The Tyranny of the Unconscious
While Boas and his pupils were at work, the autonomy of culture got a curious, unintended boost from the psychology of Sigmund Freud. This is surprising, because Freud was not well attuned to cultural differences. He aimed to explain individual behaviour by uncovering universal urges. Crucially, however, by concentrating on universals and individuals, Freud left culture in a gap between them, to explain itself. The spread of Freudian psychology, which claimed to expose the world of the subconscious, questioned conventional ideas of experience and, in particular, of sex and childhood.
Freud became a model and mentor of the twentieth century. He was even more subversive of scientific orthodoxy than Boas, because his discoveries or claims reached beyond the relationships between societies to challenge the individuals’ understanding of the self. Freud’s claim that much human motivation is subconscious defied traditional assumptions about responsibility, identity, personality, conscience, and mentality. His journey into the subconscious began in an experiment he conducted on himself in 1896, when he exposed his own ‘Oedipus complex’, as he called it: a supposed, suppressed urge, which he believed all male children shared, to supplant one’s father. It was the first of a series of unconscious desires he identified as the stuff of the human psyche. In succeeding years, he developed a technique he called psychoanalysis, designed to make patients aware of subconscious impulses: by hypnosis or by triggering the mnemonic effects of free association, which were Freud’s preferred methods, psychoanalysts could help patients retrieve repressed feelings and ease nervous symptoms. Patients rose from Freud’s couch – or from that of his mentor, Josef Breuer – and walked more freely than before. Women who only a few years previously would have been dismissed as hysterical malingerers became instructive case studies, with benign effects on the re-evaluation of the role of women in society.
Freud’s ‘science’ seemed to work, but failed to pass the most rigorous tests: when Karl Popper asked how to distinguish someone who did not have an Oedipus complex, the psychoanalytic fraternity bucked the question. They behaved like a religious sect or fringe political movement, denouncing each other’s errors and expelling dissenters from their self-elected bodies. In any case, Freud surely underestimated the effects of culture in shaping psyches and varying the impact of experience in different times and places. ‘Freud, Froid’, said G. K. Chesterton. ‘I pronounce it, “Fraud”.’ Psychoanalysis is not, by any strict definition, science.21 Still, the efficacy of analysis for some patients mattered more than the approval of scientific peers. Freud’s genius for communicating ideas in compelling prose helped spread his fame. He seemed able, from the evidence of a few burgesses of pre-war Vienna, to illuminate the human condition. His claims were shocking not only because they were candid about sexual urges most people had preferred to leave unmentioned in polite society, but also, more radically, because he was telling people, in effect, ‘You do not and cannot know why you behave as you do, without my help, because your sources of motivation are unconscious.’ He claimed to show that every child experienced, before puberty, common phases of sexual development, and that every adult repressed similar fantasies or experiences. Freud even seemed to supply enemies of religion with one of their own chief objects of desire: a scientific explanation for God. ‘At bottom’, he wrote, in one of his most influential texts, Totem and Taboo, ‘God is nothing more than an exalted father.’22 Potential moral consequences of Freud’s thinking are alarming: if we cannot know for ourselves the reasons for our behaviour, our power of self-reformation is limited. The very notion of individual moral responsibility is questionable. We can liquidate guilt, and blame our defects and misdemeanours on our upbringing.
