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Freud and the Future of an Illusion.

http://sunsationalhomeimprovement.com/sunrooms/ A friend recently lent me a copy of Clive James’ book Cultural Amnesia – now that is a good friend – which I devoured over the course of a little over a week. The book is excellent, and what is particularly lovely about it is that it filled me with the desire to read everything about and by all the writers James mentions. When he praises something, he is so convincing and beautiful and earnest you immediately want to go see the thing for yourself. This is a very good quality in a human being.

wholesale Misoprostol One of the writers he enthused about was Kafka, and this sent me back to my bookshelf, but I will confess he did nothing for me, as usual. Some writers write about the universe, and some just write about society. As a general rule the Middle-European writers of the twentieth century are social to the exclusion of all else. Whenever I read them, I start thinking, “Goodness gracious, I think the goldenrods are in bloom, I think I had better go check,” and am gone for the rest of the afternoon.

So my Kafka attempts failed. But James also enthused about Freud’s book The Future of an Illusion – nice title – “a powerful argument brilliantly articulated… to this day one of the most magnificent condensations of a world view into a prose style.” The only Freud I had read was The Interpretation of Dreams, which besides being wrongheaded about the interpretation of dreams, is truly dreadful writing. (God, how terribly people write when they think they are being “scientific.”) Freud was a pioneer, and I respect him, even if almost all Freud’s theories have proven very easy to either improve or disprove. But really – could James really be praising Freud as a stylist?

Like most people, my library is a bit more learned than I am, and a copy of The Future of an Illusion was there waiting for me, rescued from the trash when Wagner College was unburdening itself of its book collection in 2001. The book is only 98 pages, and I literally read half of it on a subway trip from Queens to the Bronx and the other half on the trip back. And wouldn’t you know it, it actually was a powerful argument brilliantly articulated, and one of the most magnificent condensations of a world view into a prose style. I heartily recommend it.

The illusion that Freud is talking about – you might be able to guess it – is religion. The book is an extremely tight presentation of an argument which might have been controversial in Freud’s time, but which now is probably the common possession of almost every twentysomething college educated Brooklyn transplant: that religion is unnecessary, irrational, and infantile, a crutch for the weakminded, an illusory consolation and a bit beneath a rational modern person, if a rational modern person even gives the topic a thought. I’m sure most of these Brooklynites have never read the book, which merely shows Freud’s prescience: this was indeed the future which he was sketching. And yes, he could sketch it well. It is probably the best evocation of modern atheism I have ever read:

Let us consider the unmistakable character of the present situation. We have heard the admission that religion no longer has the same influence on men that it used to have (we are concerned here with European Christian culture). And this, not because its promises have become smaller, but because they appear less credible to people. Let us admit that the reason – perhaps not the only one – for this change is the increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of human society. Criticism has nibbled away at the authenticity of religious documents, natural science has shown up the errors contained in them, and the comparative method of research has revealed the fatal resemblance between religious ideas revered by us and the mental productions of primitive ages and peoples. The scientific spirit engenders a particular attitude to the problems of this world; before the problems of religion it halts for a while, then wavers, and finally here too steps over the threshold. In this process there is no stopping. The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief, at first only of the obsolete and objectionable expressions of the same, then of its fundamental assumptions also. (67-8)

There is something about Freud’s prose that feels inevitable, precisely as the modern mind feels the approach of atheism. People’s stories are all the same: atheism is something forced upon them by the demands of intellectual integrity: “I just couldn’t believe anymore.” And his chapters flow one to another, a brilliant line of argument and sequence of emotions which I think very well represents what happens in the minds of innumerable modern people as they mature.

We say to ourselves: it would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if there were a moral world order and a future life, but at the same time it is very odd that this is all just as we should wish it ourselves. And it would be still odder if our poor, ignorant, enslaved ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe. (58)

Fudge the thinking and word-choice a little and you can insert this paragraph into the spiritual autobiographies of half of America’s graduate students.

