The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Warming to his theme, he asserts that culture incurs a great danger by maintaining its present attitude to religion, that religion has had quite long enough to show what it can achieve, and that if it were the success it claims to be, people would not be trying to change things. “But instead what do we see? We see that an appallingly large number of men are discontented with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke that must be shaken off.”

  To him the reason is clear. Religion no longer claims the support it once did, not because its promises have become smaller “but because they appear less credible to people.” And this is so because of “the increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of society”; science he describes, also in The Future of an Illusion, as offering “opportunities for mental awakening.”14 It would be an undoubted advantage, Freud says, to “leave God out of the question altogether” and admit honestly the purely human origins of all cultural laws and institutions—then men would realize that the rigidity of many laws need not be immutable, which would be “an important advance on the road which leads to reconciliation with the burden of culture.”15 In fact, he thought that religious belief was on an inexorable decline and that, although in the past the consolations of religion had worked (“by accepting the universal neurosis [man] is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis”), the time had now come to replace the consequences of repression (required by culture) with “the results of rational mental effort,” a psychoanalytic treatment, as it were, of society as a whole. In any case, “The truths contained in religious doctrines are . . . so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of mankind cannot recognize them as truth.”16

  As one might expect, Freud was critical of the effects of a religious upbringing on children. He thought that the average child is not naturally interested in God, but is introduced to the idea by parents who, in doing so, transform the “radiant intelligence of a healthy child” into the “feeble mentality of the average adult.” “So long as a man’s early years are influenced by the religious thought-inhibition . . . we cannot really say what he is actually like.”17

  THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

  Freud had finished The Future of an Illusion in the autumn of 1927. During the following two years, no doubt on account of illness, he produced very little. But in the summer of 1929 he began another book, once more on a “sociological subject.” The original title he chose was Das Unglück in der Kultur (Unhappiness in Civilization), but Unglück was later changed to Unbehagen, a word difficult to translate into English. Freud, who spoke English well, suggested “Man’s Discomfort in Civilization,” but it was Joan Riviere, his translator, who came up with the form of words by which we know this work, Civilization and Its Discontents.

  In some ways the original title would have been better, though since the book went to press in the immediate wake of the Wall Street crash, which occurred at the end of October that year, it is easy to see why it quickly achieved the resonance it did. Its main theme is, in the words of its English editor, “the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization.”18

  It was in this book that Freud claimed that many people acknowledged an “oceanic feeling” as the basis of their religious belief, a feeling which, he said, he had never experienced himself. “The ‘oneness’ with the universe which constitutes [the] ideational content [of the ‘oceanic feeling’] sounds like a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the external world.” The question of the purpose of human life “has been raised countless times” but it had never yet received a satisfactory answer “and perhaps does not admit of one.” He acknowledged that some had said that if life had no purpose, it would lose all value for them, but he dismissed this. “Nobody talks about the purpose of life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. . . . It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us . . . the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.”

  His own offering was much more down-to-earth: “[W]hat decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start.” Freud thinks that there can be no other purpose of life than “happiness.” This was not the purpose of creation, he says, adopting a Darwinian view, and for that reason what we call happiness comes from the “sudden satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree in civilization,” and thus by its nature it is “only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.”19

  THE FOUR PALLIATIVES

  For Freud, then, existence is something of a burden, and “in order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures”—analgesic, cultural and psychological tools and techniques—to help us get through. He specifically identifies four palliatives: religion, art, love and intoxication. Belief in a loving God and a blissful afterlife are “wish-generated beliefs,” illusions, which serve to soften the harsh realities of life. But, he said, “even religion cannot keep its promise. If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God’s ‘inscrutable decrees,’ he is admitting that all that is left to him as a last possible consolation and source of pleasure in his suffering is an unconditional submission. And if he is prepared for that, he could probably have spared himself the détour he has made.”20

  Art, he thought, was a more respectable palliative, but not available to everyone; and even for those for whom it is, he didn’t think it was anything other than a mild pleasure—it did not “convulse our physical being.” Love, he thought, was the most sought-after palliative, which provided enormous comfort and, in sex, the most intense experiences. But it also carried enormous risks, since “we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” He thought that intoxication (and he himself took cocaine and tobacco) was the “crudest but also most effective” method for ameliorating sensations of suffering. He added the important qualification that we should not look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.

