The dogma of desire

I can't remember which thread it was on recently, but our friend and frequent commentator Franklin JENNINGS [not Evans, as I originally said -- my apologies to both Franklins] said, "My heart is infallible." As I recall, Franklin was responding to someone who'd remarked that the problem with people today is that they no longer wanted to be subject to objective morality. I may have gotten this a bit wrong, but I think that was the gist of it. What Franklin was saying, I think, is that the individual is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. [N.B., Greg Wolfe says in the comboxes that I got the context way wrong, and that that's not what Franklin was saying at all. Again, I'm sorry for that, and probably could have found the comment when I put the initial post up had I not had it in my head that it was Franklin Evans instead of Jennings. Apologies all around. -- RD] I would ask you, Franklin, what happens when your heart says A, and your neighbor's heart says not-A -- who's right? In what sense is it possible to judge which one of you is correct? If your heart tells you that slavery is wrong, and your brother's heart tells him that it is not wrong, isn't violence inevitable, if the wrong is of such a great magnitude?

I bring this up not to engage in Philosophy 101 debates, but because Franklin's striking line -- "my heart is infallible" -- is, I believe, the modern credo. And it's why we are disintegrating as a culture. I've written a very long post about this, in my usual stream of consciousness blabbity-blab, which I'll put in the extended entry mode, so it won't chew up miles of space on the blog front. For those interested in this sort of thing, read on. Warning: there will be Rieff.

The sociologist Philip Rieff, who was not a religious man, saw Freud as the true author of our late modern consciousness, because Freud saw (as did Nietzsche) that the old myths that guided Western man had lost their power to enchant and to bind. All cultures, in Rieff's view, were built around authority and its power to shape human thought and behavior by forbidding certain things. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment West, though, belief in the Christian God and in religious authority had waned. The idea of the autonomous individual had become our cultural ideal, and the overthrowing of all cultural traditions that bound the free choice of the individual necessary to human freedom.

But: human nature being what it is, people cannot bear to live totally free, with no sense of place, of meaning, of community. Yet they cannot accept belief in God because in some sense it's "good" for them to believe in God ("good" in the sense of "socially useful"). Life then becomes therapeutic -- that is, the search for ever more pleasures and distractions to help us deal with the anxiety we have knowing that we're facing the abyss. Even religion becomes therapeutic: "God" is not who the churches say He is, as in ages past, but whoever and whatever helps us cope with this anxiety (hello Moralistic Therapeutic Deism!).

Rieff believed that any and every culture had an ideal of what constituted reality (analogous to Richard Weaver's idea that the shared "metaphysical dream" was the fundamental basis for a culture). Religion is the way a culture sacralizes its metaphysical dream, and makes it binding on everyone who is part of that culture. This is emphatically not, for Rieff, a matter of understanding the "rules," but of holding a sense of authority and myth that is so deep most people never stop to question its roots. Order is kept in any society by first ordering the structure of the individual's consciousness.

Anyway, after the Enlightenment, said Rieff, any claim to transcendental belief and authority is automatically suspect. Taken to its logical conclusion, we can't say that anything is fundamentally true; all truth claims become in effect claims about what the person making them believes to be the case. This philosophical revolution is in turn a psychological revolution, and is, of necessity, effecting a social revolution. Here's Rieff interpreter Stephen Gardner:

lmost half a century ago, Philip Rieff came to realize what by now is surely incontestable: That we were—and still are—and in the midst of a revolution, not political or economic as on the classic French or Marxian models, but cultural and psychological, and therefore all the more profound. The rise of democracy and equality, the loss of authority and hierarchical order that has defined the modern world, have produced not just a change in regime but a virtual transformation in human character. The “surface effects” of this revolution—though here surface and depth are difficult to distinguish—seem obvious. To name some of the most striking, these include: a corrosion of the distinction between public and private spheres; an “ethics” of entitlement and victimology; and a popular and consumer culture dedicated to explicit sexuality and to an equally obsessive cult of violence, as if they were twin paradigms of freedom. In general, this panoply reflects the emancipation of desire that accompanied the advance of equality; these phenomena are the contemporary issue of what we may call democratic desire.

The modern revolution reaches “all the way down,” or at least as far down as one can go to reconfigure human character without changing human nature or altering the human condition itself. The anthropological core of these “effects,” so to speak, is the appearance of a new human “species”—a social type whose passions are structured according to the same ultimate laws of human nature, yet unlike the citizen of any prior regime. Sigmund Freud, claimed Philip Rieff, was the presiding deity of the new type, its theoretical muse. It was in Freud the bourgeois “moralist”—not Marx, not Nietzsche, nor any other of the standard gurus of European radicalism—that Rieff detected the index of the most consequential revolution in history.

As Gardner points out, it is foolish to blame the Sixties for the breakdown of Western culture. It began much earlier than that; Freud saw it happening in early 20th century Vienna, though of course two world wars and the rise of mass man helped it along.

Since then the revolution has only accelerated; no political barrier in the Western world has been proof against it.

The sixties were as much effect as cause; they registered deep cultural shifts well underway long before that particular denouement. These appear to be as unstoppable as what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “social power” of democracy. As Tocqueville profoundly understood, the collective force of “society” is unleashed, paradoxically, by the rise of individualism and a culture founded on choice. Social power—the anonymous and irresistible pressure of “society” over and against the individuals who make it up—results not from the suppression of liberty but from its emancipation. The collective product of individual freedom produces a “mechanism” beyond any human power to abrogate. It transcends the partisan divide of our political culture, both wings of which, each in their own unique libertarian ways, have contributed to its acceleration. This essentially antitraditional, anticonservative revolution of democratic modernity penetrates everywhere. Even conservatism has succumbed to it, as the rise of “neoconservatism” demonstrates.