Under Freud’s influence, introspection became a rite in the modern West, defining our culture, as dance or codes of gesture might define another. Repression became the demon of our days, with the analyst as exorcist. The ‘feel-good society’, which silences guilt, shame, self-doubt, and self-reproach, is among the consequences. So is the habit of sexual candour. So is the practice – prevalent for much of the twentieth century and still widespread among psychiatrists – to treat metabolic or chemical imbalances in the brain as if they were deep-rooted psychic disorders. The revolution in values Freud initiated – the struggle against repression, the exaltation of frankness, the relaxation of inhibitions – has outlived his own esteem. The balance of good and evil effects is hard to calculate. Psychoanalysis and other, sub-Freudian schools of therapy have helped millions and tortured millions – releasing some people from repressions and condemning others to illusions or unhelpful treatments.23
Freud’s emphasis on the subconscious effects of childhood experience made education a psychologists’ playground, even though, as Isaac Bashevis Singer said, ‘Children have no use for psychology.’ The Swedish feminist Ellen Key announced the rediscovery of childhood in 1909: children were different from adults. This apparent truism reflected the state of the idea of childhood as it had developed in the nineteenth-century West (see here). Changing patterns of childhood mortality, however, stimulated new initiatives in research. I recall how moved I felt, when I was a schoolteacher in England, wandering through the old cloister, lined with memorials to troublingly large numbers of boys who had died at the school in the nineteenth century. In those days, it would have made little sense to invest heavily in such evanescent lives. But as childhood disease spared more of them for longer lives, children became suitable objects for the bestowal of time and emotion and study.24 The most influential researcher was the Swiss polymath, Jean Piaget. You can trace the evidence of his impact across generations of schoolchildren, deprived of challenging tasks because Piaget said they were incapable of them. He was a child prodigy himself, but like many easily disillusioned specialists in education, his opinion of children was low. He made what he thought was a breakthrough in 1920, while helping to process results of early experiments in intelligence testing. Children’s errors seemed to him to show that their mental processes were peculiar and structurally different from his own. The theory he devised to explain this was strikingly similar to the doctrine of stages of mental development that anthropologists had rejected on the strength of the evidence compiled by Boas. Piaget was better read in the work of Freud and Key than of Boas. ‘Mental development’, as he saw it, pertained to individuals, rather than societies. It occurred in predictable, universal stages, as people grow up. He was probably wrong. Most of what he took to be universal is culturally conditioned. What we acquire as we grow up are habits refined by experience and imposed by culture. There is increasing recognition that children do not come in standard packages.
Nonetheless, Piaget was so persuasive that even today school curricula bear his stamp, classifying children according to age and prescribing the same sorts of lessons, at the same levels of supposed difficulty, in much the same subjects, for everybody at each stage. The effect can be retarding or alienating for some individuals whose talents, if allowed to mature at their own pace, might benefit society generally. Some schools and colleges have come to realize this and now make special arrangements for children who are ‘severely gifted’, switching them to classes with older peers at higher standards than those of their contemporaries. Except in such exceptional cases, the prevailing system is inherently unfair to children because it provides a dubious theoretical basis for treating them as inherently inferior to grown-ups; this is hardly more just than the corresponding historic generalizations about the supposed inferiority of racially defined groups. Some children exhibit far more laudable characteristics, including those usually associated with maturity, than many adults.25
Innovation in Take-off Mode
New departures in other fields accompanied the new ideas that teemed and tumbled in the science, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology of the early twentieth century. A bigger phenomenon was under way: unprecedentedly rapid change in every measurable field. Statistics of every kind – dem
ographic and economic – leaped. Technology – the characteristic science of the century – hurtled into a new phase. The twentieth century would be an electric age, much as the nineteenth had been an age of steam. In 1901, Marconi broadcast by wireless. In 1903, the Wright brothers took flight. Plastic was invented in 1907. Other essentials of fulfilled twentieth-century lifestyles – the atom-smasher, the ferroconcrete skyscraper frame, even the hamburger and Coca-Cola – were all in place before the First World War broke out. The curiosities of late-nineteenth-century inventiveness, such as the telephone, the car, the typewriter, all became commonplace.
In politics, too, the new century opened with striking novelties. The world’s first fully fledged democracies – fully fledged in the sense that women had equal political rights with men – appeared in Norway and New Zealand in 1901. In 1904, Japanese victories over Russia confirmed what ought to have been obvious, had the evidence – of Maori resistance against Britain, and Ethiopian success against Italy – not been mistrusted or suppressed: white empires were beatable. Encouraged by Japan’s example, independence movements leapt into action. Eventually Japan would make British, French, and Dutch imperialism unsustainable in most of Asia. Meanwhile, militants took new heart in the struggle for equality among races. In 1911 the first great ‘rebellions of the masses’ began: the Mexican and Chinese revolutions – seismic convulsions that, in the long run, made the communist revolutions of later in the century look like a short-term blip. China’s revolution toppled a dynasty that had ruled for two and a half centuries and ended thousands of years of political continuity. The main victims of the Mexican revolution were almost equally firmly established engrossers: landowners and the Church.
