"The Triumph of the Therapeutic"

ISI has issued a 40th anniversary edition of Philip Rieff's landmark book "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." I recently received a copy, and began it last night. Amusingly, I almost instantly regretted it, because I can tell this is an incredibly demanding book whose pulsing intellectual energy is almost radioactive. I'm not going to have time to give it the attention it deserves over the holidays. But it's a thrilling book, so I'm going to put down a few thoughts about the first chapter now, while it's on my mind, hoping that some of you might be drawn to it.

Rieff, who died earlier this year, today commands the respectful attention of cultural conservatives, though he himself was no conventional conservative, nor, despite his focus on the role of faith and cultural authority, was he religious (as far as I can tell). Driving in to work today, I was thinking about how to describe the point of "Triumph" (gleaned from his introductory chapter, as well as the preface by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn), but nothing I could come up with beats this Wikipedia summary:

The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Rieff continues the theme established in Freud in which he sees the therapeutic ethos – as exemplified by Freud's analytic attitude – become the dominant cultural attitude in its placing of the conflicted individual at the center of his own stage. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1965), Rieff traces the way in which therapy, which aims not at "the good life" but at "better living," has become the reigning mode of life in Western culture. The rise of "Psychological Man" marks for Rieff the death of a culture whose ideals had lost their power to sink deep into the character of its members. In modern culture, virtue gives way to value, and what is of value is whatever conduces to the well-being of the individual. Except as therapeutic devices, commitments (faiths) cease to be possible: "the psychologizers, now fully established as the pacesetters of cultural change, propose to help men avoid doing further damage to themselves by preventing live deceptions from succeeding the dead ones." The therapeutic mode of thinking and acting calls for a flight from the discomforts of fear, the responsibility inherent in identity, and authority itself. In the therapeutic, everything is a game, and all truths are contingent and negotiable. "Truth" is a means to the end of present therapy.

Rieff was interested in the question of whether a culture with such a foundation can long endure. In Triumph, he left open the possibility, both rhetorically and analytically, that it can.

In Fellow Teachers (1973), Rieff presents his argument that it cannot. Chief among the reasons for this is that the therapeutic mode leads in the absence of all other modes to an abyss of identity nihilism. Rieff observes that the deconstructive effort coming out of art and the academy itself is working tirelessly, and in cooperation with the technologists, to instruct fresh generations in the murder of their own culture's authoritative interdicts.

In the introductory chapter of "Triumph," Rieff says that the overturning of Christian civilization has given rise to a civilization in which people wish to retain inherited morality without "the hard external crust of institutional discipline." But this isn't possible, according to Rieff, because any culture survives by the strength of its institutions, and their ability to "bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs" in ways that are "commonly and implicitly understood." When a culture stops to think about why we do things this way and not that way, and there are no institutions powerful enough to say, in effect, "Because that's the way we do it" -- then you have a culture in decline.

The impact collapse of Christianity as a binding civilizational force in the West cannot be overestimated. We now live in a world where any appeal to idealism is immediately suspect. Writes Rieff: "The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: 'Can civilized men believe?' Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?" That is, can people who do not believe in the existence of objective truth, and the possibility that it can be authoritatively expressed, ever form a durable civilization?

(If this reminds you of Alasdair MacIntyre's conclusion in "After Virtue," you're right.)

You cannot have culture without "cult" -- that is, without religion (understood sociologically as that set of rules, presented as objective and sacred truths, around which a society organizes its individual and collective lives). With Christianity dead in this sense, we have supplanted it with the search for individual fulfillment and well-being. We seek not to find truth, but to find -- you've heard this phrase -- "what's true for me." Which is to say, what set of beliefs makes my life comfortable, easy and pleasurable. This, of course, is soft nihilism.

Rieff says he's not really interested in the validity of this or that truth, only its social viability. And here is where I was struck hard by the situation of churches in our contemporary culture. Rieff:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. "Is not the very fact that so wretchedly litte binding address is heard in the church," asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, "accountable for a goodly share of her misery -- is it not perhaps the misery?" The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.

What he's saying is this: A culture begins to die when people cease to believe what its institutions say, which comes in part from the institutions themselves lacking the power to say what they stand for in persuasive ways ... which comes in part from the elites running those institutions losing faith in those truths. Suddenly I saw the profundity of what a Catholic priest friend of mine once said about the Catholic bishops, and many of his fellow priests: "They simply do not believe in Jesus Christ." He was making a Rieffian point about the loss of faith in the Faith among the clerical class. If they can't make a case for Christianity, if they cannot or will not articulate the truths of the Catholic faith for the masses, it's probably because they themselves no longer believe them deep down. The crisis of the Church (by which I mean not just the Catholic church, but all institutional Christian religion) is that its leadership class has been overwhelmed by the disintegration that has overtaken the entire civilization. Rieff is skeptical that any recovery of institutional authority can take place in a culture like ours, where we are constantly questioning everything -- and, as he later indicates, in which the only generally recognized authority is the sovereign autonomous Self.

And there is this prophetic passage from the end of the first chapter:

The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, bur rather in doctrines amount to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again, culture will give back what it ha s taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfuly conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the po2ers that be perserve social order and manage an economy of abundance. ...Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use. ...If "immoral" materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody's sense of well-being, then they are useful. The "end" or "goal" is to keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.

Forty years ago, Rieff anticipated a culture in which the only things that really matter politically is that the government keeps us satisfied with consumer goods and free to choose whatever makes us happy. The pursuit of virtue and the practice of faith is fine, so long as we realize that it's merely entertainment, and shouldn't be thought of as proclaiming any truths binding on anyone else. The primary criterion used in judging phenomena is instrumental and therapeutic: that is, not is this right or wrong? but does this serve the goal of making me happier? Because that, ultimately, is the only standard of progress.

Sound like a culture you know? Is it possible to refuse and resist it from generation to generation? If so, how? That, of course, is the principle concern of "Crunchy Cons." I wish I had read Rieff before writing the book, though.