  While Freud believed that a lot of our misery comes from the restrictions of civilization, he did not dismiss technological progress. On the contrary, he said that we ought not to infer that “technical progress is without value for the economics of our happiness,” that it was difficult to gauge how happy or otherwise people had been in the past, and that the values of cleanliness, order and justice, three of the most important features of civilization, stemmed from our early life in the family.

  He cast doubt on what we might call the St. Francis of Assisi doctrine, that universal love is the aim. Freud had two objections: “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.” He thought that, broadly speaking, Schiller had it right when he said that “hunger and love are what move the world.” “Hunger could be taken to represent the instincts which aim at preserving the individual; while love strives after objects, and its chief function, favored in every way by nature, is the preservation of the species.”21 He further felt that the education of the day concealed from children the part that sexuality would play in their lives, which hindered their integration into a human community which “appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before the aim of happiness can be achieved.”

/>   Freud concluded by reasserting that he had attempted to guard himself against “the enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the most precious thing we possess or could acquire and that its path will necessarily lead to heights of unimagined perfection.” Civilization is the work of man, not of God, and neither our future happiness nor consolation is guaranteed.

  In Moses and Monotheism (1939), he argued that Moses was not Jewish but Egyptian. This theory was largely discredited before the ink was dry on the page but, as Michael Palmer says, that doesn’t matter, in that the argument substantiates what Freud’s other books on religion propose, that faith begins in the oedipal predicament, in each individual’s need for a father figure. Jewish monotheism originated in a particular monotheistic episode of Egyptian history, in the course of which the people rose up against their father figure and killed him, as well as abandoning their new religion (symbolized by the story of the golden calf). They sought to forget this episode and fused Moses’s identity with the Midianite Jethro, who was thus given the name Moses.22 Elsewhere, Freud characterized Christianity as son worship replacing father worship (as in Judaism).

  Freud never abandoned his view that religion was a form of infantilism, or rooted in infantile experience—the dependence of the child on the parent—and he believed that, just as in therapy when the patient is forced/invited to confront (unconscious) reality, so as society and civilization grew more “mature,” religion would wither away—much as Marx thought the state would wither away. Characterizing adherence to a religion as a form of unconscious mental illness, relegating it to that part of our nature that can usefully be discarded, was arguably the most frontal and offensive attack on God that a man could mount.

  Viewed at this distance, we can see that Freud very much underestimated the power of religion to endure in society. One might think that, as a specialist in the emotions, he should have realized this. In some ways—and this is a rare thing to say about Freud—he appears naïve. But, as we have seen with the Vienna Circle and shall see again, he was not alone in his mistake.

  NO REFUGE

  By the time Civilization and Its Discontents appeared in 1929, Freud was well and truly estranged from Carl Jung, once his heir apparent and crown prince but now his most prominent rival. The rupture had begun as early as 1912 after they returned from their visit to America and Jung had published the second part of Symbols of Transformation, which aired for the first time his idea of the collective unconscious. In explaining religion, mythology and philosophy, he departed from—and threatened the status of—Freud’s more scientific approach. The split became obvious a year later when Symbols was published in book form.

  In Totem and Taboo, Freud had taken on Jung on his own ground, so to speak, so it was perhaps no surprise that his rival should weigh in on much the same subject—the psychological plight of modern man—with an essay of his own.

  Modern Man in Search of a Soul appeared in 1933. Although its title might seem to address exactly the matter we are considering here, in fact it ranged more widely. It was, for a start, an attack on Freud, one of its chapters airing the theoretical disagreements that Jung felt separated them. The book was also a restatement, or an updating, of Jung’s own psychoanalytical theories, in particular his theory of archetypes, which by then had reached as far as the notion of “introverts” and “extraverts,” plus some thinking on the stages of life (“morning” and “afternoon”), on psychology and literature and on “archaic man.” Only the last two chapters were given over to “The spiritual problem of modern man” and “Psychotherapists or the clergy.” He returned to the subject in his Terry Lectures, at Yale in 1937, and at other times after the Second World War.

  What particularly interested Jung was that twentieth-century man, in comparison with his forebears, was solitary, removed from the participation mystique and from “submersion in a common unconsciousness.” Modern man no longer lives within the bounds of tradition and so has become “unhistorical,” discarding and outgrowing what went before. The new condition, Jung said, was a form of poverty and, in being unhistorical, a form of “living in sin.” Modern individuals are aware of being “the culmination of the history of mankind, the fulfillment and the end-product of countless centuries” and at the same time “the disappointment of the hopes and expectations of the ages.” We have “fallen into profound uncertainty,” the Great War having shattered our faith in ourselves and in “our own worth.” And that includes losing faith in the possibility of a rational organization of the world; “that old dream of the millennium, in which peace and harmony should rule, has grown pale.”

