have
sensed this much better than we civilized ones. Dance, music and ritual
have traditionally vented much of the feelings and frustrations of
those fortunate enough to partake. (When was the last time you danced
your feelings to help along the peace movement? Try it!) Young males
after puberty are given large doses of extra energy with their male
hormones that need outlets and containments that can help them move on
to the next stage of their life cycles.

The Territorial Prerogative I have only to watch our dog bark
ferociously at any stranger who approaches our yard, despite our
disapproval of such unfriendly behavior, and to be amazed at how she
ignores anyone coming to the neighbor's front door, for me to be
convinced that defending territory is pretty important to dogs. This
also appears to be true for the majority of mammalian societies, many
of whom will defend their particular pieces of real estate to the
death. There is also much evidence that man has many of the same
instinctual needs to keep outsiders off his territory, and to
scrupulously maintain individual distance, especially from strangers,
that animals do. Whether he can be considered primarily a territorial
species is still hotly debated, however. Certainly by far the greatest
number of his wars have been fought over: territory, resources,
succession or ideologies, and sometimes for a blend of three or four.
Further, ideological wars, it's been argued, may be seen as another
form of territorial struggle. In a sense they seek ownership of the
minds of the populace. The existence of territorially linked social
groups at any rate is obviously an essential condition for warfare,
even though not always its cause. Any schemes for eliminating wars must
take great consideration of man's deep territorial and spatial needs.

The Hierarchical Instinct Man, like the majority of mammalian
societies, tends to organize his groups hierarchically. Most commonly
with animals, a number of dominant aggressive males take charge,
assuming responsibility for the whole, protecting the vulnerable
members, defending the territory, and keeping the more rebellious,
recalcitrant individuals in order. As their reward, the leaders enjoy
the privileges of rank and power, the pick of the sexually available
females, more attention, food and respect. Defending this "pecking
order" seems to be a need of the first importance. Experiments with
cooling the waters in hierarchically organized fish tanks showed that
the desire to mate disappeared considerably ahead of the propensity to
fight challengers to the established ranking system! Perhaps the
growing documentation of animal practices relating to privilege and
hierarchies can help man to acknowledge the biological and innate
psychological bases for his own desires for wealth, power and position.
He has only to look around and observe that they are in evidence
everywhere that humans have gone on earth. Plans that seek ways to
eliminate war between groups must fully allow for the internal and
external struggles around power and rank issues that seem to be encoded
in the human psyche. They must not naively imagine that a new
millennium of highly conscious and therefore no longer power-hungry
individuals will have sprung full grown from the yearning to stop
nuclear war. As with the birth of the United States from the 13
original colonies on the Eastern seaboard of North America, the
political and peace-keeping system must be flexible enough to handle
disputes and provide alternatives to fighting wars.

The Hunger for Initiation Rituals Human societies everywhere throughout
their long histories have invented ceremonies to mark the passage from
one stage of life to another. With intuitive wisdom they have sensed
the need for group-sanctioned rituals that could help the individual
overcome his/her inertia and reluctance to move on. Particularly
important for large numbers of cultures were the initiation tests and
rites that boys at puberty went through to prove their abilities as
adult men of the group. These were meant to ready the young men to
shoulder their load as fathers, providers and defenders of the tribe or
country. These tests were frequently hard, dangerous and frightening,
but their wisdom proved effective, for the boys who passed generally
seemed able to own a pride in their manliness, a sense of achievement
for having overcome fear and the old childish ways. Western cultures
have allowed their rites of initiation to decline, and there are many
who insist that the ills of our so called "advanced" societies are due
in part to their absence. Psychologically, young men need to mark the
break with their ties to mother, unlike young women, and identify with
the leading males of their community. The widespread forms of weakness
apparent everywhere in the first and even third world countries, much
of the incidence of juvenile delinquency, disillusionment and loss of
meaning among the young, could be prevented if sufficient rites and
trials of passage at puberty were reinitiated. War and military
training seem to be the primary expression left in Western culture of
these rites. The valid hunger and need for such puberty rituals to move
young males out of the world of mother and the familiar and help them
take on a new identity may well explain a good part of the persistence,
strength and glory of the military ideals that are still so pervasive
in most of the nations of the Western world. Vital ways to satisfy the
need for initiation rituals other than through military training should
be part of any scheme to ban warfare throughout the planet.

