The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  In The Death of Literature (1990), Alvin Kernan quotes George Steiner: ‘We are now seeing, all of us today, the gradual end of the classical age of reading.’25 Kernan himself puts it this way: ‘Humanism’s long dream of learning, of arriving at some final truth by enough reading and writing, is breaking up in our time.’26 He has no doubt about the culprit. ‘Television, however, is not just a new way of doing old things but a radically different way of seeing and interpreting the world. Visual images not words, simple open meanings not complex and hidden, transience not permanence, episodes not structures, theater not truth. Literature’s ability to coexist with television, which many take for granted, seems less likely when we consider that as readers turn into viewers, as the skill of reading diminishes, and as the world as seen through a television screen feels and looks more pictorial and immediate, belief in a word-based literature will inevitably diminish.’27 ‘There is always the possibility that literature was so much a product of print culture and industrial capitalism, as bardic poetry and heroic epic were of tribal oral society, that … it will simply disappear in the electronic age, or dwindle to a merely ceremonial role, something like Peking opera perhaps.’28

  Both Gunther Stent, referred to earlier, and John Barrow, an astronomer, have written about what they see as an evolutionary process in the arts ‘which has steadily relaxed the compositional constraints placed on the artist…. As the constraints imposed by convention, technology, or individual preference have been relaxed, so the resulting structure is less formally patterned, closer to the random, and harder to distinguish from the work of others working under similar freedom from constraint.’29 Stent argued that music actually has evolved like anything else. Studies have shown, for instance, that in order to be liked, music must strike a balance between the expected and the introduction of surprises. If it is too familiar, it is boring; if it is too surprising, it ‘jars.’ Physicists with a mathematical bias have actually calculated the familiarity/surprise ratio of music, and Stent was able to show that, beginning with ‘the maximal rigidity of rhythmic drumming in ancient times, music has exhausted the scope of each level of constraint for its listeners, before relaxing them and moving down to a new level of freedom of expression. At each stage, from ancient to medieval, renaissance baroque, romantic, to the atonal and modern periods, evolution has proceeded down a staircase of ever-loosening constraints, the next step down provoked by the exhaustion of the previous level’s repertoire of novel patterns…. The culmination of this evolutionary process in the 1960s saw composers like John Cage relinquish all constraints, leaving the listeners to create what they would from what they heard: an acoustic version of the Rorschach inkblot test.’30 John Barrow added the thought that other creative activities like architecture, poetry, painting, and sculpture have all displayed similar trends away from constraint. ‘Stent’s suspicion,’ he wrote, ‘was that they were all quite close to reaching the asymptote of their stylistic evolution: a final structureless state that required purely subjective responses.’31

  A related way in which Darwinism encourages the evolution of knowledge forms has been suggested by Robert Wright. As he puts it, the various ways of conceiving the world – moral, political, artistic, literary, scientific – are ‘by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. A winner will emerge, but there’s often no reason to expect that winner to be truth.’ Wright calls this approach ‘Darwinian cynicism,’ which he equates to the postmodern sensibility that views all modes of human communication as ‘discourses of power,’ where ‘ironic self-consciousness is the order of the day,’ where ideals can’t be taken seriously because one cannot avoid ‘self-serving manipulation.’32 On this analysis, postmodernism has itself evolved and, as with music, poetry, and painting, has reached the end as a way of looking at the world. Fukuyama didn’t know what he was starting when he wrote about the end of history.

  Yet another reason why many of the arts must rate as unsatisfactory forms of knowledge in the twentieth century stems from the modernist reliance on the theories of Sigmund Freud. Here I agree with Britain’s Nobel Prize-winning doctor Sir Peter Medawar, who in 1972 described psychoanalysis as ‘one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.’33 Freud unveiled the unconscious to the world in 1900, at much the same time that the electron, the quantum, and the gene were identified. But whereas they have been confirmed by experiment after experiment, developing and proliferating, Freudianism has never found unequivocal empirical support, and the very idea of a systematic unconscious, and the tripartite division of the mind into the id, ego, and superego has seemed increasingly far-fetched. This is crucial in my view, for the consequences of the failure of Freudianism have not been thought through, and a re-evaluation of psychoanalysis is now urgently needed. For example, if Freud was so wrong, as I and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss’s ‘Freudian’ operas such as Salomé and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf? It doesn’t render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don’t owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings, and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong. The overall effect of this is incalculable. All of us now harbor the view, for example, that our adult selves bear a certain relation to our childhood experiences, and to conflicts with our parents. Yet in 1998 Judith Rich Harris, a psychologist who had been dismissed from her Ph.D. course at Harvard, caused consternation among the psychological profession in America and elsewhere by arguing in her book The Nurture Assumption that parents have much less influence on their children than has traditionally been supposed; what matters instead is the child’s peer group – other children. She produced plenty of evidence to support her claim, which turned a century of Freudian jargoneering on its head.34 As a result of Freud, there has been a strain of thought in the twentieth century that holds, rather as in primitive societies, that the mad have an alternative view of the human condition. There is no evidence for this; moreover, it damages the fortunes of the mentally ill.

