FREUD REDEEMS HIMSELF

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was fuming at Freud's The Future of an Illusion because he seemed to me to be tone deaf to religion. I have now finished reading the short book [I don't read very fast], and in the final pages, he redeems himself. Freud shows himself to be, perhaps, the last unreconstructed Enlightenment rationalist, deeply committed to the conviction that only scientific reason can serve us well in our parlous journey through life. Freud famously said, "Where Id was, let Ego be." The true force of this maxim is somewhat lost in the translation from the German, because in English, the convention has been adopted of using the Latin terms for "it" [Id] and "I" [Ego], whereas in German they are rendered precisely as Es and Ich. "Where It was, let I be," is the proper translation, and it captures perfectly Freud's belief that it is the conscious rational self that is the true I, for all that, as was the first to show us scientifically, that self arises out of, and is forever built on, the instinctual drives and energies that he refers to as It.

Freud hated America, a fact the irony of which has been often noted, inasmuch as psychoanalysis had its most enthusiastic reception in the United States. The Future of an Illusion was published in 1927, during the reign of Prohibition in America. Here is Freud's biting comment on what was happening on this side of the Atlantic:

"That the effect of religious consolations may be likened to that of a narcotic is well illustrated by what is happening in America. There they are now trying -- obviously under the influence of petticoat government -- to deprive people of all stimulants, intoxicants, and other pleasure-producing substances, and instead, by way of compensation, are surfeiting them with piety."

This passage has an eerily contemporary ring. What Freud failed to recognize was the iron grip that religious illusion has on all strata of society, not merely on those whom Freud persisted in calling the lower orders. Despite the flourishing of so-called higher education in this country, Americans of all strata remain irrationally and inseparably wedded to religious beliefs of the most anti-scientific character. Where, save in the United States and in Iran, can one find candidates for public office enthusiastically denying the simple evidence of scientific truth?

THE DEATH OF SECULARISM

My post earlier today on end times theology and the doctrine of the trinity was meant as a playful jeu d'esprit. [I know, I know. In a world inundated with twittering and Facebook hookups, theology hardly qualifies as playful, but keep in mind that I am a seventy-five year old philosopher. We have a pretty low standard of humor in that profession.] As the day wears
on, however, I find myself more and more oppressed by my awareness of the resurgence of superstition around the world.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Ever since the eighteenth century, a broad spectrum of thinkers have attacked the accumulated superstition of past ages, arguing instead for the supremacy of reason, of science, of simple common sense. Marx celebrated capitalism as the most revolutionary force the world had ever seen, confidently predicting that its expansion would dissolve national, racial, ethnic, and religious parochialisms. This same fundamentally optimistic point of view was shared by so varied an assortment of thinkers as Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Sigmund Freud.

As I grew up, the rationalist vision of a secular world became so deeply embedded in my mind that I could no more imagine its demise than I could imagine a world in which the laws of physics ceased to operate. And for a long while, it seemed that Marx and company were right. Certainly in the rest of the capitalist world, church attendance declined, science was in the ascendant, and superstition was confined to fairy tales and benighted backwaters.

But here we are in a world gone mad with anti-rationalism. I am not speaking of armed conflict, or even of unspeakable holocausts -- both of which have been as much abetted as opposed by the forces of reason. It is the pervasive corrosion of simple rationality that I find especially depressing. I have in mind the prevalance of the denial of the manifest truths of evolutionary biology, the embrace of religiosity in every corner of the public world, the self-denial of the evidence of the senses. Militant Christianity, militant Islam, militant Judaism, militant Hinduism -- there is no end to the varieties of unreason that have taken hold of large portions of the world's population.

When I was young, I thought that I could rely upon the forces of modernization to sap the strength from every form of parochial irrationality. But in my dotage [as I am coming to think of it], I am forced to acknowledge that perhaps the triumph of reason was merely a passing phase in the historical unfolding of unreason. How the shade of Hegel must be weeping.