Freud - Complete Works (721 page)

The Future Of An Illusion

4445

   The one person this publication
may injure is myself. I shall have to listen to the most
disagreeable reproaches for my shallowness, narrow-mindedness and
lack of idealism or of understanding for the highest interests of
mankind. But on the one hand, such remonstrances are not new to me;
and on the other, if a man has already learnt in his youth to rise
superior to the disapproval of his contemporaries, what can it
matter to him in his old age when he is certain soon to be beyond
the reach of all favour or disfavour? In former times it was
different. Then utterances such as mine brought with them a sure
curtailment of one’s earthly existence and an effective
speeding-up of the opportunity for gaining a personal experience of
the after-life. But, I repeat, those times are past and to-day
writings such as this bring no more danger to their author than to
their readers. The most that can happen is that the translation and
distribution of his book will be forbidden in one country or
another - and precisely, of course, in a country that is convinced
of the high standard of its culture. But if one puts in any plea at
all for the renunciation of wishes and for acquiescence in Fate,
one must be able to tolerate this kind of injury too.

   The further question occurred to
me whether the publication of this work might not after all do
harm. Not to a person, however, but to a cause - the cause of
psycho-analysis. For it cannot be denied that psycho-analysis is my
creation, and it has met with plenty of mistrust and ill-will. If I
now come forward with such displeasing pronouncements, people will
be only too ready to make a displacement from my person to
psycho-analysis. ‘Now we see,’ they will say,
‘where psycho-analysis leads to. The mask has fallen; it
leads to a denial of God and of a moral ideal, as we always
suspected. To keep us from this discovery we have been deluded into
thinking that psycho-analysis has no
Weltanschauung
and
never can construct one.’

   An outcry of this kind will
really be disagreeable to me on account of my many fellow-workers,
some of whom do not by any means share my attitude to the problems
of religion. But psycho-analysis has already weathered many storms
and now it must brave this fresh one. In point of fact
psycho-analysis is a method of research, an impartial instrument,
like the infinitesimal calculus, as it were. If a physicist were to
discover with the latter’s help that after a certain time the
earth would be destroyed, we would nevertheless hesitate to
attribute destructive tendencies to the calculus itself and
therefore to proscribe it. Nothing that I have said here against
the truth-value of religions needed the support of psycho-analysis;
it had been said by others long before analysis came into
existence. If the application of the psycho-analytic method makes
it possible to find a new argument against the truths of religion,
tant pis
for religion; but defenders of religion will by the
same right make use of psycho-analysis in order to give full value
to the affective significance of religious doctrines.

The Future Of An Illusion

4446

   And now to proceed with our
defence. Religion has clearly performed great services for human
civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the
asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for
many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can
achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind
happy, in comforting them, in reconciling them to life and in
making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of
attempting to alter the existing conditions. But what do we see
instead? We see that an appallingly large number of people are
dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a
yoke which must be shaken of; and that these people either do
everything in their power to change that civilization, or else go
so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing to do
with civilization or with a restriction of instinct. At this point
it will be objected against us that this state of affairs is due to
the very fact that religion has lost a part of its influence over
human masses precisely because of the deplorable effect of the
advances of science. We will note this admission and the reason
given for it, and we shall make use of it later for our own
purposes; but the objection itself has no force.

   It is doubtful whether men were
in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held
unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not. They have
always known how to externalize the precepts of religion and thus
to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to
ensure obedience to religion, met them half-way in this.
God’s kindness must lay a restraining hand on His justice.
One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then
one was free to sin once more. Russian introspectiveness has
reached the pitch of concluding that sin is indispensable for the
enjoyment of all the blessings of divine grace, so that, at bottom,
sin is pleasing to God. It is no secret that the priests could only
keep the masses submissive to religion by making such large
concessions as these to the instinctual nature of man. Thus it was
agreed: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful. In
every age immorality has found no less support in religion than
morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to
man’s happiness, susceptibility to culture and moral control
are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we
are not overrating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do
wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it.

The Future Of An Illusion

4447

   Let us consider the unmistakable
situation as it is to-day. We have heard the admission that
religion no longer has the same influence on people that it used
to. (We are here concerned with European Christian civilization.)
And this is not because its promises have grown less but because
people find them less credible. Let us admit that the reason -
though perhaps not the only reason - for this change is the
increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of human
society. Criticism has whittled away the evidential value of
religious documents, natural science has shown up the errors in
them, and comparative research has been struck by the fatal
resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and the
mental products of primitive peoples and times.

   The scientific spirit brings
about a particular attitude towards worldly matters; before
religious matters it pauses for a little, hesitates, and finally
there too crosses the threshold. In this process there is no
stopping; the greater the number of men to whom the treasures of
knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the
falling-away from religious belief - at first only from its
obsolete and objectionable trappings, but later from its
fundamental postulates as well. The Americans who instituted the
‘monkey trial’ at Dayton have alone shown themselves
consistent. Elsewhere the inevitable transition is accomplished by
way of half-measures and insincerities.

