Civilization 11-22-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 2/27/2025]

I have made about halfway through Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930; W.W. Norton Co. 1962; James Strachey, translator). Much better reading than his pre-WWI stuff. I read earlier this year. Or might it be having just read Friedrich Nietzsche, I see how Walter Kaufmann thought of Freud as Nietzsche's successor? Lots of quotes.

 ...Human life in common is only mde possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individuals and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of the community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as 'brute force'. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of community constitutes the decisvie step of civilization... The first requisite of civilization, there is that of justice - that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favor of an individual... The further course of cultural development seems to tend towards making the law no longer an expression of the will of a small community - a caste or a stratum of the population or a racial group - which, in its turn behaves like a violent individual towards otehr, and perhaps more numerous collections of people. The final outcome should be a rule of law to which all - except those who are not capable of entering a community - have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one - again with the same exection at the liberty of brute force. [III, p. 42]

 Sounds to me that Nietzsche's herd rules over the individual. Also, that Nietzsche's blonde beast - especially thinking of the Aryans invading India - succeeds only as a symbol of another culture, of another herd mentality.

Yes, there are weaknesses to Freud's formula. Who gets to choose whom cannot enter a community? Surely Vienna knew what was going on in the Munich and Berlin of 1930.

...In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes receisely the non-satisfaction ... of  powerful instinct. This `cultureal frustration' dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings...  it is the cause of the hositility against which all civilizations have to struggle. [III, p. 44]

What do we get when mass democracy wants not discipline but pleasure? We get a climate crisis - a conflict between those who understand science and those who want their culture comforts. I think both Nietzsche and Michel Foucault (A History of Sexuality, Introduction) foresaw this problem. I disagree with Nietzsche's attack on asceticism. Consider gluttony - everyone eating more than necessary for survival - as a danger to the survival of the species. Asceticism is the discipline necessary for survival. We are not lemmings ramping up to a plunge over the cliffside, are we?

I quote the following to satisfy my cynical, jaundiced, jaded streak I still carry with me while recognizing Christians have a duty to love and not to judge, duties which may prevent us from being good Christians:

... According to one ethical view... this readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can read. Even at this early stage of the discussion I should like to bring forward my two main objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love. [IV; p. 49]

And the following I offer as an example, old Sigmund had no more basis for his ideas than his own preconceptions:

... The work of a civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more with ever more difficulty tasks and compels them to carry out intellectual sublimations of which women are little capable.[IV. p. 59]

Well, Nietzsche and Freud do have nothing in common.

I ask why some thinkers, some politicians, say there is no such thing as civil society. This means there is no community. They substitute the market and consumers. Ask how these thinkers, the politicians, benefit you by doing away with your community, with you as a citizen?

Cue up Bob Dylan's Subterranean Home Sick Blues, and turn up the volume. Follow with the MC5's American Ruse.

Back to the reading.

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[4/24/2025:

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