I'm not too sad to say that I am currently falling woefully short of my intent to read a book a week. I'm so darn distractible, with this-or-that arising in the moment: the sunny backyard, weeds, the Zaadz I-I pod, various blogs, sitting in silence. Well, instead of distractible, I prefer available. I am available for whatever arises.

Anyway, back to Meeting the Shadow. I am loving this book. I highly recommend it. Here's another taste:

Enemy-making seems to serve a vital purpose: those qualities that we cannot tolerate in ourselves we can unconsciously and painlessly attribute to our enemies. When observed through psychological lenses, enemy-making is a transposition of shadow onto others who, for often complicated reasons, fit our images of the inferior. We need only to think of the people whom we judge or dislike or against whom we hold secret prejudices to find ourselves in the grip of our darker nature.

At the level of nation, race, religion, or other collective identity, we can witness enemy-making being enacted in mythic, dramatic, and often tragic proportions. Wars, crusades and persecutions are the terrible estate of this form of the human shadow, which is, to some degree, a legacy of our instinctual tribal heritage. The greatest cruelties in human history have been carried out in the name of righteous causes, when the shadows of entire nations have been projected onto the face of an enemy, and thus an alien group can be made into a foe, a scapegoat, or an infidel.

The ultimate function of warring with an enemy is redemption. According to social critic Ernest Becker: "If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play by means of which evil is redeemed. All wars are conducted as 'holy' wars in the double sense that - as a revelation of our fate, a testing of divine favor, and as a means of purging evil from the world."

Our time has seen an incredible waste of human and material resources, squandered to keep the enemy-making game of the cold war in place. We have already mortgaged the future of our children in armaments and war technologies. Hopefully, we can apply these lessons of futility as we dismantle the weapons of this obsolete machinery.

The world seems to be waiting for a new age of constructive cooperation, a millennial era when we will use the energy of enemy-making for problem solving. The new enemy to engage requires no projection; it may be accessed by simply owning our own collective shadows and taking responsibility, for it is now made manifest in the form of ecological disaster, global warming, the death of countless other species, and the economic deprivation and malnutrition of many people.


I think the end is a bit idealistic and reductionistic, but I appreciated the deconstruction of the enemy. War technologies are not likely to be obsolete any time soon, though; tribalism is rampant, and the higher waves of development have a responsibility to try to limit aggression. Unfortunately, those at the tribal stage don't often show up for rational discourse, so keeping an arsenal seems necessary, hopefully more for symbolic purposes than for literal usage.

I do appreciate the idea that enemies can shift from being mutual projections towards being societal problems that we can overcome.

I love, love, LOVE this shit! It smells like roses to me.