Freud - Complete Works (728 page)

   It is time for us to turn our
attention to the nature of this civilization on whose value as a
means to happiness doubts have been thrown. We shall not look for a
formula in which to express that nature in a few words, until we
have learned something by examining it. We shall therefore content
ourselves with saying once more that the word
‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the
achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from
those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes - namely
to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual
relations.¹ In order to learn more, we will bring together the
various features of civilization individually, as they are
exhibited in human communities. In doing so, we shall have no
hesitation in letting ourselves be guided by linguistic usage or,
as it is also called, linguistic feeling, in the conviction that we
shall thus be doing justice to inner discernments which still defy
expression in abstract terms.

  
¹
See
The Future of an Illusion
(1927
c
).

Civilization And Its Discontents

4488

   The first stage is easy. We
recognize as cultural all activities and resources which are useful
to men for making the earth serviceable to them, for protecting
them against the violence of the forces of nature, and so on. As
regards this side of civilization, there can be scarcely any doubt.
If we go back far enough, we find that the first acts of
civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of control over
fire and the construction of dwellings. Among these, the control
over fire stands out as a quite extraordinary and unexampled
achievement,¹ while the others opened up paths which man has
followed ever since, and the stimulus to which is easily guessed.
With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or
sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor
power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his
muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and
aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means
of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by
means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means
of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the
structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he has created
an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just
as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones;
both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of
recollection, his memory. With the help of the telephone he can
hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in
a fairy tale. Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent
person; and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the
mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood
man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease.

  
¹
Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it
is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits
of a conjecture - a fantastic sounding one - about the origin of
this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he
came in contact with fire, or satisfying an infantile desire
connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine.
The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally
phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards.
Putting out fire by micturating - a theme to which modern giants,
Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back
- was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of
sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to
renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off
with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of
his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire.
This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his
renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been
appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the
domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to
yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how
regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between
ambition, fire and urethral erotism.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4489

   These things that, by his science
and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he
first appeared as a feeble animal organism and on which each
individual of his species must once more make its entry (‘oh
inch of nature!’) as a helpless suckling - these things do
not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfilment of
every - or of almost every - fairy-tale wish. All these assets he
may lay claim to as his cultural acquisition. Long ago he formed an
ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied
in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed
unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may
say, therefore, that these gods were cultural ideals. To-day he has
come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost
become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which
ideals are usually attained according to the general judgement of
humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others
only half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic
God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly
magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they
still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled
to console himself with the thought that this development will not
come to an end precisely with the year 1930 A.D. Future ages will
bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in
this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness
to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we
will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his
Godlike character.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4490

   We recognize, then, that
countries have attained a high level of civilization if we find
that in them everything which can assist in the exploitation of the
earth by man and in his protection against the forces of nature -
everything, in short, which is of use to him - is attended to and
effectively carried out. In such countries rivers which threaten to
flood the land are regulated in their flow, and their water is
directed through canals to places where there is a shortage of it.
The soil is carefully cultivated and planted with the vegetation
which it is suited to support; and the mineral wealth below ground
is assiduously brought to the surface and fashioned into the
required implements and utensils. The means of communication are
ample, rapid and reliable. Wild and dangerous animals have been
exterminated, and the breeding of domesticated animals flourishes.
But we demand other things from civilization besides these, and it
is a noticeable fact that we hope to find them realized in these
same countries. As though we were seeking to repudiate the first
demand we made, we welcome it as a sign of civilization as well if
we see people directing their care too to what has no practical
value whatever, to what is useless - if, for instance, the green
spaces necessary in a town as playgrounds and as reservoirs of
fresh air are also laid out with flower-beds, or if the windows of
the houses are decorated with pots of flowers. We soon observe that
this useless thing which we expect civilization to value is beauty.
We require civilized man to reverence beauty wherever he sees it in
nature and to create it in the objects of his handiwork so far as
he is able. But this is far from exhausting our demands on
civilization. We expect besides to see the signs of cleanliness and
order. We do not think highly of the cultural level of an English
country town in Shakespeare’s time when we read that there
was a big dung heap in front of his father’s house in
Stratford; we are indignant and call it ‘barbarous’
(which is the opposite of civilized) when we find the paths in the
Wiener Wald littered with paper. Dirtiness of any kind seems to us
incompatible with civilization. We extend our demand for
cleanliness to the human body too. We are astonished to learn of
the objectionable smell which emanated from the
Roi Soleil
;
and we shake our heads on the Isola Bella when we are shown the
tiny wash-basin in which Napoleon made his morning toilet. Indeed,
we are not surprised by the idea of setting up the use of soap as
an actual yardstick of civilization. The same is true of order. It,
like cleanliness, applies solely to the works of man. But whereas
cleanliness is not to be expected in nature, order, on the
contrary, has been imitated from her. Man’s observation of
the great astronomical regularities not only furnished him with a
model for introducing order into his life, but gave him the first
points of departure for doing so. Order is a kind of compulsion to
repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for
all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in
every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision.
The benefits of order are incontestable. It enables men to use
space and time to the best advantage, while conserving their
psychical forces. We should have a right to expect that order would
have taken its place in human activities from the start and without
difficulty; and we may well wonder that this has not happened -
that, on the contrary, human beings exhibit an inborn tendency to
carelessness, irregularity and unreliability in their work, and
that a laborious training is needed before they learn to follow the
example of their celestial models.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4491

