All posts tagged Ethics

Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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1. The Future of An Illusion (1927)

Freud posits a parallel between the development of a child and the development of civilisation. In individuals you get a progression through helpless infant, wilful adolescent and mature adult. By an analogous evolution society can be said to develop through stages, from savage tribes with beliefs in all kinds of spirits; to semi-civilised societies who believe in one God; then onto modern society, rational, scientific and atheist.

1. Civilisation is based on, indeed, is to some extent defined as, the amount of instinctual repression it can achieve. Some people (i.e. communists) may wish for a redistribution of wealth so that everyone will work joyfully and creatively together. Unlikely. People don’t like work; people prefer indulging their instincts in pleasurable pursuits. Civilisation means coercing people into wealth-creating work and making them repress their instinctual desires.

2. Society organises instinctual repression. The upper classes repress their instincts in order to provide a ‘moral’ role-model for the workers. The workers are ambivalent towards this model of rational self-repression, partly resenting it because they are clearly not getting as much wealth and power as the upper classes; but allying with their rulers if the latter identify threats from outsiders, for example, the ‘barbarians’ for ancient Greece or Rome, or ‘outsider’ groups such as Jews in 20th century societies (or refugees and immigrants in contemporary Britain). But all sectors of society can be united by certain artistic ideals (in the sense that art is a sublimation of our instinctual wishes). A shared art can help unite people in their ideal.

(N.B. Freud wrote this during the heroic age of Bolshevik propaganda – 1927 – and anticipated many of the aesthetic theories of the Nazis, namely to unite the Volk in worship of high ideals while focusing anti-social energy onto outsider groups like the Jews.)

3. Primitive man is paralysed with fear in face of the horrors of existence, the arbitrariness of disease, famine, catastrophe, death and so on. He peoples the world with spirits who he tries to relate to in the same way he relates to those around him i.e. family, chief, slaves etc. As mankind develops, so does this primitive pantheism, so that the many spirits and their functions become concentrated into a king of the gods and, eventually, into one figure, one God, ruler of a totally controlled Providence, in charge of divine justice, deciding who has been good and will be rewarded etc. Naturally, whoever thought up this monotheism consider themselves to be The One People, the Chosen People (i.e. the Jews).

4. Freud reminds the reader of the theory he outlined in Totem and Taboo 15 years earlier. There he took a hint from Darwin about the possibility that early man lived in hordes, a band of brothers borne by a harem of mothers owned and inseminated by one semi-divine Father. In Freud’s fantasy of ‘primitive’ society the brothers rose up in rebellion, overthrew the ruling Father, killed him and ate him in a communal meal deliberately designed to implicate everyone in the guilt. This ‘historical’ fact is what lies behind the practice found among so many cultures – the worship of a totem animal which is superstitiously revered all year round, except for the one holy day when it is executed and ritually eaten. (In fact, no history or anthropology has come anywhere near confirming Freud’s fantasy of this primal parricide, which is generally discredited.)

Freud then highlights the continuity between his explanation of religion as a protection for the helpless savage from the cruel forces which surround him, and modern-day religious belief.

5. Freud lists the reasons our parents and priests give for believing religion:

it is handed down from time immemorial
there are many proofs
in any case, you’re forbidden to discuss it

In fact 2) is demolished because religious belief is so riddled with contradictions and falsehoods, for example, the contradictions in the Bible, the explosion of the Genesis myths by archaeology and geology and so on. Some Christians say, ‘I believe precisely because it is absurd’ but if that is the case, why not believe any old absurdity and fantasy? The fact is that religious people may differ in details of theology or ritual but overlap considerably in their basic, primeval wishes – to be consoled, protected, assured of life after death.

Spiritualists try and persuade us of the immortality of the soul but how pitiful is the transparent egotism of such a wish, the wish to live forever, to deny the upsetting reality of death and extinction.

6. Religion is an illusion: an illusion is a belief incorporating a large amount of wish-fulfillment. We all want a Big Daddy to hide from us the desolation and heartbreak of reality, to pick us up and dust us off and make things better. Religious beliefs cannot be proved or refuted, and this is clearly what gets Freud’s goat about religious people – they are so dishonest. They have no intellectual discipline but use whatever tools lie to hand – logic till that runs out, absurdity till that won’t serve, the strength of tradition till that is proved to be largely false, and then the testimony of personal experience which can’t be proved or disproved – they will do anything to cling onto their pitifully childish wishes: Yes, I will live forever; Yes, Daddy loves me, totally, completely; Yes, all the injustices I suffer now are recorded and will be set right in the Afterlife.

Even a bunch of ‘savages’ ought to be embarrassed by the childishness of all this, let alone so-called ‘civilised’ men.

7. ‘Ah but’ (says The Voice of The Believer, which Freud invents to play Devil’s advocate), ‘it is:

dangerous to undermine religion since this will lead to anarchy
cruel to deprive people of the illusions that sustain them

Now these are good points which Freud doesn’t really rebut. He concedes that that religion has achieved much, historically, by making civilization possible (i.e. focussing people’s anarchic wishes and fears onto one controllable God) but moves on swiftly to point out how, after thousands of years of its hegemony, just look around at the misery, injustice and inhumanity which still plague us. Far from ensuring moral behaviour, religion has in fact made many scandalous concessions to the weakness of human nature, for example, the rigmarole of confession and penance and masses for dead relatives, and so on.

But fortunately, in Freud’s view, the spirit of Science is now abroad: we live in dangerous times and pretty soon the repressed masses are going to realise that the sanctions against rebellion underpinned by religion have evaporated. So if we want to keep order in society, we have to do something about the fact that religion is collapsing and have to establish a firmer foundation for law and morality than this dying system – solid, secular ethics.

8. By basing the undoubtedly wise injunction ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ exclusively on God’s authority, along with a host of other restrictions and laws, we risk the collapse of these injunctions so vital to civilisation when religion itself collapses, as it inevitably will, before the onslaught of science.

