Thoughts on Civilization (and Its Discontents)

Freud is remarkably consistent in his worldview throughout psychology, religion, and politics. Here he takes his grand theory of everything to its latest manifestation, civilization. Civilization is a thing actively created. The original German title called it kultur, which derives from Latin cultus, to cultivate. Civilization is defined as what isn't natural, yet unlike a kingdom of God or a supernatural realm it is imperfect as we work on what is given under conditions not of our choosing.

For Freud civilization is the most difficult thing to achieve, what ultimately sets us apart from the animals. He starts out the book discussing what happiness is. He claims rightfully so that we can never be happy for more than a short time as satisfying one desire opens up others, and that satisfaction given the world of scarcity comes at something else's expense and is done at excess of too much or too little.

 "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures."

Freud's comprehensive worldview begins with the law of conservation of energy. In our closed system the amount of energy stays the same or decreases with every use. Nothing is free. Organisms are the matter complexes which resist entropy, homogeneity with the environment, reproducing themselves and evolving to more complex forms which can overcome the environment. This is done with a major expense of energy from the organism to convert other living things, plants and animals, to energy. The activity of living drains the life force of the organism. Only by growing more sophisticated means of energy conversion like eating and eventually tool making can the organism escape death, a return to the original unorganized form of matter it emerged from at great cost.

Reproduction allows the individual organism to cheat death by passing on its genes. Offspring come from the organism and especially in mammals are cared for as one cares for one self. But the care come to take on a new meaning because younglings are the ticket to immortality. Of course simple creatures aren't conscious of this, but their basic drive to live evolves pleasure organs to facilitate reproduction, and it's genes would select a kind of altruism of the individual organism towards its children (using Neo-Darwinian theory here, which parallels many of Freud's theories.)

So then comes human beings who are aware of their death and gain a transcendental value to being loved by others, and having that love outlast them by the products of their copulation, the animal act. Our happiness becomes dependent on others. The ego emerges from this awareness of self and seeks immediate gratification from the world around it. When it fails and becomes disheartened, it seeks to destroy this world of desires and return to the original simple form. This death wish is manifested through aggression to others.

So there is an inherent struggle within human nature, between the pursuit of happiness and the difficulty of attaining it, especially from others. Freud mentions communism, the utopia of his day, as a false solution to this struggle not economically, which he doesn't think is impossible, but in terms of abandoning aggression which he argues has a metaphysical basis rather than being the result of property. We must love one another to live, but are frustrated when it is not returned.

So far nothing terribly new except for the thermodynamic metaphors. But here is Freud's innovative view civilization: we have to get people to thwart their own desires. We must limit our desires, like the desire to rape and abuse, to have social harmony which is at the same time can be antithetical to our desires. The ego will only do this by being inflicted with punishment, as the life force can't be alienated. For Freud political order follows social order which follows individual order. When no one is looking, we won't obey the taboos. What society must do is internalize that social pressure, making it feel as if there is always a parental figure watching us. This for Freud is the origin of religious experience as a return to the desired primordial state of oneness with the mother, the oceanic feeling, corresponding with a human face we crave. Religion makes it so we can see the father in the universe as well, providing order.

Freud established this earlier in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 1922.  "In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology as well." The superego internalizes social authority through a reconnection of nature as something like us. We anthromorphize nature to make it feel as the eye of others is everywhere. The purpose of this is to keep the pain of guilt with us at all times. We restrain ourselves out a desire to serve a lover which will never leave us and is greater than anyone.

The pain of living in society which limits the ego's satisfaction of the id is transferred towards ourselves. This is why most religions and moral codes are altruistic, which means putting putting others ahead of yourself. Altruism is not really egalitarian; the individual is often the loser. Freud followed Nietzsche in Moses and Monotheism 1939 arguing that the Jews took this to an extreme with a fundamental belief in human wickedness with salvation only for a certain group who practices strict self-denial. Something future Abrahamic Faith's like Christianity and Islam as well as modern Western society adopted in their own unique forms.

The lesson for politics is that individual repression, not oppression, is the basis of social control. By oppression I mean blunt force from an external ruler. If this was the case no one would follow the law except in public when the police were around. Repression is force by yourself. You want to be controlled, not by another person but an abstract ideal lover, be it your parental ideal, God or "the people." The ruling class's power comes from taboos already being internalized into the people who are able to be ruled over.

