The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine just published a recent, and, presumably, slightly tongue in cheek article, drawing parallels between psychiatry, clinical psychology and traditional religious practices.

Freud states that human nature is inherently destructive, andti-social, and anti-cultural. This puts us at odds with having a harmonius civilization. Instinct is controlled by coercion. We’re lazy and have passions that aren’t controlled by reason. It is only through a superior force and the renunciation of our desires that society is able to continue.

This seems so “negative” to me. What a downer! We’d like to view ourselves as the “sane” and kindly folk in society. But maybe I’m a part of the violent, rampaging majority? Nah!

Anyway, Freud thinks there’s no reasoning with barbarians. This clearly is correct. But I guess the question keeps circling back to “who is the barbarian”?

Second, there must be strong leaders who gain the respect of the masses. The respect might be gained in any number of ways: physical force, persuasion of some kind, rewarding through money, sex, or status.

Here’s a question: After this sweeping indictment of human society, and especially of the underclass, where are we today? Where are we now. What will it take to be more evolved?

We know where Freud is going to go in his criticism of religion, but religion does play a role. If nothing else, if we accept Freud’s assessment, religion is at least a means to control people. And if things are so scary without coercion, why should we not want religion? I’m sure kids think their parents (Freud would limit this to the “father”) is all-powerful. But the father isn’t really all-powerful. One’s father may be killed, attacked, or fired; the mother might dump the father. Any number of things reveal the “humanity” of the father and his vulnerability.

I suppose Freud would say that while it is good for children to revere as well as fear the father, when we grow up we realize that the father isn’t “God”. Maybe the problem with people believing in religion is their insistence on “not growing up”, for lack of a better word. Our beliefs are “illusions”. So even though religion may serve a good purpose, since we don’t grow out of it, it becomes a bad thing for society.

What I appreciate about The Future of an Illusion [FOI] is that it is short enough to read and straightforward enough to grasp. I have read the text just about each time I have offered the course, so that makes it about four times. I am reading the text yet again, this time through the eyes of a “blogger”. I must confess that I am finding the richer than I remembered. There is so much to discuss. Blogging it makes me look at it with even more critical eyes. That is part of the point of scholarly blogging. I hope my students can get a bit of the blogging bug, or at least gain some useful experience in approaching a text slowly and critically. We shall see.

The flip side of finding a text so intriguing is that there is always a danger that one becomes so fascinated by a topic that one abandons one’s prior field or person of interest and falls in madly love with this new and exciting paramour. Maybe it will be a fling and you regain your senses, but maybe not.

I remember taking a Kant seminar from Pierre Keller when I was at working on my PhD at Claremont. He told us that Kant had not always been his research field. He first was focused on Aristotle. How could anyone dump Aristotle for Kant, I wondered. Well, Pierre found Kant so confusing, so aggravatingly dense and baffling, that he spent hours and hours trying to untangle the text. Of course, you have to do that in the original German. So Greek was switched to German. Before he knew it he was smitten.

I shall take the risk since there is not much chance of my forsaking Aristotle for Freud.