The Quest for Meaning Ironic as it may seem, the strongest inner force
that drives men to war may yet prove to be a hunger for meaning! Human
beings yearn that their lives may have purpose, yet all too often in
Western industrialized societies, they do not. Jung has shown that
within each individual, however distorted by outer circumstances, there
is an energy that seeks his wholeness and seeks to connect him with
that which is greater than his small ego self. Participating in war has
enabled the great mass of the population generally to believe that they
are contributing to a deeply worthy cause. Their lives are ennobled,
and the highest that is in them, their utmost strength, courage and
self-sacrifice is called forth. Inevitably when their society, which is
inherently regarded as good, true, compassionate, brave, etc., is
threatened (as it almost invariably is rationalized to appear to be),
their enemies then become the embodiment of evil. Their war becomes a
holy war and by fighting it or helping it they are participating with
the Divine in ridding the world of darkness. We must never
underestimate the yearning within every individual to further the cause
of justice and righteousness and to aid the heroic task of eliminating
evil. Practically every society of the planet, large or small, makes
its warriors heroes and teaches its children the glories of bravely
defeating "enemies." If nuclear holocaust is to be permanently avoided,
war must be demythified and a new vision must inspire the highest Self
within each person. Perhaps it will be possible to take the best of the
warrior/monk ideal and inspire the populace to call forth their
greatest qualities by "attacking" the evils of pollution, poverty,
disease and mental stagnation, to name a few. Without a replacement for
the sense of Divine purpose that the just war brings (and research
shows that almost every war is considered just by each side who fights
it!), there is not a great deal of hope that wars can be stopped. The
hunger for meaning is too great.

The Shadow: This Thing of Darkness I Do Not Acknowledge As Mine Jung
called "The Shadow" the unconscious qualities which belong to a person
but are the opposite of what the ego personality expresses. The same
definition applies to a group shadow. Thus a generally warm and
outgoing person might have a part that tended to be very critical at
certain times. Since she liked to think of herself as caring and
accepting, however, she simply would fail to register the instances
when she was being extremely judgmental. Nor would she recognize the
incongruity, though any friend would probably be able to point it out.
The shadow contains the traits which are usually unknown to the person
or group who sometimes shows them, and which tend to be condemned in
his/her culture. These characteristics were unacceptable to parents,
peers, or teachers and therefore needed to be repressed into the
unconscious. They are qualities which are regarded by the group as
negative. In Western countries today some of these might be: laziness,
slyness, greed, jealousy, thirst for power or control, ruthlessness,
lack of love. In other circumstances or societies a number of these
same traits might well have their positive expressions. For example,
the more easygoing life-styles of certain native peoples may not be
laziness in one sense at all, but an awareness of the value in going
more slowly and enjoying more - a casual sensuousness perhaps that our
high pressured society desperately needs.

People and nations need to learn that they can, and most frequently do,
have both positive and negative traits. No human or country is all good
or all bad. Herein lies the basic oversimplification, directly related
to repression of the shadow which results in hostility and frequently,
war. Those who begin a journey to consciously find out who they really
are invariably discover a host of diverse "sub-personalities" within -
often in conflict with each other. They find out that we humans, and
consequently the societies we form, all carry many opposites within. As
Anthony Storr says in his book on Human Aggression:

"Although we may recoil in horror when we read in newspaper or history
book of the atrocities committed by man upon man, we know in our hearts
that each one of us harbors within himself those same savage impulses
which lead to murder, to torture and to war."

This phenomenon would account for the fascination that many have for
works of literature which openly deal with the shadow split and its
pull. A few of those that come to mind are the tales of Faust and the
Devil, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and more
recently in another genre, Ursula le Guin's, The Wizard of Earthsea.

Invariably the Shadow contains qualities that the conscious personality
or group needs in order to help them become more whole. Shadow
characteristics become odious precisely because they are repressed. The
rule is that, once a quality is pushed into the unconscious, it becomes
hostile and regresses. When it can be recognized and owned, solutions
for how to channel its energies differently can be directly sought, and
often found. If the trait can be brought to the light of awareness it
can even befriend us, and teach us humility and wisdom. "Yes, at times
I am bitchy and controlling. I need to be sensitive to what makes that
happen, as my teenagers and husband hate that in me. It drives them
away. But I also need to assert myself more at the right moments."
Admitting the shadow in ourselves or our society can also give a sense
of oneness with our other struggling human brothers and sisters who
must also deal with their own imperfections.

As with individuals, so with nations. The society that dares to admit
its own complexity, light and darkness, has a far better chance of
finding effective answers to its internal problems. Its people begin to
know how to ask the right questions, and to actually see what they have
blindfolded themselves to previously. A quick way for a person or group
to take a peek at their own shadow, short of asking a mate or a partner
to talk about it in all gentleness, is to imagine who or what bugs them
the most. List the qualities that make those "others" so despicable.
Without fail, the list will contain a tally of at least some of their
own more persistent shadow qualities! We as a nation, therefore, need
to ask, "What do we find most despicable in the USSR?" And then to seek
to discover where we might be doing some of the same things. (In Latin
America? To our minority groups?) Obviously, in a world bristling with
nuclear arms, the Russians, the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland,
the Israelis and the Arabs, the Iranians and the Iraqis also need to be
doing the same exercise.