  Having lost all the metaphysical uncertainties of his medieval brother, modern man has set up in their place “the ideals of material security, general welfare and humaneness.” But the very idea of “progress,” Jung said, had begun to “terrorize” the imagination. “Science has destroyed even the refuge of an inner life.” Thus had developed a widespread interest “in all sorts of psychic phenomena as manifested in the growth of spiritualism, astrology, theosophy and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. . . . The modern movement which is numerically most impressive is undoubtedly Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in a Hindu dress. Compared with these movements the interest in scientific psychology is negligible.” The passionate interest in these movements arose from psychic energy which could no longer be invested in “obsolete forms of religion. . . . For this reason such movements have a truly religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific.”23

  Though Jung felt that this heightened concern with our psychic life was inevitable, he wasn’t convinced that we should spend all our time dwelling on it. He thought that political internationalism, and sport, were antidotes to too great an obsession with psychic life, and that the political, social, artistic and psychological optimism of America had its place, too, in any future system.

  Hitherto, only the more educated had sought psychological help, but in the future, he thought, this practice would spread to “the masses.” Ever more clergymen were undergoing psychological training; indeed, only a method that comprised both psychology and religion could provide the enlightenment that most people sought from therapy—rather than, say, relief from neurotic symptoms. Jung states that people come to him to find meaning in their lives. And so what he sought, in effect, was to return them to religion (though not necessarily to any one particular confession). But that return would not be through faith per se so much as through psychological insight, the insight that religion performs various psychological functions in modern man and that only by explaining religion psychologically could many people be returned to the fold.

  Unlike Freud, who grew up as a “Godless Jew,” Jung was the son of a pastor. Sons of pastors have played a significant role in Germanic philosophy and psychology—Gotthold Lessing, Johann Herder, Nietzsche himself, Wilhelm Dilthey and Jürgen Habermas were or are all sons of pastors. It is as if the son could not embrace the faith of the father and opted instead for a secular equivalent.

  Jung entered university to study natural sciences, switched to medicine and then turned to psychiatry in his fourth year of study, when he attended a séance in which the subject was his fifteen-year-old cousin: in trance, she lost her Basel accent and spoke in High German, claiming she was controlled by spirits. An account of this episode formed the starting point of his first published work: his degree dissertation, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena (1902). This neatly encapsulates his lively interest in both the occult and the unconscious.

  His main disagreements with Freud lay in his rejection of the latter’s insistence on the supreme importance of repressed sexuality in the etiology of neurosis, and his conviction that beneath consciousness and the (personal) unconscious there is a third, deeper level, the collective unconscious. Jung’s rival view, derived
from his clinical experience and his researches among myths, ethnography and animal behavior, he said, was based on observation, on the fact that, as he found it, “psychic energy” was more significant as a source of neurosis than was sexual repression. These researches showed, he claimed, that across the world—in myths, for example—there were many images and patterns that overlapped, causing him to conclude that they derive from very ancient experiences that have been incorporated into our nature “at the deepest levels.”

  To these patterns Jung attached the term “archetype,” of which he identified five as the most important: persona, anima and animus, extravert and introvert, shadow and self.

  Persona is the mask we present to the world, designed to mislead; anima is the female tendency in males and animus the male tendency in females; extravert and introvert are characteristic stances we have toward the world and represent perhaps Jung’s most widely accepted innovation. What most concerns us here is his idea that God is an archetype. That is to say, it is a disposition within us, a disposition to believe in God, though at this point Jung gets very ambiguous.

  An archetype cannot be known directly, he says, only inferred or intuited. Patterns observed—in mythology, for example—refer to “archetype-contents,” not to the actual “archetype-form.” This is—or appears to be—a little like Moore’s understanding of “the good,” which cannot be defined without corrupting and limiting the idea. Jung further complicates matters by arguing that the archetype of the self is very similar to—may even be identical with—the God-archetype. There are, within the collective unconscious, archetypes of “wholeness” and “perfection” (Jesus figures here); and the purpose of life, in the process of what he called “individuation,” is to bring the personal and collective unconscious into “balance” so that the self-archetype and the God-archetype are in harmony.