Discussion

Jacob Reynolds:

"Sigmund Freud, in his seminal work posed between the two World Wars, suggested that the process of civilisation produced an inevitable ‘discontent’ in individuals. In order to fit into society, we have to repress certain basic impulses. Rather than simply taking what we want and what we can from the dinner table, we had to learn manners. Rather than simply satisfying the sexual urge, we had to learn courtship. And so on. His model implies an idea of man almost bursting at the seams, constantly living with desires lurking in the background of our unconscious, ready to explode.

Published in 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents has seemed, in retrospect, prophetic. Isn’t it true that, only a few years later, Europe descended into barbarism with all the repressed urges of civilisation bursting out in monstrous fashion? Freud’s model has provided something of an unofficial template for elites in Western society – they see their role very much in terms of managing and constraining the dangerous impulses of ordinary people. For the post-War elites, ‘never again’ meant never trust the masses.

The point is not that the fear the elites had of the masses’ irrational outbursts was a justified one, but that a terrified elite couldn’t even dream of a coherent, ‘rational’ threat to their civilisation. The virtues of their civilising processes were such an unquestioned, bedrock assumption of society at large that even the most profound threats to their way of life could not challenge them. Only those literally out of their minds would reject civilisation – no-one would knowingly reject it.

Freud’s view of the boiling inner workings of man might have inspired a trend of political thought which has poured doubt on rationality, agency and even democracy, but his work did hit on a fundamental truth about the human condition: civilisation is a human accomplishment, one that cannot be guaranteed. Discontent, in Freud, was akin to the philosophical and psychological anxiety described by existentialist writers: it represented not a state of evil in man, but a vague feeling of being ill-at-ease with the necessary but still constraining social order.

The society of Freud’s time could barely entertain the idea that an individual might openly take a stand against civilisation. Instead, the threat to civilisation lay in the chance outburst of irrational impulses. The masses might be regrettably prone to such impulses, but they represented an irrational, not rational, challenge to civilisation.

The only germ of an alternative challenge to the civilisational idea was the romantic impulse stretching back at least to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Society’s artifice hampered the ‘true’ or ‘natural’ inclinations of mankind. But even the Rousseauian critique - which was, in any case, understandable given the grotesque pretensions that sustained the high society against which he rebelled - was still comprehensible within the confines of Western civilisation. Rousseau, and the romantic tradition more broadly, sought to liberate man - to unleash his creative impulses - on the assumption that only then could a true civilisation equal to the splendour of the Greeks emerge.

But it was Freud’s model which structured the thinking of much of the post-War elites. His utility lay in both articulating the theory of the unconscious - which allowed psychiatrists to become the doctors of the soul - and in generalising this medical approach to society - which allowed the technocratic class to claim the same authority for society at large.

Still, however questionable this influence was, it implied that man only erred from the good out of irrationality. It was only the irrational outburst that overcame man’s tendency towards the good. Even when it came to explaining the Nazis, the monstrous ‘rationality’ of the death machine, the Freudian model rejected the idea that evil was at play and instead insisted the problem was the ‘authoritarian personality’. In other words, Nazis were simply irrational victims of their upbringing. The idea that there was something truly barbaric in Nazism was given a wide berth."

(https://frankfuredi.substack.com/p/civilisation-and-its-malcontents)

Civilization and Its Discontents

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