26
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
to contemporary forms and symbols. Constantly balancing these ele–
ments midst the extraordinarily rapid change surrounding his own
life, the nostalgia is pervasive, and can be one of his most explosive
and dangerous emotions. This longing for a "Golden Age" of absolute
oneness, prior to individual and cultural separation or delineation, not
only sets the tone for the restorationism of the politically Rightist
antagonists of history: the still-extant Emperor-worshipping assassins
in Japan, the Colons in France and the John Birchites and Ku Klux
Klanners in this country. It also, in more disguised form, energizes
that transformationist totalism of the Left which courts violence, and
is even willing to risk nuclear violence, in a similarly elusive quest.
Following upon all that I have said are radical impairments to
the symbolism of transition within the life cycle - the
rites de pas–
sage
surrounding birth, entry into adulthood, marriage and death.
Whatever rites remain seem shallow, inappropriate, fragmentary.
Protean man cannot take them seriously, and often seeks to im–
provise new ones with whatever contemporary materials he has avail–
able, including cars and drugs. Perhaps the central impairment here
is that of symbolic immortality - of the universal need for imagery
of connection predating and extending beyond the individual life
span, whether the idiom of this immortality
is
biological (living on
through children and grandchildren), theological (through a life
after death), natural
(in
nature itself which outlasts
alI)
or creative
(through what man makes and does). I have suggested elsewhere that
this sense of immortality is a fundamental component of ordinary
psychic life, and that it is now being profoundly threatened: by
simple historical velocity, which subverts the idioms (notably the
theological) in which it has traditionally been maintained; and, of
particular importance to protean man, by the existence of nuclear
weapons, which, even without being used, call into question
alI
modes of immortality. (Who can be certain of living on through chil–
dren and grandchildren, through teachings or kindnesses?)
Protean man is left with two paths to symbolic immortality which
he tries to cultivate, sometimes pleasurably and sometimes desperately.
One is the natural mode we have mentioned. His attraction to nature
and concern at its desecration has to do with an unconscious sense
that, in whatever holocaust, at least nature will endure - though
such are the dimensions of our present weapons that he cannot be
absolutely certain even of this. His second path may
be
termed that