This is what I was getting at in "Crunchy Cons" when I said that contemporary American liberals and conservatives are two sides of the same modernist coin. I apologize for quoting Gardner at such length -- you may read his entire essay on the old New Pantagruel site -- but this is absolutely key. Gardner says that for the new man who came into existence in the past century in the West:

... psychology would replace ontology or theology, and therapy would replace community, hitherto the most potent psychic medicines in Western culture. Emancipated by modern technology, commerce, law, and consumerism from integral community, the modern individual found himself abandoned to contradictory passions and impulses and alienated from the remnants of a cultural order that, nonetheless, he could not do without. He thus entered into the twilight zone of modernity, the realm of ambivalences and ambiguities that ensue when every fixed point of reference is dissolved into the sheer interplay of individuals in a culture that can no longer sustain its origins. Freud appeared as his savior and advocate, the inventor of a technique of survival not physical but psychical. He promised to teach the modern individual how to desire in a world where all desires were equal and arbitrary, void of any intrinsic order, but not necessarily equally permissible or socially estimable. Here was a human type where interiority and its dilemmas were not a mark of the spiritual or transcendent but exactly of their absence, at best of their fading images—where interiority and the sense of alienation from the outer reflect the social fact of “negative community.”

It is this massive cultural revolution that Rieff’s sociological exegesis of Freud brought into view. The outer world of consumerism and popular culture belies inwardly the world of an individual who is the captive of desires he can neither entirely abandon nor ever truly satisfy. The modern world makes a virtue of this fate and turns it to profitable advantage.

What's my point? This: we are all living in a culture built around the dogma of individual desire, and our prosperity and technological superiority -- which resulted in large part from the liberation of the individual -- serve to mask the internal rot. We don't know what we believe in except in ourselves. It can be a beautiful way to live. Certainly any of us would rather live in Amsterdam than Riyadh. But how does a culture like ours sustain itself in a lengthy crisis? What if the global economy collapses this year (I heard from a friend in NYC today who reported from personal experience that this is being seriously discussed by very rich and powerful financiers)? What do we do when most of the consumer goods and services that give us so much pseudo-meaning are no longer there?

Tonight on "60 Minutes," Steve Kroft presented a report about the subprime mortgage crisis and the broader economic crisis. It was jaw-dropping. He reported that banks and lending institutions were handing money out for little or nothing. They weren't even bothering to check the creditworthiness of home loan applicants. Individual lending institutions were turning around and selling the loans to Wall Street firms, which were bundling them and selling them to overseas investors as secure investments. But none of them were secure. Everybody up the line got rich passing along loans they knew, or should have known, were extremely risky to somebody else. And now, Kroft reports, you're seeing greedy borrowers who took the free money at favorable rates, but who now owe more money than their houses are worth, just walking away from their commitment, giving their suddenly less valuable houses to the bank, even if they can afford the payment. From the report:

There is a certain cold logic to just walking away.

Kevin Moran, the real estate agent who gave Kroft the tour of foreclosed houses in the Weston Ranch subdivision, says it is happening every day. They were never really invested. Most of the people who lost the houses didn’t lose any money because they never put any money down. Though their credit is damaged, and they could face legal action in some circumstances, they got to live in a new house for a couple of years, and some of them even managed to get some money with home equity loans or by refinancing.

"Nobody seems to be saying, 'Look, I made a contract with you. I borrowed money from you. I'm gonna do everything I can to pay off that obligation.' People just seem to be saying, 'Look, take the house. Good-bye. I'm leaving,'" Kroft says. "There was a time, I think, when people felt really bad about not paying off a debt."

"Yeah, I think in those days, loans were made by your local banker or building and loan associations or savings and loan. They were guys you saw in the grocery store. They were on the little league team with you, the PTA, the school. And I think as mortgages became securitized and Wall Street became involved, they became very transactional and there was no relationship built with the borrower and the lender. And I think that makes it easier for someone to see it as an anonymous party at the other end of the transaction and just walk away from it," Moran says.

"Just a business decision," Kroft says.

"A business decision that has to be made," Moran agrees.

Why shouldn't they walk away? In a culture that no longer believes in God, life becomes a matter of doing whatever you can get away with, or rationalize away. Who's to judge?

I'm rambling, I know. The reason I brought up the mortgage crisis is because it's such a great metaphor for where we are culturally. The solidity we enjoy now is a facade; we have been living on the capital of centuries of cultural development in the West, but we have badly overextended ourselves. The Islamic nations -- yes, they've lived lives of relative poverty, misery and unfreedom. I wouldn't trade places with anyone living there, and neither would you. But. But, but, but. They will endure. Robert D. Kaplan saw this for himself, traveling from chaotic western Africa to Cairo. Both places are filled with very poor people, but Cairo, it had a lot more order than anarchic west Africa. The people there managed to live more humanly because of Islam. They had order, they had unity, they had purpose. Islam gave that to them. It also extracted a tremendous cost from them in terms of personal liberty. But they survive tough times. Islam tells them right from wrong, and as Charles Curtis has eloquently written on this blog in recent days, provides them with a sense of communality that is immensely powerful, and which we in the West can scarcely imagine.

Do we have what it takes as a culture to survive tough times? We may be about to find out this year. Or as Rieff, an unbeliever, would have asked, do we even have a culture? He didn't think so, not anymore. We'd thrown it all away by losing our faith in transcendentals, the basis for any culture.