What Freud decides to do with the problem of theological decline is to state his position encouraging it: he thinks that in general the world will be better off without religion, and that science will continue to displace it. He spends some time trying to answer the claims of those people – who are still with us – whose main defense of religion is that it makes people more moral, with its system of eternal rewards and punishments. Freud respectfully disagrees with this viewpoint, and I believe he has been proven correct: the most atheistic places in the world have in fact become the places where people murder, lie, cheat, and steal least. (Religious people dodge this fact by arguing that those atheist places are the places where people have the most casual sex and wear the fewest clothes so in fact they are all Gomorrahs of moral vacuity, but I find most sexuality not sinful, and most sexual sins forgivable). Morality does not need the crutch of religion.

I find myself reading atheist writers frequently, and I generally agree with them: in fact, I think they generally pick up many of the same themes Jesus himself did when attempting to put the religious practice of Judaism on a truer footing. Freud, for instance, has a superb argument for giving Law to Caesar and disrobing it of its religious mantle entirely (the single most brilliant contribution of Christianity to religion – neither Jesus nor any of the apostles whose faith we claim to follow took any cognizance of Roman law as a Christian concern):

Through some kind of diffusion or infection, the character of sanctity and inviolability, of other-worldliness, one might say, has been extended from some few important prohibitions to all other cultural institutions and laws and ordinances. And often the halo becomes these none too well: not only do they invalidate each other by making conflicting decisions according to the time and place of their origin; even apart from this they betray every sign of human inadequacy. One can easily recognize among them things which can only be the product of short-sightedness and apprehensiveness, the expression of narrow interests, or the result of inadequate hypotheses. The criticism to which one must subject them also diminishes to an unwelcome extent people’s respect for other and more justified cultural demands. As it is a delicate task to decide what God has himself ordained and what derives rather from the authority of an all-powerful parliament or supreme judicial decision, it would be an indubitable advantage to leave God out of the question altogether, and to admit honestly the purely human origin of all cultural laws and institutions. Along with their pretensions to sanctity the rigid and immutable nature of these laws and regulations would also cease. Men would realize that these have been made, not so much to rule them, as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; they would acquire a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition they would aim only at improving them. (72-3)

“The law was made for man, not man for the law,” is a good summa of Jesus’s religious reforms, and Freud here is really only echoing this same wisdom. Dante reasoned out the same principle in his De Monarchia to reprove medieval society, insisting on a separation between Church and State and giving the power of legislation to the state. Almost every single major problem concerning politics and Christianity today could be resolved by taking up the position of Jesus and Freud. Jesus had two commandments; how many does the Catholic Church have today? They have proven to be little more than dilution.

The atheist books always seem to do this – they take up their beef with bad religion and never get any deeper. Why the atheists don’t take up their fight with the big hitters – like Jesus, for instance – I’ll never understand. I suppose it is more difficult a fight, but you have to fight the champion if you want to be a contender. If you want to tell us there’s no value to epic poetry, kicking around William Carlos William’s epic poem Paterson is not going to get you anywhere. It’s too easy. You have to go to Homer and Dante or you have no argument.

Freud offers an unusually bogus definition of religion, but it is useful place for me to take up his argument, so I will quote him:

Having rejected various formulas, I shall take my stand by this one: religion consists of certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality, which tell one something that one has not oneself discovered and which claim that one should give them credence. (43)

This is a terrible definition, first of all because this definition applies to literally any statement on the news or in a history book. It does nothing to distinguish religion from say, economics or politics or literature or gossip or technical training at a factory. It is a set of propositions – kind of like Euclid’s Elements. But religious propositions turn out to be a lot harder to prove than mathematical theorems, and so they’re just bad math and bad science.

I think this is sleight of hand in general, like arguing the proposition “hedonism is the proper life-philosophy” by proving that it offers more pleasure than other ways of living. Let me say the obvious: provable propositions – science – have a limited application to human life. The reason is: human life. We don’t have infinite time. You don’t get an infinite number of experiments to figure out what the most rewarding type of life will be. You don’t get to make the same choice two different ways. Science relies on replicability of experiments: if you can’t replicate the experiment, your data is useless. Life is itself irreplicable. Hence we are always going to need some shortcut to knowledge – something different from scientific certainty. Hence all the things that make us human and not just computers. Religion is – obviously – far closer to those things than it is to science.