Better to be honest. Religion is ‘true’ (just like dreams and neurotic symptoms) insofar as it tells us a psychologically true story in symbolic terms (for example, the central event of the sacrifice and cannibalism of the Father as depicted in Totem and Taboo is psychologically true depiction of the Oedipus Complex which Freud claims every male human experiences). But now, says Freud, it’s time to cast symbols aside and face the facts, to move into the scientific – or adult – phase of civilization.

9. The Voice of the Believer says this is dangerous talk because it is naive to think that Reason can replace Religion as the glue binding Society together. Look at the French Revolution which tried just this and catastrophically failed.

Once again, Freud doesn’t quite refute this good point. Instead he says the reason to be sceptical about any triumph of Reason is because so many people’s adult intellects are weakened, and this is because:

their instinctual sex life is so repressed that they become obsessed and/or ill
as children they are force-fed so much illogical nonsense under threat of hellfire

No, says Freud, we must take the risk, we must draw up a plan for modern education which omits religion. It may take a while for the reform to take affect (he cites the slow progress of Prohibition in the USA, 1920 to 1933) but it will be worth it to build the just, unrepressed, scientific society of the future.

Instead of wasting our energy on vain hopes of an afterlife, let’s build a New Jerusalem on earth ‘by concentrating all our liberated energies into life on earth.’ Freud expresses the ‘hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God’.

10. The Voice of Religion says:

you are trying to replace a tried and tested illusion with an untried one, and
religion unites all levels of society from labourer to intellectual. What else can do this?

Once again Freud answers his own question unconvincingly by resorting to the relatively small example of the help he has been able to give individual patients in coming to terms with their illnesses. Freud hopes that psychoanalysis can extend that help to society at large.

This is, to put it mildly, quite a big hope…

Thoughts

Given Freud’s lifelong animus against religion, it’s surprising that, when he finally got round to writing a complete book on the subject, it turned out to be such a surprisingly bad and unsystematic text. It trots through various arguments for atheism, buttressed by bits of psychoanalytic theory, but is surprisingly ramshackle and unconvincing.

For me, the Voice of the Believer which he creates in order to dramatise the text, is much more persuasive, especially when you consider that, as Freud was writing, some European nations stood poised to experiment with just the sort of non-religious, ‘scientific’ ideologies to bind society together which Freud appears to recommend: Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany.

Obviously, Freud wasn’t a Nazi or a Bolshevik, but both those ideologies claimed to have ‘scientific’ solutions to society’s problems, circa 1927, which just goes to show what a slippery term ‘science’ is, just as liable to ideological manipulation and distortion as the ‘religion’ he so simple-mindedly attacks.

And then, looking back with the benefit of hindsight from 2023, it’s clear that, despite with all the gee whizz technology we in the West have invented, if you look at the world as a whole, religious fundamentalism (Muslim and Hindu, in particular) and irrational nationalisms (Russia, Turkey, Brazil), are on the rise almost everywhere.

It is Freud’s hopes for a rational, secular and scientific future which seem naive and superficial.

2. Oskar Pfister’s The Illusion of A Future: A Friendly Disagreement with Professor Sigmund Freud (1928)

Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion in 1927 partly with his friend and devout Christian, Oskar Pfister, in mind. The following year Pfister wrote a pamphlet refuting Freud’s points, The Illusion of a Future, which Freud welcomed (dissent was OK as long as fundamental allegiance to The Movement remained unquestioned).

Pfister summarises Freud’s critique of religion in The Future of an Illusion, thus:

Religion is a universal obsessional neurosis based on the Oedipus Complex.
Religion comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality.
Religion is hostile to free thought.
Religion has failed as a guardian of civilisation.

Pfister’s rebuttals

1. Undoubtedly religious belief can include a neurotic component. Undoubtedly early religious systems were based on ‘primitive’ mental states. Undoubtedly religious belief in its earliest phase was bound up with the repression of instinctual drives accompanied by neurotic components. But that doesn’t disprove the validity of belief itself.

Freud oversimplifies to say the same Oedipal complex lies at the bottom of all religious belief. Can such a simple explanation really explain the religion of the totemists, the social-ethical monotheism of the Israelites, the Aten-belief of the Egyptians, the piety of the conquistadors, and so on?

In contrast to the many repressive elements of primitive religious belief, Pfister sets the uniquely unrepressed and liberating belief of reformed Christianity, and above all, the ethical achievement of Jesus’s commandment of Love.

Jesus overcame the collective neurosis of his people according to good psychoanalytic practice in that he introduced love – morally complete love – into the centre of life.

For Pfister, Jesus was the first psychoanalyst. Therefore Freud, insofar as he is following in Jesus’s footsteps, is a good Christian!

Whoever has fought with such immense achievements for the truth and argues for the salvation of love, as you have [Pfister’s book is directly addressed to Freud], is a true servant of God according to Protestant standards.

For Pfister Protestantism is the reverse of Freud’s neurotic, repressed illusion: it is the blossoming of man into his full biological destiny of love.

It is misleading of Freud to write his natural history of the development of religion in such a way as to tar Christian belief with the brush of primitive animism etc. The entire point of Christianity is that Jesus represents a triumph over the irrational compulsions of the Old Law, the superstitious repressions of the Old Testament, and its replacement with a new dispensation of brotherly love and love of God.

2. Undoubtedly there is a large element of wish-fulfilment in much religious experience. Pfister points out that Freud is indebted to the pioneering ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 to 1872) and his psychologising of religion; it was Feuerbach who first demonstrated that much theology is disguised anthropology and religion a dream.

But, for a start, many atheists are governed just as much by wish-fulfilment as believers; and their compulsion to disbelief, their atheism, is no more than their Oedipal wish to do away with the Father. Wishes are common to all mankind, as psychoanalysis shows. Pfister agrees with Freud that the moral progress of mankind consists of the overcoming of egotistical wishes: where he differs is in insisting that Jesus enjoins the highest form of overcoming egotism.

