You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
An old French proverb ironically suggests that it is the dead one must kill: Ces sont les morts qu'il faut qu'on tue. But, of course, it is with just these ancestral specters one need learn to live. Conscience consists of such ghosts, and of the residual anger and love one feels toward these living, although often unconscious, memories of earliest teachers. Ideally, the superego becomes impersonal, free from a child's ambitions, free from a material parental image. It becomes an integral part of an adult character, and thereby capable of being tolerant, even tender, toward oneself and others. In our time, many have shown little interest in this process of growing up. Others, feeling compelled to struggle with some rag of a conscience, have only learned to act out cynically or maliciously. What number of men have wrestled with the demonic in themselves, like Jacob in Genesis or Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker, and in that mental crucible have forged a covenant with their conscience and their God? Each of these representative men grew to accept, “willingly like an heir,” the compassion and the responsibility of a grown man's conscience. And when they felt they had to choose then, like the prophets Amos and Micah, they preferred justice even to kindness.
Cannibals are without conscience. They believe in the mechanical power of magic—in the might of their wishes, spelled out in words and enacted in rites, to change the world. If they want to possess strengths of an honorable enemy, then they make of him a tasty morsel. They do not know guilt for this deed, only pride. Civilized men aim to renounce these passions. Conscience is to replace magic. Remorse, the agenbit of inwit, takes the place of a