  Robert Wright has described still other ways in which evolutionary thinking has been used to sow further doubt about Freudianism. As he wrote in The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1994), ‘Why would people have a death instinct (‘thanatos’) [as Freud argued]? Why would girls want male genitals (‘penis envy’)? Why would boys want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers (the Oedipus complex’)? Imagine genes that specifically encourage any of these impulses, and you’re imagining genes that aren’t exactly destined to spread through a hunter-gatherer population overnight.’35

  The muddle over Freud, and psychoanalysis, was shown starkly by an exhibition scheduled for the mid-1990s at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The exhibition was designed to celebrate the centenary of the birth of psychoanalysis.36 However, when word of the planned exhibition was released, a number of scholars, including Oliver Sacks, objected, arguing that the planning committee was packed with Freud ‘loyalists’ and that the exhibition threatened to become mere propaganda and hagiography, ‘ignoring the recent tide of revisionist writings about Freud.’37 When the book of the exhibition appeared, in 1998, no mention of this controversy was made, either by the Librarian of Congress, who wrote the foreword, or by the editor. Even so, the book could not avoid completely the doubts about Freud that have grown as the centenary of The Interpretation of Dreams approached. Two authors wrote papers describing Freud’s ideas as unstabl
e and untestable, ‘on a par with flying saucers,’ while two others, including Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac, described them as unconvincing but conceded that Freud has been influential. It is noticeable, for instance, that a great deal of the book was given over to talk of Freud’s ‘industry,’ ‘courage,’ and ‘genius,’ and to arguing that he should be judged ‘less as a scientist than as an imaginative artist.’38 Even psychoanalysts now concede that his ideas about women, early societies of hunter-gatherers, and the ‘Primal Crime’ are both fanciful and embarrassing. And so we are left in the paradoxical situation that, as the critic Paul Robinson says, the dominant intellectual presence of our century was, for the most part, wrong.

  Nor did this revisionism stop with Freud. In 1996 Richard Noll, an historian of science at Harvard, published The Jung Cult and, two years later, The Aryan Christ.39 These books provoked a controversy no less bitter than the one over Freud, for Noll argued that Jung had lied about his early research and had actually fabricated dates in his notes to make it appear that patients’ memories of such things as fairy tales were part of the ‘collective unconscious’ and had not been learned as children. Noll also documented Jung’s anti-Semitism in detail and criticised present-day Jungians for not wanting to put his ideas to the test, lest they scare away potential clients.

  The commercial side of jungianism need not concern us. More important is that, when this is taken together with Freud’s shortcomings, we can see that psychology in the twentieth century is based on theories – myths almost – that are not supported by observation, and is characterised by fanciful, idiosyncratic, and at times downright fraudulent notions. Psychology has been diverted for too long by Freud and Jung. The very plausibility of Freud’s theories is their most problematical feature. It has taken an entire century to get out from under their shallow. Until we can rid ourselves of our Freudian mindset, the Freudian ‘climate of opinion,’ as Auden called it, it is highly unlikely that we can look upon ourselves in the new way that is required. Darwin provides the only hope at the moment, together with the latest advances being made in neuroscience.

  A related trend regarding the evolution of knowledge may be seen by juxtaposing Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1987) alongside John Brockman’s The Third Culture (1995).40 Jacoby described the fall of the ‘public intellectual’ in American life. Until the early 1960s, he said, figures like Daniel Bell, Jane Jacobs, Irving Howe, and J. K. Galbraith had lived in urban bohemias and written for the public, raising and keeping alive issues common to all – but especially educated people.41 Since then, however, they had disappeared, or at least no new generation of public intellectuals had followed them, and by the late 1980s, when his book appeared, the big names were still Bell, Galbraith, et al.42 Jacoby attributed this to several factors: the decline in bohemia, which has been taken ‘on the road’ by the Beats, then lost in suburbia; the removal of urban Jews from their marginal position with the decline in anti-Semitism; the fall of the left with the revelations about Stalin’s atrocities; but above all the expansion of the universities, which sucked in the intellectuals and then broke them on the rack of tenure and careerism.43 This thesis was a little unfair to the later generation of intellectuals like Christopher Lasch, Andrew Hacker, Irving Louis Horowitz, or Francis Fukuyama, but Jacoby nonetheless had a point. In reply, however, as was referred to in the introduction, John Brockman argued that this function has now been taken over by the scientists, since science has more and more policy and philosophical ramifications than ever before. Jacoby describes the complete triumph of analytic philosophy in U.S. and U.K. universities, but for Brockman’s scientists it is their philosophy of science that is now more advanced, and more useful. This is the evolution of ideas, and knowledge forms, in action.