Oppression is external rule and repression is internal rule. However it seems much more desirable to have a society in which individuals repress themselves than one in which people must be forced to do what is socially agreeable. It is also better to have repressing agents such as religion be separate from the state, to have civil society in addition to political society. Economic progress is also something that relies on self-denial, which is based on an anal character learned early in life during potty training, a time when parents and not government are the most important. Martin Luther from whom the Protestant work ethic eventually comes from thought of the doctrine of "solo fide", faith alone, while on the toilet. And so family values early in life and not government contributes more to developing the capitalist spirit, so government interference in the market should also take a backseat to family in cultivating virtue. That would be the "ideal" society; the late Victorianism, Gilded Age, Fin de Siecle that Freud lived in.

Another take from Civilization and its Discontents is that even though the motives for vice can't be eliminated, they can be repressed into more socially useful forms, called sublimation. This is why I think drugs even if always with us shouldn't be encouraged. But they reflect the basic driving force of life, pleasure, their continued use can be put into more positive things like funding education or supplementing the tax burden. Vice unlike evil can be shaped into better behavior, which is why we are amazed by the skills criminals have and how better life would be if they were put to different use. This jars with the repression aspect; if vice can be good then why should restrictions be tolerated? We must be rational, that's why. Follow the reality principle; that satisfaction of some of our desires must either be delayed due to immediate external circumstances or will be harmful in the future. Just like nature imposes objective demands on us which makes us delay satisfaction, so does society which is Freud's thesis here.

I think what Freud wanted to do was to give social morality a basis in the naturalist/scientific worldview as he felt that religion was losing its grip. While Freud thought the decline of religious belief was a good thing, there is the possibility of throwing out the good and the bad. Guilt, repression, sublimation, and altruism are necessary for society to ultimately limit aggression and channel pleasure to socially useful channels. So Freud, as accused by Richard Webster, was actually trying to justify Judeo-Christian morals and Victorian-liberal social values using thermodynamic and Darwinian theories from his late 19th century education of Herman Helmholtz and Ernst Haeckel. I think he was, and there's nothing wrong about it.

"Freud genuinely believed that, by invoking evolutionary biology in the manner that he did, he was using science to sweep away superstition and introduce a new view of human nature. His real achievement in creating psychoanalysis, however, was to hide superstition beneath the rhetoric of reason, and by doing this succeed in reintroducing a very old view of human nature. By portraying the unconscious or the ‘id’ as a seething mass of unclean impulses, and seeing men and women as driven by dark sexual and sadistic impulses and a secret love of excrement which was associated with a compulsion to hoard money, Freud in effect recreated Swift’s Christian vision of “unregenerate man” as a Yahoo. By casting his intense moral vision in an ostensibly technical form he had, it would seem, succeeded in reinventing for a modern scientific age the traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin." Richard Webster Why Freud Was Wrong 1995

The Ego and the Id

The ego and the id describes the structural model that is now common knowledge; the id, ego, and superego. Prior to this, Freud used the topographical model of unconscious, pre-conscious, and conscious. The notion of the unconscious having explanatory power over conscious life is the essence of psychoanalysis. The essay begins with this, and then proceeds to lay out the limitations of the topographical model. The question is how does the unconscious get into the pre-conscious. There must be a censor of some sort which part of it which censors the unconscious is itself unconscious. But how would this fit into the topographical model, a mechanism which straddles the conscious and unconscious? Here comes the structural model of id, ego, and superego. The ego operates according to the reality principle, restraining the pleasure principle of the id. The ego can therefore be conscious and unconscious so long as it operates to both fulfill the demands of the id and the limits of the external world. Because of the ego, we can sustain long periods of unease so long as there is an opportunity to find pleasure down the road.

Freud's concept of pleasure and pain described in the prior essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a pessimistic one. Happiness is a sort of equilibrium, stability. It is pain that is a motivator to act. "Any given process originates in an unpleasant state of tension, i.e. with avoidance of pain or the production of pleasure". The pursuit of happiness is conservative, about conserving energy. Action doesn't reach toward any final goal, it is motivated by a quantitative disturbance. Pain and pleasure are only relevant according to this disturbance in the investment of energy. This energy "psychophysics" is beyond this book, but it does give insight into how nuanced Freud's argument is. This is the paradox of psychoanalysis, sometimes it appears to fit in with natural science. But then psychoanalysis posits unobservable explanations for naturalistic phenomena. However these unobservable explanations aren't supernatural. The job of the ego is to manage the expenditure of energy (called cathexis: the investing of energy into an object) to meet the competing demands of reality and the pleasure of the id. It may not be observable or measurable like the "physical" world but it is limited by it.

