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- Imagining nuclear death is a project of survival – their alternative promotes life-denying repression and denial
- Death imagery affirms life
- Fear of death key to recognizing a value to life and its spiritual element
AT – Nuclear Fear BadCollective fear of death is key to check genocide and extinctionBeres 96 Louis Rene (PhD Princeton), “No Fear, No Trembling Israel, Death and the Meaning of Anxiety,” www.freeman.org/m_online/feb96/beresn.htm Fear of death, the ultimate source of anxiety, is essential to human survival. This is true not only for individuals, but also for states. Without such fear, states will exhibit an incapacity to confront nonbeing that can hasten their disappearance. So it is today with the State of Israel. Israel suffers acutely from insufficient existential dread. Refusing to tremble before the growing prospect of collective disintegration - a forseeable prospect connected with both genocide and war - this state is now unable to take the necessary steps toward collective survival. What is more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe unawareness of its national mortality deprives its still living days of essential absoluteness and growth. For states, just as for individuals, confronting death can give the most positive reality to life itself. In this respect, a cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's pattern of potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off such an awareness, a choice currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the altogether critical benefits of "anxiety." There is, of course, a distinctly ironic resonance to this argument. Anxiety, after all, is generally taken as a negative, as a liability that cripples rather than enhances life. But anxiety is not something we "have." It is something we (states and individuals) "are." It is true, to be sure, that anxiety, at the onset of psychosis, can lead individuals to experience literally the threat of self-dissolution, but this is, by definition, not a problem for states. Anxiety stems from the awareness that existence can actually be destroyed, that one can actually become nothing. An ontological characteristic, it has been commonly called Angst, a word related to anguish (which comes from the Latin angustus, "narrow," which in turn comes from angere, "to choke.") Herein lies the relevant idea of birth trauma as the prototype of all anxiety, as "pain in narrows" through the "choking" straits of birth. Kierkegaard identified anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom," adding: "Anxiety is the reality of freedom as a potentiality before this freedom has materialized." This brings us back to Israel. Both individuals and states may surrender freedom in the hope of ridding themselves of an unbearable anxiety. Regarding states, such surrender can lead to a rampant and delirious collectivism which stamps out all political opposition. It can also lead to a national self-delusion which augments enemy power and hastens catastrophic war. For the Jewish State, a lack of pertinent anxiety, of the positive aspect of Angst, has already led its people to what is likely an irreversible rendezvous with extinction. Imagining nuclear death is a project of survival – their alternative promotes life-denying repression and denialLenz 90 Millicent (Assis. Prof Science and Policy @ SUNY), Nuclear Age Literature for Youth, p. 9-10 A summary of Frank’s thought in “Psychological Determinants of the Nuclear Arms Race” notes how all people have difficulty grasping the magnitude and immediacy of the threat of nuclear arms and this psychological unreality is a basic obstacle to eliminating that threat. Only events that people have actually experienced can have true emotional impact. Since Americans have escaped the devastation of nuclear weapons on their own soil and “nuclear weapons poised for annihilation in distant countries cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched,” we find it easy to imagine ourselves immune to the threat. Albert Camus had the same phenomenon in mind when he wrote in his essay Neither Victims nor Executioners of the inability of most people really to imagine other people’s death (he might have added “or their own”). Commenting on Camus, David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton observed that this distancing from death’s reality is yet another aspect of our insulation from life’s most basic realities. “We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding.” If we are to heed Camus’s call to refuse to be either the victims of violence like the Jews of the Holocaust, or the perpetrators of it like the Nazi executioners of the death camps, we must revivify the imagination of what violence really entails. It is here, of course, that the literature of nuclear holocaust can play a significant role. Without either firsthand experience or vivid imagining, it is natural, as Frank points out, to deny the existence of death machines and their consequences. In psychiatric usage denial means to exclude from awareness, because “letting [the instruments of destruction] enter consciousness would create too strong a level of anxiety or other painful emotions.” In most life-threatening situations, an organism’s adaptation increases chances of survival, but ironically, adapting ourselves to nuclear fear is counterproductive. We only seal our doom more certainly. The repressed fear, moreover, takes a psychic toll. Death imagery affirms lifeFox 85 Michael Allen (Assoc. Prof Phil. @ Queens), “Nuclear War: Philosophical Perspectives,” ed. Fox and Groarke, p. 127 There remains but one choice: we must seek a reduction of world tensions, mutual trust, disarmament, and peace.35 Security is not the absence of fear and anxiety, but a degree of stress and uncertainty with which we can cope and remain mentally healthy. For security, understood in this way, to become a feature of our lives, we must admit our nuclear fear and anxiety and identify the mechanisms that dull or mask our emotional and other responses. It is necessary to realist that we cannot entrust security to ourselves, but, strange as it seems and however difficult to accept, must entrust it to our adversary Just as the safety and security of each of us, as individuals, depends upon the good will of every other, any one of whom could harm us at any moment, so the security of nations finally depends upon the good will of other nations, whether or not we willingly accept this fact. The disease for which we must find the cure also requires that we continually come face to face with the unthinkable in image and thought and recoil from it. 36 In this manner we can break its hold over us and free ourselves to begin new initiatives. As Robert J. Lifton points out, “confronting massive death helps us bring ourselves more in touch with what we care most about in life. We [will then] find ourselves in no way on a death trip, but rather responding to a call for personal and professional actions and commitments on behalf of that wondrous and fragile entity we know as human life. Fear of death key to recognizing a value to life and its spiritual elementKelsang 99 (Geshe, internationally renowned teacher of Buddhism ), http://www.tharpa.com/background/fear-of-death.htm) A healthy fear of death would be the fear of dying unprepared, as this is a fear we can do something about, a danger we can avert. If we have this realistic fear, this sense of danger, we are encouraged to prepare for a peaceful and successful death and are also inspired to make the most of our very precious human life instead of wasting it. This "sense of danger" inspires us to make preparations so that we are no longer in the danger we are in now, for example by practicing moral discipline, purifying our negative karma, and accumulating as much merit, or good karma, as possible. We put on a seat belt out of a sense of danger of the unseen dangers of traffic on the road, and that seat belt protects us from going through the windshield. We can do nothing about other traffic, but we can do something about whether or not we go through the windscreen if someone crashes into us. Similarly, we can do nothing about the fact of death, but we can seize control over how we prepare for death and how we die. Eventually, through Tantric spiritual practice, we can even attain a deathless body. In Living Meaningfully, Dying Joyfully, Geshe Kelsang says: Dying with regrets is not at all unusual. To avoid a sad and meaningless end to our life we need to remember continually that we too must die. Contemplating our own death will inspire us to use our life wisely by developing the inner refuge of spiritual realizations; otherwise we shall have no ability to protect ourself from the sufferings of death and what lies beyond. Moreover, when someone close to us is dying, such as a parent or friend, we shall be powerless to help them because we shall not know how; and we shall experience sadness and frustration at our inability to be of genuine help. Dying with regrets is not at all unusual. To avoid a sad and meaningless end to our life we need to remember continually that we too must die. Contemplating our own death will inspire us to use our life wisely by developing the inner refuge of spiritual realizations; otherwise we shall have no ability to protect ourself from the sufferings of death and what lies beyond Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.8 Mb. Share with your friends:
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