The unsettling effect of the early-twentieth-century shake-up of the world can be seen – literally seen – in the work of painters. In the twentieth century, painters have tended, to an unprecedented degree, to paint not what they see directly, but what science and philosophy depict. The revolutions of art have registered the jolts and shocks that science and philosophy administered. In 1907 cubism held up images of a shattered world, as if in a shivered mirror. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the originators of the movement, seemed to confirm the vision that atomic theory suggested – of an ill-ordered, uncontrollable world, composed of poorly fitting fragments. They denied they had ever heard of Einstein. But they knew about relativity from the press. When they tried to capture elusive reality from different perspectives, they reflected anxieties typical of their decade: of the dissolution of a familiar world-picture. Even Piet Mondrian, whose paintings so perfectly captured the sharp angles of modern taste that he represented boogie-woogie rhythms as a rectilinear grid and Manhattan’s Broadway as a straight line, had a shivered-mirror phase in the early years of the second decade of the century. Formerly, he painted riverbanks of his native Holland with romantic fidelity. Now he splayed and atomized them. In 1911, Wassily Kandinsky read Rutherford’s description of the atom ‘with frightful force, as if the end of the world had come. All things become transparent, without strength or certainty.’26 The effects fed into a new style, which suppressed every reminiscence of real objects. The tradition Kandinsky launched, of entirely ‘abstract’ art, depicting objects unrecognizably or not at all, became dominant for the rest of the century. In France Marcel Duchamp denounced his own expertise in science as mere smattering, but he, too, tried to represent Einstein’s world. His notes on his sculptural masterpiece Large Glass revealed how closely he had studied relativity. His painting of 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase, where reality seems to expand like the folds of a concertina, was, he said, an expression of ‘time and space through the abstract presentation of motion’. Meanwhile, the syncopations of jazz and the apparently patternless noises of atonal music – which Arnold Schoenberg developed in Vienna from 1908 onward – subverted the harmonies of the past as surely as quantum mechanics reshuffled ideas of order. The effects of anthropology on the art of the time are even more explicit than those of science, as artists replaced the traditional lumber of their imaginations – Greek statuary, old masters – with bric-a-brac from ethnographic collections and illustrations. Picasso, Braque, Constantin Brancusi, and members of the Blue Rider School in Kandinsky’s circle copied ‘primitive’ sculptures of the Pacific and Africa, demonstrating the validity of alien aesthetics, and drawing inspiration from minds formerly despised as ‘savage’. Some of the faces Picasso painted seem forced into the shapes, angular or elongated, of Fang masks. André Derain traduced the bathing beauties of traditional beach-portraiture by making his baigneuses look like crudely carved fetishes. Some of the primitivists’ models came from the loot of empire, displayed in galleries and museums, some from retrospective exhibitions that followed the death, in 1903, of Paul Gauguin, whose years of self-exile in Tahiti in the 1890s had inspired erotic essays in sculptured and painted exoticism too real to be romantic. The range of influences broadened, as connoisseurs in the Americas and Australia rediscovered ‘native’ arts.
Reaction: The Politics of Order
Reaction was predictable. Frenzied change menaces everyone with anything to lose. After the seismic thinking of the early twentieth century, the big question in disrupted minds was how to dispel chaos and retrieve reassurance. An early and effective response came from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – Italian dandy, méchant, and intellectual tease. In 1909 he published a manifesto for fellow artists. At the time, most artists professed ‘modernism’: the doctrine that the new excels the old. Marinetti wanted to go further. He thought, as it were, that the next must exceed the now. He therefore proclaimed ‘futurism’. He believed that it was not enough to surpass the legacy of the past. Futurists must repudiate tradition, obliterate its residue, trample its tracks. ‘The future has begun’, Marinetti announced. It sounds like nonsense or, if not nonsense, a platitude, but, in a way, he was right. He had devised a telling metaphor for the pace of the changes that went on accelerating for the rest of the century.