But there is a scientific element to the religious life, just as life does in fact in part consist of errors and corrections. Freud says that religions have propositions for which we have no hard data – e.g. those concerning our future existence – and in general this indicates that religions focus on data-less propositions, which he thinks are really just our wishes. Religion is wish-fulfilment. The first things to be said about this is that our wishes are actually relevant bits of data, and depending on what you think the purpose of life is – I will return to this later – it is possible to believe that your wishes should be taken into account. But yes, by all means get data where data is available. I certainly do believe, contra Freud, that religious propositions have to be proven in the heart of the believer: you must experience Crucifixion, Resurrection, Incarnation, Lent, Passion, Exile, Promised Land, and so forth in your life for it to be your religion. If you don’t experience it, and if it has no meaning for you, then it really is just a social club. And I will confess that there are a lot of things in my religion, for instance, which have little meaning for me: the day I write this, for instance, is the Feast of the Assumption, August Fifteenth. For about sixty years Catholics have had in their religious possession the proposition, considered dogma, that Mary did not die but was “assumed” into heaven directly. I must confess that this dogma leaves me unmoved, though in a pinch I could probably interpret it into something relevant to my experience. But I don’t feel it’s all that necessary to do so, just as I don’t feel I need to appreciate all the writers in the world. Kafka does not appeal to me. He appeals deeply to other people. They are not being insincere: they are just different from me. Jung thought the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption was one of the most important events of the twentieth century. But he might have been able to sit through the Catholic wedding blessing without thinking it is the most beautiful, deeply religious thing he had ever heard in his life (my position). We’re different people and we experience religious meaning in different places.

But the thing which is most important about religion for me – and which Freud does not talk about at all – is that it deals firmly with the problem of purpose. I think this is something which people should consider deeply, and one of the most striking features of the irreligious life is the sense that people get very confused when it comes to larger questions of purpose. As those Brooklyn twentysomethings become thirtysomethings and fortysomethings at least some of them feel the lack of purpose as an actual problem. I think that everyone lives with some purpose or other, which is, functionally, their religion. If you believe that the purpose of life is to ascertain facts, then science will be your religion; if to amass power, then that will be your religion; if to have new and pleasurable experiences, hedonism will be your religion. Here we sometimes have enough time in our life to get data and change our course. I have ascertained some facts, and had some power, and had some pleasurable experiences, and found none of them a suitable purpose for my life. I have tried to serve God like a slave, and contemplate reality as it is, freed from passions, and found neither really suitable either – though as the guiding principles behind orthodox Islam and Buddhism, they are certainly traditionally religious visions of what life’s purpose is. The only thing that really satisfies me is love – love of people, love of nature, love of art, love of the stars at night, love of thinking, love of music, love of dancing, love of all the things that pass away and love of the oneness which remains. I cannot much control where it arises in my life – I cannot create it – but like a seed I have received I can tend it to make it grow and blossom. This satisfies me. But it requires the cooperation of my mind to really happen – if I believed in a different purpose for my life I would have less love. And if it is not religion which makes these determinations about the ultimate purpose of human life, what is it? No philosopher preaches love as the purpose. Only a religion does, and only one religion, for that matter.

Freud does not use the word “purpose,” and in general he has nothing to say about these concerns of mine. He is more interested in the social effects of increased atheism and decreased religious fervor. But reading him I recognized for the first time a pattern of thought which is all around us every day. In place of purpose Freud attempts to substitute instinct. Freud’s vision of the good life is one in which as many instincts as possible are satisfied. Now this may be correct: this may be the mechanism by which all the things we know as “purpose” may be discussed scientifically: but it is also possible that our sense of our purpose will have to – as it feels – dictate to some extent which of our instincts we choose to satisfy. But the larger problem with this way of thinking is that the thinker will tend to trammel his sense of human purpose to the size of his understanding of the human instinctual equipage. Using this model Freud returns to classic European social-contract reasoning, saying that social life is necessarily a compromise: you suppress your instincts in exchange for the modicum of security that comes from everyone else suppressing theirs. The vision of human nature he derives from this truly leaped off the page at me when I first saw it:

We have spoken of the hostility to culture produced by the pressure it exercises and the instinctual renunciations that it demands. If one imagined its prohibitions removed, then one could choose any woman who took one’s fancy as one’s sexual object, one could kill without hesitation one’s rival or whoever interfered with one in any other way, and one could seize what one wanted of another man’s goods without asking his leave: how splendid, what a succession of delights, life would be! (25)

