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.

SCIENTOLOGY, DIANETICS, AND ALL THAT

I am planning s series of serious posts on the contemporary relevance of Anarchism, but while that is gestating, I thought I would amuse myself [and you, perhaps] with a stroll down memory lane.

When I was in high school, in the late 40's [yes, Virginia, the 1940's, just after WW II, or, as Archie Bunker would say, The Big One], I was a rabid science fiction fan. I loved all the big authors -- A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard. Their stories appeared in a number of pocket pulpy magazines, roughly the size of the Reader's Digest, the two most popular of which were Galaxy and Astounding Science Fiction. I subscribed to Astounding Scdience Fiction, which was actually the venue of my very first publication -- a letter written as a sixteen year old Harvard Freshman scoffing at the notion of "non-Aristotelian logic," or Non-A, which was then very popular among science fiction afficionados. [I was also a member of The Baker Street Irregulars, a fan club of Sherlock Holmes devotees, also with its own magazine, but that is another story.]

One month, my copy of Astounding arrived, with a big non-fiction article by L. Ron Hubbard called "Dianetics." I started to read it, and immediately decided that it was a brilliant send-up of Freudian psychoanalysis and the theories of artificial intelligence then gaining currency as a consequence of the work of Alan Turing, Norbert Weiner, and others. [Since I spent two and a half years in analysis as a teenager and had hopes of becoming a mathematician, I had a certain investment in both schools of thought.]

Hubbard's article set forth a theory that struck me as sheer inspired nonsense. Here it is in a nutshell: The mind is a computer with an enormous untapped capacity for logical deduction and mathematical ca;culation. Almost all of this capacity is blocked by scars or traumas from early life, to which Hubbard gave the wonderfully scientific name "engrams." By working one's way backward through one's mental history, one could locate each of these engrams and bring them to consciousness, thus Clearing them from the mind and releasing the blocked potential. With the help of someone who would sit and listen to one's backward tracings -- an Auditor -- one could eventually become a Clear, at which point one would have seemingly superhuman powers of ratiocination. One would then be fully rational and thus happy.

Hubbard called this pastiche of pseudoscience Dianetics, a name that brilliantly captured both the hypermodern panache of the new field of artificial intelligence and the then very great medical authority of psychoanalysis.

I laughed my way through the article, and turned to the serious business of reading that month's fiction.

Little did I know! The next month, my copy of Astounding arrived, with the second half of Hubbard's screed, and I realized with a sinking sensation that he was serious.

In the next few years, Dianetics caught on like crazy, with California naturally as its most fertile territory. Dianetic Auditors hung out their shingles and started to collect big bucks for what they promised would be a shorter and far better path to happiness than ordinary psychoanalysis. Stories surfaced of patients who had managed to bring to consciousness, and thus to Clear, traumas from the second year of life, the first year of life, even the birth process itself. Not to be outdone, other Dianetics patients claimed to remember life in the womb. One even claimed to recall the mad swim upstream of schools of sperm on their way to the egg. Hubbard was getting very rich.

Then disaster struck. The Feds got wind of what was going on, and started charging Dianetic Auditors with practicing medicine without a license. Hubbard's elaborate scam seemed threatened with an early death.

It was at this point that Hubbard showed himself to be an authentic genius and a true American original. Having retreated to a ship more than twelve miles off the California coast [and hence beyond the reach of the authorities], he now announced that Dianetics had morphed into The Church of Scientology. As a religion, it was protected by the First Amendement, and its teachings, which were, after all, no crazier than those of Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, or The Church of Latter Day Saints, could legally be preached and promulgated by anyone presenting himself or herself as an initiate of the faith.

Now, as an atheist, I am in principle an equal opportunity unbeliever when it comes to religions, but I must confess that in the matter of faith, I actually think that though all faiths are equal, some, like the pigs in Animal Farm, are more equal than others. Scientology is about as patently crackpot as any cure for baldness or penile insufficiency to be found in the back pages of scrimy magazines.

But don't let Tom Cruise know that I said so.