Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LIFTON has hit on a very important concept here, yet he insists on finding the reason for the phenomenon of Protean man in the malaise caused by the atomic bomb. In fact, while the bomb may have disoriented members of Lifton's generation, it is implausible to suggest that it accounts for the Protean man. The contemporary adult or young adult does not have as vivid a memory or understanding of the bombing as did Lifton, or John Hersey, and can not relate to it in the terms Lifton suggests. While psychological disorientation and the Protean state are observable...
This leaves man with two possibilities for immortality, and he grasps at them both. The current resurgence of interest in nature and the environment, Lifton says, is merely an expression of man's desire to live on through nature, combined with his perception that nature is assured of immortality, no matter what the fate of man. But the fifth mode of immortality is the one which most concerns him, for he sees in it the explanation of much of the new culture which man has developed in the past quarter century...
THIS FIFTH mode of immortality-the seeking of an experience to transcend life and death-seems to Lifton to be the reason for the drug culture, for revolution, for almost any of the consuming passions made have experienced since 1945. He uses the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a paradigm for man's attempt to redefine the boundaries and re-establish the concept of immortality, while defying the specter of death which the bomb has established. "The activist response to symbolic death," he says, "or to what might be called unmastered death anxiety, is a quest for rebirth. One could...
...fallacies in his arguments are obvious. Lifton has established that the survivors of Hiroshima feel a sense of unlimited destruction, and feel that their traditional ways of relating to immortality are meaningless, but he has failed to show that these survivors participate in the drug culture, the revolutionary movement or any of the other "modes of immortality" to which he refers. He certainly never manages to connect the cultural revolution with the Hiroshima atrocity, or to prove that the bombing had any personal psychological effect on Mao or any of the other leaders of China...
Although he fails to provide a convincing link between Hiroshima and the revolutionary movement, Lifton does formulate one very intriguing thesis from his analysis of the aftermath of the nuclear era. He postulates the existence of what he calls Protean man, a man who has lost the boundaries of his own self. Protean man is in a state of total confusion, and finds himself embracing a series of conflicting ideologies for no apparent reason. "Until relatively recently, no more than one major ideological shift was likely to occur in a lifetime, and that one would be long remembered...