The ego is epiphenomenal. It rides atop the objective world described by physics and the unconscious realm of the id. Freud gives the metaphor of a man riding a horse, whose success entails satisfying the needs of the horse. He gets his power from the horse, his job is to direct the horse for his own needs as a conscious director working according to his foresight of environmental challenges (has a map I guess? I'm going a bit behind Freud's metaphor). But there is another demand on the poor ego, the superego. The superego is more complicated than I thought it was. Apparently it also gets its power from the unconscious despite being abstract. The superego is social morality. Although it seems abstract and universal like religion, it is inherently social. It emerges from the Oedipal desire to kill the father and love the mother. As this is not possible for the child, the child identifies with the father and seeks another woman to love. The female can also identify with the father apparently, but this isn't explained too much in this book. What happens is that the destructive desire of repressing the Oedipal desire becomes an ideal-self for the ego to achieve. The ego cannot fulfill its desire for the mother and hate for the father and must identify with them, and so the achievement of this is spurned by a negative emotion; guilt. This is explained in depth in other writings like Totem and Taboo, but the point is that the superego is an ideal ego which gets its power from repressed unconscious desire which internalizes social restriction.

With this tripartite model, conscious life seems very strained and weak. Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontents that "life as we find it is too hard for us". There are so many competing demands for the conscious self. The instincts, the external world, social obligations, and morality. But this is the cost of being a complex organism. Freud mentions that the long period of dependence on the parents from our Mammalian nature is responsible for this feeling of helplessness. We require so much to go right for us because of the complexity of our energy management and the limits of our budget. So we need to recognize the shortcuts that unconscious forces give us.

At the end of the Interpretation of Dreams Freud consoles us by saying we should not be held responsible for the seemingly immoral desires of the unconscious life.

"I think that the Roman emperor was wrong when he had one of his subjects executed because he had dreamt of murdering the emperor...would it not be right to bear in mind Plato's dictum that the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does? I think it best, therefore, to acquit dreams."

At the end of Ego and Id, he assured us that the id is neither moral or immoral. The superego of conscious is what provides morality. But we should not pretend that civilization can rid us of these undesirable feelings. These instincts in a controlled way make society and morality possible, and sure do take a load off of us. Surely the ego is at least strong enough to allow us to manage the instincts, fulfilling their needs.

Sensuous Animals and the Birth of Misery

Animals confront their own emptiness in the form of nature, external to its will, as a sensuous object. The sensuous object is an immediate object to consciousness, but it's continuation in existence forces the animal to confront its independence of the animals will. Those objects favorable and unfavorable to the animal will, the expression of its being outside the object, share an alien nature which must be overcome. The emptiness of animal life necessitates this domination of nature. The animal negates nature by the act of consuming it, destroying its alien-ness and adapting it to what is favorable to the animal will.

¨In this respect, what one can say to those who make assertions about the truth and reality of sensuous objects is that they should be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, namely, to the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus and that they have yet to learn the mystery of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. This is so because the person who has been initiated into these secrets not merely comes to doubt the being of sensuous things. Rather, he is brought to despair (Verzweiflung) of them; in part he brings about their nothingness, and in part he sees them do it to themselves. Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.¨ Hegel-Phenomenology of Spirit

The act of negation is brought on by the despair of animal life. Animal existence is perpetuated by need, a lack of something. The lack of an object which belongs to consciousness. The being of sense certainty disappears with the separate will of nature. The vicissitudes of change, comprehended by the category of causality in the understanding undergirded by space and time, are what give power to the objects of consciousness. To have power of its own, consciousness must itself identify with sensuous objects. But it cannot be an identical relation.

Need results from the reality of nothingness. Only humans have the fear of death as animal life only fears deprivation of what is.

"The only good things he knows in the universe are food, a female and repose, and the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death, because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions which man gains on leaving the animal condition." Jean Jacques Rousseau

Accordingly only humans or those animals approaching human consciousness have the capacity of self-improvement, which requires foresight. The foresight humans have, which undergirds reason, can be explained in physiological terms. But the impetus to greater intelligence is not a directive of nature. The overwhelming majority of life discovered so far is rather unintelligent or it is of a crude nature serving only survival. To contemplate ones existence is to remove the self from understanding the sensuous objects and their vicissitudes and understand them according to how one understands one self.

"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die." Friedrich Nietzsche-On Truth and Lie

We understand things according to our own empty nature, imaging that nature has teleology. That there is a purpose to the course of natural events.

Yes consciousness is empty. When we consider what can be said of sensuous objects that remains essential to them, it is the intuitions of space and time. But this reality is colorless, tasteless, soundless, odorless, and numb. To give content to consciousness is to engage with the sensuous objects

The truth is that the necessity of thought lies only in thought. It is by consciousness' own rules, its own necessity. Continually striving to identity with nature through unity, consciousness does impart necessity through its own actions but only to itself.