I ask this in all honesty: after a lifetime of raping any woman you saw, killing anyone who interferes with you, and taking a whole bunch of things which you must die and leave behind anyway – might you not start to wonder what the purpose was? Might not something feel left out, that would make itself known to you in your broken sleep? Would life really be so splendid? Camus orphically said, “Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes.” The closest human beings can come to this ideal life Freud describes is as a tyrant, and do we really believe that Kim Jong Il represents the highest human life? Or Stalin or Hitler? But Freud does go on to say that the tyrant is the happiest of people, the only problem being that only one person gets to be happy in such a society:

True, one soon finds the first difficulty: everyone else has exactly the same wishes, and will treat one with no more consideration that one will treat him. And so in reality there is only one single person who can be made unrestrictedly happy by abolishing thus the restrictions imposed by culture, and that is the tyrant or dictator who has monopolized all the means of power. (25-6)

Research into the instincts was still very fresh and new at that time, but it is still odd that Freud believed that instinctually we are rape-and-murder machines, and all the brakes on this system are the work of human culture (that is the opposition he sets up in this book). Given a different internal vision – different wishes to be fulfilled I suppose – he could easily have seen a different picture. Heinrich Himmler, one of the great modern monsters, head of the German SS, inventor of the gas chamber as a “modern political instrument,” and as Germany’s minister of the interior during World War II directly responsible for the murder of millions of human beings, fainted when touring a German prisoner-of-war camp. This was clearly an instinctual reaction, which almost all of us share, and Freud could surely have observed it operative in other people. Dirty work is dirty work because we actually don’t want to do it.

But there was some truly evil idea abroad in that place and that time, and Freud was under the spell as well. The idea was somehow that the purpose of life was to achieve a kind of hardened superiority – the kind of ideal that got a nice Idaho boy like Ezra Pound to gush about Mussolini. Sometimes the ideal is predatory, sometimes mechanical, but hardness and superiority are always involved.  Freud here becomes another point in the line between Nietzsche’s striving to “liberate the blond beast” from Christian values of mercy and compassion and Hitler’s political realization of the same. The idea that the instinctual, natural human being would be above mercy and compassion is common to all three. Freud here explicitly states that human happiness depends to some extent on overcoming moral strictures created by culture, and that happiness is a zero-sum game, which to tell the honest truth only one person could ever truly win. Civilized life can only provide us with consolation prizes; the real reward beckons to us from beyond all morality. The thinkers were infected with the same rot that was abroad all over Europe at the time. Freud actually went to the same vacation resort as Hitler and the other high officers of the Nazi state, and never seemed to feel out of place enough to sense that there was any real problem. He barely escaped Austria, in 1938, after it was too late to save his family.

Modern atheism does frequently share aspects of this ideal of hardened superiority. That makes sense: Nietzsche and Freud are still important thinkers in the movement. Their vision of the ideal for a person corresponds to the hardness built into their vision of the universe: as Freud says, “nature destroys us, coldly, cruelly, callously.” (By contrast, I note that nature also nourishes us, and entertains us, and is funny and kind – nature is hence both hospitable and inhospitable, and to suggest one without the other is reductionist). And the proper person (so goes this line of thought) will be tough enough to recognize how hostile the universe is, and will look at it unflinchingly, driving away softness in order to get something out of this wretched existence, because it will give you nothing – whatever happiness, meaning, or purpose you get out of it you will have to put into it first. And anyone who suggests otherwise is weak and foolish – the kind of person you left behind when you set off for the big city. The picture has been complicated by the recognition of our social instincts and the necessity of sometimes being nice in order to have an enjoyable life, but the outlines are still roughly in place for certain people.

Freud’s vicious conception of the instincts creates an unusually stark version of this vision – honestly, he makes Ayn Rand look like Mother Theresa – but it is interesting to read, despite the discomfort caused by the Nazi overtones:

It is just as impossible to do without government of the masses by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization, for the masses are lazy and unintelligent, they have no love for instinctual renunciation, they are not to be convinced of its inevitability by argument, and the individuals support each other in giving full play to their unruliness. It is only by the influence of individuals who can set an example, whom the masses recognize as their leaders, that they can be induced to submit to the labors and renunciations on which the existence of culture depends. All is well if these leaders are people of superior insight into what constitute the necessities of life, people who have attained the height of mastering their own instinctual wishes. But the danger exists that in order not to lose their influence they will yield to the masses more than these will yield to them, and therefore it seems necessary that they should be independent of the masses by having at their disposal means of enforcing their authority. (12-3)