The gentleness and humility, the self-denial and rejection of the hoarding of wealth, the surrender of one’s life for the highest moral values, in short the whole way of living that he who was crucified at Golgotha demanded of the apostles, is diametrically opposed to the appetites of human nature.

Consider the Lord’s prayer. It embodies the overcoming of everything egotistical. Freud, by implication, is attacking a Judaic, a Mosaic religion, based on the jealous God of the Old Testament and operating through fear. Not Pfister’s God of liberation through love.

Pfister goes onto the attack to say that there is in fact a huge element of wish-fulfilment in science. The history of science is an unceasing struggle against anthropomorphisms. This was being highlighted at the time these books were being written by quantum physics and the splitting of the atom. Now we know that reality is textured and fissured in complicated, sometimes incomprehensible ways: to continue to see colours as colours not frequencies, to see this table as solid and not a buzzing mass of particles, these could be said to be wishes for the world to remain stable and meaningful despite the strict testimony of science.

Science and philosophy have to take into account the experiential, the phenomenological. In order to function in the world we make leaps beyond what science can now prove: this is not wish-fulfilment, it is being human.

Nor is Religion inflexible. After some resistance (and hasn’t psychoanalysis shown that resistance is a common human quality?) religion has adapted to Copernicus and Evolution. And so it will assimilate Freud’s insights as easily.

3. Is religion hostile to thought? No, says Pfister. On the contrary, his brand of Protestantism encourages freedom of thought whenever possible.

We calm frightened persons who are experiencing a crisis of belief with the assurance that God loves the sincere doubter and that a belief made more secure through thought is more valuable than one which has simply been taken over and taught.

Contrary to Freud’s claim that religion has stifled thought, consider the great thinkers who were Christians. Descartes, Newton, Faraday, Pasteur, Leibnitz, Pascal, Lincoln, Gladstone, Bismarck, Kant, Hegel, Goethe et al were all Christians; did belief stop them from thinking new and original thoughts? No. Look at Einstein who, through brilliant scientific achievement, has come to believe that the universe has a design.

4. Freud claims that religion has held the field for thousands of years as a civiliser of mankind and look at the mess we’re still in, so now – says Freud – it’s Science’s turn. Pfister agrees that there is much to abhor in the contemporary world. But it is just silly to blame religion for this. Religion is and always has been: ‘not a police force that conserves, but a leader and beacon toward true civilization from our sham civilization.’

Religion should bring forth the greatest achievements in art and science; should fill the lives of all people, even the poorest, with the greatest treasures of truth, beauty and love; should help to overcome the real stresses of life; should pave the way for new, more substantive and genuine forms of social life, and thus call into being a higher, inwardly richer humanity, which corresponds more closely to the true claims of human nature and of ethics than our much-praised uncivilisation.

Pfister then moves on to the offensive to attack Freud’s scientism (defined as ‘the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality’). Freud (optimistically) writes that Science will steadily reveal the truth of the world to us and that the advance of intellect will in time reconcile us to the hard facts of existence.

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life.
(The Future of an Illusion)

Pfister replies that this vision is breath-takingly naive. Freud sidesteps all the epistemological questions which have dogged science, questions about the ‘reality’ of the outside world on which we conduct our experiments, and the nature of the knowledge we acquire about it.

On the one hand Freud’s naive faith in the reality of external appearances has been hugely undermined by recent (1920s) science, which has consisted precisely in dissolving appearances: optics dissolves colour into frequencies, physics dissolves solids into whirling worlds of atoms, and atoms themselves disappear into smaller entities which are both particles and waves, at the same time. So Pfister accuses Freud of being a philosophical novice:

Natural science without metaphysics doesn’t exist. The world is accessible to us only through our intellectual make-up and not through the senses alone. Our categories of thought, whether one considers them according to Kant’s method or some other way, always play a part. Therefore we must engage in criticism of knowledge. We need concepts like cause and effect, although they have been discovered to have their origins in anthropomorphisms, we need molecules and atoms [though they are now realised to be artificial constructs]. Even the measuring and weighing has to do with abstractions for numerical concepts are, like all concepts, abstract. Philosophy, which begins as soon as experience ends, extends into the empirical sciences and whoever doesn’t seriously come to grips with philosophical problems will do so in an amateur confused way.

So, according to Pfister: 1) Freud’s deliberate ignorance of philosophy seriously undermines his understanding of what science is and how it proceeds. But 2) given that Freud’s ‘science’ is a rather simple-minded, uncritical concept, how can we believe Freud’s predictions of a future world ruled by it?

Thus I don’t know through Freud’s generally accessible concept of science how far knowledge extends, what degree of reliability it can establish and what opportunities are allotted to it. How can I know if the extension of power through knowledge means an increase in happiness for humanity?….

Is it unthinkable that a civilisation that is guided only by science will succumb to wild passions after the World War has revealed to us the barbarism lurking in the depths of nations? Has it been settled so definitely that progress in the sciences until now has increased the sum total of human joy in life? Is it certain that we are happier than we were 100 years ago? What will become of the most beautiful characteristics of technology when they are forced into the service of the inhuman hunger for money, of human cruelty, of inhuman dissipation?

(Very prophetic in the light of the uses science was shortly to be put to in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, and in the countries who developed and dropped the atomic bomb.)

Pfister then delivers a sustained assault on the implications of Freud’s narrow scientism: human beings are not just thinking machines, they make and feel and judge. Setting up rational Science as the great shibboleth is throwing out everything which makes human existence glorious and humane: the great achievements in art, in poetry, in philosophy, in architecture; the entire realm of aesthetics and the judgement of beauty; the realm of ethics which must guide us through all the decisions of a lifetime.

Freud seems to think that knowing something gives us control over it and that therefore Science will provide the rational mind with everything it needs to rule its life. This is a demonstrably silly idea. What’s more, it is subverted by the very discoveries Freud himself has made about the vast amount of human behaviour which is subject to irrational determination, to unconscious motivation.

For Pfister Religion, not Science, offers the best means of overcoming these instinctual drives and determinants, of arriving at the full freedom and self-determination offered by Jesus.