The Future Of An Illusion

4448

   Civilization has little to fear
from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of
religious motives for civilized behaviour by other, secular motives
would proceed unobtrusively; moreover, such people are to a large
extent themselves vehicles of civilization. But it is another
matter with the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed, who
have every reason for being enemies of civilization. So long as
they do not discover that people no longer believe in God, all is
well. But they will discover it, infallibly, even if this piece of
writing of mine is not published. And they are ready to accept the
results of scientific thinking, but without the change having taken
place in them which scientific thinking brings about in people. Is
there not a danger here that the hostility of these masses to
civilization will throw itself against the weak spot that they have
found in their task-mistress? If the sole reason why you must not
kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it and will
severely punish you for it in this or the next life then, when you
learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His
punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without
hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane
force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most
severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of
intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between
civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.

The Future Of An Illusion

4449

VIII

One might think that there would be no special
difficulties in the way of carrying out this latter proposal. It is
true that it would involve a certain amount of renunciation, but
more would perhaps be gained than lost, and a great danger would be
avoided. Everyone is frightened of it, however, as though it would
expose civilization to a still greater danger. When St. Boniface
cut down the tree that was venerated as sacred by the Saxons the
bystanders expected some fearful event to follow upon the
sacrilege. But nothing happened, and the Saxons accepted
baptism.

   When civilization laid down the
commandment that a man shall not kill the neighbour whom he hates
or who is in his way or whose property he covets, this was clearly
done in the interest of man’s communal existence, which would
not otherwise be practicable. For the murderer would draw down on
himself the vengeance of the murdered man’s kinsmen and the
secret envy of others, who within themselves feel as much inclined
as he does for such acts of violence. Thus he would not enjoy his
revenge or his robbery for long, but would have every prospect of
soon being killed himself. Even if he protected himself against his
single foes by extraordinary strength and caution, he would be
bound to succumb to a combination of weaker men. If a combination
of this sort did not take place, the murdering would continue
endlessly and the final outcome would be that men would exterminate
one another. We should arrive at the same state of affairs between
individuals as still persists in Corsica between families, though
elsewhere only between nations. Insecurity of life, which is an
equal danger for everyone, now unites men into a society which
prohibits the individual from killing and reserves to itself the
right to communal killing of anyone who violates the prohibition.
Here, then, we have justice and punishment.

The Future Of An Illusion

4450

   But we do not publish this
rational explanation of the prohibition against murder. We assert
that the prohibition has been issued by God. Thus we take it upon
ourselves to guess His intentions, and we find that He, too, is
unwilling for men to exterminate one another. In behaving in this
way we are investing the cultural prohibition with a quite special
solemnity, but at the same time we risk making its observance
dependent on belief in God. If we retrace this step - if we no
longer attribute to God what is our own will and if we content
ourselves with giving the social reason - then, it is true, we have
renounced the transfiguration of the cultural prohibition, but we
have also avoided the risk to it. But we gain something else as
well. Through some kind of diffusion or infection, the character of
sanctity and inviolability - of belonging to another world, one
might say - has spread from a few major prohibitions on to every
other cultural regulation, law and ordinance. But on these the halo
often looks far from becoming: not only do they invalidate one
another by giving contrary decisions at different times and places,
but apart from this they show every sign of human inadequacy. It is
easy to recognize in them things that can only be the product of
short-sighted apprehensiveness or an expression of selfishly narrow
interests or a conclusion based on insufficient premisses. The
criticism which we cannot fail to level at them also diminishes to
an unwelcome extent our respect for other, more justifiable
cultural demands. Since it is an awkward task to separate what God
Himself has demanded from what can be traced to the authority of an
all-powerful parliament or a high judiciary, it would be an
undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and
honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and
precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity,
these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and
unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are
made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their
interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them,
and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their
improvement. This would be an important advance along the road
which leads to becoming reconciled to the burden of
civilization.

The Future Of An Illusion

4451

   But here our plea for ascribing
purely rational reasons to the precepts of civilization - that is
to say, for deriving them from social necessity - is interrupted by
a sudden doubt. We have chosen as our example the origin of the
prohibition against murder. But does our account of it tally with
historical truth? We fear not; it appears to be nothing but a
rationalistic construction. With the help of psycho-analysis, we
have made a study of precisely this piece of the cultural history
of mankind, and, basing ourselves on it, we are bound to say that
in reality things happened otherwise. Even in present-day man
purely reasonable motives can effect little against passionate
impulsions. How much weaker then must they have been in the human
animal of primaeval times! Perhaps his descendants would even now
kill one another without inhibition, if it were not that among
those murderous acts there was one - the killing of the primitive
father - which evoked an irresistible emotional reaction with
momentous consequences. From it arose the commandment: Thou shalt
not kill. Under totemism this commandment was restricted to the
father-substitute; but it was later extended to other people,
though even to-day it is not universally obeyed.