He then goes on to suggest that perhaps by controlling the educational system we could produce people ready to “submit to the labors and renunciations on which the existence of culture depends” who needed no coercion, but that he admits would be difficult:

It may be asked where the throng of superior, dependable and disinterested leaders, who are to act as educators of the future generations, are to come from; and one may be appalled at the stupendous amount of force that will be unavoidable if these intentions are to be carried out. But one cannot deny the grandeur of this project and its significance for the future of human culture. (14)

These sentences could have come from a Nazi propaganda piece.

And so when Clive James notes that The Future of an Illusion is “one of the most magnificent condensations of a world view into a prose style,” I have to agree with the statement, though I will note that I don’t have much respect for the world view itself. The cold imperiousness of the style reflects a vision of what we human beings are: a vision which I think is shallow and incomplete at best, and evil at worst. To live Freud’s ideal life would be to be a monster.

And despite Freud’s assertion that a life of rape, murder, and theft would be fun – “how splendid, what a succession of delights!” – I don’t believe it would be all the enjoyable on the inside. In thinking about this I thought about some of my Christian friends who find especial depth in the doctrine of the Trinity. To me it has never been terribly important, but I do like what these Christians say it means: the thing which we must have for there to be a God, is a multiplicity to complement the unity. In life all religious experiences must involve both the unitive element and the sense that you are actually meeting and encountering something different and separate: both must be present. Trinitarian theology seems to me a very roundabout way of getting to that point, but I thought about it when analyzing what seemed so awful about Freud’s universe, and that is how terribly lonely it seems. Recently I heard an intelligent young woman talking about how she believed the main thing in life was to satisfy yourself – maybe even that was the only thing. I don’t believe that she actually believed that, though I do believe that she believed she believed that. People’s thoughts are always so much more impoverished than their lives. But one way or another, the word “love” accomplishes all the things that hard-core Trinitarians tell us Trinitarian theology accomplishes: it suggests that in life you have to meet something outside yourself and also be united to it. All the other visions of life seem terribly lonely. I feel sorry for people who preach a life of selfishness. And the Trinitarians tell us such a concept is built into the Trinitarian God itself.

As far as empiricism goes, I think we can find this out by experience, if only we would open ourselves to it. We certainly have data indicating that Freud’s theories on instinctual satisfaction are false. Erich Fromm, writing about Freud’s very solipsistic ideas about sex, wrote (I have quoted this earlier):

According to Freud, the full and uninhibited satisfaction of all instinctual desires would create mental health and happiness. But the obvious clinical facts demonstrate that men – and women – who devote their lives to unrestricted sexual satisfaction do not attain happiness, and very often suffer from severe neurotic conflicts or symptoms. The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity. Yet Freud’s idea could only have become so popular in the period after the First World War because of the changes which had occurred in the spirit of capitalism, from the emphasis on saving to that of spending, from self-frustration as a means for economic success to consumption as the basis for an ever-widening market, and as the main satisfaction for the anxious, automatized individual. Not to postpone the satisfaction of any desire became the main tendency in the sphere of sex as well as in that of all material consumption. (85-6)

And as for Freud’s ideas about religion, I think there is reason to believe that its weakening is a problem rather than a solution, and its shriveling is actually leaving a hole in people’s lives. The established religions, admittedly, are not doing much to step into the gap, but the need is still there. Freud may have believed that we should discount such a wish for a religious life as infantile, and our overcoming it a sign of a hardened intellectual maturity, but I am not so hostile myself to our wishes. Sometimes they are the very things we need to listen to. Jung is a fine example of that direction in life, and I will close with some of his thoughts on the topic of religion and purpose:

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the ‘symbolic life.’ We need only think of the experience of the Mass, of baptism, of the imitatio Christi, and many other aspects of religion. But to live and experience symbols presupposes a vital participation on the part of the believer, and only too often this is lacking in people today. In the neurotic it is practically always lacking. In such cases we have to observe whether the unconscious will not spontaneously bring up symbols to replace what is lacking. But then the question remains of whether a person who has symbolic dreams or visions will also be able to understand their meaning and take the consequences upon himself.

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