A positivistic Science such as Freud promotes cannot begin to offer the foundations for morality, for art, for any sensible guidance on how to live our lives. Psychoanalysis can restore the overdetermined subject to his or her proper autonomy, but the big decisions in life still lay all before them and science alone is nowhere nearly enough of a guide.

Conclusion

Pfister summarises his case: Isn’t Freud’s scientism every bit as much of a wish-fulfilment, of an illusion, as the simple-minded version of faith he ascribes to religious believers?

Freud’s airy visions of the future triumph of his vague, ill-defined ‘Science’ are a limp wish next to the solidity of the science of the human heart which he has developed. And Pfister delivers his punchline: In his social and religious writings, then, Freud is labouring under ‘the illusion of a future’ i.e. a naive, utopian belief in a future where human beings are governed by reason and science – as obvious a wish-fantasy as anything Freud attributes to believers.

3. Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister

Oskar Pfister was a Swiss pastor who was introduced to Freud’s writings by Jung in 1909. Freud and Pfister exchanged letters between 1909 and 1937.

Pfister – born in 1873, the same year Freud entered University – was the youngest of four sons of a Swiss pastor. His father died when Pfister was three and he was afflicted with a lifelong sense of loss and a search for love. After attending university he trained in theology and took charge of his first congregation in 1902. Repelled by the word-spinning of traditional theology Pfister looked for a more practical way of helping the souls in his charge. When Jung introduced him to Freud’s work in 1909 he became a convert and from that moment never wavered in his belief in the insights and usefulness of psychoanalysis, writing books on technique, pastoral care and pedagogy up to his death in 1956.

When Jung left Freud in 1913 and then the Swiss psychoanalysts rebelled against the founder, Pfister stayed loyal. But Pfister never wavered either from his Christian faith, and in the letters and in the two pamphlets, Future of an Illusion and Illusion of a Future Freud and Pfister carried out a private and public debate about psychoanalysis’s implications for religion. Only some of their correspondence has been published. In among a good deal of chat about books, congresses and the spread of the Psychoanalytic Movement there are exchanges on religion. Here are some highlights:

Pfister sends Freud an outline of how he treats adolescents. Freud says analysis consists in two stages: the release of tension and the sublimation of instinctual drives. To release tension in his patients is relatively easy and helped, Freud says, by their irreligion and by the analyst’s openness to sexuality. Freud says Pfister is lucky to have religion to help him with the second part of the process.

Freud: ‘In itself, psychoanalysis is neither religious nor non-religious but an impartial tool which both priest and layman can use in the service of the sufferer.’

Pfister says there’s little difference between them in views on sexual morality. The Reformation was, after all, an analysis of Catholic sexual repression, imperfectly carried through. Pfister sees himself now at the forefront of a further evangelical movement towards the liberation of love. He is working for better education, better social conditions, a healthier moral outlook.

Freud agrees with the description of himself as ‘a sexual protestant’.

Freud ironically asks why none of the pious discovered psychoanalysis, why was it left to a godless Jew? Pfister replies that he doesn’t regard Freud as a Jew at all, but in his emphasis on the healing power of love, says of Freud, ‘A truer Christian never was.’ Anna Freud interpreted this as Pfister’s inability to accept Freud’s militant atheism. But then, Anna would say that. You can read Pfister’s Illusion of a Future as a (persuasive) attempt to incorporate Freud into a Christian tradition of love.

Pfister quotes Plato to Freud: ‘The art of healing is knowledge of the body’s loves and he who is able to distinguish between the good and bad kinds, and is able to bring about a change, so that the body acquires one kind of love instead of the other, and is able to impart love to those in whom there is none is the best physicians.’

Freud perceptively points out that psychoanalysis can only catch on in Protestant countries. No surprise that its first foreign conquest was Protestant Switzerland, with son-of-a-pastor Jung and son-of-a-pastor Pfister. Whereas it had hardly made any headway in arch-Catholic Austria. Cf Protestant England where it caught on up to a point, and Puritan America, where it became wildly popular.

Pfister critiques The Future of an Illusion by saying it is too simplistic. If there are contradictions in the religious world-view, why doesn’t Freud refer to the many theologians who have attempted new syntheses?

‘Your substitute for religion is basically the idea of 18th century Enlightenment in proud modern guise.’

How awful if the aim of Freud’s therapy is to bring people into ‘the dreadful icy desolation’ of a godless stoicism. Pfister, by contrast, tries to bring people through therapy to a love of life, a life of love.

Freud replies by saying that he wrote Future of an Illusion as his own opinion; his personal views on religion form no essential part of psychoanalysis (shrewd politics here, from Freud). The book only really contains one argument: religion is a means of sublimating instinctual drives; it is wish-fulfilment.

Freud regards the icy waste of atheism as beyond the reach of most analysands; most will have to sublimate their needs into higher forms – art, religion etc. (Note the implication that Freud’s atheism is in some sense heroic, beyond the reach of most mortals).

Pfister suggests that Freud’s militant atheism is due to his having been brought up round arch-Catholics (not least his Catholic nurse, who terrified the infant Freud with visions of hell and was then sacked for theft, leaving him with an indelibly poor opinion of Catholics).

Pfister assures Freud that Freud’s great god Science is just as full of contradictions as Religion and, what’s worse, it’s continually changing. Moreover, look at the great minds who have been believers – a counterthrust to Freud who had said, ‘Look at the great minds who have been twisted and distorted by religious repression’.

Freud says his one big argument against religion is, ‘How the devil do you reconcile all that we experience and have to expect in this world with your assumption of a moral world order?’ It is a restatement of the age-old, single biggest objection to belief in a caring God, the so-called Problem of Pain. Freud writes:

I do not know if you have detected the secret link between the Lay Analysis and the Illusion. In the former I wish to protect analysis from the doctors and in the latter from the priests. I should like to hand it over to a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of souls who need not be doctors and should not be priests.