Shadow repression and the universal tendency of humans to project what
they don't like about themselves onto other people and outside groups
is perhaps the single most powerful programming permitting warfare. It
is all too easy, as the New Testament asserts, to see the flaw in our
brother's eye and to ignore our own. Furthermore, there is a particular
energy of unforgiving hatred surrounding the qualities that we try to
keep from seeing in ourselves and instead find in others. We detest
those people or nations with a special vehemence. We yearn to eliminate
them from the earth, falsely imagining that we then would be free from
the gnawing, persistent way the qualities they represent clamor inside
to be recognized. Those buried qualities we dare not acknowledge
because they seem too terrible, and would spoil our nicely shaped
pictures of ourselves, cry for air and recognition. They do threaten
our carefully constructed ego pictures and national images, though,
ironically, many of them are no more terrible than a sense of our own
vulnerability and imperfections, which if we could but own, would make
us far more accessible and warm.

Shadow projection is epidemic on a national scale, and sooner or later
almost invariably invites hostilities. The true richness and
multiplicity and humanness of the identified enemy is denied or
ignored. The unconscious need to see only their threatening and
sinister aspects - which usually are also present - is too great. There
is always some truth in what the shadow projection finds, but
inevitably exaggerated because it leaves out any impressions that
contradict what it needs to see. It also fails to notice that the very
same aspects it detests in its enemies are present in its own policies
and spheres of influence. We in the United States are now demonizing
the Soviet Union to a frightening degree. Our present leaders
blatantly, and with incredible unconsciousness, project onto the USSR
what they cannot recognize in themselves, just as rulers of the
Communist Bloc have been doing to us for years. Quotations from two of
our Presidents help to show this process in action. Former President
Nixon writes in his book, The Real War:

"It may seem melodramatic to treat the twin poles of human experience
represented by the United States and the Soviet Union as the equivalent
of good and evil, light and darkness, God and the Devil: yet if we
allow ourselves to think of them in that way, even hypothetically, it
can help clarify our perspective on the world struggle. "

President Reagan in a speech to the evangelicals last spring declares:

"We must reject those simpleminded appeasers who declare themselves
above it all, and who label both sides equally at fault, who ignore the
facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, who
simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove
themselves from the struggle between right and wrong and good and
evil!"

This is the same archetype that, like the Mundrucus of Brazil, divides
the world into "us" and "them." It sees all evil as out there, and all
good as within its own borders, black and white, God and the Devil. We
might hear these words with more equanimity if they did not come from
one of the men in the world who has the awesome power to press a button
and thereby destroy most of civilization, if not all life on the
planet! The leaders of the Soviet Union, so as not to make shadow
projection the prerogative of any one group, have been depicting us as
the personification of greed, aggression, darkness and evil as a near
daily ritual for over 40 years. Neither side seems able to glimpse or
acknowledge the monstrous, brutal side of their own shadow that
continues to make nuclear bombs that would kill millions upon millions
of innocent men, women and children. Each side rationalizes their
armament buildup as merely needed "defense" without realizing that
these armaments are a totally ineffective defense against that which
most disturbs and threatens them - their own shadow.

Whether or not we feel worthy or ready, we humans alive today are
challenged to become a new breed of heros. If we are not to annihilate
ourselves, we must find ways to make the quantum leap into a new kind
of consciousness. The Golden Rule and Buddha's teachings on compassion
must of necessity become vital daily practices, equally among our
fellow in-group as with the foreign strangers across the seas. It may
also be, as many are saying, that we must re-develop a sense of the
sacredness of the earth if we are to save it. In all this, we are
called upon to become fully aware of the psychological coding that has
shaped much of our social behavior since the dawning of mankind, and
then be prepared to counter its destructive aspects. As Anthony Stevens
says, "There is an urgent biological imperative to make the shadow
conscious." We must squarely face the evil that our greed or self-
centeredness or lust for power - hidden from ourselves as these
qualities most frequently are - accomplishes. We must become so aware
of the falseness and now dangers of shadow projection that we no longer
tolerate it on any level of our personal or national lives. We must
stop placing the enemy archetype onto other human groups, but move it
instead to the common enemies of all humankind: nuclear war, pollution
of the planet, inequality and hunger. Stopping war requires, above all,
knowing ourselves.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All contents copyright (c)1983, 1997 by Context Institute


.

Quantcast