Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
We have read some dense canonical European White Guys. None of them have been as difficult and off-putting as Freud. I would have rather read Civilization And Its Discotheques.
Freud begins with the observation that for most of human history, our happiness has been tied to our ability to control nature: to keep away predators and stinging instincts, to keep ourselves fed and sheltered, to alleviate pain and disease. At the time Freud was writing, nature was well under control. You would think, then, that we would be really happy. But as Louis CK puts it: “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.”
Why are civilized people so miserable? Freud attributes some of our unhappiness to civilization itself, the way it hems in our vicious ape instincts. Civilization is a deal we make with each other where we trade some of our freedom to obey our violent instincts in order to be free from one another’s violent instincts.
The final outcome should be a rule of law to which all — except those who are not capable of entering a community — have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one — again with the same exception — at the mercy of brute force. The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions.
This seems reasonable enough, but Freud’s arguments in support of his thesis have a lot of problems. He seems to be unaware that humans’ evolutionary success is due entirely to our ability to cooperate, to form bonds of social reciprocity. We are certainly violent and competitive, but we are also instinctually capable of heroic altruism. All mammals have social instincts, from mice to wolves to whales. Freud is either ignorant of evolutionary biology and paleontology, or not interested in them, which does not do anything to diminish the confidence of statements like these.
The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic, phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced.
Jeez Freud, there’s a perfectly good evolutionary reason for incest taboos. Mammals don’t naturally want to mate with their close biological relatives. Giving up incest is not a big sacrifice for us. But okay, maybe we should squint our eyes and look at the larger point, which is that we give up a lot of sexual freedom for the sake of social stability. Freud was progressive for his time in recognizing that humans exhibit considerable sexual diversity, and that civilization (ours specifically) tries to pin us down into a limited set of acceptable behaviors. Sexual relationships are exclusive and marked by jealousy, which is a problem if you need everyone to mostly get along. Freud sees a pattern in which civilization asks us to redirect our libidinal energy away from our loved ones and sexual partners and instead to diffuse it out among all of our fellow humans.
But civilization demands other sacrifices besides that of sexual satisfaction… It aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every means to that end. It favours every path by which strong identifications can be established between the members of the community, and it summons up aim-inhibited libido on the largest scale so as to strengthen the communal bond by relations of friendship. In order for these aims to be fulfilled, a restriction upon sexual life is unavoidable. But we are unable to understand what the necessity is which forces civilization along this path and which causes its antagonism to sexuality. There must be some disturbing factor which we have not yet discovered. The clue may be supplied by one of the ideal demands, as we have called them, of civilized society. It runs: ‘Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself.’ It is known throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strange to mankind. Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for whose fulfilment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way.
Here, Freud is on sounder evolutionary footing. Humans are only alturuistic and cooperative within our tribal groupings; we save most of our hostility for people outside the tribe. The primatologist Robin Dunbar noticed a linear relationship between primates’ relative brain size and the size of their social groupings. Through extrapolating that relationship, he predicted that human social groups should have a maximum size of about 150 people. The theory goes that we can only have meaningful relationships within our monkeysphere. Universal love among humans is no more physiologically possible than universal love among dolphins or horses. Freud goes further and says that love within the monkeysphere is only possible because of hatred outside the monkeysphere.
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.
Given our instincts, the commandment to “love thy neighbor” is an impossible request.
[I]f he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. But if I am to love him (with this universal love) merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share — not by any possibility as much as, by the judgement of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. What is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?
Freud says that the only way to keep the monkeyspheres from being locked in a state of perpetual warfare is to keep ourselves in check via the threat of emotional violence. “Love thy neighbor” is a reaction-formation against our instinctual murderous rage, a way to overcompensate.
In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of men in check by psychical reaction-formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence too the ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself — a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs as strongly counter to the original nature of man.
Freud naturally takes a dim view of the communists, who believe that humans are basically good and cooperative, only corrupted by the institution of private property has corrupted his nature.
Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child).
Here is where Freud goes off the rails. Maybe his theory about mothers and their male children was true for him and his mother, but the idea that this is a universal truth of human nature reads like massive projection on Freud’s part. Anyway, the idea goes that we become civilized by redirecting all of our aggression against our own aggression, as the superego subdues the ego by force.
His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from — that is, it is directed towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of ‘conscience’, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.
Psychologically speaking, Freud thinks that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Civilization is to society as the superego is to individuals. In civilization, it’s not enough to frighten people into submission. You need them to internalize the rules and norms and to believe in them until they self-police. So it is within the individual psyche.
We ought not to speak of a conscience until a super-ego is demonstrably present. As to a sense of guilt, we must admit that it is in existence before the super-ego, and therefore before conscience, too. At that time it is the immediate expression of fear of the external authority, a recognition of the tension between the ego and that authority. It is the direct derivative of the conflict between the need for the authority’s love and the urge towards instinctual satisfaction, whose inhibition produces the inclination to aggression. The superimposition of these two strata of the sense of guilt — one coming from fear of the external authority, the other from fear of the internal authority — has hampered our insight into the position of conscience in a number of ways.
I would be on board with this line of thinking if Freud didn’t insist on tying everything back to sex. I know it’s a big thing, but for Freud it seems to be the only thing.
[N]eurotic symptoms are, in their essence, substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled sexual wishes. In the course of our analytic work we have discovered to our surprise that perhaps every neurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment. It now seems plausible to formulate the following proposition. When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt.
I also do not buy that everyone wants to murder their father. I think that might just be Freud.
The super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders — men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided, expression. In many instances the analogy goes still further, in that during their lifetime these figures were — often enough, even if not always — mocked and maltreated by others and even despatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed, the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence. The most arresting example of this fateful conjunction is to be seen in the figure of Jesus Christ — if, indeed, that figure is not a part of mythology, which called it into being from an obscure memory of that primal event.
Freud frames all of our human struggles in terms of “Eros versus Thanatos”, the love/life drive versus the death/destruction drive.
And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life arid the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.
If you want to name the urge to survive and propagate after Eros, that’s fine, but it seems silly to me to identify plain old entropy as needing a positive “death drive.” You don’t need to want to die for this to happen to you, you just need to be alive and under stress for long enough:
Freud takes it for granted that the basic unit of life is the individual organism, which is understandable enough, since most people do. But if you study social organisms, the picture gets more complicated. Natural selection happens at the level of genes, not organisms; taking the “gene’s-eye view,” organisms are disposable vehicles for DNA to get around in. When you look at eusocial insects like ants or termites, the individual colony members seem as disposable as your individual skin cells. It’s the colony as a whole that behaves like a robust “organism.” The picture gets even more complicated when you start thinking about complex symbiosis relationships like the one between Darwin’s termites and Mixotricha. Which is really the “individual,” the termite or the bacterium in the termite’s gut? Or the smaller bacterium living as a symbiote on the bigger bacterium? Humans are themselves walking bacteria colonies, and our consciousness is as much social as it is individual. Maybe we’ll one day see the concept of the “individual” as a strange anachronism.