This loneliness that accompanies even the achievement of power over nature is where the need of recognition from another self-consciousness derives. Another consciousness makes the order and unity which thought provides to nature, through its relations, objective. We are not alone. Yet the existence of another consciousness limits the power of consciousness into self-consciousness. Moving beyond sense-certainty is self-certainty

Self-conscious self-certainty is also empty. Its needs derive from a lack of connection to nature rather than a lack of power over nature. To say I is I means almost nothing. It is in relation to something else that consciousness has any meaning.

The highest of our needs becomes embodied in social relations emptied of their sensual content, in the form of abstract ideas which retain the force of an alien will. This is the monotheist's God, which gives ethical demands but is not knowable to the senses. It is defined by its abstract power; omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. The Gods of the pagans were closer to humans, but differed in the scope of their powers.

It is fitting that many of the philosophical arguments for God give the necessity of logical reasoning causal powers, which belong to the physical world. If I can conceive of the greatest possible being, then that entails its actual existence outside of thought. Unlike the emptiness of logical abstraction, God gets its appeal because being conscious itself it in some way is not limited by nature the way we are. Being all powerful, God is in the monotheist tradition usually the creator of the entire universe while being so powerful as to exist apart from it. The argument goes that if God made the universe then it follows whatever laws it wants. They need no justification, and the principle of sufficient reason is suspended. Sui Causa, self causation. Self explained. God is the thing in itself of sorts. God has power over nature, consciousness that isn't empty.

We thus see that man did not develop in isolation. Belief in God is a sign of the evolution of self-conscience. 

Empty Space, and Me

"Life itself is only a vision. A dream. Nothing is real except empty space, and you. And you are but a thought."

"It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it."

The Market and Care

The idea behind commerce is that I do something for you not because I care about you, but because I can get something else from you. There is something impersonal and inauthentic about it. It takes many people to make a single pencil, but they don't even know each other or care about each other.

Adam Smith the father of free market economics summed up the operation of the market likewise: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"

What kind of society can be held together without benevolence? Without love? We can get our meals, but will subsist in a world foreign to our own humanity. Our world separated from ourselves. Others having only instrumental value in our lives.

They are strangers, but they are involved in our lives in an intimate way. We depend on these people for our material subsistence. And yet we don't care about them. We do need them. We are more dependent than ever on others thanks to the market. The market is an intensely social relationship. But an impersonal, cold relationship. Imagine a family running like that.

Market exchange values individuals only extrinsically, not intrinsically. As means to an end and not an end in themselves. When we do something because it makes us happy, the value of the activity or thing is intrinsically rewarding. It ceases to be a thing foreign, in opposition to ourselves. When we do something in order to get something else, we see no inherent value in the activity or thing and are willing to dispose of or cease using when it doesn't procure what else we want.

Why not care for those whom we depend for our daily bread? As opposed to the absurdity of the atomic isolated individual dependent on the labor of others.

Nobody prefers the impersonal with people they care about. Nobody wants to be inauthentic with things they care about. Why not apply this thinking to society?

This is why I say a market economy yes, but a market society no!

Theaetetus by Plato

"If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else"

Yogi Berra

Plato's dialogue Theaetetus takes on what we call today epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Socrates, Theaetetus, and Theodorus attempt to answer the question "what is knowledge?."

Put forward first is the doctrine that perception is knowledge. This is what the sophist Protagoras taught, that "man is the measure of all things." What is true for me is true for me, and what is true for you is true for you. If you feel cold and I feel hot, we are both right because we feel so. I may have a fever and you do not. In our own situations, we are both correct about the states we are individually in. 

This is rejected as a basis of knowledge because it is contradictory that we are both right. It is true that what everyone says is true? Then how can anything be wrong? If nothing is wrong, then that doesn't give us a meaningful definition of what knowledge is. People have contradictory opinions which cannot be reconciled. God exists and doesn't exist? You may believe God doesn't exist and I do. But we both cannot both right. We are in this case talking about the same thing which cannot both be and not be. 

171a " In saying that everyone believes what is the case, he is conceding the truth of beliefs which oppose his own; in other words, he is conceding the truth of the opinion that he is wrong"

The dialogue also takes on the Heraclitean philosophy that everything is in flux, and things can both be and not be. Everything is becoming, not being or not being. Everything becomes its opposite and is defined by its opposite. Hot things become cold and living things die. This we perceive all around us. What is true at one time is not true another moment. Today this doctrine is called moral relativism. Just look at how slavery used to be acceptable 150 years ago, and is still practiced in certain parts of the world. There is a right and wrong, but this is always changing. It is different for every culture and time period. The Heraclitean philosophy accounted for opposites like truth and falsehood, but argued that opposites were co-dependent and therefore constantly changing. 