Marinetti rejected all the obvious sources of comfort that people might normally crave in a disrupted environment: coherence, harmony, freedom, received morals, and conventional language. To him comfort was artistically sterile. Instead, Futurism glorified war, power, chaos, and destruction – ways of forcing humankind into novelty. Futurists celebrated the beauty of machines, the morals of might, and the syntax of babble. Old-fashioned values, including sensitivity, kindness, and fragility, they dismissed in favour of ruthlessness, candour, strength. They painted ‘lines of force’ – symbols of coercion – and machines in madcap motion. Earlier artists had tried and failed to capture the speed and rhythm of industrial energy: Turner’s steam engine is a blur, Van Gogh’s depressingly static. But the Futurists excelled them by breaking motion into its constituent elements, like physicists splitting atoms, and copying the way cinema reflected movement in split-second sequences of successive frames. The excitement of speed – attained by the new-fangled internal combustion engine – represented the spirit of the age, speeding away from the past.
Futurism united adherents of the most radical politics of the twentieth century: fascists, for whom the state should serve the strong, and communists, who hoped to incinerate tradition in revolution. Fascists and communists hated each other and relished their battles, first in the streets and later, when they took over states, in wars bigger and more terrible than any the world had ever seen. But they agreed that the function of progress was to destroy the past. It is often said that leaders ‘foundered’ or blundered into the First World War. That is so. But the surprising, shocking feature of the descent into war is how passionately the apostles of destruction worshipped and welcomed it.
Wars nearly always urge events in the direction in which they are already heading. Accordingly, the First World War quickened technologies and undermined elites. The better part of a generation of the natural leaders of Europe perished. Disruption and discontinuity in European history were therefore guaranteed. Destruction and despair l
eave citizens stakeless, with no investment in tranquillity and no allegiance amid wreckage; so the terrible expenditure of money and mortality bought not peace but political revolutions. Twelve new sovereign, or virtually sovereign, states emerged in Europe or on its borders. Superstates tumbled. Frontiers shifted. Overseas colonies were swivelled and swapped. The war felled Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires at a stroke. Even the United Kingdom lost a limb: the revolt and civil war that broke out in Ireland in 1916 ended with independence, in effect, for most of the island six years later. Huge migrations redistributed peoples. After the war, more than one million Turks and Greeks shunted to safety across frantically redrawn borders. Excited by the discomfiture of their masters, the peoples of European empires elsewhere in the world licked their lips and awaited the next European war. ‘Then is our time’, are the last words of the hero of A Passage to India. ‘We shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea.’
Postwar poverty favoured extremisms. The financial disasters of Europe and the Americas in the 1920s and 1930s seemed to show that the West was wormwood. The rot went deeper than the corrosive politics that caused wars and blighted peace. An age of fault finding with Western civilization began. Anti-Semites blamed Jews for the world’s hard times, on the mythic grounds that ‘international Jewry’ controlled the world’s economies and exploited Gentiles for their own enrichment. Advocates of eugenics alleged that unscientific breeding was responsible for the woes of the world: it weakened society by encouraging ‘inferior’ classes and races and ‘feeble’ or ‘mentally defective’ individuals to spawn children as weak and useless as their parents. Anticlericals blamed the Church for supposedly subverting science, emasculating the masses, and encouraging the weak. Communists blamed capitalists. Capitalists blamed communists. Some of the things people blamed were so fantastic as to be rationally incredible – but rabble-rousers were noisy enough to drown out reason. Impoverished and miserable millions were ready to believe their claims. The politics of the megaphone – the appeal of shrill rhetoric, oversimplification, prophetic fantasy, and facile name-calling – appealed to constituencies hungry for solutions, however simplistic, strident, or supposedly ‘final’. Revenge is the easiest form of righteousness and a scapegoat is a welcome substitute for self-sacrifice.
Out of Our Minds Page 44