Pfister replies that it’s wrong to forbid priests to practice psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis purifies and refines art, philosophy and religion.

Freud: The essence of religion is the pious illusion of a providence and a moral world order, which are in conflict with reason. It becomes clear that Freud’s Number One problem is with the idea of a divine Providence ruling over everything and ensuring its followers peace, health and happiness. For him, this simply does not exist and people who pretend it does are giving in to infantile wishes. Ethics are not based on an external world order but on the inescapable exigencies of human existence.

On receiving a copy of Civilisation and its Discontents Pfister says: Freud is a biological conservative, Pfister a biological progressive. In the biological theory of evolution Pfister sees a progression upwards. Pfister reads Freud’s concept of the Death Drive, Thanatos, as not an instinct but a slackening of the master life-force, Eros. Civilisation aspires upwards.

Freud thinks Mind is special. But, at the end of the day, it is only an infinitesimally small part of Nature. Would Nature really miss ‘Mind’ if it was snuffed out? Only if you argue that Mind is the point, the purpose of Nature i.e. that the world was created as a garden for mankind, either in Christian or Jewish or Muslim belief. Freud looks coldly at the evidence and thinks such a belief is childish.

Pfister tells Freud that just because the ego-ideal (i.e. the ‘conscience’) may be based on an introjection of parental demands doesn’t diminish its value. Just because Freud demonstrates how even the highest products of the mind develop from the basest instincts doesn’t invalidate those highest products – art, religion, morality – in their own terms.

Morality is vital to physical and psychological health. Immoralism leads to anarchy and unhappiness. Morality is a kind of mental hygiene; it seems designed to keep mankind well. Pfister tries to persuade Freud that he himself lives a deeply moral, kind and loving life, despite all his attempts to deny it.

Right to the end of their correspondence, Pfister and Freud seem to be talking at cross-purposes, arguing past each other.

Thoughts

The difference between the two thinkers is they start from different premises. Freud has the panoramic view and Pfister the humanistic. Freud’s imagination roams across all of human history and across all the modern world. Makes you suspect that there is something in the panoramic imagination which predisposes a person to finding the miserable and the wretched aspects of human existence.

On the other hand Pfister, starting from the wishes and desires of the individual, our need for love, our creativity and imagination, produces a far more optimistic world-view.

Maybe all people who view human beings sub specie aeternitatis – possibly the great majority of scholars and intellectuals – are drawn to a pessimistic view, whereas particularists, people interested in the trials and triumphs of the individual, tend towards a more optimistic view of life. Take the striking example of Bruno Bettelheim who went through Auschwitz but retained a faith in the improvability of ‘the informed heart’.

4. A religious experience (1927)

This an exchange of letters between Freud and an American doctor in 1927.

In the autumn of 1927 G.S Viereck, a German-American journalist who had paid me a welcome visit, published an account of a conversation with me, in the course of which he mentioned my lack of religious faith and my indifference on the subject of survival after death. This ‘interview’ as it was called, was widely read and brought me, among others, the following letter from an American physician:

“… What struck me most was your answer to the question whether you believe in a survival of the personality after death. You are reported as having said: I give no thought to the matter. I am writing now to tell you of an experience that I had in the year I graduated at the university of X.

“One afternoon while I was passing through the dissecting room my attention was attracted to a sweet-faced dear old woman who was being carried to the dissecting-table. This sweet-faced woman made such an impression on me that a thought flashed up in my mind: There is no God; if there were a God he would not have allowed this dear old woman to be brought into the dissecting room.

“When I got home that afternoon the feeling I had had at the sight in the dissecting-room had determined me to discontinue going to church. The doctrines of Christianity had before this been the subject of doubts in my mind. While I was meditating on this matter a voice spoke to my soul that ‘I should consider the step I was about to take’. My spirit replied to this inner voice by saying, ‘If I knew of a certainty that Christianity was truth and the Bible was the Word of God, then I should accept it.’

“In the course of the next few days God made it clear to my soul that the Bible was His Word, that the teachings about Jesus Christ were true, and that Jesus was our only hope. After such a clear revelation I accepted the Bible as God’s Word and Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour. Since then God has revealed Himself to me by many infallible proofs. I beg you as a brother physician to give thought to this most important matter, and I can assure you, if you look into this subject with an open mind, God will reveal the truth to your soul, as He did to me and to multitudes of others.”

I sent a polite answer, saying that I was glad to hear that this experience had enabled him to retain his faith. As for myself, God had not done so much for me. He had never allowed me to hear an inner voice; and if, in view of my age, he did not make haste, it would not be my fault if I remained to the end of my life what I now was – an infidel Jew.

In the course of a friendly reply, my colleague gave me an assurance that being a Jew was not an obstacle in the pathway to true faith and proved this by several instances. His letter culminated in the information that prayers were being earnestly addressed to God that he might grant me faith to believe.

I am still awaiting the outcome of this intercession. In the meantime my colleague’s religious experience provides food for thought. It seems to me to demand some attempt at an interpretation based upon emotional motives; for his experience is puzzling in itself and is based on particularly bad logic. God, as we know, allows horrors to take place of a kind very different from the removal to a dissecting-room of the dead body of a pleasant-looking old woman. This has been true at all times and it must have been so while my American colleague was pursuing his studies. Nor, as a medical student, can he have been so sheltered from the world as to have known nothing of such evils. Why was it, then, that his indignation against God broke out precisely when he received this particular impression in the dissecting-room?

For anyone who is accustomed to regard men’s internal experiences and actions analytically the explanation is very obvious – so obvious that it actually crept into my recollections of the facts themselves. Once, when I was referring to my pious colleague’s letter in the course of a discussion, I spoke of his having written that the dead woman’s face had reminded him of his own mother. In fact these words were not in the letter, and a moment’s reflection will show that they could not possibly have been. But that is the explanation irresistibly forced on us by his affectionately phrased description of the ‘sweet-faced dear old woman’. Thus the weakness of judgement displayed by the young doctor is to be accounted for by the emotion roused in him by the memory of his mother. It is difficult to escape from the bad psychoanalytic habit of bringing forward as evidence details which also allow of more superficial explanations – and I am tempted to recall the fact that my colleague addressed me as a ‘brother-physician’.