The problem with this doctrine is that if everything is changing, it is not perceived. For how can we perceive what not is? The "negation" of something is relative and requires some basis of what either is or was. It isn't perception if not of something. 

182e "So if everything is changing in all respects, we shouldn't talk of seeing something rather than not seeing it, and any other perception is no more perception than not perception

But perception is not knowledge either as said before. Rather it is reason which distinguishes what something from what it isn't. It is true that things change, but also that we have an idea of what something is even if it has changed. If not, how could we come to know change? Also, memory stores knowledge of a past perception of something which as the Heracliteans would say is no more. Yet we still have a notion of this thing which no longer is what it was. 

186d "Therefore knowledge is not located in immediate experience, but in reasoning about it, since the latter ,apparently, but not the former, makes it possible to grasp being and truth."

Now the conversation turns to a new definition of knowledge: true belief. What we hold in the mind about being reflects what the thing we think about actually is. Belief is an internal affirmation about something which exists. A statement about ourselves, related to something existing. A true belief corresponds to its object. This definition of knowledge admits truth and falsehood which corresponds to something independently existing.

The issue here is how to distinguish between true and false belief. It isn't as if the person who has a false belief knows they are wrong. Otherwise it wouldn't be false to that person. It is either that said person knows what is true and false and confuses them, or they know neither. But how could someone confuse what is true and false, without already knowing what is true and false? How could they personally believe in what they know to be wrong? I'm speaking consciously here. This obviously is absurd.

199d "although knowledge is present, it is possible for the mind to know nothing and be ignorant of everything"

The final attempt to provide a definition of knowledge is justified true belief or true belief with an account. What is true surely has defining features to it. A whole is not more than its parts. So if we can determine the "markers" of something, we have knowledge of it. Yet, 203b "how can one say what the elements are?" If something is what it is, as a single thing, then how can any one thing be an indicator of it, unless it is the thing we're looking for? Can one know the elements without already knowing what they belong to? And if they belong exclusively to that, then do we already know what we're looking for? 204a "Because where there are parts, the whole is identical to the parts." 

The answer to this dilemma is that one can only know to be true and false what one already knows to be true and false. There needs to prior knowledge in the mind, which has as its source something actually existing. For the idea to be true about the external world must have some objective basis in this real world. 

209d "we still need correct belief about the uniqueness of things whose uniqueness we already have correct belief about!"

209e "we require something we already have, in order to get know what we believe."

This is why according to Plato we need a innate ideas. That always have their basis in reality. In that they derive from a prior experience with the object, or are built into our minds from birth. Or that our minds have access to a non-sensual world of forms which allows us to recognize their transient forms in the ever-changing universe described by Heraclitus. 

Saint-Simonian Conservatism

Suppose I'm a Saint-Simonian. I've always liked to see the state divided into sovereign and administrative sides. I see the great challenge of politics as bringing together enough competing important interests to support a state or prevent independent centers of power. Like church or aristocracy. It is best to incorporate them into the state. In that way I'm a pluralist. Society is not composed of abstract individuals, but social groups. I don't see things in terms of class only, but more in terms of equal dignity to the class without property and largest in number. The harmony of class interests is what I'm into. Politics as I see it evolves more and more into a struggle for identity. Of the recognition of unique interests in the state. A successful state should reflect the people. Not atomically, but in moral terms. Though I am a fan of strong leadership and a strong state above these interests. United by common morality, and able to subdue independent power sources, mass discontent, insurgency, and foreign invasion.

Once we figure that out, we can put society on an incline as Louis Blanc said. That is the "easier" side of politics in terms of figuring out what we want. It is course difficult to make it work. I do think that at points of history there comes a settled consensus of what a civilization should be.

Above all, I believe in the market economy but not the market society. Moral and social concerns should trump economic concerns. I don't pretend like socialists do that capitalism is fundamentally flawed or doomed. It works well for what it does. But like Irving Kristol I don't give it the third cheer because it can override social and moral concerns. And the other cheer for personal freedom I'm not always sure is warranted. Freedom is not a universal right.

I suppose I'm a modernist conservative.
Reject historical materialism: Morality matters.
Reject radical individualism and egalitarianism: Which go hand in hand.
Embrace the strong state.
A limited pluralism
Market capitalism, division of labor, specialization good
Civil religion