Civilization and its Discontents[fn.43]
	See enlarged image		"So far, we can quite well imagine a cultural community consisting of double individuals... who, libidinally satisfied in themselves, are connected with one another through the bonds of common work and common interests. If this were so, civilization would not have to withdraw any energy from sexuality. But this desirable state of things does not, and never did, exist. Reality shows that civilization is not content with the ties we have so far allowed it. It aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every means to that end. It favors 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 to strengthen the communal bond.... (pp.108-9; emphasis added)
			"If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization -- possibly the whole of mankind -- have become 'neurotic'? (p.144)
			"The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance to their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers'... eternal Eros, will make an effort to reassert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?" (p.145)

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Commentary: The foregoing eloquently evokes a vision of a form of human community in which it would be good to live; and it also explains why we are not blessed to live in such community. The voraciousness with which current forms of social group formation ("God", "country", "the company", etc.) appropriate each individual member's life and energy is limitless (See example: Quote #236). The mechanism of this expropriation, the way the group gets its members willingly to devote themselves to ends which are at best indifferent to the individual's own self-actualizing and fulfilling interests, is by: (1) deflecting each individual's motivational structure ("Eros") from its straightforward ends to an alien agenda, and, further, (2) deceiving the individual into perceiving as opportunities, not extortionary obstacles, these prescribed tracks along which his or her efforts must go out in hopes that rewards may return. If I work hard I can succeed (see. e.g., Alain Resnais' 1980 film, "Mon Oncle d'Amerique"...); Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori....

The result of this pervasive subversion of the psyche from earliest infancy to old age, is a universal sickness of it ("neurosis"), in which aggression is pursued (whether in the guise of "selfishness" or "selflessness"...), and casualties ensue: losers and losses (which latter accrue to everyone, albeit, in general, more perceivedly painfully to the losers than to the winners). Since the prizes are substitutes for what persons really want even though they are "socialized" to believe they want the substitutes, even for the winners there is not straightforward contentment.

The question for the future of humanity, consequently, is: Can the group be tamed (civilized) to limit its claims to what will freely accrue to it as the logical byproduct of nurturing straightforwardly constructive endeavors of "double individuals... libidinally satisfied in themselves... [and] connected with one another through the bonds of common work and common interests"? (See Melanie Klein quote at top of This I Believe page, summarizing some of my constructive social hopes.) Can civilization rise above what it cannot avoid being: a structure composed of and sustained by persons, to what it might become: a project which knows itself to be this, in which the persons affected by it (who are in each case us) endeavor together to make it be emphatically and unalloyedly for them (ourselves)?

Afternote: Professor Alfonso Lingis, in his book Excesses: Eros and Culture (SUNY, 1983), describes a high culture that did not repressively rechannel (aka "sublimate") sexual energy. It was in central India in the tenth and eleventh centuries: Khajuraho (op. cit., Chap.3). If Lingis is correct, then we have empirical evidence that Freud's contention that "this desirable state of things... never did exist", is unnecessarily pessimistic. If some persons actually had this desirable form of life, then neither "human nature" nor the nature of society can be glibly adduced to summarily dismiss as "unrealistic", our desire to have it too. --Some of our closest relatives in the animal world, the bonobos, in fact do live such a peaceful and "instinctually satisfied" form of life: Click here to learn more about bonobo social life.

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After 11 September 2001: If it wasn't clear before the terrorist destruction of the New York City World Trade Center towers by suicide bombers repurposing commercial airplanes as kamikaze incendiary bombs, it is now all too obvious that civilization's discontents[fn.43a] can direct their frustration "outward" as well as inward. Freud's patients expressed their discontent in neurotic symptoms that hurt mainly themselves. But the suicide bombers of "911" showed how effectively persons can direct their discontent outward at the "society/world" they feel has disappointed and/or harmed them. The New York Times described the sociogenesis of many such persons: "Nowhere Man: Islam alone didn't produce Mohamed Atta". The repressed can return into reality as well as into fantasy -- it can return in the form of fantasies that get acted out with massive effects in reality. Has "instinctual life" in our time become too explosive for society to continue to "run on" repressive rechanneling of its energy (aka "sublimation")?

Running on empty: Is it already too late to try to see if a society based on straightforward gratification of persons' needs (Freud's "double individuals, libidinally satisfied in themselves, and connected with one another through the bonds of common work and common interests", above) could be more constructive, and no longer produce the agents of its self-destruction?

Leisure is the basis of culture. Learn  about the peaceful, "instinctually satisfied" social life of our close relatives, the bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees).   Revisit The Tower of Babel. Learn  Jan Szczepanski's ideas concerning Individuality and Society. Read  Edmund Husserl's lecture: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (1935).   Think  about the role of philosophy in daily life: The vulnerability of the human spirit.
Read  Garrett Hardin's classic essay: The Tragedy of the Commons.   "911" : See terrorist destruction of NYC World Trade Center towers (11Sep01). Read  Washington Post Editorial Opinion essay, 12Sep01: "When Innocents Are the Enemy".   Read my essay: Against ambivalence. Discover a big secret about secrets. Hear the peremptory [Freudian: repressive] discourse of petty power. Go/Return to reflections on myth.

Return  to thoughts on childrearing (The civilizing process).
Our Century: "The century of barbed wire". Think  about The Decline of The West: Is the adventure of Univeralizing emancipatory Culture over? (L'Avventura) What I believe ("The net").  [View intro!]   See  five kinds of schooled fools (from Sebastian Brandt's Ship of Fools, 1494).

 
Go/Return to Brad McCormick's doctoral dissertation.
Return to dissertation bibliography.

What's new on this website? Go to website Table of Contents. Return to Brad McCormick's home page. Return to site map.

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http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/civil.html Copyright © 1998-2003 Brad McCormick, Ed.D. bradmcc@cloud9.net 13 March 2006CE (2006-03-13 ISO 8601) v04.02

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Each person needs to be a peer member of a world, a family and a community: cosmos, oikos and polis.