We may suppose, therefore, that this was the way in which things happened. The sight of a woman’s dead body, naked or on the point of being stripped, reminded the young man of his mother. It roused in him a longing for his mother which sprang from his Oedipus Complex, and this was immediately completed by a feeling of indignation against his father. His ideas of ‘father’ and ‘God’ had not yet become widely separated; so that his desire to destroy his father could become conscious as doubt in the existence of God and could seek to justify itself in the eyes of reason as indignation about the ill-treatment of a mother-object. It is, of course, very natural for a child to regard what his father does to his mother in sexual intercourse as ill-treatment. The new impulse, which was displaced into the sphere of religion, was only a repetition of the Oedipus situation and consequently soon met with a similar fate. It succumbed to a powerful opposing current. During the actual conflict the level of displacement was not maintained: there is no mention of arguments in justification of God, nor are we told what the infallible signs were by which God proved his existence to the doubter. The conflict seems to have been unfolded in the form of a hallucinatory psychosis: inner voices were heard which uttered warnings against resistance to God. But the outcome of the struggle was displayed once again in the sphere of religion and it was of a kind predetermined by the outcome of the Oedipus complex: complete submission to the will of God the Father. The young man became a believer and accepted everything he had been taught since his childhood about God and Jesus Christ. He had had a religious experience and had undergone a conversion.

All of this is so straightforward that we wonder whether this case throws any light on the psychology of conversion in general. Our case does not contradict the views arrived at on the subject by modern research. The point it throws into relief is the manner in which the conversion was attached to a particular determining event, which caused the subject’s scepticism to flare up for a last time before being finally extinguished.

This is an excellent example of Freud’s technique of rewriting or over-writing other people’s experiences and beliefs in terms of his own theory. Some patients found and still find it liberating. Others have found it authoritarian and oppressive.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. Freud’s works quoted here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions which were included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s. ‘The Future of an Illusion’ is in volume 12.

I read ‘The Illusion of a Future’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 74, part 3 (1993), in a translation by Susan Abrams, as edited by Paul Roazen. I can’t remember where the short text ‘A religious experience’ comes from. I’ll add an update when I find the source.

Freud and religion reading list

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
Totem and Taboo (1913)
On Transience (1915)
A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
The Future of An Illusion (1927)
Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
Group Psychology (1930)
Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
Moses and Monotheism (1939)
Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on July 5, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged A religious experience, a sexual protestant, animism, Anna Freud, anthropology, anthropomorphism, Antisemitism, atheism, atom bomb, Auschwitz, Bolshevism, Bruno Bettelheim, Catholicism, Christians, civilisation, Civilisation and Its Discontents, commandment of Love, conscience, Copernicus, Darwin, death drive, divine Providence, ego-ideal, Epistemology, Eros, Ethics, Evolution, French Revolution, Freud, G.S Viereck, Genesis, God, Golgotha, illusion, instinctual repression, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, introjection, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jews, Judaism, Jung, love, Ludwig Feuerbach, morality, Nazi Germany, Nazis, neurotic symptoms, Oedipus Complex, Old Law, Oskar Pfister, parricide, Paul Roazen, Pelican Freud Library, Philosophy, Plato, primal parricide, Prohibition, Protestant England, Protestantism, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Faith, Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, psychotherapy, Puritan America, quantum physics, reformed Christianity, religion, religious belief, religious fundamentalism, Roman Catholicism, scientism, sexual morality, Sigmund Freud, society, Soviet Union, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Susan Abrams, Thanatos, The Bible, the crucifixion, The Future of An Illusion, The Illusion of A Future: A Friendly Disagreement with Professor Sigmund Freud, the Lord's Prayer, The Old Testament, The Problem of Pain, the Reformation, Theology, Totem and Taboo, totemism, wish-fulfillment, wish-fulfilment

Posted by Simon on July 5, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/05/future-of-an-illusion-and-other-writings-on-religion-sigmund-freud/

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
widespread lack of education
marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.

Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

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On the nature of the gods by Cicero – 1

A mine of curious information about ancient science, religion and philosophy…
(J.M. Ross in his introduction to De natura deorum, p.62)

Cicero wrote this book to examine a central problem of theology, namely do the gods have any impact on human life and, if so, what? It approaches the issue by focusing on a specific question, namely: Is there a Providence? Meaning: are events predetermined and preordained by the gods? Because if they are, then this calls into question the entire concept of ‘free will’ upon which most concepts of ‘morality’ rest. No free will = no morality, no law, no justice.

The 1972 Penguin edition I own contains a translation of Cicero’s De natura deorum by H.C.P. McGregor and an introduction by J.M. Ross. The introduction is unusually long, at 64 pages, and gives a thorough introduction to Cicero, the sources and aims of De natura deorum and its place in the overall plan of Cicero’s works.

Cicero had already written extensively about social duties and responsibilities, about friendship, personal morality, politics and the state. But, in a sense, a person’s views about all these topics depends on the fundamental question, is there a God or not. Your position on the existence and nature of a god or gods stands at the centre of your position on all those issues, underpinning or undermining them all.

Very broadly, there are four possible positions:

1. There are no gods or God, in which case there is no divine sanction or underpinning for morality, for virtue or wisdom, for right and wrong. Human behaviour and values are completely up to us to define and judge.

Pessimists or theological propagandists denigrate this situation as Anarchy and Cicero is among them: he is of the atheism = anarchy party and strongly believed that religion was necessary to underpin morality.

If the Gods have neither the power nor the inclination to help us; if they take no care of us, and pay no regard to our actions…then what reason can we have to pay any adoration, or any honours, or to prefer any prayers to them? Piety, like the other virtues, cannot have any connection with vain show or dissimulation. When piety goes, religion and sanctity go with it. And when these are gone, there is anarchy and complete confusion in our way of life. (I.2)

2. There are immortal gods who in some sense underpin our moral values, but they are completely indifferent to human affairs or don’t intervene, don’t respond to sacrifices or prayers or human suffering.

