Continuations of Totalism

Perhaps because I only just finished Robert Lifton’s memoir, I am now thinking mostly about the final chapter, “Full Circle,” especially with the sections in which he connects his studies and the events from the 20^th Century to the more recent and ongoing events of the 21^st. I’m interested in his following America’s war-making projects from World War II to Vietnam to Iraq/Afghanistan, and it had me wondering how extreme the early 21^st Century and later the century as a whole may seem compared to the historical events we will be studying.

I like how Lifton emphasizes the totalistic, absolutist ideology that allows for the terrible work of thought reformers, Nazi doctors, the cults like Aum Shinrikyo, and other, and that that same absolutist mindset helps spur the extremist beliefs of religious fundamentalists (both Christian and Muslim) today. I also saw in Lifton’s brief description of fundamentalism on page 388, a mixing in Fundamentalist thought of totalist and reactionary impulses—the desire to bring to the world an impossible purity and that desire blooming in adherents from their rejection of “protean experimentation,” of compromise and an understanding of complexity that challenges such simplistic ideas of purity. Lifton also mentions fundamentalism in the 20^th Century occurring as a sort of reaction “to religious liberalism” (388), which recalled the moments of “political backlash against radical movements” that Lifton alludes to in the “decades following the sixties” (214). It speaks to a cycle of Rebellion, Change, and Reactionary Backlash, which even seems to occur in a miniaturized scale during these past few Obama years--the movement from “Hope” and “Change” to the rise of the Tea Party and what Liften calls the “new waves of right-wing American totalism” (406).

I’m interested in the intersection of totalism and reactionary backlash, as it occurs in the past and present. It’s amazing how much Lifton’s life, his studies, and this memoir cover, and I feel like I’ll be dwelling on this book for quite a while.