   Beauty, cleanliness and order
obviously occupy a special position among the requirements of
civilization. No one will maintain that they are as important for
life as control over the forces of nature or as some other factors
with which we shall become acquainted. And yet no one would care to
put them in the background as trivialities. That civilization is
not exclusively taken up with what is useful is already shown by
the example of beauty, which we decline to omit from among the
interests of civilization. The usefulness of order is quite
evident. With regard to cleanliness, we must bear in mind that it
is demanded of us by hygiene as well, and we may suspect that even
before the days of scientific prophylaxis the connection between
the two was not altogether strange to man. Yet utility does not
entirely explain these efforts; something else must be at work
besides.

   No feature, however, seems better
to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of
man’s higher mental activities - his intellectual, scientific
and artistic achievements and the leading role that it assigns to
ideas in human life. Foremost among those ideas are the religious
systems, on whose complicated structure I have endeavoured to throw
light elsewhere. Next come the speculations of philosophy; and
finally what might be called man’s ‘ideals’ - his
ideas of a possible perfection of individuals, or of peoples or of
the whole of humanity, and the demands he sets up on the basis of
such ideas. The fact that these creations of his are not
independent of one another, but are on the contrary closely
interwoven, increases the difficulty not only of describing them
but of tracing their psychological derivation. If we assume quite
generally that the motive force of all human activities is a
striving towards the two confluent goals of utility and a yield of
pleasure, we must suppose that this is also true of the
manifestations of civilization which we have been discussing here,
although this is easily visible only in scientific and aesthetic
activities. But it cannot be doubted that the other activities,
too, correspond to strong needs in men - perhaps to needs which are
only developed in a minority. Nor must we allow ourselves to be
misled by judgements of value concerning any particular religion,
or philosophic system, or ideal. Whether we think to find in them
the highest achievements of the human spirit, or whether we deplore
them as aberrations, we cannot but recognize that where they are
present, and, in especial, where they are dominant, a high level of
civilization is implied.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4492

   The last, but certainly not the
least important, of the characteristic features of civilization
remains to be assessed: the manner in which the relationships of
men to one another, their social relationships, are regulated -
relationships which affect a person as a neighbour, as a source of
help, as another person’s sexual object, as a member of a
family and of a State. Here it is especially difficult to keep
clear of particular ideal demands and to see what is civilized in
general. Perhaps we may begin by explaining that the element of
civilization enters on the scene with the first attempt to regulate
these social relationships. If the attempt were not made, the
relationships would be subject to the arbitrary will of the
individual: that is to say, the physically stronger man would
decide them in the sense of his own interests and instinctual
impulses. Nothing would be changed in this if this stronger man
should in his turn meet someone even stronger than he. Human life
in common is only made possible when a majority comes together
which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains
united against all separate individuals. The power of this
community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to
the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute
force’. This replacement of the power of the individual by
the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of
civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members
of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of
satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions. The
first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice -
that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in
favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical
value of such a law. The further course of cultural development
seems to tend towards making the law no longer an expression of the
will of a small community - a caste or a stratum of the population
or a racial group - which, in its turn, behaves like a violent
individual towards other, and perhaps more numerous, collections of
people. The final outcome should be a rule of law to which all -
except those who are not capable of entering a community - have
contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no
one - again with the same exception - at the mercy of brute
force.