As I understand it, this was the view of the Epicureans, the followers of Epicurus. Some Epicureans went so far as to claim that worshipping gods – any form of state religion – was such an irrelevance and a distraction from the problems of good governance that it amounted to a social evil.

3. There are gods but they, like humans, are caught in the mechanism of the universe, which is entirely mechanistic and deterministic. Everything has been pre-ordained by fate and nothing they or we can do can change that.

This, as I understand it, is the Stoic position. Some Stoics went so far as to claim that God is identical with the universe and that both are governed by iron rules i.e. even God himself doesn’t have free will.

4. There are immortal gods and they do intervene in human affairs, do respond to sacrifices and prayers and try to make things right.

Position 4 is Cicero’s: there are gods, they underpin a moral law, they do answer prayers and sacrifices. However, Cicero doesn’t believe this with the dogmatism that would later be associated with Christian religion, because in his time there were no widely agreed texts laying down precise rules of behaviour in the manner of Christian teaching.

Instead, Cicero was an adherent of the Academic philosophy, so-called because it was taught by members of the Academy in Athens founded by Plato back in the fourth century BC. The Academic approach was to question everything, to attack all positions and points of view with the most powerful arguments possible, until only the strongest, most likely position remained. That was then adopted. It was a thorough-going scepticism.

In his introduction Ross quotes the theory of scholar H.A.K. Hunt that Cicero’s purpose in this book was to clear the decks of the jungle of contemporary misunderstandings about the gods in order for all his other writings about friendship, citizenship and so on to make sense. The need to address the specific question of predestination (as the Christians would call it) or Providence (as Cicero’s contemporaries called it) explains why he devoted a long book to the subject of Divination, at first sight a slightly cranky choice of subject, until you realise that, if divination works and the future can be foretold, then there is no human free will, in which case all his other moral and political arguments collapse.

In fact, it turns out that Ross cites Hunt’s theory in order to refute it. Ross thinks Cicero wasn’t as narrowly focussed as Hunt suggests. He takes Cicero at his word when he says that his aim was to introduce the entirety of Greek philosophy into Latin, to ‘by devoting myself to the examination of the whole body of philosophy’ (I.4).

Ross interprets Cicero’s writings as a systematic attempt to translate all the key philosophical debates of his time from Greek – where they had a long provenance – into Latin, where they were relatively new and where some key concepts didn’t even have an adequate Latin translation. These topics included:

Epistemology, the problem of knowledge: can we be certain of anything, can we trust the evidence of our senses – which Cicero addresses in his book titled the Academics
Ethics, what is the highest ‘good’ we should aim at – treated in The Ends of Good and Evil
consolation for death, whether our souls survive after death – treated in the Tusculan Disputations
the relationship between god and the world, treated via a translation of Plato’s Timaeus
a more detailed look at applied ethics in On Duties

Method

The Academic tradition Cicero followed was sceptical. It held that absolute truth is impossible for humans to find and may not even exist. All we can do is weigh the balance of probabilities. In order to do this we need to consider all the available evidence before coming to a conclusion. In this respect, Cicero’s philosophical position is very similar to a lawyer or judge’s approach in a court of law, a comparison he himself draws:

I am asking everyone to come into court, weigh up the evidence, and return their verdict (I.6).

Therefore, in their written treatises, adherents of the Academy set down all the possible views on a topic and subject them to criticism. Only at the end of this process does a likely contender for ‘the truth’ remain standing.

The dialogue form

And this explains two things about the De naturam deorum. First, the way Cicero systematically lays out the beliefs of all the existing schools before, only at the end, revealing his own position. Secondly, the book is, like most of Cicero’s works, in dialogue format. This format perfectly suits the Academic approach as it assigns each of the key positions to an individual and then lets their position be probed and questioned by all the others.

Thus the text takes the form of an imagined conversation between four educated Romans in the year 77 BC. It is set in the house of Gaius Aurelius Cotta, who is the senior representative of the Academic point of view and features Gaius Velleius who represents the Epicurean point of view, and Quintus Lucilius Balbus who propounds the Stoic point of view. And the fourth? Cicero is depicted as a late-comer, who arrives at Cotta’s house after the debate has begun and is invited to sit quietly in a corner and listen. So he doesn’t take part in the main debate at all.

Why only three schools of thought, when the Greek world pullulated with philosophies? Because a) to most educated Romans there were only 3 philosophical schools to choose from, Epicurean, Stoic or Academic; b) because the question itself boils down to only 3 positions:

atheist / Epicurean (no gods or, if gods, no intervention in human affairs)
providential / Stoic (gods exist and have foreordained everything )
sceptic (voicing objections to the 2 dogmatic views above and trying to find pragmatic compromises)

In fact in the text itself Cicero mentions a fourth school, the Peripatetic school, which could have been represented by its leading Roman proponent, Marcus Piso. But 1. he has Cotta explain that by the time the debate takes place the Peripatetics’ main beliefs about theology had become almost indistinguishable from Stoicism and 2. Ross suspects that Cicero probably knew less about the Peripatetics than he did about the two other schools, so preferred to stay on safe ground.

Early on, Cicero indicates that although he belongs to the sceptical Academy the last thing he wants to do is undermine religion, as he believes it provides a vital underpinning to society, is the foundation of personal morality and public justice (as per the passage quoted above). He just wants to remove the bad arguments for this position, to establish the really good arguments and then promote them. His book is a form of spring cleaning or decluttering. He wants to banish superstition (which he defines as ‘a senseless fear of the gods’), not religion (which he defines as ‘the science of divine worship’) (p.117).

