Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Civilization and Its Discontents

To what extent can we baptize Freud? To what extent can we use Freud’s mechanisms of guilt and conscience to explain Christian conception of sin?


When Freud talks about the human conscience, he is using the term to describe a part of the self that exists for the express purpose of attacking self for doing things that are instinctive, but that it has been trained are ‘bad’. This contrasts greatly with the Christian definition of conscience, a part of ourselves that responds to the Holy Spirit’s prompting about the intrinsic value of an action. While there are several problems with Freud’s analysis of the conscience, a major one that stands out is his lack of absolute values. The reduction of the perceived value of actions to an acquired flinching that has nothing to do with the action itself, and only with the punishment, is dangerous. It sounds plausible. It is a comforting thought, to think that everything that we feel bad about having done is just us being mildly neurotic. It is something that we want to believe, because then we are not responsible, and there is nothing wrong with doing whatever we want. We are free.

The thing is, it does not work. Humanity self-destructs when anarchy reigns. Also, contrary to Freud’s assertions, it does not kill us to exercise self-control, and in the long run we are happier when we do so. This lines up with his comment on pages twenty-five and twenty-six, “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.” To deny one’s self is to create a contrast in which good things are even better, causing one’s self to be happier overall than one would be if one stayed in a continual state of self indulgence and moderate happiness.

Another of Freud’s fallacies is that denying a temptation only makes it stronger. I know from experience that denying a temptation makes subsequent denials easier. We grow in strength, not our desires, and eventually we can weed out desires almost entirely.

There are many things in Civilization and It’s Discontents that are similarly appealing and wrong. It is tempting to try to baptize Freud, and to pick out the truth from among the chaff. The problem is, he is so clever that it is ridiculously hard to find all of the places where he goes wrong. Each place he goes wrong, however, is major in itself, and even missing one would lead to major problems. While it might be possible to salvage the truth in Freud, it is not to be taken lightly, or to be thought easy.


Due to the general insanity of life at the moment, my posting schedule is rather random. My apologies....hopefully sometime in the near future I will be able to remedy that, but for now I will try to at least post once a week.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Anna Karennina: What separates Levin from Anna? What sends her to her doom, and allowed Levin to be saved?

In the beginning, Levin and Anna seem similar, except that Levin is in a state of panic over Kitty, and Anna is happily married. They both have morals, and are moderately self-sufficient. Suddenly, however, things change. Anna breaks. She finds that the love and respect that he has for her husband and the love she has for her son are not enough to control her passionate desire for Vronsky. From then on she is doomed. Even when she repents after a brush with death, her penitence cannot stop her from going back to Vronsky. Levin, on the other hand, goes on to win Kitty, and eventually to find faith.

Why does Anna fall prey to her desires, and Levin never seem to? They have a similar beginning. The thing that separates them is the temptation. Anna had morals, but her thinking was not strong enough to make her actions follow when push came to shove, and eventually even her morals changed. Levin too had a discrepancy between his head and his heart, but because he was never faced with a strong enough temptation, his actions followed his heart until finally his head caught up. Levin got lucky, and Anna really didn’t. The major temptation that Anna faced seems to be the one thing that separates the two characters. They were both unstable, but only one got pushed over the edge.

The consequences of a discrepancy between what one believes and what one thinks can be seen in young Christians without a strong theological and apologetical background who have been raised in the ‘Christian greenhouse’, and are then thrust into an environment that is intellectually hostile to Christianity. Without an intellectual foundation for their beliefs, they crumble, and loose their faith. Their heart ends up following their head.

There are other young Christians who also are raised in a reasonless Christianity who are never challenged strongly and eventually figure our why they believe what they believe, and find an intellectual basis for it. Their head catches up with their heart.

Programs, like Torrey, that seek to unite the head and the heart, are then immensely important. They help to equip students to stand firm against the attacks of the secular world, both intellectual and otherwise. They equip students not only to survive, but also to excel and to change to world.