  Finally, in considering this evolution of knowledge forms, think back to the link between science, free-market economics, and liberal democracy which was mentioned earlier in this conclusion. The relevance and importance of that link is brought home in this book by an interesting absence that readers may have noticed. I refer to the relative dearth of non-Western thinkers. When this book was conceived, it was my intention (and the publishers’) to make the text as international and multicultural as possible. The book would include not just European and North American – Western – ideas, but would delve into the major non-Western cultures to identify their important ideas and their important thinkers, be they philosophers, writers, scientists, or composers. I began to work my way through scholars who specialised in the major non-Western cultures: India, China, Japan, southern and central Africa, the Arab world. I was shocked (and that is not too strong a word) to find that they all (I am not exaggerating, there were no exceptions) came up with the same answer, that in the twentieth century, the non-Western cultures have produced no body of work that can compare with the ideas of the West. In view of the references throughout the book to racism, I should make it clear that a good proportion of these scholars were themselves members of those very non-Western cultures. More than one made the point that the chief intellectual effort of his or her own (non-Western) culture in the twentieth century has been a coming to terms with modernity, learning how to cope with or respond to Western ways and Western patterns of thought, chiefly democracy and science. This underlines Frantz Fanon’s point, and James Baldwin’s, discussed in chapter 30, that for many groups, the struggle is their culture for the present. I was astounded by this response, which was all the more marked for being made in near-identical terms by specialists from different backgrounds and in different disciplines.

  Of course, there are important Chinese writers and painters of the twentieth century, and we can all think of important Japanese film directors, Indian novelists, and African dramatists. Some of them are in this book. We have examined the thriving school of revisionist Indian historiography. Distinguished scholars from a non-Western background are very nearly household names – one thinks of Edward Said, Amartya Sen, Anita Desai, or Chandra Wickramasinghe. But, it was repeatedly put to me, there is no twentieth-century Chinese equivalent of, say, surrealism or psychoanalysis, no Indian contribution to match logical positivism, no African equivalent of the Annales school of history. Whatever list you care to make of twentieth-century innovations, be it plastic, antibiotics and the atom or stream-of-consciousness novels, vers libre or abstract expressionism, it is almost entirely Western.

  One person who may offer a clue to this discrepancy is Sir Vidia (V. S.) Naipaul. In 1981 Naipaul visited four Islamic societies – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Iran he found confused and angry, ‘the confusion of a people of high mediaeval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of a great new encircling civilisation.’44 ‘That civilisation couldn’t be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended upon.’45 Pakistan, he found, was a fragmented country, economically stagnant, ‘its gifted people close to hysteria.’46 The failure of Pakistan as a society, he said, ‘led back again and again to the assertion of the faith.’47 As with Iran there was an emotional rejection of the West, especially its attitudes to women. He found no industry, no science, the universities stifled by fundamentalism, which ‘provides an intellectual thermostat, set low.’48 The Malays, he found, had an ‘inability to compete’ (he meant with the Chinese, who constituted half its population and dominated the country economically). The Islam of Indonesia Naipaul described as ‘stupefaction’; community life was breaking down, and the faith was the inevitable response.49 In all four places, he said, Islam drew its strength from a focus on the past that prevented development, and that very lack of development meant that the peoples of the Islamic nations could not cope with the West. The ‘rage and anarchy’ induced by this kept them locked into the faith – and so the circle continues. Not for nothing did Naipaul quote Bertrand Russell in his book: ‘History makes one aware that there is no finality in human affairs; there is not a static perfection and an unimprovable wisd
om to be achieved.’50

  Naipaul was even harder on India. He visited the country three times to write books about it – An Area of Darkness (1967), India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).51 ‘The crisis of India,’ he wrote in 1967, ‘… is that of a decaying civilisation, where the only hope lies in further swift decay.’ In 1977 things didn’t look so black, though that could have meant that the swift decay was already overtaking the country. Though not unsympathetic to India, Naipaul pulled no punches in his second book. Phrases taken at random: ‘The crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded old civilisation that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move ahead’;52 ‘Hinduism … has exposed [Indians] to a thousand years of defeat and stagnation. It has given men no idea of contract with other men, no idea of the state…. Its philosophy of withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped them to respond to challenge; it has stifled growth.’53

  Octavio Paz, Mexico’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, was twice attached to Mexico’s embassy in India, the second time as ambassador. His In Light of India, published in 1995, is much more sympathetic to the subcontinent, celebrating in particular its poetry, its music, its sculpture.54 At the same time, Paz is not blind to India’s misfortunes: ‘The most remarkable aspect of India, and the one that defines it, is neither political nor economic, but religious: the coexistence of Hinduism and Islam. The presence of the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism alongside the richest and most varied polytheism is, more than a historical paradox, a deep wound. Between Islam and Hinduism there is not only an opposition, but an incompatibility’;55 ‘Hindu thought came to a halt, the victim of a kind of paralysis, toward the end of the thirteenth century, the period when the last of the great temples were erected. This historical paralysis coincides with two other important phenomena: the extinction of Buddhism and the victory of Islam in Delhi and other places’;56 ‘The great lethargy of Hindu civilisation began, a lethargy that persists today…. India owes to Islam some sublime works of art, particularly in architecture and, to a lesser degree, in painting, but not a single new or original thought.’57