It is also worth noting that Cicero himself held a post in Rome’s state religion. In 53 BC he was elected member of the college of augurs. According to Wikipedia, an augur:

was a priest and official in the classical Roman world. His main role was the practice of augury: interpreting the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds – whether they were flying in groups or alone, what noises they made as they flew, direction of flight, and what kind of birds they were. This was known as ‘taking the auspices’. The augural ceremony and function of the augur was central to any major undertaking in Roman society – public or private – including matters of war, commerce, and religion. Augurs sought the divine will regarding any proposed course of action which might affect Rome’s pax, fortuna, and salus (peace, good fortune, and well-being).

So we can probably hear his own opinion expressed through Cotta in I.61.

Three books

Since it expounds and critiques three schools of thought, the text is divided into three volumes, although not quite as neatly as you might imagine. In the first half of book I Velleius propounds the Epicurean position at length; in the second half, Cotta the academic enthusiastically demolishes Velleius’s arguments, with a wealth of exuberant abuse. Book II is devoted to a lengthy exposition of the Stoic position by Balbus. Then Book III consists of Cotta’s extensive criticism of everything Balbus has said.

Three problems with philosophy

The three things I’ve always disliked about philosophy ever since I started reading it at school are:

The terrible state of most of its key texts, many of which exist in such poor shape it’s not at all clear what the authors intended.
The need nearly all philosophers have felt to invent new words and terms to describe their views, terms which invariably lead to endless squabbling among their acolytes and among academics about what they actually mean, resulting in needless obscurity.
The way most of philosophy’s key authors changed and developed their positions, sometimes so much so that their later philosophy ends up completely contradicting their earlier views (Wittgenstein springs to mind).

De rerum deorum demonstrates all three of these problems. Regarding the text, there are gaping holes. The master manuscript, which appears to have been the source of all the later manuscripts which survive, appears to have come to pieces and been reassembled, not in a particularly rational order, and with some big and important sections (like Cotta’s refutations of key Stoic points) altogether missing. Maybe a third of book III is missing.

Then it is patchily organised. Even without this textual confusion, it’s clear that Cicero, when he has a character refuting the previous character’s presentation, often omits key points in what they said and answers points they never made. In other words, even if we had a perfect text, it would still be uneven, and badly assembled. This is because Cicero was copying his arguments from a variety of Greek sources and didn’t manage to fully assimilate them into a smooth flow or argument.

This also explains why the text contains a number of irritating digressions, when Cicero seems to have inserted vaguely relevant topics (such as the origins of the names of gods, pages 147 to 152, or a passage on astronomy) just because he had them to hand and they were sort of relevant to the topic, but which damage the flow of the argument.

To further add to the confusion, there were not one but two main traditions of Stoicism in regard to conceptions of God and Providence, and Cicero doesn’t distinguish clearly between them, either in Balbus’s presentation or in Cotta’s refutation. Early Stoicism was pantheistic, believing that God was just another name for nature and that everything in the world is divinely determined. Later, a more Platonic conception was overlaid onto this, in which God is a free rational deity caring for men, and interfering in the world for their welfare. As you can see, these are two quite distinct beliefs, but they are bundled together in Balbus’s presentation and (in what survives of) Cotta’s refutation.

Mess

All this explains two things: why De rerum deorum has been heavily criticised by commentators and why it is one of Cicero’s less popular texts. The central criticism is that it was written at great speed and so is riddled with inconsistencies in the main argument and littered with distracting digressions. Ross concludes that it was never really finished and Cicero intended to revise, trim and make it more coherent.

In addition, all readers have criticised the way the book just stops, without any kind of summary of the results of its long-winded investigation. If it was intended to be useful, then the most potentially useful part, the conclusion, is missing. Instead Cicero seems to have decided to address to sub-aspects of the problem of gods in the supplementary works, On divination and On fate.

In other words, this book is prime evidence for my case against philosophy, a good example of the way the self-proclaimed ‘lovers of truth’ in fact produce badly organised, badly thought-through, inconsistent texts which are so badly written that even their own pupils can’t agree what they mean and, instead of shedding light on ‘the truth’ serve to sink it miles deeper into oceanic depths of murky obscurity.

The philosophical buffet

In reality:

although reading philosophy is entertaining and often intellectually challenging (for example when, as so often, it is written in deliberately obscure language using ad hoc invented terms and phrases designed to tease you away from your normal perceptions or habits of thought);
although philosophical debates, especially about ‘morality’ are inevitable, can result in real changes in people’s opinions, in social attitudes and even the law;

nonetheless, there are now so many philosophical schools, systems and arguments that, as with the Bible, almost any position you care to take, from extreme idealism to extreme pragmatism, from moral altruism to cynical selfishness, from rigid obedience to strict laws to the wildest anarchism, have been fully worked out, named, popularised and made into t-shirt slogans.

With the result that, far from being the pursuit of any kind of ‘truth’, the vast realm of philosophic discourse is more like an enormous breakfast buffet where people interested in this kind of thing can choose from a huge range of options, mix and match, and cobble together whichever belief and value systems suit them. In other words, 3,000 years of philosophy has left the world and human beings in even worse conceptual and moral confusion than it found them.

In the following two blog posts I’ll summarise the arguments used in De rerum deorum in detail.

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by Simon on May 16, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Philosophy, Theology

Posted by Simon on May 16, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/05/16/on-the-nature-of-the-gods-by-cicero-1/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Ethics

Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud

1. The Future of An Illusion (1927)

Thoughts

2. Oskar Pfister’s The Illusion of A Future: A Friendly Disagreement with Professor Sigmund Freud (1928)

Pfister’s rebuttals

Conclusion

3. Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister

Thoughts

4. A religious experience (1927)

Credit

Freud and religion reading list

More Freud reviews

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The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

Historical context – the War on Terror

Ignatieff’s approach

Contents

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

The Arab future

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

2. The threshold of repugnance

3. The world is watching

Notes and thoughts

Seven days later

Credit

New world disorder reviews

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On the nature of the gods by Cicero – 1

Method

The dialogue form

Three books

Three problems with philosophy

Mess

The philosophical buffet

Related links

Roman reviews

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