Teller Like It Is

Wafers! Let me begin by wishing you all a Happy New Year. It promises to be a rough one, but then us Wafers are used to that, because we have a strong commitment to Reality. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how many Americans don’t, n’est-pas? Biden (Schmiden) doesn’t. Kamala (Schmamala) doesn’t. And the American people certainly prefer Reagan to Jimmy, Disneyland to courage, or the hard facts of life. This much must be obvious by now, no? Most of the American people are like Edward Teller, to some degree, it seems to me. So let me elaborate on this notion, on the (faint?) hope that it might offer some sort of guidance for the new year. Here goes:

In 2023, I published a book called Healing, which included a discussion of the work of Donald Winnicott, the psychiatrist and pediatrician who became famous for his 1951 article on the teddy bear, or what he called the Transitional Object. At least within civilization (i.e., possibly not including hunter-gatherer societies), infants find the outside world threatening, and get attached to some object as a safety-net, to protect themselves from that outside world. It can be anything—a teddy bear, a pillow or blanket, a rattle, and so on. But as the whole thing is existential, revolves around the core issue of survival, the attachment is usually quite strong. In time, however, the child will lose it, or lose interest in it, and that would supposedly mean the end of the attachment.

But not really, wrote Winnicott. What happens is that we tend to transfer this to nonphysical forms of attachment, such as religion—which can be secular as well as literal—and when these are held to an intense degree, we call it fundamentalism. Because these things are rooted in the primal need for security, people usually react to any doubt or criticism of their religion/ideology with varying degrees of anger. They will double-down on their commitment, because they are fighting for their psychological lives. In the extreme case, which is unfortunately the norm, they may go to war. This unwillingness, or inability, to engage in self-transparency has given us the tragic world in which we live, because the alternative to self-transparency (examination of one’s own motives) is to remain opaque to yourself, and to lay your “trip” on the outside world. Theoretically, at least, Buddhists stress the importance of the former over the latter; Ernest Becker made this conundrum the centerpiece of his famous study, The Denial of Death, which was awarded a Pulitzer in 1974.

In addition to the T.O. transfer phenomenon, most of us suffer a fair amount of damage in childhood—again, to varying degrees. I was led to think about this while reading Peter Goodchild’s biography of Edward Teller, the so-called “father of the H-bomb,” and the major architect behind the arms race that characterized the Cold War. (Dr. Strangelove, in the movie of that name, is played by Peter Sellers, whose character, many believe, was based on that of Teller’s. His fanaticism is shown to be, indeed, a very strange love.) Teller emerged from a very painful childhood with a desperate need to be loved, or at least accepted; to belong, to be approved of. In the context of the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, this deep need led him into an extreme paranoia, such that for him, atomic weaponry and anti-Russian hostility served as life-rafts. So instead of engaging in any self-transparency, which would have been far too threatening, he gave us the hydrogen bomb, which became part of the appropriately labeled policy of MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction. “If you go on with this nuclear arms race,” remarked Winston Churchill, “all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce,” while the eminent physicist Isidor Rabi declared that “it would have been a better world without Teller”—sentiments that many people share (unfortunately not enough, in my opinion).

I also couldn’t help thinking that nearly all of us are Edward Tellers—as I said, at least to some degree. Almost all of us have this need to belong, to feel accepted, to be part of the dominant culture, and we typically opt for laying our “trip” on others, or the outside world, rather than for self-transparency. This bias, or orientation, is probably not going to change anytime soon, which leaves us with Gaza, the Ukraine, and the unholy mess you can read about in the daily online news media. It means that most of the activities we read about are ultimately illusions, and we are hardly in any hurry to give these up. As T.S. Eliot famously put it, “we cannot bear very much reality.”

And this is the reality—or should I say, “reality”—which leaves us with the only question worth considering: What now?

©Morris Berman, 2024